Physicalism is a metaphysical thesis easily presented in slogan form - there is nothing over and above the physical - but notoriously difficult to formulate precisely. Understanding physicalism combines insights from contemporary philosophy of mind and metaphysics to present a new account of physical properties and metaphysical dependence and, on this foundation, develop a more rigorous and illuminating formulation of the thesis of physicalism

Walking Inside Out is the first text that attempts to merge the work of literary and artist practitioners with academics to critically explore the state of psychogeography today. The collection explores contemporary psychogeographical practices, shows how a critical form of walking can highlight easily overlooked urban phenomenon, and examines the impact that everyday life in the city has on the individual. Through a variety of case studies, it offers a British perspective of international spaces, from the British metropolis to the post-communist European city. By situating the current strand of psychogeography within its historical, political and creative context along with careful consideration of the challenges it faces Walking Inside Out offers a vision for the future of the discipline.

This book brings together essays from leading scholars who, rather than taking a strictly exegetical approach, attempt to show how discussions in moral philosophy can benefit from Wittgenstein's later philosophical work. The essays in this volume make the argument that Wittgenstein's relevance for moral philosophy depends not only on his views about ethics, but also on the methods he introduces, on his views on the nature of philosophy and philosophical problems, and on the insights into language developed in his philosophy. They also focus on the 'Wittgensteinian tradition' in moral philosophy and its relation to more mainstream analytic moral philosophy, addressing how several prominent philosophers use these ideas and methods in their work. Ethics in the Wake of Wittgenstein seeks to answer the following question: Can we apply Wittgenstein's ways of dealing with problems in logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of mathematics to moral philosophy as well? It will be of interest to Wittgenstein scholars and those working on current debates in moral philosophy, metaethics, and normative ethics.

Wilfrid Sellars's ethical theory was rich and deeply innovative. On Sellars's view, moral judgments express a special kind of shared intention. Thus, we should see Sellars as an early advocate of an expressivism of plans and intentions, and an early theorist of collective intentionality. He supplemented this theory with a sophisticated logic of intentions, a robust theory of the categorical validity of normative expressions, a subtle way of reconciling the cognitive and motivating aspects of moral judgment, and much more-all within a strict nominalism that preserves Sellars's commitment to naturalism. The Ethics of Wilfrid Sellars offers the first systematic treatment of this sadly-neglected aspect of Sellars's work, and demonstrates that his ethical theory-just like his more widely-discussed epistemology-has much to contribute to current debates.

Social robotics is a cutting edge research area gathering researchers and stakeholders from various disciplines and organizations. The transformational potential that these machines, in the form of, for example, caregiving, entertainment or partner robots, pose to our societies and to us as individuals seems to be limited by our technical limitations and phantasy alone. This collection contributes to the field of social robotics by exploring its boundaries from a philosophically informed standpoint. It constructively outlines central potentials and challenges and thereby also provides a stable fundament for further research of empirical, qualitative or methodological nature.

Who is God? The variety of images of God tends to overwhelm us in the present age. Is 'God' a fiction of human construction, or a reality that makes claims upon how we practice 'faith in God'? How does this quest for an understanding of 'God' illumine who 'we' are? God in Postliberal Perspective presents an introduction to the doctrine and concept of God in contemporary philosophy and theology, exploring how some theologians and philosophers dare to speak of God as "real" in our sceptical, pluralistic, and interfaith age. Robert Cathey tours the "house of realism" as constructed by postliberal Christians (David Burrell, William Placher, Bruce Marshall), in conversation with living communities of faith and critical work in philosophy and theology, and develops a distinctive argument about the relation of realism and non-realism in constructing the doctrine of God in postliberal theology. Offering a reading of postliberal theology which is open to critical discussion with other types of theology, philosophy, and faith traditions, this book proposes a model of theological reflection that may be extended to the reality-claims of a wide range of doctrines and concepts.

Impossible God introduces Derrida's theology for a new generation interested in Derrida's writings and in the future of theology, and clarifies Derrida's theology for those already familiar with his writings. Derrida's theological concerns are now widely recognised but Impossible God shows how Derrida's theology takes its shape from his earliest writings on Edmund Husserl and from explorations into Husserl's unpublished manuscripts on time and theology. Rayment-Pickard argues that Derrida goes beyond both the nihilism of the 'death of God' and the denials of negative theology to affirm a theology of God's 'impossibility'. Derrida's 'impossible God' is not another God of the philosophers but a powerful deity capable of wakening us into faith, ethical responsibility and love. Showing how central theology has been to Derrida's philosophy since the beginning of his career, Impossible God presents an accessible study of a neglected area of Derrida's writing which students of philosophy and theology will find invaluable.

