The 'end of the world' opens up philosophical questions concerning the very notion of the world, which is a fundamental element of all existential, phenomenological and hermeneutical philosophy. Is the 'end of the world' for us 'somebody's' death (the end of 'being-in-the-world') or the extinction of many or of all (the end of the world itself)? Is the erosion of the 'world' a phenomenon that does not in fact affect the notion of the world as a fundamental feature of all existential-ontological inquiry? This volume examines the present state of these concerns in philosophy, film and literature. It presents a philosophical hermeneutics of the present state of the world and explores the principal questions of the philosophical accounts of the end of the world, such as finality and finitude. It also shows how literature and cinema have ventured to express the end of the world while asking if a consequent expression of the end of the world is also an end of its expression.

This book represents a primer on artistic research, presenting diverse perspectives, strategies, methodologies, and concrete examples of research projects situated at the crossroads of art and academia. Exposing international work of significant research projects from Europe, Asia, Australia, South- and North America, it provides a multidisciplinary overview on different discourses and practices, exploring cutting-edge questions coming from the burgeoning field of artistic research. The first part includes chapters on artistic research and diverse artistic fields, addressing a common thread of questions and problematics. The second part provides insights into six internationally relevant artistic research projects. The comprehensive editors' introduction offers a much-needed and extensive overview practice-based artistic research in general. Ideal for graduate students across Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Art, Music, Performance Studies and more, The book is enhanced by a range of multimedia components (images, videos, sounds).

This book provides a wide-ranging, systematic, and comprehensive approach to the moral philosophy of John Dewey, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. It does so by focusing on his greatest achievement in this field: the Ethics he jointly published with James Hayden Tufts in 1908 and then republished in a heavily revised version in 1932. The essays in this volume are divided into two distinct parts. The first features essays that provide a running commentary on the chapters of the 1932 Ethics written by Dewey. Each chapter is introduced, situated within a historical perspective, and then its main achievements are highlighted and discussed. The second part of the book interprets the Ethics and demonstrates its contemporary relevance and vitality. The essays in this part situate the Ethics in the broader interpretive frameworks of Dewey's philosophy, American pragmatism, and 20th-century moral theory at large. Taken together, these essays show that, far from being a mere survey of moral theories, the 1932 Ethics presents the theoretical highpoint in Dewey's thinking about moral philosophy. This book features contributions by some of the most influential Dewey scholars from North America and Europe. It will be of keen interest to scholars and students of American pragmatism, ethics and moral philosophy, and the history of 20th-century philosophy.

Jean-Michel Rabate uses Nietzsche's image of a "pathos of distance," the notion that values are created by a few gifted and lofty individuals, as the basis for a wide-ranging investigation into the ethics of the moderns. Revealing overlooked connections between Nietzsche's and Benjamin's ideas of history and ethics, Rabate provides an original genealogy for modernist thought, moving through figures and moments as varied as Yeats and the birth of Irish Modernism, the ethics of courage in Virginia Woolf, Rilke, Apollinaire, and others in 1910, T. S. Eliot's post-war despair, Jean Cocteau's formidable selfmythology in his first film The Blood of a Poet, Siri Hustvedt's novel of American trauma, and J. M. Coetzee's dystopia portraying an affectless future haunted by a messianic promise.

In Society as a Department Store Ryszard Legutko wrestles with the emancipatory ideology promulgated by postmodernists, libertarians, and liberal thinkers. Legutko argues that modern Western liberals have embraced a revolutionary ethic; they have turned their backs on their own cultural heritage, and used its political and ideological apparatus to destroy classical metaphysics and epistemology. The book considers the paradoxical implications of this state of affairs for Eastern European intellectuals arguing that, with the triumph of liberalism over communism, these intellectuals feel compelled to digest an ideology that shares many elements with the oppressive system from which they just liberated themselves. Based on hubris rather than genuine humane concerns, Legutko mourns not simply the loss of faith in classical Western culture, but the way in which that loss is becoming a central point of identity.

