First published in 1938, these lectures argue that liberality is the foundation of civilization. According to Gilbert Murray, civilization provides the surplus of security, leisure and wealth that makes liberality possible; a failure of liberality is the surest test of the failure of a civilization. This is a fascinating reissue that will be of great value to students with an interest in political philosophy and the foundations of liberal society.

Jewish German philosopher Ernst Cassirer was a leading proponent of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. The essays in this volume provide a window into Cassirer's discovery of the symbolic nature of human existence-that our entire emotional and intellectual life is configured and formed through the originary expressive power of word and image, that it is in and through the symbolic cultural systems of language, art, myth, religion, science, and technology that human life realizes itself and attains not only its form, its visibility, but also its reality. Thought and being are set in opposition and united in genuine correspondence by the symbolic strife between them that Cassirer calls Auseinandersetzung, which determines the ethical relationship of the self to the other.

This collection brings together the latest work of some of the world's leading Marxist philosophers and new young researchers. Based upon work presented at meetings of the Marx and Philosophy Society, it offers a unique snapshot of the best current scholarship on the philosophical aspects and implications of Marx's thought.

Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) was an eminent theorist across the fields of philosophy, physical chemistry and economics. Elected to the Royal Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, his contributions to research in the social sciences, and his theories on positivism and knowledge, are of critical academic importance. The three lectures included in this comprehensive volume, first published in 1959, argue for Polanyi's principle of 'tacit knowing' as a fundamental component of knowledge. They were intended to accompany Polanyi's earlier work, Personal Knowledge, and as a tribute to the philosophical and educational work of Lord A. D. Lindsay.

This volume brings together generous selections from his major texts: Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, Creative Evolution, Mind-Energy, The Creative Mind, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion and Laughter. In addition it features material from the Melanges never before translated in English, such as the correspondence between Bergson and William James. The volume will be an excellent textbook for pedagogic purposes and a helpful source book for philosophers working across the analytic/continental divide.

'...a book which should be read by all students contemplating enrolment for a university course in modern English or European literary studies.' - Roy Harris, Times Higher Education Supplement Eliot to Derrida is a sardonic portrait of the cult of the specialist interpreter, from I.A. Richards and the Cambridge School to Jacques Derrida and his disciples. This lucid, iconoclastic study shows how, and why, so much of the academic response to a rich variety of literary experiment has been straitjacketed by the vast industries which have grown up around `modernism' and `postmodernism'. For anyone disenchanted with the extravagant claims - and leaden prose - of literary theorists, this will be an exhilarating book.

Following A.N. Whitehead, this book takes up the principal challenge facing a natural philosopher who wishes to engage with Nature while rescuing both Life and Thought from materialistic approaches which rob them of their 'quicknesses'. Selecting certain insights and intuitions from the writings of Peirce, Coleridge, Deleuze and Nietzsche, the author proffers a remedy for the pervasive nihilism of 'the moderns' which illustrates Deleuze's suggestion that philosophy should be imaged as a dynamic collage that is forever in the making.

This volume is a collection of original essays by sociologists and intellectual historians who have been leading figures in recent scholarship on the classical sociological theorists. The volume includes essays by Mary Pickering on Auguste Comte, Moishe Postone on Kar Marx, Valerie A. Haines on Herbert Spencer, Robert Alun Jones on Emile Durkheim, Donald N. Levine on Georg Simmel, Stephen Kalberg on Max Weber, Martin Bulmer on Robert E. Park and W. I. Thomas, and Hans Joas on George Herbert Mead. Also included is a wide-ranging examinatin of neglected woman founders by Lynn McDonald plus a concluding analysis of recent developments in the area of classical theory by Alan Sica.

Offering a novel blend of historicist and presentist approaches to reclaiming sociology's rich intellectual past, the studies in the collection provide an analytic guide to the vast secondary literature that has appeared in recent years. The essays also dispel longstanding stereotypes about the lives and works of these theorists and propose major revisionist reinterpretations of their thought.

