William James (1842-1910) was one of the most original and influential American thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As a professor at Harvard University he published many works that had a wide-ranging impact on both psychology and philosophy. His "Principles of Psychology" was the most important English-language work on the mind since Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding." His "Varieties of Religious Experience "practically inaugurated the field of psychology of religion, and it also remains a major inspiration for philosophy of religion. Perhaps most importantly, James publicized the movement of pragmatism and supplied much of its powerful momentum.
This book covers the primary topics for which James is still closely studied: the nature of experience; the functions of the mind; the criteria for knowledge; the definition of "truth"; the ethical life; and the religious life. His notable terms, still resonating in their respective fields, are all here, from the "stream of consciousness" and "pure experience" to the "will to believe," the "cash-value of truth," and the distinction between the religiously "healthy soul" and the "sick soul."
This volume's eighteen selections receive the bulk of the attention and citation from scholars, provide excellent coverage of core topics, and have a broad appeal across many academic disciplines. This well-organized compilation of James's important writings offers an exciting and fascinating tour for both the casual reader and the dedicated student interested in philosophy, psychology, religious studies, American studies, or any related field.

Current tendencies in religious studies and theology show a growing interest for the interchange between religions and the cultures of rationalization surrounding them. The studies published in this volume, based on the international conferences of both the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, aim to contribute to this field of interest by dealing with concepts and influences of rationalization in Judaism, Christianity, Islam and religion in general. In addition to taking a closer look at the immediate links in the history of tradition between those rationalizing movements and evolutions in religion, emphasis is put on intellectual-historical convergences: Therefore, the articles are led by central comparative questions, such as what factors foster/hinder rationalization?; where are criteria for rationalization drawn from?; in which institutions is rationalization taking place?; who propagates, supports and utilizes rationalization?

Although pain is one of the most fundamental and unique experiences we undergo in everyday life, it also constitutes one of the most enigmatic and frustrating subjects for many scientists. This book provides a detailed analysis of why this issue is grounded in the nature of pain itself. It also offers a philosophically driven solution of how we may still approach pain in a theoretically compelling and practically useful manner. Two main theses are defended: (i) Pain seems inscrutable because there exists no property that is commonly shared by all types of pain and that is at the same time particular to pain, setting it apart from other bodily sensations. This applies irrespective of whether we consider the psychological dimensions, neural networks, causal relations or biological functions of pain. Consequently, it is impossible to refer to ideal far-reaching and ideal distinct generalizations on the matter of pain. (ii) Despite this challenge, by focusing on the resemblance relations that hold across pains, we can generate scientific progress in explaining, predicting and treating pain. In doing so, the book aims to provide a clear conceptual basis for interdisciplinary communication and a useful heuristic for future research.

Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) was the most outstanding logician of the twentieth century. This second volume of a comprehensive edition of Gödel's works collects the remainder of his published work, covering the period 1938-1974. (Volume I included all of his publications from 1929-1936). Each article or closely related group of articles is preceded by an introductory note that elucidates it and places it in historical context. The aim is to make the full body of Gödel's work as accessible and useful to as wide an audience as possible, without in any way sacrificing the requirements of historical and scientific accuracy.

As an analyst, philosopher and militant, Felix Guattari anticipated decentralized forms of political activism that have become increasingly evident around the world since the events of Seattle in 1999. Lines of Flight offers an exciting introduction to the sometimes difficult and dense thinking of an increasingly important 20th century thinker. An editorial introduction by Andrew Goffey links the text to Guattari's long-standing involvement with institutional analysis, his writings with Deleuze, and his consistent emphasis on the importance of group practice - his work with CERFI in the early 1970s in particular. Considering CERFI's work on the 'genealogy of capital' it also points towards the ways in which Lines of Flight anticipates Guattari's later work on Integrated World Capitalism and on ecosophy. Providing a detailed and clearly documented account of his micropolitical critique of psychoanalytic, semiological and linguistic accounts of meaning and subjectivity, this work offers an astonishingly fresh set of conceptual tools for imaginative and engaged thinking about capitalism and effective forms of resistance to it.