This is a short introduction to the work, ideas and influence of one of the twentieth century's most important and widely-read thinkers. Merleau-Ponty was one of the most important European philosophers of the 20th century, whose work made enormous contributions to the development of phenomenology and the concept of the lived-body. Clearly and thematically structured, covering all Merleau-Ponty's key works and focussing particularly on the hugely important "The Phenomenology of Perception, Starting with Merleau-Ponty" leads the reader through a thorough overview of the development of his thought, resulting in a more thorough understanding of the roots of his philosophical concerns. Offering coverage of the full range of Merleau-Ponty's ideas, the book firmly sets his work in the context of the 20th century intellectual landscape and explores his contributions to phenomenology, existentialism, empiricism, objective thought and his vision of human reality. Crucially the book introduces the major thinkers and events that proved influential in the development of Merleau-Ponty's work, including Husserl, Sartre, Heidegger and those philosophers and psychologists whom he labelled 'intellectualists' and 'empiricists'. This is the ideal introduction for anyone coming to the work of this hugely important thinker for the first time. "Continuum's Starting with" ...series offers clear, concise and accessible introductions to the key thinkers in philosophy. The books explore and illuminate the roots of each philosopher's work and ideas, leading readers to a thorough understanding of the key influences and philosophical foundations from which his or her thought developed. Ideal for first-year students starting out in philosophy, the series will serve as the ideal companion to study of this fascinating subject.

The question of what characterizes feelings of being alive is a puzzling and controversial one. Are we dealing with a unique affective phenomenon or can it be integrated into existing classifications of emotions and moods? What might be the natural basis for such feelings? What could be considered their specifically human dimension? These issues are addressed by researchers from various disciplines, including philosophy of mind and emotions, psychology, and history of art. This volume contains original papers on the topic of feelings of being alive by Fiorella Battaglia, Eva-Maria Engelen, Joerg Fingerhut, Thomas Fuchs, Alice Holzhey-Kunz, Matthias Jung, Tanja Klemm, Riccardo Manzotti, Sabine Marienberg, Matthew Ratcliffe, Arbogast Schmitt, Jan Slaby, and Achim Stephan.

Critical Theory is an interdisciplinary framework of analysis that was founded by a group of intellectuals working at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. While the Institute itself was established in 1923, the program of 'critical theory' was not formalized until 1937 when Max Horkheimer, the Director of the Institute at that time, dubbed it as such in his essay, "Traditional and Critical Theory." The Institute is frequently referred to simply as 'The Frankfurt School'. Its significance cannot be underestimated. To this day there have been three generations of Frankfurt School academics, but 'critical theory' refers to something broader than just the work of the Institute for Social Research. Critical theory now indicates a theoretical approach that is studied all over the world. However, the main interests and goals of the founding Institute still remain integral. Foremost among these interests is the primary focus on the individual human being as the locus for social change. Over the years many debates have ensued as to how the individual can achieve social change. While these debates took Critical Theory in diverse directions, Soren Kierkegaard, a nineteenth century Danish religious thinker who emphasizes the individual's self-imposed obligation to society at large, played a major role. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard's impact on the development of Critical Theory has received scant study. I aim to fill this scholarly lacuna. My intention is to expose the complexity not only of Kierkegaard but of the Frankfurt School and their cohort. Kierkegaard's relationship to Critical Theory suffered from the misappropriation of his works by philosophers and theologians associated with National Socialism. This caused the Critical Theorists to view the content of Kierkegaard's philosophy itself as fascistic. Ultimately, I will highlight the ways in which Kierkegaard has been redeemed for a multiculture activist ethics today, working vigorously in spirit with the fundamental aims of the Frankfurt School.

Wittgenstein was centrally concerned with the puzzling nature of the mind, mathematics, morality and modality. He also developed innovative views about the status and methodology of philosophy and was explicitly opposed to crudely "scientistic" worldviews. His later thought has thus often been understood as elaborating a nuanced form of naturalism appealing to such notions as "form of life", "primitive reactions", "natural history", "general facts of nature" and "common behaviour of mankind". And yet, Wittgenstein is strangely absent from much of the contemporary literature on naturalism and naturalising projects. This is the first collection of essays to focus explicitly on the relationship between Wittgenstein and naturalism. The volume is divided into four sections, each of which addresses a different aspect of naturalism and its relation to Wittgenstein's thought. The first section considers how naturalism could or should be understood. The second section deals with some of the main problematic domains-consciousness, meaning, mathematics-that philosophers have typically sought to naturalise. The third section explores ways in which the conceptual nature of human life might be continuous in important respects with animals. The final section is concerned with the naturalistic status and methodology of philosophy itself. This book thus casts a fresh light on many classical philosophical issues and brings Wittgensteinian ideas to bear on a number of current debates-for example experimental philosophy, neo-pragmatism and animal cognition/ethics-in which naturalism is playing a central role.

