This book examines the cogency and value of Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence, as an antidote to the nihilism resulting from the catastrophic event of 'the death of God'. Its significance to Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole (when presented either as an imaginative thought experiment, a cosmological hypothesis, or a poetic metaphor) is analysed, alongside the manifold criticisms the idea has attracted. In this original reading of eternal recurrence, McNeil explores the strength of metaphorical meaning contained within Heraclitean and Stoic cosmologies, revealing their influence on Nietzsche's own cosmology, along with their holistic approach to life which Nietzsche endorsed. Furthermore, an extensive critique of Heidegger's interpretation of eternal recurrence is given. McNeil argues that Heidegger ignores not only the life-affirming Dionysian aspects of the concept, but also the Heraclitean sense of play evident in the cosmology, and the importance of this for developing a positive, celebratory attitude towards our lives and creative projects.

Noam Chomsky is among the most influential contemporary thinkers. Peter Wilkin looks in particular at the philosophical basis of his social and political thought, especially his ideal about power, knowledge and human nature. He shows how Chomsky's ideas can help to defend naturalism as in social and political thought. Chomsky's critical writings of social inquiry and his normative ideas on libertarian socialism and human emancipation are interpreted as synthesising a number of important ideas and approaches at a time when these ideas have fallen out of favour.

The Place of the Mosque: Genealogies of Space, Knowledge, and Power extends Foucault's analysis Of Other Spaces and the "ideological conflicts which underlie the controversies of our day [that] take place between pious descendants of time and tenacious inhabitants of space." The book uses this framework to illuminate how mosques have been threatened in the past, from the Cordoba Mosque in the eighth century to the development of Moorish aesthetics in nineteenth-century United States to the clashes surrounding the building of mosques in the West in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Foucault's genealogy allows us to elaborate and study the subjects that are caught in the emergence of a battle-the social and political will to power, the networks of power and the rituals of power-in the interstitial space which define the subjects and clears a space ruling both the body and space. In going beyond individual buildings to broader geographical and genealogical dimensions of the power struggles, The Place of the Mosque reconciles the public space experience, governmentality, and micro powers, paving the way for a new philosophical language. Expanding architectural and urban regional approaches, Kahera shows the biopolitical significance of the problem of space.

In No Professor's Lectures Can Save Us, John J. Stuhr utilizes the thought of American philosopher and psychologist William James to develop an original world view that addresses both enduring philosophical problems and contemporary cultural issues. Drawing on and illuminating the entirety of James's work, Stuhr explores James's psychology, his account of religious experience and his "will to believe" thesis, his pragmatism, his radical empiricism, his pluralism, and his writing on politics, democracy, and imperialism. Throughout, Stuhr engages the wide-ranging scholarship on James's philosophy and explores connections between James and the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Dewey, Peirce, Rorty, and Whitehead, as well as intellectual movements including contemporary democratic theory, positive psychology, and philosophical naturalism. After establishing the need to approach James's writings as intimately interwoven, Stuhr turns to each of James's major texts, including The Will to Believe, Principles of Psychology, Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism, The Meaning of Truth, and Essays in Radical Empiricism. His focus throughout is practical, showing the concrete differences it makes in one's life should one take up a broadly Jamesian perspective across the "ever not quite" endeavors of our finite lives. "From this unsparing practical ordeal," James noted, "no professor's lectures and no array of books can save us." In this spirit, this book does not by itself, promise salvation. Instead, it is a master class not only in the philosophy of William James but in a new philosophy through James's thought.