This book proposes a pragmatist methodological framework for generating practically relevant political philosophy. It draws on John Dewey's social and political philosophy to develop an "experimentalist" method, thus charting a middle course between idealism and realism in political philosophy. Deweyan experimentalism promises to balance civic deliberation, empirical facts, and moral considerations by reconstructing Dewey's pragmatist conceptions of 'philosophy' and 'democracy' from the perspective of social action. While some authors have taken the steps to articulate Dewey's experimentalism, they have focused on institutional rather than methodological implications. This book is original in the ways in which it situates the role of ideas in political practice and contemporary political problems. Additionally, it underlines the similarities between today and the historical context in which Dewey wrote, connects Dewey's social and political philosophy to Greek and Roman mythology, and concludes with a timely case study in which the author's methodological insights are applied. The result is a book that offers a focused reconstruction of Dewey's work and shows its relevance for engaging with contemporary issues in political philosophy and political theory.

The claim according to which there is a categorial gap between meaning and saying - between what sentences mean and what we say by using them on particular occasions - has come to be widely regarded as being exclusively a claim in the philosophy of language. The present essay collection takes a different approach to these issues. It seeks to explore the ways in which that claim - as defended first by ordinary language philosophy and, more recently, by various contextualist projects - is grounded in considerations that transcend the philosophy of language. More specifically, the volume seeks to explore how that claim is inextricably linked to considerations about the nature of truth and representation. It is thus part of the objective of this volume to rethink the current way of framing the debates on these issues. By framing the debate in terms of an opposition between "ideal language theorists" and their semanticist heirs on the one hand and "communication theorists" and their contextualist heirs on the other, one brackets important controversies and risks obscuring the undoubtedly very real oppositions that exist between different currents of thought.

An internationally famous philosopher and best-selling author during his lifetime, Georg Simmel has been marginalized in contemporary intellectual and cultural history. This neglect belies his pathbreaking role in revealing the theoretical significance of phenomena-including money, gender, urban life, and technology-that subsequently became established arenas of inquiry in cultural theory. It further ignores his philosophical impact on thinkers as diverse as Benjamin, Musil, and Heidegger. Integrating intellectual biography, philosophical interpretation, and a critical examination of the history of academic disciplines, this book restores Simmel to his rightful place as a major figure and challenges the frameworks through which his contributions to modern thought have been at once remembered and forgotten.

Research on federalism is rarely concerned with its philosophical foundations. However, arguments on why and how best to organise a plurality of states in a multilevel political order have first been discussed by philosophers and continue to inspire contemporary reasoning on international and supranational relations not only in political philosophy. This book offers a unique overview of the philosophical foundations of federalism from both a historical and a systematic perspective. The analyses proposed by renowned scholars from the US and from several European countries cover classic writers such as Hobbes and the authors of the Federalist Papers, Kant and Rawls, and range from anthropological justifications of federal orders to contemporary problems of EU constitutionalism, the principle of subsidiarity and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The book is of relevance to anyone interested in philosophical justifications of federalism.

This collection of specially commissioned essays offers a wide array of new psychoanalytic approaches impacted by Lacanian theory, queer studies, post-colonial studies, feminism, and deconstruction in the domains of film and literature. We have witnessed a remarkable return to psychoanalysis in those fields, fields from which it had been excluded or discredited for a while. This has changed recently, and we need to understand why. The fourteen essays make use a freshly minted psychoanalytic concepts to read diverse texts, films and social practices. The distinguished authors gathered here, an international group of scholars coming from Japan, China, Korea, India, Belgium, Greece, France, Australia, and the USA, are all cognizant of the advances of theory under the form of deconstruction, feminism, post-colonial studies and trauma studies. These essays take into account the latest developments in Lacanian theory and never bracket off subjective agency when dealing with literature or film. The authors make sense of changes brought to psychoanalytical theory by redefinitions of the Oedipus complex, reconsiderations of the death drive, applications of Lacan's symptom and the concept of the Real, reassessments of the links between affect and trauma, insights into the resilience of Romantic excess and jouissance, awareness of the role of transference in classical and modernist texts, and pedagogical techniques aimed at teaching difficult texts, all the while testifying to the influence on Lacanian theory of thinkers like Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, Melanie Klein, Didier Anzieu, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003002727

This book elaborates Jean Amery's critique of philosophy and his discussion of some central philosophical themes in At the Mind's Limits and his other writings. It shows how Amery elaborates the shortcomings and unfitness of philosophical theories to account for torture, the experience of homelessness, and other indignities, and their inability to assist with overcoming resentment. It thus teases out the philosophical import of Jean Amery's critique of philosophy, which constitutes his own philosophical testament of being an inmate at Auschwitz. This book situates At the Mind's Limits in the context of twentieth-century Continental philosophy. On the one hand, it elaborates Amery's engagement with key philosophical figures. On the other hand, it shows how thoroughly Amery denounces the limits of the philosophical enterprise, and its impotence in capturing and accounting for the crimes of the Third Reich.