Despite the recent upsurge of interest in Theodor Adorno's work, his literary writings remain generally neglected. Yet literature is a central element in his aesthetic theory. Building on the current emergent interest in modern philosophical aesthetics, this book offers a wide-ranging account of the literary components of Adorno's thinking. Bringing together original essays from a distinguished international group of contributors, it offers the reader a user-friendly path through the major areas of Adorno's work in this area. It is divided into three sections, dealing with the concept of literature, with poetry and poetics, and with modernity, drama and the novel respectively. At the same time, the book provides a clear sense of the unique qualities of Adorno's philosophy of literature by critically relating his work to a number of other influential theorists and theories including contemporary postmodernist thought and cultural studies.

Through an engagement with the philosophies of Proust's contemporaries, Felix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson, and Georg Simmel, Suzanne Guerlac presents an original reading of Remembrance of Things Past (A la recherche du temps perdu). Challenging traditional interpretations, she argues that Proust's magnum opus is not a melancholic text, but one that records the dynamic time of change and the complex vitality of the real. Situating Proust's novel within a modernism of money, and broadening the exploration through references to cultural events and visual technologies (commercial photography, photojournalism, pornography, the regulation of prostitution, the Panama Scandal, and the Dreyfus Affair), this study reveals that Proust's subject is not the esthetic recuperation of loss but rather the adventure of living in time, on both the individual and the social level, at a concrete historical moment.

Professors Murphy and Choi use postmodern philosophy to expose an important source of racism and cultural domination. They examine foundationalism, which they see at the core of the Western intellectual tradition and which is shown to foster a metaphysics of domination. By contrast, postmodernism undermines this root of racism.

They demonstrate that foundationalism is not needed to support identity, institutions, or political order. Indeed, they assert that true pluralism is possible once foundationalist approaches to knowledge and order are set aside. Special attention is directed to two current modes of discrimination: institutional racism and symbolic violence. Murphy and Choi provide an intriguing look at ways to undercut the justification for racism and other threats to cultural difference. This volume will be of particular interest to scholars and other researchers in the areas of race relations, cultural studies, and political theory.

This volume brings together critical review papers, many specially commissioned, on key themes and questions in the work of the political scientist, philosopher and religious thinker Eric Voegelin (1901-1985). Areas covered include: (1) Political science: 'Political Religions': manifestations in Nazi Germany and in contemporary European and North American nationalism; (2) International relations: the 'Cold War' in critical perspective; (3) Philosophy: Plato and Aristotle in the reading of Eric Voegelin: contemporary assessments; (4) Sociology: Correspondence of Voegelin and Alfred Sch++tz; (5) New Testament studies and Christology: questions and developments for Voegelin's interpretations; (6) Old Testament studies: questions and developments from Voegelin's Israel and Revelation; (7) Historical sociology: Revelation and order in axial-age societies; (8) Philosophy of history: Voegelin and Toynbee in contrast; (9) Literary studies: Voegelin in contrast with contemporary literary theory; critical readings of Milton, Greek tragedy.

This book is the first critical genealogy of Jacques Derrida's philosophy of technology. It traces the evolution of what Derrida calls "originary technicit"' via an appraisal of his own philosophy of technology together with that of key interlocutors including Marx, Freud, Lacan, Heidegger and Bernard Stiegler.

While well-known for his book-length work, philosopher Peter Unger's articles have been less widely accessible. These two volumes of Unger's Philosophical Papers include articles spanning more than 35 years of Unger's long and fruitful career. Dividing the articles thematically, this first volume collects work in epistemology and ethics, among other topics, while the second volume focuses on metaphysics.
Unger's work has advanced the full spectrum of topics at the heart of philosophy, including epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, and ethics. Unger advances radical positions, going against the so-called "commonsense philosophy" that has dominated the analytic tradition since its beginnings early in the twentieth century. In epistemology, his articles advance the view that nobody ever knows anything and, beyond that, argue that nobody has any reason to believe anything--and even beyond that, they argue that nobody has any reason to do anything, or even want anything. In metaphysics, his work argues that people do not really exist--and neither do puddles, plants, poodles, and planets. But, as Unger has often changed his favored positions, from one decade to the next, his work also advances the opposite, "commonsense" positions: that there are in fact plenty of people, puddles, plants and planets and, quite beyond that, we know it all to be true. On most major philosophical questions, both of these sides of Unger's significant work are well represented in this major two volume collection.
Unger's vivid writing style, intellectual vitality, and fearlessness in the face of our largest philosophical questions, make these volumes of great interestnot only to the philosophical community but to others who might otherwise find contemporary philosophy dry and technical.