With one exception, all of the papers in this volume were originally presented at a conference held in April, 1978, at The Ohio State University. The excep tion is the paper by Wilfrid Sellars, which is a revised version of a paper he originally published in the Journal of Philosophy, 1973. However, the present version of Sellars' paper is so thoroughly changed from its original, that it is now virtually a new paper. None of the other nine papers has been published previously. The bibliography, prepared by Nancy Kelsik, is very extensive and it is tempting to think that it is complete. But I believe that virtual com pleteness is more likely to prove correct. The conference was made possible by grants from the College of Human ities and the Graduate School, Ohio State University, as well as by a grant from the Philosophy Department. On behalf of the contributors, I want to thank these institutions for their support. I also want to thank Marshall Swain and Robert Turnbu l for early help and encouragement; Bette Hellinger for assistance in setting up the confer ence; and Mary Raines and Virginia Foster for considerable aid in the pre paration of papers and many other conference matters. The friendly advice of the late James Cornman was also importantly helpful. April,1979 GEORGE S. PAPPAS ix INTRODUCTION The papers in this volume deal in different ways with the related issues of epistemic justification or warrant, and the analysis of factual knowledge."

Bertrand Russell was not only one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, he was also a humanitarian and activist who fought for many moral, social, and political causes. During his lifetime, the general public knew him for his activism and popular works, in which he tackled such diverse topics as sexual ethics, religion, war, and nuclear disarmament. Besides the great achievements in mathematical logic on which his reputation rests, Russell was a pioneer in moral philosophy, and his work in this area informed and guided his activism. Russell created one of the first versions of a meta-ethical theory known as emotivism (sometimes also called the 'boo-hooray' theory, later popularized by A.J. Ayer and C.L. Stevenson) which maintains that ethical statements cannot be true or false - they are simply expressions of emotional attitudes. That Russell could hold such a theory while being at the same time an ardent activist is one feat. That his version was superior to more popular versions of emotivism is another. Yet, despite the fact that Russell held on to some form of emotivism for most of his professional life, and despite the fact that the theory is present in some of his best-known books, it was virtually ignored until the late 1990s. Michael K. Potter's book brings an important new dimension to our understanding of Russell's life, his activism, and his contribution to moral philosophy.

This book is the first to provide a critical history of analytic philosophy from its inception in the late nineteenth century to the present day. Quentin Smith focuses on the connections between the four leading movements in analytic philosophy -- logical realism, logical positivism, ordinary language analysis, and linguistic essentialism -- and corresponding twentieth-century theories of ethics and of religion. Through a critical evaluation of each school's theoretical positions, Smith counters the widespread view of analytic philosophy as indifferent to important questions about fight and wrong and human meaning. He argues that analytic philosophy throughout its history has revolved around the central issues of existence, and he offers a new ethics and philosophy of religion.

The author develops a positive ethical theory based on a method of ethics first formulated by Robert Adams. Smith's theory belongs to the tradition of perfectionism or self-realization ethics and builds on Thomas Hurka's recent theory of perfectionism. In his consideration of philosophy of religion, Smith concludes that there is a sound "logical argument from evil" that takes into account Alvin Plantinga's free-will defense and undermines monotheism, paving the way to a naturalistic pantheism.

"Smith's book is original not only in intent but frequently in the detailed argument involved in evaluating the merits of the philosophies of language and their implications for ethics and philosophy of religion". -- John F. Post, Vanderbilt University

Theodor Adorno's reputation as a cultural critic has been well- established for some time, but his status as a philosopher remains unclear. In Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy Andrew Bowie seeks to establish what Adorno can contribute to philosophy today. Adorno's published texts are notably difficult and have tended to hinder his reception by a broad philosophical audience. His main influence as a philosopher when he was alive was, though, often based on his very lucid public lectures. Drawing on these lectures, both published and unpublished, Bowie argues that important recent interpretations of Hegel, and related developments in pragmatism, echo key ideas in Adorno's thought. At the same time, Adorno's insistence that philosophy should make the Holocaust central to the assessment of modern rationality suggests ways in which these approaches should be complemented by his preparedness to confront some of the most disturbing aspects of modern history. What emerges is a remarkably clear and engaging re-interpretation of Adorno's thought, as well as an illuminating and original review of the state of contemporary philosophy. Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy will be indispensable to students of Adorno's work at all levels. This compelling book is also set to ignite debate surrounding the reception of Adorno's philosophy and bring him into the mainstream of philosophical debate at a time when the divisions between analytical and European philosophy are increasingly breaking down.