For the past fifteen years, Aikin and Talisse have been working collaboratively on a new vision of American pragmatism, one which sees pragmatism as a living and developing philosophical idiom that originates in the work of the "classical" pragmatisms of Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, uninterruptedly develops through the later 20th Century pragmatists (C. I. Lewis, Wilfrid Sellars, Nelson Goodman, W. V. O. Quine), and continues through the present day. According to Aikin and Talisse, pragmatism is fundamentally a metaphilosophical proposal - a methodological suggestion for carrying inquiry forward amidst ongoing deep disagreement over the aims, limitations, and possibilities of philosophy. This conception of pragmatism not only runs contrary to the dominant self-understanding among cotemporary philosophers who identify with the classical pragmatists, it also holds important implications for pragmatist philosophy. In particular, Aikin and Talisse show that their version of pragmatism involves distinctive claims about epistemic justification, moral disagreement, democratic citizenship, and the conduct of inquiry. The chapters combine detailed engagements with the history and development of pragmatism with original argumentation aimed at a philosophical audience beyond pragmatism.

Contemporary interest in realism and naturalism, emerging under the banner of speculative or new realism, has prompted continentally-trained philosophers to consider a number of texts from the canon of analytic philosophy. The philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars, in particular, has proven remarkably able to offer a contemporary re-formulation of traditional "continental" concerns that is amenable to realist and rationalist considerations, and serves as an accessible entry point into the Anglo-American tradition for continental philosophers. With the aim of appraising this fertile theoretical convergence, this volume brings together experts of both analytic and continental philosophy to discuss the legacy of Kantianism in contemporary philosophy. The individual essays explore the ways in which Sellars can be put into dialogue with the widely influential work of Quentin Meillassoux, explaining how-even though their methods, language, and proximal influences are widely different-their philosophical stances can be compared thanks to their shared Kantian heritage and interest in the problem of realism. This book will be appeal to students and scholars who are interested in Sellars, Meillassoux, contemporary realist movements in continental philosophy, and the analytic-continental debate in contemporary philosophy.

Philosophy in the American West explores the physical, ecological, cultural, and narrative environments associated with the western United States, reflecting on the relationship between people and the places that sustain them. The American West has long been recognized as having significance. From Crevecoeur's early observations in Letters from an American Farmer (1782), to Thoreau's reflections in Walden (1854), to twentieth-century thoughts on the legacy of a vanishing frontier, "the West" has played a pivotal role in the American narrative and in the American sense of self. But while the nature of "westernness" has been touched on by historians, sociologists, and, especially, novelists and poets, this collection represents the first attempt to think philosophically about the nature of "the West" and its influence on us. The contributors take up thinkers that have been associated with Continental Philosophy and pair them with writers, poets, and artists of "the West". And while this collection seeks to loosen the cords that tie philosophy to Europe, the traditions of "continental" philosophy-phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and others-offer deep resources for thinking through the particularity of place. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Philosophy, as well as those working in Ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities more broadly.

This book brings together Foucault's writings on crime and delinquency, on the one hand, and sexuality, on the other, to argue for an anti-carceral feminist Foucauldian approach to sex crimes. The author expands on Foucault's writings through intersectional explorations of the critical race, decolonial, critical disability, queer and critical trans studies literatures on the prison that have emerged since the publication of Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. Drawing on Foucault's insights from his genealogical period, the book argues that those labeled as sex offenders will today be constructed to re-offend twice over, once in virtue of the delinquency with which they are inculcated through criminological discourses and in the criminal punishment system, and second in virtue of the manners in which their sexual offense is taken up as an identity through psychological and sexological discourses. The book includes a discussion of non-retributive responses to crime, including preventative, redistributive, restorative, and transformative justice. It concludes with two appendixes: the original 19th-century medico-legal report on Charles Jouy and its English translation by the author. Foucault, Feminism, and Sex Crimes will be of interest to feminist philosophers, Continental philosophers, Women's and Gender Studies scholars, social and political theorists, as well as social scientists and social justice activists.

