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 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.

"Herbartism in Austrian-Hungarian philosophy" is often an obligatory reference, but even if quoting Herbart and his school is frequent, reading them attentively is less evident. Because Herbartism reached its peak in the second half of the 19th century, and was effectively institutionalized as "official philosophy" of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at least in Prague and Vienna, criticizing Herbartism often means discussing the "Austrian", "philosophical" and "institutional" criteria of the object under consideration. As the history of the Austrian tradition and theoretical reflections in this field expand, discussion of this tradition is becoming more and more tight and precise. The contributors in this volume recall the historical and conceptual importance of Herbartism in the field of Austrian philosophy, by addressing several aspects of his specific realism: philosophical, theoretical, pedagogical, psychological, and aesthetical.

Double looks at the contending schools of thought on the problem of free will and argues that this problem is intractable, since free will theorists are separated by metaphilosophical differences in the way they view the philosophical enterprise itself. Statements about what actions are "free" express subjective attitudes and values but do not have objective truth value.

Taking readers through key themes in Wittgenstein's thought, this is an essential introduction to one of the most important thinkers in 20th Century Philosophy. Ludwig Wittgenstein was arguably the most important and influential philosopher of the twentieth century. Covering all the key concepts of his work, "Starting with Wittgenstein" provides an accessible introduction to the ideas of this hugely significant thinker. Thematically structured, the book leads the reader through a thorough overview of the development of Wittgenstein's thought, resulting in a more comprehensive understanding of the roots of his philosophical concerns. Offering coverage of the full range of Wittgenstein's earlier and later work, the book emphasizes the relationship between his treatment of language and his treatment of the other major questions in philosophy. Crucially the book introduces the major thinkers whose work proved influential in the development of Wittgenstein's thought, including Frege, Russell and Schopenhauer. This is the ideal introduction for anyone coming to the work of this challenging 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 impact of Nietzsche's engagement with the Greek skeptics has never before been systematically explored in a book-length work - an inattention that belies the interpretive weight scholars otherwise attribute to his early career as a professor of classical philology and to the fascination with Greek literature and culture that persisted throughout his productive academic life. Jessica N. Berry fills this gap in the literature on Nietzsche by demonstrating how an understanding of the Pyrrhonian skeptical tradition illuminates Nietzsche's own reflections on truth, knowledge, and ultimately, the nature and value of philosophic inquiry. This entirely new reading of Nietzsche's epistemological and ethical views promises to make clear and render coherent his provocative but often opaque remarks on the topics of truth and knowledge and to grant us further insight into his ethics-since the Greek skeptics, like Nietzsche, take up the position they do as a means of promoting well-being and psychological health. In addition, it allows us to recover a portrait of Nietzsche as a philologist and philosophical psychologist that has been too often obscured by commentaries on his thought.
"The book addresses a number of central issues in Nietzsche's philosophy, including perspectivism and his conception of truth. The idea that his views in these areas owe much to the ancient Pyrrhonists casts them in an important new light, and is well supported by the texts. A lot of people from a lot of different areas in philosophy will have good reason to take notice." - Richard Bett, Johns Hopkins University

Much has been written about Heidegger's reappropriation of Aristotle, but little has been said about the philosophical import and theoretical context of this element of Heidegger's work. In this important new book, Michael Bowler sheds new light on the philosophical context of Heidegger's return to Aristotle in his early works and thereby advances a reinterpretation of the background to Heidegger's forceful critique of the primacy of theoretical reason and his radical reconception of the very nature of philosophical thinking. This book offers a detailed analysis of the development of Heidegger's thought from his early enagagement with neo-Kantianism and Husserlian phenomenology. Through this reading, a criticism of the theoretical conception of philosophy as primordial science, especially in relation to life and lived-experience (Erlebnis), emerges. It is in this context that Bowler examines Heidegger's reappropriation of key aspects of Aristotle's thought. In Aristotle's notions of movement, life and activity proper (praxis), Heidegger perceives a new approach to the dilemma presently facing philosophy, namely how philosophy is situated within life and human existence.

The phrase "Without Authority" is Soren Kierkegaard's way of designating his lack of clerical ordination and to raise the complex and central human issue of authority in human culture. Authors of the essays in IKC-18 demonstrate how Kierkegaard's literary genius, religious passion, and intellectual penetration handle with equal ease and acuity the lily of the field, the bird of the air, the sacrament of holy communion, and the concepts of martyr, witness, genius, prototype, and apostle to create a singular and 'authoritative' contribution to both theology and philosophy of religion.