The Times Biography of the Year
Winner of the Hawthornden Prize 2019
Shortlisted for the HWA Non-Fiction Prize 2019
Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2019
Longlisted for the Cundhill History Prize 2019

'Outstanding.' The Sunday Times

'A revelation.' Guardian

'Wonderful.' The Times

'Riveting.' New Statesman

Friedrich Nietzsche's work rocked the foundation of Western thinking and continues to permeate our culture, high and low - yet he is one of history's most misunderstood philosophers. Sue Prideaux's myth-shattering book brings readers into the world of a brilliant, eccentric and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work. I Am Dynamite! is the essential biography for anyone seeking to understand Nietzsche, the philosopher who foresaw - and sought solutions to - our own troubled times.

This book aims to create a Christian theology of wisdom for the present day, in discussion with two sets of conversation-partners. The first are writers of the 'wisdom literature' in ancient Israel and the Jewish community in Alexandria. Here, special attention is given to the biblical books of Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes. The second conversation-partners are philosophers and thinkers of the late-modern age, among them Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Julia Kristeva, Paul Ricoeur and Hannah Arendt. In the late-modern period there has been a reaction against an inherited conception of the conscious and rational self as mastering and even subjugating the world around, and there has been an attempt to overcome the consequent split between the subject and objects of observation. Paul S. Fiddes enters into dialogue with these late-modern concerns about the relation between the self and the world, proposing that the wisdom which is indicated by the ancient Hebraic concept of hokmah integrates a 'practical wisdom' of handling daily experience with the kind of wisdom which is 'attunement' to the world and ultimately to God as creator and sustainer of all. Fiddes brings detailed exegesis of texts from the ancient wisdom literature into interaction with an account of the subject in late-modern thought, in order to form a theology in which seeing the world is knowing a God whose transcendent reality is always immanent in the signs and bodies of the world. He thus argues that participation in a triune, relational God shapes a wisdom that addresses problems of a dominating self, and opens the human person to others.

Is it impossible to assess dignity, which is the faculty or agency of autonomy and equality of rights under the current rule of law, when we are met by global challenges like climate change, financial crisis, food crisis, natural disasters, inequality, violent conflicts and trade disputes? Drawing on European philosophical enlightenment to rethink dominant theories of contemporary Western Human Rights, Stephan P. Leher explores the philosophical foundation of the concept of "dignity" and Human Rights. Using specific examples from Africa and Latin America to explain these concepts as social realizations in the world, Leher demonstrates the link between justice and peace and contends that dignity, freedom and Human Rights law rule are social realizations and claims by all people. With the help of language philosophy, he argues that sentences and propositions about social choices and realizations of real life expressed in ordinary language constitute the basic elements of the foundation and protection of human dignity and Human Rights. The social choice to claim one's freedom and rights can be considered the dignity agency of the individual. Dignity and Human Rights sheds new light on the academic assessment of dignity, the agency of autonomy and the equality of rights under the rule of law, in a time of changes and challenges to Human Rights policies and politics.

Mono no Aware and Gender as Affect in Japanese Aesthetics and American Pragmatism places the naturalistic pragmatism of John Dewey in conversation with Motoori Norinaga's mono no aware, a Japanese aesthetic theory of experience, to examine gender as a felt experience of an aware, or an affective quality of persons. By treating gender as an affect, Johnathan Charles Flowers argues that the experience of gendering and being gendered is a result of the affective perception of the organization of the body in line with cultural aesthetics embodied in Deweyan habit or Japanese kata broadly understood as culturally mediated transactions with the world. On this view, how the felt sense of identity aligns with the affective organization of society determines the nature of the possible social transactions between individuals. As such, this book intervenes in questions of personhood broadly-and identity specifically-by treating personhood itself as an affective sense. In doing so, this book demonstrates how questions of personhood and identity are themselves affective judgments. By treating gender and other identities as aware, this book advocates an expanded recognition of the how to be in the world through cultivating new ways of perceiving the affective organization of persons.