This book employs recursivity and contingency as two principle concepts to investigate into the relation between nature and technology, machine and organism, system and freedom. It reconstructs a trajectory of thought from an Organic condition of thinking elaborated by Kant, passing by the philosophy of nature (Schelling and Hegel), to the 20th century Organicism (Bertalanffy, Needham, Whitehead, Wiener among others) and Organology (Bergson, Canguilhem, Simodnon, Stiegler), and questions the new condition of philosophizing in the time of algorithmic contingency, ecological and algorithmic catastrophes, which Heidegger calls the end of philosophy. The book centres on the following speculative question: if in the philosophical tradition, the concept of contingency is always related to the laws of nature, then in what way can we understand contingency in related to technical systems? The book situates the concept of recursivity as a break from the Cartesian mechanism and the drive of system construction; it elaborates on the necessity of contingency in such epistemological rupture where nature ends and system emerges. In this development, we see how German idealism is precursor to cybernetics, and the Anthropocene and Noosphere (Teilhard de Chardin) point toward the realization of a gigantic cybernetic system, which lead us back to the question of freedom. It questions the concept of absolute contingency (Meillassoux) and proposes a cosmotechnical pluralism. Engaging with modern and contemporary European philosophy as well as Chinese thought through the mediation of Needham, this book refers to cybernetics, mathematics, artificial intelligence and inhumanism.

First published in 1986. Fanon: In Search of the African Revolution is different from other books on Fanon in that it approaches him as both a political philosopher and political sociologist of the African experience. It suggests that Fanon's political writings be viewed in terms of his concern with how relations are structured in colonial and post-colonial Africa and the implications of those structural arrangements for political conflict in Africa. Fanon's attempt to explain the pathologies and contradictions of African politics in terms of class and the historical processes that influence and constrain class political behavior is provocative and insightful. But the moral dimension that informs Fanon's theoretical perspectives is no less important, if only because it attests to his strong advocacy of the need for revolutionary change as a condition for the restructuring of African political systems.

The title of this timely and thought-provoking book, a French bestseller, refers to schoolgirls sending text messages to their friends on their smart phones. Michel Serres, one of France's most important living intellectuals, uses this image to get at something far broader: that humans are formed and shaped by technologies, and that with the advent of computers, smart phones, and the Internet, a new human is being born. These new humans beings are our children-thumbelina (petite poucette) and tom thumb (petit poucet)-but technologies have been changing so fast that parents scarcely know their children. Serres documents this cultural revolution, arguing that there have been several similar revolutions in the past: from oral cultures to cultures focused on reading and writing; the advent of the printing press; and now the complex changes brought about by the new information technologies-changes that are taking place at an accelerated pace and that affect us all.

Slavoj Zizek's critical engagement with Christian theology goes much further than his seminal The Fragile Absolute (2000), or his The Puppet and the Dwarf (2003), or even his discussion with noted theologian John Milbank in The Monstrosity of Christ (2009). His reading of Christianity, utilising his signature elements of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian philosophy with modern philosophical currents, can be seen as a genuinely original contribution to the philosophy of religion. This book focuses on these aspects of Zizek's thought with either philosophy and cultural theory, or Christian theology, serving as starting points of enquiry. Written by a panel of international contributors, each chapter teases out various strands of Zizek's thought concerning Christianity and religion and brings them into a wider conversation about the nature of faith. These essays show that far from being an outright rejection of Christian thought and intellectual heritage, Zizek's work could be seen as a perverse affirmation thereof. Thus, what he has to say should be of direct interest to Christian theology itself. Touching on thinkers such as Badiou, Lacan, Chesterton and Schelling, this collection is a dynamic reading and re-reading of Zizek's relationship to Christianity. As such, scholars of theology, the philosophy of religion and Zizek more generally will all find this book to be of great interest.

Christos Yannaras is one of the most significant Orthodox theologians of recent times. The work of Yannaras is virtually synonymous with a turn or renaissance of Orthodox philosophy and theology, initially within Greece, but as the present volume confirms, well beyond it. His work engages not only with issues of philosophy and theology, but also takes in wider questions of culture and politics. With contributions from established and new scholars, the book is divided into three sections, which correspond to the main directions that Christos Yannaras has followed - philosophy, theology, and culture - and reflects on the ways in which Yannaras has engaged and influenced thought across these fields, in addition to themes including ecclesiology, tradition, identity, and ethics. This volume facilitates the dialogue between the thought of Yannaras, which is expressed locally yet is relevant globally, and Western Christian thinkers. It will be of great interest to scholars of Orthodox and Eastern Christian theology and philosophy, as well as theology more widely.