Taken together, the studies in the volume fill the serious void that currently exists in the literature between, on the one hand, introductory summaries of the ideas of various classical authors, and, on the other, specialized monographs and articles devoted to the examination of particular thinkers.

Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger explains how two notoriously opposed German philosophers share a rethinking of the possibility of metaphysics via notions of music and waiting. This is connected to the historical materialist project of social change by way of the radical Italian composer Luigi Nono.

How can the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari be used to unearth the 'metaphysics' of modernist literature? This intersection of philosophy and key literary works uses their radical concepts to draw a dynamic map of modernism that explores the confrontation of each writer with the non-human machine age of the early twentieth-century.

Alain Badiou's work in philosophy, though daunting, has gained a receptive and steadily growing Anglophone readership. What is not well known is the extent to which Badiou's positions, vis-a-vis ontology, ethics, politics and the very meaning of philosophy, were hammered out in dispute with the late Jean-Francois Lyotard. Matthew R. McLennan's Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy is the first work to pose the question of the relation between Lyotard and Badiou, and in so doing constitutes a significant intervention in the field of contemporary European philosophy by revisiting one of its most influential and controversial forefathers. Badiou himself has underscored the importance of Lyotard for his own project; might the recent resurgence of interest in Lyotard be tied in some way to Badiou's comments? Or deeper still: might not Badiou's philosophical Platonism beg an encounter with philosophy's other, the figure of the sophist that Lyotard played so often and so ably? Posing pertinent questions and opening new discursive channels in the literature on these two major figures this book is of interest to those studying philosophy, rhetoric, literary theory, cultural and media studies.

The History of Reason in the Age of Madness revolves around three axes: the Foucauldian critical-historical method, its relationship with enlightenment critique, and the way this critique is implemented in Foucault's seminal work, History of Madness. Foucault's exploration of the origins of psychiatry applies his own theories of power, truth and reason and draws on Kant's philosophy, shedding new light on the way we perceive the birth and development of psychiatric practice. Following Foucault's adoption of 'limit attitude', which investigates the limits of our thinking as points of disruption and renewal of established frames of reference, this book dispels the widely accepted belief that psychiatry represents the triumph of rationalism by somehow conquering madness and turning it into an object of neutral, scientific perception. It examines the birth of psychiatry in its full complexity: in the late eighteenth century, doctors were not simply rationalists but also alienists, philosophers of finitude who recognized madness as an experience at the limits of reason, introducing a discourse which conditioned the formation of psychiatry as a type of medical activity. Since that event, the same type of recognition, the same anthropological confrontation with madness has persisted beneath the calm development of psychiatric rationality, undermining the supposed linearity, absolute authority and steady progress of psychiatric positivism. Iliopoulos argues that Foucault's critique foregrounds this anthropological problematic as indispensable for psychiatry, encouraging psychiatrists to become aware of the epistemological limitations of their practice, and also to review the ethical and political issues which madness introduces into the apparent neutrality of current psychiatric discourse.

First published in 1927, Science and Philosophy: And Other Essays is a collection of individual papers written by Bernard Bosanquet during his highly industrious philosophical life. The collection was put together by Bosanquet's wife after the death of the writer and remains mostly unaltered with just a few papers added and the order of entries improved. The papers here displayed consist of various contributions Bosanquet made to Mind, the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, the International Journal of Ethics and other periodicals, as well as work from volumes of lectures and essays under his own or other editorship. Throughout the collection, Bosanquet considers the relationship between science and philosophy. The two subject areas became increasingly intertwined during Bosanquet's lifetime as scientific writers grew more interested in the philosophical investigation of the concepts which underlined their work and philosophical thinkers recognised the importance of the relationship between mathematics and logic as well as that between physics and metaphysics. The first essay in this volume discusses this idea explicitly and all subsequent articles may be regarded as essays in support of the main discussion with which the volume opens.