Bringing together active neuroscientists, neurophilosophers, and scholars this volume considers the prospects of a neuroscientifically-informed pragmatism and a pragmatically-informed neuroscience on issues ranging from the nature of mental life to the implications of neuroscience for education and ethics.

Reading Ricoeur through Law, edited by Marc de Leeuw, George H. Taylor, and Eileen Brennan, is the first collection of essays solely focused on Ricoeur's thinking about law, bringing together both established and emerging scholars to offer a systematic and critical examination of Ricoeur's legal thinking. The chapters not only explore the specific contribution Ricoeur makes to the field of jurisprudence but also examine how Ricoeur's work on law fits, complements, or changes his overall anthropology, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. The book provides a complex insight into how law, ethics, and politics intertwine both from within law as normative rule setting, as well as through the wider social-political and historical context in which law and legal institutions affect our inter-subjective and communal life as lived "with and for others in just institutions." The collection also makes available in English "The Just between the Legal and the Good," a key text in Ricoeur's reflections about law and justice. The core topics of this collection are rights, justice, responsibility, judging, interpretation, argumentation, punishment, and authority, but contributors but also offer original insights in how Ricoeur's philosophical reconceptualization of symbolism, action, ideology, narrative, selfhood, testimony, history, trauma, reconciliation, justice, and forgiveness can be made productive for our understanding of law and legal institutions.

A companion volume to Drake's Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France (2002), French Intellectuals from the Dreyfus Affair to the Occupation traces the political positions adopted by French writers and artists from the end of the 19th century to the Liberation. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, it offers a clear and accessible analysis of the intellectuals' engagement with nationalism, pacifism, communism, anti-communism, surrealism, fascism and anti-fascism, which is located within the evolving national and international context of the period.

Aesthetic experience has had a long and contentious history in the Western intellectual tradition. Following Kant and Hegel, a human's interaction with nature or art frequently has been conceptualized as separate from issues of practical activity or moral value. This book examines how art can be seen as a way of moral cultivation. Scott Stroud uses the thought of the American pragmatist John Dewey to argue that art and the aesthetic have a close connection to morality. Dewey gives us a way to reconceptualize our ideas of ends, means, and experience so as to locate the moral value of aesthetic experience in the experience of absorption itself, as well as in the experience of reflective attention evoked by an art object.

Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity is the first full-length study of Beauvoir's political thinking. Best known as the author of The Second Sex, Beauvoir also wrote an array of other political and philosophical texts that are less well known. Together, these constitute an original contribution to political theory and philosophy. The book both locates Beauvoir in her own intellectual and political context and demonstrates her continuing significance. For, in her unique voice, Beauvoir still speaks to a range of pressing theoretical and practical questions concerning politics. These include the political value and dangers of liberal of humanism; how oppressed groups become complicit in their own oppression; how social identities are perpetuated; the limits to rationalism and the place of emotions, such as the desire for revenge, in politics. In discussing Beauvoir's reflections on these and other matters the book puts her ideas into conversation with those of many contemporary thinkers, including feminist and race theorists, as well as with historical figures in the liberal, Hegelian, and Marxist traditions. Beauvoir's political thinking emerges from her fundamental insights into the ambiguity of human existence. Combining phenomenological descriptions with structural analyses, she focuses on the tensions of human action as both free and constrained. To be human is to be an embodied self, to be capable of free choice and yet to be constrained and physically vulnerable. It is also to be in the world with many other such selves, whose relationships may be both reciprocal and conflictual or oppressive. Such ambiguities are intrinsic to politics, and they are not subject to resolution. Beauvoir thus shows us that failure is a necessary part of political action, and she insists that we acknowledge this while also assuming responsibility for the outcomes of what we do.

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.

