"Morality and religion have failed because they are based on duplicity and fantasy. We need something new." This bold statement is the driving force behind Richard Garner's "Beyond Morality." In his book, Garner presents an insightful defense of moral error theory-the idea that our moral thought and discourse is systemically flawed. Establishing his argument with a discerning survey of historical and contemporary moral beliefs from around the world, Garner critically evaluates the plausibility of these beliefs and ultimately finds them wanting. In response, Garner suggests that humanity must "get beyond morality" by rejecting traditional language and thought about good and bad, right and wrong. He encourages readers to adhere to an alternative system of thought: "informed, compassionate amoralism," a blend of compassion, non-duplicity, and clarity of language that Garner believes will nurture our capability for tolerance, creation, and cooperation. By abandoning illusion and learning to listen to others and ourselves, Garner insists that society can and will find harmony.

Richard Garner's, "Beyond Morality" delves deep into the thoughts and codes that inform the actions of humanity and offers a solution to the embedded error of these forces. An essential text for students of philosophy, "Beyond Morality" provides a groundwork for improving human action and relationships.

Richard Garner is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Ohio State University.

"One can discern the influence of the moral skeptic upon philosophy for as far back as one can gather any solid evidence at all, yet all too often the skeptical case has been articulated by opponents only with an eye to its refutation. All the more important it is, then, that forms of moral skepticism are sympathetically developed and advocated in the intellectual community. When first published in 1994, "Beyond Morality" was one of very few books that intelligently championed a radical type of moral skepticism; here Garner threw down the gauntlet in a firm, level-headed, and engaging manner. In so doing, he showed amoralism to have many attractions and a rich cultural history. Garner's position remains very much a live option in metaethics, and the importance of "Beyond Morality" has not diminished."

-Richard Joyce, Professor of Philosophy, Victoria University of Wellington

"This work is a tremendous achievement. The author's erudition is overwhelming, yet it is expressed without overwhelming the reader. He goes easily from modern to ancient thought. Some of the most difficult areas of thought are explored with such clarity that readers unfamiliar with them can grasp them readily. One of the chief virtues of this highly informative book is that it sets the problems of ethics in the context of wider areas of thought and brings them down to earth. Garner's main thesis, referred to as amoralism, is extremely important, not only to philosophy, but to all popular thinking about ethics, both theoretical and applied. He has done a magnificent job defending this important theme. This is a landmark work."

-Richard Taylor, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Rochester

"Garner is one of the first philosophers since Nietzsche to take seriously the idea that 'morality' might be nothing more than a sham. . . . In his hands, 'amoralism' turns out to be more appealing and humane than many thinkers' versions of 'morality' "

-James Rachels, Professor of Philosophy, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Nietzsche's famous attack upon established Christianity and religion is brought to the reader in this superb hardcover edition of The Antichrist, introduced and translated by H.L. Mencken. The incendiary tone throughout The Antichrist separates it from most other well-regarded philosophical texts; even in comparison to Nietzsche's earlier works, the tone of indignation and conviction behind each argument made is evident. There is little lofty ponderousness; the book presents its arguments and points at a blistering pace, placing itself among the most accessible and comprehensive works of philosophy. The Antichrist comprises a total of sixty-two short chapters, each with distinct philosophical arguments or angle upon the targets of Christianity, organised religion, and those who masquerade as faithful but are in actuality anything but. Pointedly opposed to notions of Christian morality and virtue, Nietzsche vehemently sets out a case for the faith's redundancy and lack of necessity in human life.

Locating poetry in a philosophy of the everyday, Brett Bourbon continues a tradition of attention to logic in everyday utterances through Wittgenstein, Austin, Quine, and Cavell, arguing that poems are events of form, not just collections of words, which shape everyone's lives. Poems taught in class are formalizations of the everyday poems we live amidst, albeit unknowingly. Bourbon resurrects these poems to construct an anthropology of form that centers everyday poems as events or interruptions within our lives. Expanding our understanding of what a poem is, this book argues that poems be understood as events of form that may depend on words but are not fundamentally constituted by them. This line of thought delves into a poem's linguistic particularity, to ask what a poem is and how we know. By reclaiming arenas previously ceded to essayists and literary writers, Bourbon reveals the care and attention necessary to uncovering the intimate relationship between poems, life, reading and living. A philosophical meditation on the nature of poetry, but also on the meaning of love and the claim of words upon us, Everyday Poetics situates the importance of everyday poems as events in our lives.

