This volume is composed of extended versions of selected papers presented at an international conference held in June 2011 at Opole University-the seventh in a series of annual American and European Values conferences organized by the Institute of Philosophy, Opole University, Poland. The papers were written independently with no prior guidelines other than the obvious need to address some aspect of George Herbert Mead's work. While rooted in careful study of Mead's original writings and transcribed lectures and the historical context in which that work was carried out, these papers have brought that work to bear on contemporary issues in metaphysics, epistemology, cognitive science, and social and political philosophy. There is good reason to classify Mead as one of the original classical American pragmatists (along with Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey) and consequently as a major figure in American philosophy. Nevertheless his thought has been marginalized for the most part, at least in academic philosophy. It is our intention to help recuperate Mead's reputation among a broader audience by providing a small corpus of significant contemporary scholarship on some key aspects of his thought.

Speculative realism is one of the most talked-about movements in recent Continental philosophy. It has been discussed widely amongst the younger generation of Continental philosophers seeking new philosophical approaches and promises to form the cornerstone of future debates in the field. This book introduces the contexts out of which speculative realism has emerged and provides an overview of the major contributors and latest developments. It guides the reader through the important questions asked by realism (what can I know? what is reality?), examining philosophy's perennial questions in new ways. The book begins with the speculative realist's critique of 'correlationism', the view that we can never reach what is real beneath our language systems, our means for perception, or our finite manner of being-in-the-world. It goes on to critically review the work of the movement's most important thinkers, including Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, and Graham Harman, but also other important writers such as Jane Bennett and Catherine Malabou whose writings delineate alternative approaches to the real. It interrogates the crucial questions these thinkers have raised and concludes with a look toward the future of speculative realism, especially as it relates to the reality of time.

Georges Bataille's influence upon 20th-century philosophy is hard to overstate. His writing has transfixed his readers for decades - exerting a powerful influence upon Foucault, Blanchot and Derrida amongst many others. Today, Bataille continues to be an important reference for many of today's leading theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Jean-Luc Nancy and Adrianna Caverero. His work is a unique and enigmatic combination of mystical phenomenology, politics, anthropology and economic theory - sometimes adopting the form of literature, sometimes that of ontology. This is the first book to take Bataille's ambitious and unfinished Accursed Share project as its thematic guide, with individual contributors isolating themes, concepts or sections from within the three volumes and taking them in different directions. Therefore, as well as providing readings of Bataille's key concepts, such as animality, sovereignty, catastrophe and the sacred, this collection aims to explore new terrain and new theoretical problems.Georges Bataille and Contemporary Thought acts simultaneously as a companion to Bataille's three-volume secular theodicy and as a laboratory for new syntheses within his thought.

This is above all a practical book. It discusses with a wealth of illustration and insight such subjects as the organization of the intellectual worker's time, materials, and his life; the integration of knowledge and the relation of one's specialty to general knowledge; the choice and use of reading; the discipline of memory; the taking of notes, their classification and use; and the preparation and organization of the final production.

This book investigates a number of central problems in the philosophy of Charles Peirce grouped around the realism of his semiotics: the issue of how sign systems are developed and used in the investigation of reality. Thus, it deals with the precise character of Peirce's realism; with Peirce's special notion of propositions as signs which, at the same time, denote and describe the same object. It deals with diagrams as signs which depict more or less abstract states-of-affairs, facilitating reasoning about them; with assertions as public claims about the truth of propositions. It deals with iconicity in logic, the issue of self-control in reasoning, dependences between phenomena in their realist descriptions. A number of chapters deal with applied semiotics: with biosemiotic sign use among pre-human organisms: the multimedia combination of pictorial and linguistic information in human semiotic genres like cartoons, posters, poetry, monuments. All in all, the book makes a strong case for the actual relevance of Peirce's realist semiotics.

This is the first study to compare the philosophical systems of secular scientific philosopher Mario Bunge (1919-2020), and Moroccan Islamic philosopher Taha Abd al-Rahman (b.1945). In their efforts to establish the philosophical underpinnings of an ideal modernity these two great thinkers speak to the same elements of the human condition, despite their opposing secular and religious worldviews. While the differences between Bunge's critical-realist epistemology and materialist ontology on the one hand, and Taha's spiritualist ontology and revelational-mystical epistemology on the other, are fundamental, there is remarkable common ground between their scientific and Islamic versions of humanism. Both call for an ethics of prosperity combined with social justice, and both criticize postmodernism and religious conservatism. The aspiration of this book is to serve as a model for future dialogue between holders of Western and Islamic worldviews, in mutual pursuit of modernity's best-case scenario.

This volume examines (1) the philosophical sources of the Kantian concepts "apperception" and "self-consciousness", (2) the historical development of the theories of apperception and deduction of categories within the pre-critical period, (3) the structure and content of A- as well as B-deduction of categories, and finally (4) the Kantian (and non-Kantian) meaning of "apperception" and "self-consciousness".