Philosophical questions about the mind preoccupied much of Wittgenstein's later writing, and his contribution to them is deep and wide-ranging, bearing upon philosophical issues concerning sense-experience, concept formation, perception, introspection, the science of psychology, aspect perception, the self, the understanding of rules, the relation between mind and brain, artificial intelligence, and many other subjects of current concern. According to a growing number of eminent philosophers, however, many of Wittgenstein's most important insights have still not been properly absorbed by contemporary philosophical debates on these topics. If anything, work on these subjects is less informed by Wittgenstein's examples and discussions than ever before. In this volume, philosophers from inside and outside of Wittgensteinian circles explore Wittgenstein's treatment of philosophical questions about the mind or issues in contemporary philosophy of mind upon which Wittgenstein's philosophy may have significance. Bringing to bear their broad range of perspectives on his philosophy, these philosophers collectively demonstrate how Wittgenstein revolutionized the philosophy of mind.

Western theology has long regarded 'Being' as a category pre-eminently applicable to God, the supreme Being who is also the source of all existence. This idea was challenged in the later philosophy of Martin Heidegger and identified with the position he called 'ontotheology'. Heidegger's critique was repeated and radicalized in so-called postmodern thought, to the point that many theologians and philosophers of religion now want to talk instead of God as 'beyond Being' or 'without Being'. Against this background, God and Being attempts to look again at why the ideas of God and Being got associated in the first place and to investigate whether the critique of ontotheology really does require us to abandon this link. After exploring how this apparently abstract idea has informed Christian views of salvation and of the relationship between God and world, George Pattison examines how such categories as time, space, language, human relationships and embodiment affect our understanding of God and Being. Pattison concludes that whilst Heidegger's critique has considerable force, it remains legitimate to speak of God as Being under certain restricted conditions. The most important of these is that God is better conceived in terms of purely possible Being rather than (as in classic Christian theology) 'actual' Being. This leaves open possibilities of dialogue with, e.g., non-theistic religious traditions and with science that are foreclosed by traditional conceptions. Ultimately, however, all basic religious ideas must issue from and be seen to serve the requirements of embodied love.

Cultural and historical accounts of the public intellectual and French feminism have been remiss in their failure to recognise an important group of major women intellectuals in France. In particular, studies of French feminism and public intellectuals have overlooked the contribution of notable figures such as Francoise Parturier, Gisele Halimi and Elisabeth Badinter amongst many others which has necessarily had a detrimental effect on discourses about the gendered phenomenon of the public intellectual in France. By studying the work of these neglected intellectuals alongside those of more recognised women thinkers such as Assia Djebar, Marguerite Duras and Annie Ernaux, this book aims to provide a much broader picture of the activities, both political and literary, of female key public in the aftermath of May 1968. By exploring the relationship between their interventions in the public sphere and their creative work it throws new light on the reasons for their omission in standard theoretical and empirical work on the French intellectual. In so doing, this book offers a cultural and theoretical re-evaluation of the gendered phenomenon of the public intellectual in France, as such it is important reading to students and scholars of French Feminism and French public intellectuals more generally.

'Modern European thought' describes a wide range of philosophies, cultural programmes, and political arguments developed in Europe in the period following the French Revolution. Throughout this period, many of the wide range of 'modernisms' (and anti-modernisms) had a distinctly religious and even theological character-not least when religion was subjected to the harshest criticism. Yet for all the breadth and complexity of modern European thought and, in particular, its relations to theology, a distinct body of themes and approaches recurred in each generation. Moreover, many of the issues that took intellectual shape in Europe are now global, rather than narrowly European, and, for good or ill, they form part of Europe's bequest to the world-from colonialism and the economic theories behind globalisation through to democracy to terrorism. This volume attempts to identify and comment on some of the most important of these. The thirty chapters are grouped into six thematic parts, moving from questions of identity and the self, through discussions of the human condition, the age of revolution, the world (both natural and technological), and knowledge methodologies, concluding with a section looking explicitly at how major theological themes have developed in modern European thought. The chapters engage with major thinkers including Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Barth, Rahner, Tillich, Bonhoeffer, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Wittgenstein, and Derrida, amongst many others. Taken together, these new essays provide a rich and reflective overview of the interchange between theology, philosophy and critical thought in Europe, over the past two hundred years.