First published in 1942, Reflections documents the life of John Henry Muirhead and the philosophical age that he observed. The first part of the volume derives from Muirhead's own autobiographical narrative, left unfinished when he died in May 1940. The second part features two final chapters written by John W. Harvey that comprehensively record the final stages of Muirhead's life. Harvey's chapters incorporate Muirhead's unfinished final years of commentary and begin at the man's retirement from Birmingham Chair in 1921. As a student and teacher of philosophy, Muirhead's life ran almost precisely parallel to what he himself refers to as 'one of the most vivid and important movements in British and American philosophy'. He came into contact with some of the age's primary thinkers and as such, his own autobiography is important in providing an insight into his contemporary philosophical environment.

First published in 1929, this book explores the crucial, ethical question of the objects and the justification of punishment. Dr. A. C. Ewing considers both the retributive theory and the deterrent theory on the subject whilst remaining commendably unprejudiced. The book examines the views which emphasize the reformation of the offender and the education of the community as objects of punishment. It also deals with a theory of reward as a compliment to a theory of punishment. Dr. Ewing's treatment of the topics is philosophical yet he takes in to account the practical considerations that should determine the nature and the amount of the punishment to be inflicted in different types of cases. This book will be of great interest to students of philosophy, teachers and those who are interested in the concrete problems of punishment by the state. It is an original contribution to the study of a subject of great theoretical and practical importance.

First published in 1934, this book evaluates the characteristic doctrines of the idealism which dominated philosophy during the last century. It seeks to combine realism, as to epistemology and physical objects, with a greater appreciation of views which emphasize the unity and rationality of the universe. This work is not a history and does not try to compete with any histories of idealism but it instead reaches an independent conclusion on certain philosophical problems by criticising what others have said. The book considers differing arguments in order to determine their validity.

First published in 1924, this book examines one of the main philosophical debates of the period. Focusing on Kant's proof of causality, A.C. Ewing promotes its validity not only for the physical but also for the "psychological" sphere. The subject is of importance, for the problem of causality for Kant constituted the crucial test of his philosophy, the most significant of the Kantian categories. The author believes that Kant's statement of his proof, while too much bound up with other parts of his particular system of philosophy, may be restated "in a form which it can stand by itself and make a good claim for acceptance on all schools of thought".

An original, comprehensive interpretation of Michel Foucault's analysis of biopolitics - situating biopolitics in the context of embodied histories of subjectivity, affective investments and structures of experience. Going beyond lamentation at the horrors of biopolitical domination, the book develops a positive-critique of biopolitical experience.

Perhaps the most significant development in American philosophy in recent times has been the extraordinary renaissance of Pragmatism, marked most notably by the reformulations of the so-called "Neopragmatists" Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam. With Pragmatism offering the allure of potentially resolving the impasse between epistemological realists and antirealists, analytic and continental philosophers, as well as thinkers across the disciplines, have been energized and engaged by this movement.

In "Beyond Realism and Antirealism: John Dewey and the Neopragmatists," David L. Hildebrand asks two important questions: first, how faithful are the Neopragmatists' reformulations of Classical Pragmatism (particularly Deweyan Pragmatism)? Second, and more significantly, can their Neopragmatisms work?

In assessing Neopragmatism, Hildebrand advances a number of historical and critical points:
Current debates between realists and antirealists (as well as objectivists and relativists) are similar to early 20th century debates between realists and idealists that Pragmatism addressed extensively.
Despite their debts to Dewey, the Neopragmatists are reenacting realist and idealist stands in their debate over realism, thus giving life to something shown fruitless by earlier Pragmatists.
What is absent from the Neopragmatist's position is precisely what makes Pragmatism enduring: namely, its metaphysical conception of experience and a practical starting point for philosophical inquiry that such experience dictates.
Pragmatism cannot take the "linguistic turn" insofar as that turn mandates a theoretical starting point.
While Pragmatism's view of truth is perspectival, it is nevertheless not a relativism.
Pace Rorty, Pragmatism need not be hostile to metaphysics; indeed, it demonstrates how pragmatic instrumentalism and metaphysics are complementary.