The future of deconstruction lies in the ability of its practitioners to mobilise the tropes and interests of Derrida's texts into new spaces and creative readings. In Deconstruction without Derrida, Martin McQuillan sets out to do just that, to continue the task of deconstructive reading both with and without Derrida. The book's principal theme is an attention to instances of deconstruction other than or beyond Derrida and thus imagining a future for deconstruction after Derrida. This future is both the present of deconstruction and its past. The readings presented in this book address the expanded field of deconstruction in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, Helene Cixous, Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller, Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak and Catherine Malabou. They also, necessarily, address Derrida's own readings of this work. McQuillan accounts for an experience of otherness in deconstruction that is, has been and always will be beyond Derrida, just as deconstruction remains forever tied to Derrida by an invisible, indestructible thread.

Reflections on the Religious, the Ethical, and the Political presents fourteen essays devoted to the interconnected topics of religion, ethics, and politics, along with an introductory interview with the author regarding his philosophical development over the years. This volume serves two interconnected purposes: as an introduction or reintroduction to Calvin O.Schrag s intellectual contributions to a critical consideration of these three topics, and as a critical companion and supplement to Schrag s published work on these topics. The topics of religion, ethics, and politics have served as pivot points throughout Schrag s career in the academy, which spans half a century."

This is a unique collection presenting work by Alain Badiou and commentaries on his philosophical theories. It includes three lectures by Badiou, on contemporary politics, the infinite, cinema and theatre and two extensive interviews with Badiou - one concerning the state of the contemporary situation and one wide ranging interview on all facets of his work and engagements. It also includes six interventions on aspects of Badiou's work by established scholars in the field, addressing his concept of history, Lacan, Cinema, poetry, and feminism; and four original essays by young and established scholars in Australia and New Zealand addressing the key concerns of Badiou's 2015 visit to the Antipodal region and the work he presented there. With new material by Badiou previously unpublished in English this volume is a valuable overview of his recent thinking. Critical responses by distinguished and gifted Badiou scholars writing outside of the European context make this text essential reading for anyone interested in the development and contemporary reception of Badiou's thought.

Imagination and Postmodernity addresses the role of the imagination in philosophy today. By focusing on philosophy at the boundary of reason with constant reference to Kant s view of the boundary-limit, it is possible to advance a viable alternative to deconstructing the imagination. Patrick L. Bourgeois puts forth the claim that by refocusing the imagination in the postmodern conversation, a far-reaching contemporary position can be reached that reestablishes the position of the humanities as central against the anti-humanism of deconstruction. This work addresses some of the challenges and problems that emerge in conflicting positions within contemporary philosophy, including a concentration on the role of the imagination in the work of Paul Ricoeur in contrast and in opposition to its role in such postmodern thinkers as Derrida and Lyotard. This treatment requires going back to the role of the imagination in the period of Kant and his immediate followers in order to clarify the various ways of seeing the imagination then and now, for the role today is anticipated in the nineteenth century. Finally, this work, as a creative appropriation of the position of Paul Ricoeur, presents a role for the imagination today that is more encompassing than most thinkers allow for.

Michel Foucault continues to be regarded as one of the most essential thinkers of the twentieth century. A brilliantly evocative writer and conceptual creator, his influence is clearly discernible today across nearly every discipline-philosophy and history, certainly, as well as literary and critical theory, religious and social studies, and the arts. This volume exploits Foucault's insistent blurring of the self-imposed limits formed by the disciplines, with each author in this volume discovering in Foucault's work a model useful for challenging not only these divisions but developing a more fundamental interrogation of modernism. Foucault himself saw the calling into question of modernism to be the permanent task of his life's work, thereby opening a path for rethinking the social. Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism shows, on the one hand, that literature and the arts play a fundamental structural role in Foucault's works, while, on the other hand, it shifts to the foreground what it presumes to be motivating Foucault: the interrogation of the problem of modernism. To that end, even his most explicitly historical or strictly epistemological and methodological enquiries directly engage the problem of modernism through the works of writers and artists from de Sade, Mallarme, Baudelaire to Artaud, Manet, Borges, Roussel, and Bataille. This volume, therefore, adopts a transdisciplinary approach, as a way to establish connections between Foucault's thought and the aesthetic problems that emerge out of those specific literary and artistic works, methods, and styles designated "modern." The aim of this volume is to provide a resource for students and scholars not only in the fields of literature and philosophy, but as well those interested in the intersections of art and intellectual history, religious studies, and critical theory.

It is widely believed in philosophy of science that nobody can claim that any verdict of science is forced upon us by the effects of a physical world upon our sense organs and instruments. The Quine-Duhem problem supposedly allows us to resist any conclusion. Views on language aside, Quine is supposed to have shown this decisively. But it is just false. In many scientific examples, there is simply no room to doubt that a particular hypothesis is responsible for a refutation or established by the observations. Fault Tracing shows how to play independently established hypotheses against each other to determine whether an arbitrary hypothesis needs to be altered in the light of (apparently) refuting evidence. It analyses real examples from natural science, as well as simpler cases. It argues that, when scientific theories have a structure that prevents them from using this method, the theory looks wrong, and is subject to serious criticism. This is a new, and potentially far-reaching, theory of empirical justification.