Deleuze and Guattari's landmark philosophical project, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, has been hailed as a 'highly original and sensational' major philosophical work. The collaboration of two of the most remarkable and influential minds of the twentieth century, it is a project that still sets the terms of contemporary philosophical debate. It provides a radical and compelling analysis of social and cultural phenomena, offering fresh alternatives for thinking about history, society, capitalism and culture. In Who's Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari?, Gregg Lambert revisits this seminal work and re-evaluates Deleuze and Guattari's legacy in philosophy, literary criticism and cultural studies since the early 1980s. Lambert offers the first detailed analysis of the reception of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project by such key figures as Jameson, Zizek, Badiou, Hardt, Negri and Agamben. He argues that the project has suffered from being underappreciated and too hastily dismissed on the one hand and, on the other, too quickly assimilated to the objectives of other desires such as multiculturalism or American identity politics. In the light of the limitations of this reception-history, Lambert offers a fresh evaluation of the project and its influences that promise to challenge the ways in which Deleuze and Guattari's controversial and remarkable project has been received. Divided into four key sections, Aesthetics, Psychoanalysis, Politics and Power, Who's Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? offers a fresh, witty and intelligent analysis of this major philosophical project.

With "The Relevance of Philosophy to Life," eminent American philosopher John Lachs reminds us that philosophy is not merely a remote subject of academic research and discourse, but an ever-changing field which can help us navigate through some of the chaos of late twentieth-century living. It provides a clear-eyed look at important philosophical issues--the primacy of values, rationality and irrationality, society and its discontents, life and death, and the traits of human nature--as related to the human condition in the modern world.

The Logical Must is an examination of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of logic, early and late, undertaken from an austere naturalistic perspective Penelope Maddy has called "Second Philosophy." The Second Philosopher is a humble but tireless inquirer who begins her investigation of the world with ordinary perceptual beliefs, moves from there to empirical generalizations, then to deliberate experimentation, and eventually to theory formation and confirmation. She takes this same approach to logical truth, locating its ground in simple worldly structures and our knowledge of it in our basic cognitive machinery, tuned by evolutionary pressures to detect those structures where they occur.
In his early work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein also links the logical structure of representation with the structure of the world, but he includes one key unnaturalistic assumption: that the sense of our representations must be given prior to-independently of-facts about how the world is. When that assumption is removed, the general outlines of the resulting position come surprisingly close to the Second Philosopher's roughly empirical account. In his later discussions of logic in Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Wittgenstein also rejects this earlier assumption in favor of a picture that arises in the wake of the famous rule-following considerations. Here Wittgenstein and the Second Philosopher operate in even closer harmony-locating the ground of our logical practices in our interests, our natural inclinations and abilities, and very general features of the world-until the Second Philosopher moves to fill in the account with her empirical investigations of the world and cognition. At this point, Wittgenstein balks, but as a matter of personal animosity rather than philosophical principle.

In his most recent work, the contemporary philosopher Roger Scruton has turned his attention to religion. Although a religious sensibility ties together his astonishingly prodigious and dynamic output as a philosopher, poet and composer, his recent exploration of religious and theological themes from a philosophical point of view has excited a fresh response from scholars. This collection of writings addresses Scruton's challenging and subtle philosophy of religion for the first time. The volume includes contributions from those who specialize in the philosophy of religion, the history of thought and culture, aesthetics, and church history. The collection is introduced by Mark Dooley, author of two books on Scruton, and includes a response to the writings from Scruton himself in which he develops his idea of the sacred and the erotic and defends the integrity of his work as an attempt to give a sense of the Lebenswelt (or 'lifeworld'): how humans experience the world. He argues that religion emerges from that experience and transforms us from beings bound by causal necessity into persons who acknowledge freedom, obligation and right. A unique and fascinating collection of writings that sheds light on this hitherto unexplored aspect of Roger Scruton's philosophy.

The human ambition to reproduce and improve natural objects and processes has a long history, and ranges from dreams to actual design, from Icarus's wings to modern robotics and bioengineering. This imperative seems to be linked not only to practical utility but also to our deepest psychology. Nevertheless, reproducing something natural is not an easy enterprise, and the actual replication of a natural object or process by means of some technology is impossible. In this book the author uses the term naturoid to designate any real artifact arising from our attempts to reproduce natural instances. He concentrates on activities that involve the reproduction of something existing in nature, and whose reproduction, through construction strategies which differ from natural ones, we consider to be useful, appealing or interesting.

The development of naturoids may be viewed as a distinct class of technological activity, and the concept should be useful for methodological research into establishing the common rules, potentialities and constraints that characterize the human effort to reproduce natural objects. The author shows that a naturoid is always the result of a reduction of the complexity of natural objects, due to an unavoidable multiple selection strategy. Nevertheless, the reproduction process implies that naturoids take on their own new complexity, resulting in a transfiguration of the natural exemplars and their performances, and leading to a true innovation explosion. While the core performances of contemporary naturoids improve, paradoxically the more a naturoid develops the further it moves away from its natural counterpart. Therefore, naturoids will more and more affect our relationships with advanced technologies and with nature, but in ways quite beyond our predictive capabilities.

The book will be of interest to design scholars and researchers of technology, cultural studies, anthropology and the sociology of science and technology."

"In these essays, a range of leading scholars seek both to investigate the historical, institutional and philosophical origins of deconstruction and to think through the problem of the idea of origin itself"--Provided by publisher.