In examining these and other difficulties in Neopragmatism, Hildebrand is able to propose some distinct directions for Pragmatism. "Beyond Realism and Antirealism" will provoke specialists and non-specialists alike to rethink not only the definition of Pragmatism, but its very purpose.

The book questions two key dichotomies: that of the apparent and real, and that of the internal and external. This leads to revised notions of the structure of experience and the object of knowledge. Our world is experienced as possibilities of action, and to know is to know what to do. A further consequence is that the mind is best considered as a property of organisms' interactions with their environment. The unit of analysis is the loop of action and perception, and the central concept is the notion of habit of action, which provides the embodied basis of cognition as the anticipation of action. This holds for non-linguistic tacit meanings as well as for linguistic meanings. Habit of action is a teleological notion and thus opens a possibility for defining intentionality and normativity in terms of the soft naturalism adopted in the book. The mind is embodied, and this embodiment determines our physical perspective on the world. Our sensory organs and other instruments give us instrumental access to the world, and this access is epistemic in character. The distinction between the physical and conceptual viewpoint allows us to define truth as the correspondence with operational fit. This embodied epistemic truth is however not a sign of antirealism, as the instrumentally accessed theoretical objects are precisely those objects that experimental science deals with.

Film, media, and cultural theorists have long appealed to Lacanian theory in order to discern processes of subjectivization, representation, and ideological interpellation. Here, the contributors take up a Zizekian approach to studies of cinema and media, raising questions about power, ideology, sexual difference, and enjoyment.

Badiou's Deleuze presents the first thorough analysis of one of the most significant encounters in contemporary thought: Alain Badiou's summary interpretation and rejection of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Badiou's reading of Deleuze is largely laid out in his provocative book, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, a highly influential work of considerable power. Badiou's Deleuze presents a detailed examination of Badiou's reading and argues that, whilst it fails to do justice to the Deleuzean project, it invites us to reconsider what Deleuze's philosophy amounts to, and to reassess Deleuze's power to address the ultimate concerns of philosophy. Badiou's Deleuze analyses the differing metaphysics of two of the most influential of recent continental philosophers, whose divergent views have helped to shape much contemporary thought.

Alfred North Whitehead's interpreters usually pay less attention to his later monographs and essays. "Process and Reality" is taken to be the definitive center of the Whiteheadian universe and the later works, thereby, appear to many only as applications or elaborations of themes already introduced earlier. Yet, is it also possible that the dominance of this perspective has obscured or even distorted further creative developments of Whitehead's thought? This volume offers a sort of Copernican revolution in Whitehead interpretation, methodologically and conceptually inviting its contributors to observe Whitehead's work from the perspective of his later works. The aim of this preferencing is meant not to invalidate earlier approaches to Whitehead's thought nor is the inference that the later works are more authoritative. Yet, just as the first space-based images of our planet forever changed humanity's understanding of its place in the universe, shifting the alleged center of, or even decentering of the view on, Whitehead's "philosophy of organism" to the later works, we might discover previously obscured ideas or new vistas of thought relevant not only to our current philosophical landscape, but also to the pressing issues of our fragile and endangered world. This volume invites its contributors and readers to consider whether one thereby also moves beyond metaphysics?

In the history of philosophical thought, few themes loom as large as skepticism. Skepticism has been the most visible and important part of debates about knowledge. Skepticism at its most basic questions our cognitive achievements, challenges our ability to obtain reliable knowledge; casting doubt on our attempts to seek and understand the truth about everything from ethics, to other minds, religious belief, and even the underlying structure of matter and reality. Since Descartes, the defense of knowledge against skepticism has been one of the primary tasks not just of epistemology but philosophy itself.
The Oxford Handbook of Skepticism features twenty-six newly commissioned chapters by top figures in the field. Part One contains articles explaining important kinds of skeptical reasoning. Part Two focuses on responses to skeptical arguments. Part Three concentrates on important contemporary issues revolving around skepticism. As the first volume of its kind, the articles make significant contributions to the debate on skepticism.