Hegel's critique of Early German Romanticism and its theory of irony resonates to the core of his own philosophy in the same way that Plato's polemics with the Sophists have repercussions that go to the centre of his thought. The Anti-Romantic examines Hegel's critique of Fr. Schlegel, Novalis and Schleiermacher. Hegel rarely mentions these thinkers by name and the texts dealing with them often exist on the periphery of his oeuvre. Nonetheless, individually, they represent embodiments of specific forms of irony: Schlegel, a form of critical individuality; Novalis, a form of sentimental nihilism; Schleiermacher, a monstrous hybrid of the other two. The strength of Hegel's polemical approach to these authors shows how irony itself represents for him a persistent threat to his own idea of systematic Science. This is so, we discover, because Romantic irony is more than a rival ideology; it is an actual form of discourse, one whose performative objectivity interferes with the objectivity of Hegel's own logos. Thus, Hegel's critique of irony allows us to reciprocally uncover a Hegelian theory of scientific discourse. Far from seeing irony as a form of consciousness overcome by Spirit, Hegel sees it as having become a pressing feature of his own contemporary world, as witnessed in the popularity of his Berlin rival, Schleiermacher. Finally, to the extent that ironic discourse seems, for Hegel, to imply a certain world beyond his own notion of modernity, we are left with the hypothesis that Hegel's critique of irony may be viewed as a critique of post-modernity.

French philosopher and Talmudic commentator Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) has received considerable attention for his influence on philosophical and religious thought. In this book, Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani provides the first examination of the applicability of Emmanuel Levinas' work to social and political movements. Investigating his ethics of responsibility and his critique of the Western liberal imagination, Tahmasebi-Birgani advances the moral, political, and philosophical debates on the radical implications of Levinas' work.

Emmanuel Levinas and the Politics of Non-Violence is the first book to closely consider the affinity between Levinas' ethical vision and Mohandas Gandhi's radical yet non-violent political struggle. Situating Levinas' insights within a transnational, transcontinental, and global framework, Tahmasebi-Birgani highlights Levinas' continued relevance in an age in which violence is so often resorted to in the name of "justice" and "freedom."

This book is mainly concerned with elaborating an account of the unique theoretical essence and activities of philosophy. What manner of civilization should modern humans forge? On what developmental path should a nation embark? What lifestyle should each individual choose? These are the most fundamental issues of our time. Profoundly implicit in the choices outlined above is a deeper question: What are the criteria of choice? An examination of these criteria is a reflection on the premises constituting thought, or a critique of the premises underlying thought. Using a "critique of the premises underlying thought" as the basic idea and hermeneutic principle in philosophy will open a wider theoretical space for contemporary philosophy so as to avoid the predicament of being "pseudo-scientific" or "pseudo-artistic." It will also present contemporary philosophy with a realistic path of development for the task of reflecting on the criteria of choice. This book seeks to formulate concrete philosophical arguments for a critique of the basic beliefs, logic, modes, concepts, and philosophical ideas which constitute thought, with the aim of demonstrating the vigorous self-critique and inexhaustible theoretical space found in philosophical development. This book provides a new principle of interpretation for understanding philosophy and, in turn, uses this principle to develop a critique of the premises underlying thought, thereby furthering the contemporary development of philosophy. This book encompasses a critique of the premises underlying thought, which mainly includes the basic beliefs, logic, modes, concepts, and philosophical ideas constituting thought. Such a critique should comprise five aspects: First, the basic beliefs constituting thought propose a critique of the identity of thought and being; second, the basic logic constituting thought refers to a critique of the formal, intensional, and practical logic of thought; third, the basic modes constituting thought denote a critique of the basic modes by which humans comprehend the world, including commonsense, religion, art, and science; fourth, the basic concepts constituting thought entail a critique centering on being, the world, history, truth, value, and other basic concepts; and finally, the philosophical ideas constituting thought indicate a critique of philosophy itself. A critique aligned on these five aspects will provide a general philosophical overview of the premise critique of thought.

Humanism, Antitheodicism, and the Critique of Meaning in Pragmatist Philosophy of Religion develops a distinctive approach to pragmatist philosophy of religion, and more generally to pragmatist investigations of the human search for meaning, by emphasizing what may be considered two closely interrelated main features of this tradition: humanism and antitheodicism. Humanism here emphasizes the need to focus on religion as a human practice within human concerns of meaningfulness and significance, as distinguished from any metaphysical search for cosmic meaning. Antitheodicism, in turn, stands for the refusal to accept any justification, divine or secular, for the experiences of meaninglessness that individuals undergoing horrendous suffering may have. Developing a critical form of pragmatism emphasizing these ideas, Sami Pihlstroem explores the relations between pragmatism and analytic philosophy in the philosophy of religion, especially regarding the question of religious meaning, as well as the significance of literature for philosophy of religion, with particular emphasis on William James's pragmatism.