An internationally famous philosopher and best-selling author during his lifetime, Georg Simmel has been marginalized in contemporary intellectual and cultural history. This neglect belies his pathbreaking role in revealing the theoretical significance of phenomena-including money, gender, urban life, and technology-that subsequently became established arenas of inquiry in cultural theory. It further ignores his philosophical impact on thinkers as diverse as Benjamin, Musil, and Heidegger. Integrating intellectual biography, philosophical interpretation, and a critical examination of the history of academic disciplines, this book restores Simmel to his rightful place as a major figure and challenges the frameworks through which his contributions to modern thought have been at once remembered and forgotten.

This volume engages with translations of philosophy as complex, socially structured narratives bound by emotional, political and philosophical connections, exploring these dynamics at work in A.V. Miller's Hegel translations and retranslations published between 1969 and 1986. The book contextualises Miller's lifelong commitment to Hegel and builds on this narrative to lay the foundations for its socio-narrative, Bourdieusian and feminist theoretical frameworks, applied to the texts and paratexts of Miller's six retranslations. The volume's plurifocal sociological approach both illuminates the role of translators and publishers of philosophy in the "great transformation" of political liberalism and subsequently seeks to transform understanding about the ethical responsibilities of translators of philosophy in communicating values of diversity and change in political thinking. In highlighting the value of sociologically-grounded analyses of translations of philosophical works, this book is key reading for students and scholars in translation studies, German studies, continental and feminist-informed philosophies.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's brief Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) is one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century, yet it offers little orientation for the reader. The first-time reader is left wondering what it could be about, and the scholar is left with little guidance for interpretation. In Tractatus in Context, James C. Klagge presents the vital background necessary for appreciating Wittgenstein's gnomic masterpiece. Tractatus in Context contains the early reactions to the Tractatus, including the initial reviews written in 1922-1924. And while we can't talk with Wittgenstein, we can do the next best thing-hear what he had to say about the Tractatus. Klagge thus presents what Wittgenstein thought about germane issues leading up to his writing the book, in discussions and correspondence with others about his ideas, and what he had to say about the Tractatus after it was written-in letters, lectures and conversations. It offers, you might say, Wittgenstein's own commentary on the book. Key Features: Illuminates what is at stake in the Tractatus, by providing the views of others that engaged Wittgenstein as he was writing it. Includes Wittgenstein's earlier thoughts on ideas in the book as recorded in his notebooks, letters, and conversations as well as his later, retrospective comments on those ideas. Draws on new or little-known sources, such as Wittgenstein's coded notebooks, Hermine's notes, Frege's letters, Hansel's diary, Ramsey's notes, and Skinner's dictations. Draws connections between the background context and specific passages in the Tractatus, using a proposition-by-proposition commentary.

For a good part of the 20th century, the classic Pragmatists-Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey-and pragmatism in general were largely ignored by analytic philosophers. They were said to hold such untenable views as whatever best satisfies our needs is true and that the end justifies the means. Despite a recent revival of interest in these figures, spurred largely by the work of Richard Rorty, it is not uncommon to continue to hear claims that pragmatism is a subjectivist, anti-realist position that denies that there is a mind-independent world, and fails to place objective constraints on inquiry. In this book, Robert Schwartz dispels these traditional views by examining the empiricist and constructivist orientation of the classic pragmatists. Based on updated and expanded versions of his influential papers, as well as a number of previously unpublished essays, in this book Schwartz demonstrates the relevance of pragmatic thought to a wide range of issues beyond concerns over truth and realism that currently dominate discussions. The individual essays elaborate and defend pragmatic, instrumentalist, and constructivist conceptions of truth and inquiry, moral discourse and ethical statements, perception, art, and worldmaking. Pragmatic Perspectives will appeal to scholars interested in the history of American philosophy and pragmatic approaches to contemporary issues in analytic philosophy.

This book investigates the role of humor in the good life, specifically as discussed by three prominent French intellectuals who were influenced by Nietzsche's thought: Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, and Clement Rosset. Lydia Amir begins by discussing Nietzsche's reception in France, and she explains why and how he came to be considered a "philosopher of laughter" in the French academe. Each of the subsequent three chapters focuses on the significance of humor and laughter in the good life as advocated by Bataille, Deleuze, and Rosset. These chapters also explore the complex relationship between the comic and the tragic, and of humor and laughter to irony, satire, and ridicule. The Legacy of Nietzsche's Philosophy of Laughter makes an invaluable contribution to recent interpretive work done on Bataille and Deleuze, and offers further introduction to the relatively understudied Rosset. It illuminates the philosophies of these three thinkers, their connection to Nietzsche, and, overall, the significant role that humor plays in philosophy.