Vigorous and controversial, this book develops a sustained argument for a realist interpretation of science, based on a new analysis of the concept of predictive novelty. Identifying a form of success achieved in science--the successful prediction of novel empirical results--which can be explained only by attributing some measure of truth to the theories that yield it, Jarrett Leplin demonstrates the incapacity of nonrealist accounts to accommodate novel success and constructs a deft realist explanation of novelty. To test the applicability of novel success as a standard of warrant for theories, Leplin examines current directions in theoretical physics, fashioning a powerful critique of currently developing standards of evaluation.
Arguing that explanatory uniqueness warrants inference, and exposing flaws in contending philosophical positions that sever explanatory power from epistemic justification, Leplin holds that abductive, or explanatory, inference is as fundamental as enumerative or eliminative inference, and contends that neither induction nor abduction can proceed without the other on pain of generating paradoxes.
Leplin's conception of novelty has two basic components: an independence condition, ensuring that a result novel for a theory have no essential role, even indirectly, in the theory's provenance; and a uniqueness condition, ensuring that no competing theory provides a basis for predicting the same result. Showing that alternative approaches to novelty fall short in both respects, Leplin proceeds to a series of test cases, engaging prominent scientific theories from nineteenth-century accounts of light to modern cosmology in an effort to demonstrate theepistemological superiority of his view.
Ambitious and tightly argued, A Novel Defense of Scientific Realism advances new positions on major topics in philosophy of science and offers a version of realism as original as it is compelling, making it essential reading for philosophers of science, epistemologists, and scholars in science studies.

This groundbreaking interdisciplinary collection interrogates the significance of Deleuze's work in the recent and dramatic nonhuman turn. It confronts questions about environmental futures, animals and plants, nonhuman structures and systems, and the place of objects in a more-than-human world.

This text offers a series of critical commentaries on, and forced encounters between, different thinkers. At stake in this philosophical and psychoanalytical enquiry is the drawing of a series of diagrams of the finite/infinite relation, and the mapping out of the contours for a speculative and pragmatic production of subjectivity.

This title brings a deconstructive perspective to theories of justice in the early and later work of Rawls, Habermas and Honneth. Deconstructing influential theories of justice by John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, Miriam Bankovsky explores and critiques the early and later work of these three important liberal theorists. Bankovsky examines the commitments that all these thinkers make to a conception of justice as, in Rawls' words, an 'art of the possible' and the difficulties that such commitments present for their theories. Taking a deconstructive approach, the book argues that such a defence of possibility must be supplemented by an acknowledgment of the ways in which theory ultimately fails to reconcile the conflicting demands of 'justice' - namely, it's demand for responsibility for the other in the particular and for impartiality among all. In so doing, the book draws attention to the 'perfectible' (simultaneously possible and impossible) status of theories of justice, celebrating such perfectibility as the very condition for justice's critical function. "Continuum Studies in Political Philosophy" presents cutting-edge scholarship in the field of political philosophy. Making available the latest high-quality research from an international range of scholars working on key topics and controversies in political philosophy and political science, this series is an important and stimulating resource for students and academics working in the area.

Derrida wrote a vast number of texts for particular events across the world, as well as a series of works that portray him as a voyager. As an Algerian migr , a postcolonial outsider, and an idiomatic writer who felt tied to a language that was not his own, and as a figure obsessed by the singularity of the literary or philosophical event, Derrida emerges as one whose thought always arrives on occasion. But how are we to understand the event in Derrida? Is there a risk that such stories of Derridas work tend to misunderstand the essential unpredictability at work in the conditions of his thought? And how are we to reconcile the importance in Derrida of the unknowable event, the pull of the singular, with deconstructions critical and philosophical rigour and its claims to rethink more systematically the ethico-political field. This book argues that this negotiation in fact allows deconstruction to reformulate the very questions that we associate with ethical and political responsibility and shows this to be the central interest in Derridas work.