This book offers a systematic framework for thinking about the relationship between language and technology and an argument for interweaving thinking about technology with thinking about language. The main claim of philosophy of technology-that technologies are not mere tools and artefacts not mere things, but crucially and significantly shape what we perceive, do, and are-is re-thought in a way that accounts for the role of language in human technological experiences and practices. Engaging with work by Wittgenstein, Heidegger, McLuhan, Searle, Ihde, Latour, Ricoeur, and many others, the author critically responds to, and constructs a synthesis of, three "extreme", idealtype, untenable positions: (1) only humans speak and neither language nor technologies speak, (2) only language speaks and neither humans nor technologies speak, and (3) only technology speaks and neither humans nor language speak. The construction of this synthesis goes hand in hand with a narrative about subjects and objects that become entangled and constitute one another. Using Words and Things thus draws in central discussions from other subdisciplines in philosophy, such as philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics, to offer an original theory of the relationship between language and (philosophy of) technology centered on use, performance, and narrative, and taking a transcendental turn.

This book offers two novel claims about Wittgenstein's views and methods on perception as explored in the Philosophical Investigations. The first is an interpretive claim about Wittgenstein: that his views on sensation and perception, including his critique of private language, have their roots in his reflections on sense-datum theories and on what Hymers calls the misleading metaphor of phenomenal space. The second is a major philosophical claim: that Wittgenstein's critique of the misleading metaphor of phenomenal space is of ongoing relevance to current debates concerning first-person authority and the problem of perception because we are still tempted to draw inferences about the phenomenal that only apply to the physical. Many contemporary discussions of these topics are thus premised on the very confusions Wittgenstein sought to dispel. This book will appeal to Wittgenstein scholars who are interested in the Philosophical Investigations and to philosophers of perception who may think that Wittgenstein's views are mistaken, irrelevant, or already adequately appreciated.

The work of Michel Foucault has been influential in the analysis of space in a variety of disciplines, most notably in geography and politics. This collection of essays is the first to focus on what Foucault termed 'heterotopias', spaces that exhibit multiple layers of meaning and reveal tensions within society.

Bernard Williams' Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy is widely regarded as one of the most important works of moral philosophy in the last fifty years. Williams's powerful sceptical critique of the "morality system" sent shockwaves through philosophy, the implications of which are still being reckoned with thirty years later. In this outstanding collection of new essays, fourteen internationally-recognised philosophers examine the enduring contribution that Williams's book continues to make to ethics. After a detailed topical summary of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy by Adrian Moore, the full scope of the work is assessed, including the role of Aristotle and Hume in Williams' thought and his arguments concerning the history of philosophy; the nature of virtue, the good life, practical reason, and deliberation; and the themes of duty, blame and inauthenticity. Ethics Beyond the Limits is required reading for students and researchers in ethics, metaethics, and moral psychology, and highly recommended for anyone studying the work of Bernard Williams.

First published in 1999, this volume examines how the question of autonomy has come to be of recent interest in political theory. The author argues that autonomy goes deep into the Western consciousness and is a part of our very mode of being. He suggests that while autonomy is not universal, once tasted it becomes ineradicable. Autonomy runs deeper than is often thought and this book shows that while autonomy is unique to Western consciousness and to democracy, it raises and examines the question as to whether autonomy is either universally necessary or necessary to democracy.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's writings inspired contemporary philosophical thinking and advanced many issues that had been addressed by traditional philosophy. The questions raised by the Viennese philosopher initiated debates on a reconsideration of philosophical terminology. This is especially true for a term that has generated at least three significant controversies since its creation and will probably generate more disputes in the following years. It is the expression "form(s) of life" which translates into German as "Lebensform(en)" and "Form des Lebens". The present volume contains contributions on forms of life, language games and the influence of Wittgenstein's philosophy on other scholears.

New Waves in Philosophy of Science captures the diverse array of issues in the rapidly developing area of philosophy of science by bringing together a pool of talented young philosophers from across the globe to debate the field and show where it's heading.