This volume offers critical responses to philosophical naturalism from the perspectives of four different yet fundamentally interconnected philosophical traditions: Kantian idealism, Hegelian idealism, British idealism, and American pragmatism. In bringing these rich perspectives into conversation with each other, the book illuminates the distinctive set of metaphilosophical assumptions underpinning each tradition's conception of the relationship between the human and natural sciences. The individual essays investigate the affinities and the divergences between Kant, Hegel, Collingwood, and the American pragmatists in their responses to philosophical naturalism. The ultimate aim of Responses to Naturalism is to help us understand how human beings can be committed to the idea of scientific progress without renouncing their humanistic explanations of the world. It will appeal to scholars interested in the role idealist and pragmatist perspectives play in contemporary debates about naturalism.

Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a wealth of discussion and controversy about the idea of a 'postnational' or 'cosmopolitan' politics. But while there are many normative theories of cosmopolitanism, as well as some cosmopolitan theories of globalization, there has been little attempt to grapple systematically with fundamental questions of structure and action from a 'cosmopolitan point of view.' Drawing on Kant's cosmopolitan writings and Habermas's critical theory of society, Brian Milstein argues that, before we are members of nations or states, we are participants in a 'commercium' of global interaction who are able to negotiate for ourselves the terms on which we share the earth in common with one another. He marshals a broad range of literature from philosophy, sociology, and political science to show how the modern system of sovereign nation-states destructively constrains and distorts these relations of global interaction, leading to pathologies and crises in present-day world society.

This collection of essays engages with the current resurgence of interest in the relationship between American pragmatism and communication studies. The topics engaged in this collection of essays is necessarily diverse, with some of the figures discussed within often viewed as "minor" or ancillary to the main tradition of pragmatism. However, each essay attempts to show the value of reading these minor figures for philosophy and rhetorical studies. The diversity of the pragmatist tradition is evident in the ways in which unlikely figures like Hu Shi, Ambedkar, and Alice Dewey leverage some of the original commitments of pragmatism to do important intellectual, social, and political work within the circumstances that they find themselves. This collection of essays also serves as a reminder for how we might reimagine and reuse pragmatism for our own social and political projects and challenges.

This collection features eleven original essays, divided into three thematic sections, which explore the work of Wilfrid Sellars in relation to other twentieth-century thinkers. Section I analyzes Sellars's thought in light of some of his influential predecessors, specifically Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, John Cook Wilson, and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. The second group of essays explores from different perspectives Sellars's place within the analytic tradition, including his relation with analytic Kantianism and analytic pragmatism. The book's final section extracts some of the most significant lessons Sellars's work has to offer for contemporary philosophy. These chapters address his views on inference, his views on truth and its connection to recent discussions about truth-relativism and truth-pluralism, his conception of self-knowledge, and his theory of perceptual experience.

How can we overcome the rapidly ageing postmodernist paradigm, which has become sterile orthodoxy in marketing? This book answers this crucial question using fresh philosophical tools developed by New Realism. It indicates the opportunities missed by marketing due to the pervasive postmodernist ideology and proposes a new and fruitful approach pivoting on the significance of reality to marketing analyses and models. Intensifying reference to reality will boost marketing research and practice, rather than impair them; conversely, neglecting such a reference will prevent marketing from realising its full potential, in several contexts. The aim of the book is foundational: its purpose is not a return to traditional realism but to break new ground and overcome theoretical obstacles in marketing and management by revising some of their assumptions and enriching their categories, thereby paving the way to fresh approaches and methodological innovations. In that sense, the book encourages theoretical innovation and experimentation and introduces new concepts, like invitation and attrition, which can find fruitful applications in marketing theory and practice. That is meant to be conductive to the solution of important difficulties and to the uncovering of new phenomena. The last chapter of the book applies the new approach to eight case studies from business contexts. This book will be of interest to philosophers interested in New Realism and to researchers, scholars and marketing professionals sensitive to the importance and fruitfulness of reference to reality, for their own purposes.

David Malet Armstrong (8 July 1926-13 May 2014) has been one of the most influential contemporary metaphysicians working in the analytic tradition and surely the greatest 20th century Australian philosopher. His main merit is to have reestablished metaphysics as a respectable branch of philosophy placing it at the centre of the philosophical debate, and giving it the status of an authoritative and competent interlocutor of both rational and empirical sciences. By means of a rigorously argumentative approach and a sharp prose, Armstrong has built a whole metaphysical system, that is, a comprehensive and unified picture of the fundamental structure of the world. The various chapters of the book address the key issues concerning Armstrong' view about the problem of universals, the nature of states of affairs, the ontological ground of possibility, nomic necessity, and dispositions, the truthmaker theory, and the theory of mind. This volume aims to celebrate Armstrong's memory bringing new understanding, and hopefully stimulating more work, on his philosophy, with the conviction that it constitutes an invaluable heritage for contemporary research in metaphysics.