An Essay on Metaphysics is one of the finest works of the great Oxford philosopher, historian, and archaeologist R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943). First published in 1940, it is a broad-ranging work in which Collingwood considers the nature of philosophy, especially of metaphysics. He puts forward his well-known doctrine of absolute presuppositions, expounds a logic of question and answer, and gives an original and influential account of causation. The book has been widely read and much discussed ever since. In this revised edition the complete original text is accompanied by three previously unpublished essays by Collingwood which will be essential reading for any serious student of his thought: `The Nature of Metaphysical Study' (1934), `The Function of Metaphysics in Civilization' (1938), and `Notes for a Essay on Logic' (1939). These fascinating writings illuminate and amplify the ideas of the Essay, to which they are closely related. The distinguished philosopher and Collingwood scholar Rex Martin has established authoritative versions of these new texts, added a short set of notes on the Essay, and contributed a substantial introduction explaining the story of the composition of all these works, discussing their major themes, and setting them in the context of Collingwood's philosophy as a whole.

The papers in this volume present some of the most recent results of the work about contradictions in philosophical logic and metaphysics; examine the history of contradiction in crucial phases of philosophical thought; consider the relevance of contradictions for political and philosophical actuality. From this consideration a common question emerges: the question of the irreducibility, reality and productive force of (some) contradictions.

The volume collects papers on central aspects of Alexius Meinong's Gegenstandstheorie (Theory of Objects) and its transformation in contemporary logic, semantics and ontology covering the impact of his views on grasping and representation, the status of nonexistent or inconsistent objects and their incorporation in theories like Noneism and Possible-World-Semantics. In addition it presents studies on Meinong's notion of probability and on Auguste Fischer, a student and collaborator of Meinong.

Developing work in the theories of action and explanation, Eldridge argues that moral and political philosophers require accounts of what is historically possible, while historians require rough philosophical understandings of ideals that merit reasonable endorsement. Both Immanuel Kant and Walter Benjamin recognize this fact. Each sees a special place for religious consciousness and critical practice in the articulation and revision of ideals that are to have cultural effect, but they differ sharply in the forms of religious-philosophical understanding, cultural criticism, and political practice that they favor. Kant defends a liberal, reformist, Protestant stance, emphasizing the importance of liberty, individual rights, and democratic institutions. His fullest picture of movement toward a moral culture appears in Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, where he describes conjecturally the emergence of an ethical commonwealth. Benjamin defends a politics of improvisatory alertness and consciousness-raising that is suspicious of progress and liberal reform. He practices a form of modernist, materialist criticism that is strongly rooted in his encounters with Kant, Hoelderlin, and Goethe. His fullest, finished picture of this critical practice appears in One-Way Street, where he traces the continuing force of unsatisfied desires. By drawing on both Kant and Benjamin, Eldridge hopes to avoid both moralism (standing on sharply specified normative commitments at all costs) and waywardness (rejecting all settled commitments). And in doing so, he seeks to make better sense of the commitment-forming, commitment-revising, anxious, reflective and sometimes grownup acculturated human subjects we are.

How can we take history seriously as real and relevant? Despite the hazards of politically dangerous or misleading accounts of the past, we live our lives in a great network of cooperation with other actors; past, present, and future. We study and reflect on the past as a way of exercising a responsibility for shared action. In each of the chapters of Full History Smith poses a key question about history as a concern for conscious participants in the sharing of action, starting with "What Is Historical Meaningfulness?" and ending with "How Can History Have an Aim?" Constructing new models of historical meaning while engaging critically with perspectives offered by Ranke, Dilthey, Rickert, Heidegger, Eliade, Sartre, Foucault, and Arendt, Smith develops a philosophical account of thinking about history that moves beyond postmodernist skepticism. Full History seeks to expand the cast of significant actors, establishing an inclusive version of the historical that recognizes large-scale cumulative actions but also encourages critical revision and expansion of any paradigm of shared action.

Shedding new light on the theme of "crisis" in Husserl's phenomenology, this book reflects on the experience of awakening to one's own naivete. Beginning from everyday examples, Knies examines how this awakening makes us culpable for not having noticed what was noticeable. He goes on to apply this examination to fundamental issues in phenomenology, arguing that the appropriation of naive life has a different structure from the reflection on pre-reflective life. Husserl's work on the "crisis" is presented as an attempt to integrate this appropriation into a systematic transcendental philosophy. Crisis and Husserlian Phenomenology brings Husserl into dialogue with other key thinkers in Continental philosophy such as Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. It is suitable for students and scholars alike, especially those interested in subjectivity, responsibility and the philosophy of history.