How does milk become cow milk, donkey milk or human milk? When one closely explores this question, the species difference between milks is not as stable as one might initially assume, even if one takes an embodied perspective. To show this, this book takes readers through an ethnographic comparison of milk consumption and production in Croatia in a range of different social settings: on farms, in mother-infant breastfeeding relations, in food hygiene documentation and in the local landscape. It argues that humans actually invest considerable work into abstracting and negotiating milks into their human and animal forms.

In this book, we reclaim the term "resistance" by exploring how animals can "resist" their commodification through blocking and allowing human intervention in their lives. In the cases explored in this volume, animals lead humans to rethink their relationship to animals by either blocking and/or allowing human commodification. In some cases, this results in greater control exercised on the animals, while in others, animals' resistance also poses a series of complex moral questions to human commodifiers, sometimes to the point of transforming humans into active members of resistance movements on behalf of animals.

In The Ethics of Theory, Robert Doran offers the first broad assessment of the ethical challenges of Critical Theory across the humanities and social sciences, calling into question the sharp dichotomy typically drawn between the theoretical and the ethical, the analytical and the prescriptive. In a series of discrete but interrelated interventions, Doran exposes the ethical underpinnings of theoretical discourses that are often perceived as either oblivious to or highly skeptical of any attempt to define ethics or politics. Doran thus discusses a variety of themes related to the problematic status of ethics or the ethico-political in Theory: the persistence of existentialist ethics in structuralist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial writing; the ethical imperative of the return of the subject (self-creation versus social conformism); the intimate relation between the ethico-political and the aesthetic (including the role of literary history in Erich Auerbach and Edward Said); the political implications of a "philosophy of the present" for Continental thought (including Heidegger's Nazism); the ethical dimension of the debate between history and theory (including Hayden White's idea of the "practical past" and the question of Holocaust representation); the "ethical turn" in Foucault, Derrida, and Rorty; the post-1987 "political turn" in literary and cultural studies (especially as influenced by Said). Drawing from a broad range of Continental philosophers and cultural theorists, including many texts that have only recently become available, Doran charts a new path that recognizes the often complex motivations that underlie the critical impulse, motivations that are not always apparent or avowed.

Recent discussion of the European Enlightenment has tended to highlight its radical, atheist currents of thought and their relation to modernity, but much less attention has been paid to the importance of religion. Contributors to The Enlightenment in Bohemia redress this balance by focusing on the interactions of moral philosophy and Catholic theology in Central Europe. Bohemia's vibrant plurality of cultures provides a unique insight into different manifestations of Enlightenment, from the Aufklarung of scholars and priests to the aristocratic Lumieres and the Jewish Haskalah. Four key areas of interest are highlighted: the institutional background and media which disseminated moral knowledge, developments in secular philosophy, the theology of the Josephist Church and ethical debates within the Jewish Haskalah. At the centre of this fertile intellectual environment is the presence of Karl Heinrich Seibt, theologian and teacher, whose pupils and colleagues penetrated the diverse milieus of multicultural Bohemia. The Enlightenment in Bohemia brings fresh insights into the nature and transmission of ideas in eighteenth-century Europe. It reaffirms the existence of a religious Enlightenment, and replaces the traditional context of 'nation' with a new awareness of intersecting national and linguistic cultures, which has a particular relevance today.

Historically speaking, our vices, like our virtues, have come in two basic forms: intellectual and moral. One of the main purposes of this book is to analyze a set of specifically political vices that have not been given sufficient attention within political theory but that nonetheless pose enduring challenges to the sustainability of free and equitable political relationships of various kinds. Political vices like hubris, willful blindness, and recalcitrance are persistent dispositions of character and conduct that imperil both the functioning of democratic institutions and the trust that a diverse citizenry has in the ability of those institutions to secure a just political order of equal moral standing, reciprocal freedom, and human dignity. Political vices embody a repudiation of the reciprocal conditions of politics and, as a consequence of this, they represent a standing challenge to the principles and values of the mixed political regime we call liberal-democracy. Mark Button shows how political vices not only carry out discrete forms of injustice but also facilitate the habituation in and indifference toward systemic forms of social and political injustice. They do so through excesses and deficiencies in human sensory and communicative capacities relating to voice (hubris), vision (moral blindness), and listening (recalcitrance). Drawing on a wide range of intellectual resources, including ancient Greek tragedy, social psychology, moral epistemology, and democratic theory, Political Vices gives new consideration to a list of "deadly vices" that contemporary political societies can neither ignore as a matter of personal "sin" nor publicly disregard as a matter of mere bad choice, and it provides a democratic account that outlines how citizens can best contend with our most troubling political vices without undermining core commitments to liberalism or pluralism.