This book explores the concept of the end of literature through the lens of Hegel's philosophy of art. In his version of Hegel's 'end of art' thesis, Arthur Danto claimed that contemporary art has abandoned its distinctive sensitive and emotive features to become increasingly reflective. Contemporary art has become a question of philosophical reflection on itself and on the world, thus producing an epochal change in art history. The core idea of this book is that this thesis applies quite well to all forms of art except one, namely literature: literature resists its 'end'. Unlike other arts, which have experienced significant fractures in the contemporary world, Campana proposes that literature has always known how to renew itself in order to retain its distinguishing features, so much so that in a way it has always come to terms with its own end. Analysing the distinct character of literature, this book proposes a new and original interpretation of the 'end of art' thesis, showing how it can be used as a key conceptual framework to understand the contemporary novel.

Keith Donnellan of UCLA is one of the founding fathers of contemporary philosophy of language, along with David Kaplan and Saul Kripke. Donnellan was and is an extremely creative thinker whose insights reached into metaphysics, action theory, the history of philosophy, and of course the philosophy of mind and language. This volume collects the best critical essays on Donnellan's forty-year body of work. The pieces by such noted philosophers as Tyler Burge, David Kaplan, and John Perry, discuss Donnellan's various insights particularly offering new readings of his views on language and mind.

A paradox lies at the heart of modernity: the simultaneous demand to create ideas to make us better humans and communities, along with the contrary imperative that we criticize all ideals, especially the ones we have created. In philosophy we see this paradox most acutely in figures like Immanuel Kant, who states that we cannot know the essence of things and yet we must retain old ideas - God, freedom, and the soul - in order to become better and more ethical humans. Or in Friedrich Nietzsche, whose eternal recurrence, a self-created myth whose sole purpose is to get us to see the value in the everyday. This basic scheme - belief and un-belief - is one of the fundamental elements of modernity, manifesting itself in the philosophies of Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault, along with the theologies of Blaise Pascal, C.S. Lewis, William James, Sallie McFague, and Philip Clayton. How do we live out the values we know to be constructions? This question holds captive our ability to solve public goods problems and make our lives more meaningful. Instead of seeing this paradox of modernity as self-deception or bad faith, Zachary Simpson employs cognitive and social scientific research to explain how best to realize values that we know to be false: through art, community, and ritual. In Simpson's account, the values we construct must conform to narrative, be reinforced through community, and habituated through ritual. And yet modernity has also undermined collectivity and ritual. Thus arises the second paradox of modernity: the best tools we have for realizing values are those which devalue the individual modern subject.The last part of the book attempts to make three normative points regarding modernity. First, the modern, individualist subject is insufficient to realize the very values and aspirations of modernity. We must recognize that humans are collective and communal. Second, we cannot simply create values - they must arise in communities and be realized through narrative and ritual. And, third, if we are to live meaningful lives as contemporary meta-ethicists and positive psychologists argue, then such lives must include art, community, and ritual as a way to affirm and reinforce one's values.Let's Pretend is a statement about one of the dilemmas of the contemporary western world and how that dilemma is, and might be, resolved. How do we believe in the values that we know will make a better world, even if they are of our own making? We must do so, in part, by becoming less modern, by engaging with one another and imagining more.The book should serve as both an essay in the history of Western thought as well as a constructive argument about the nature of the modern epoch and what resources we have to realize the central aspirations of modernity. It aims to fill a critical lacuna in theoretical and philosophical approaches to modernity. While most texts focus on either the need for created values or the need to remedy modern subjectivity, few, if any, link the two problems together. Moreover, they do not ground their analyses in the social sciences and contemporary findings regarding the efficacy of narrative, communal action, and rituals.The book is unique, then, because it asks a central question - how do we believe in what we know to be false? - and because it answers this question using interdisciplinary methods that allow us to see the faultlines and paradoxes of our age.