Hans Kelsen's efforts in the areas of legal philosophy and legal theory are considered by many scholars of law to be the most influential thinking of this century. This volume makes available some of the best work extant on Kelsen's theory, including papers newly translated into English. The book covers such topics as competing philosophical positions on the nature of law, legal validity, legal powers, and the unity of municipal and international law. It also throws much light on Kelsen's intellectual milieu--as well as his intellectual debts.

This accessible and jargon-free book features readings of over 20 key texts and authors in Western poetry and philosophy, including Homer, Plato, Beowulf , Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Rousseau. Simon Haines presents a thought-provoking and theoretically aware account of Western literature and philosophy, arguing that the history of both can be seen as a struggle between two different conceptions of the self: the 'romantic' (or dualist) vs the 'realist' or ('extended').

In this collection of essays, which were first delivered as lectures at the International Academy of Philosophy in the Principality of Liechtenstein in 1998, distinguished philosopher Peter Geach confronts some of the most difficult issues in philosophy with the precision of a logician and the grace and wit of an accomplished stylist. These essays constitute a significant addition to Professor Geach's esteemed body of work in philosophy, as he addresses not only problems of logic and analytic philosophy, but also of epistemology and ethics. Geach's engaging discussions of human nature, truth, goodness, and love provide probing insight into perennial themes in an appealing, highly readable style which is nevertheless forceful and exacting. Geach knows the subjectivity of his own experience and belief and is able to illuminate that experience and belief by submitting it to a rational and philosophical inquiry. His avowed Catholic perspective is neither a weapon nor a shield. It is an integral part of the sustained, systematic, and constructive approach to philosophy demonstrated in these essays. They will certainly provoke serious reflection even in those inclined to disagree with Geach's conclusions.

According to George Berkeley (1685-1753), there is fundamentally nothing in the world but minds and their ideas. Ideas are understood as pure phenomenal 'feels' which are momentarily had by a single perceiver, then vanish. Surprisingly, Berkeley tries to sell this idealistic philosophical system as a defense of common-sense and an aid to science. However, both common-sense and Newtonian science take the perceived world to be highly structured in a way that Berkeley's system does not appear to allow. Kenneth L. Pearce argues that Berkeley's solution to this problem lies in his innovative philosophy of language. The solution works at two levels. At the first level, it is by means of our conventions for the use of physical object talk that we impose structure on the world. At a deeper level, the orderliness of the world is explained by the fact that, according to Berkeley, the world itself is a discourse 'spoken' by God - the world is literally an object of linguistic interpretation. The structure that our physical object talk - in common-sense and in Newtonian physics - aims to capture is the grammatical structure of this divine discourse. This approach yields surprising consequences for some of the most discussed issues in Berkeley's metaphysics. Most notably, it is argued that, in Berkeley's view, physical objects are neither ideas nor collections of ideas. Rather, physical objects, like forces, are mere quasi-entities brought into being by our linguistic practices.

This text offers an assessment of Jean-Paul Sartre as an exemplary figure in the evolving political and cultural landscape of post-1945 France. Sartre's originality is located in the tense relationship that he maintained between deeply held revolutionary political beliefs and a residual yet critical attachment to traditional forms of cultural expression. A series of case studies centred on Gaullism, communism, Maoism (Part 1), the theatre, art criticism and the media (Part 2), illustrate the continuing relevance and appeal of Sartre to the contemporary world.

Selfie: Poetry, Social Change & Ecological Connection presents the first general theory that links poetry in environmental thought to poetry as an environment. James Sherry accomplishes this task with a network model of connectivity that scales from the individual to social to environmental practices. Selfie demonstrates how parts of speech, metaphor, and syntax extend bidirectionally from the writer to the world and from the writer inward to identities that promote sustainable practices. Selfie shows how connections in the biosphere scale up from operating within the body, to social structures, to the networks that science has identified for all life. The book urges readers to construct plural identifications rather than essential claims of identity in support of environmental diversity.

Since the early 1980s, there has been renewed scholarly interest in the concept of Christian Humanism. A number of official Catholic documents have stressed the importance of 'Christian humanism', as a vehicle of Christian social teaching and, indeed, as a Christian philosophy of culture. Fundamentally, humanism aims to explore what it means to be human and what the grounds are for human flourishing. Featuring contributions from internationally renowned Christian authors from a variety of disciplines in the humanities, Re-Envisioning Christian Humanism recovers a Christian humanist ethos for our time. The volume offers a chronological overview (from patristic humanism to the Reformation and beyond) and individual examples (Jewell, Calvin) of past Christian humanisms. The chapters are connected through the theme of Christian paideia as the foundation for liberal arts education.

This volume is based to a large extent on the understanding of biosemiotic literary criticism as a semiotic-model-making enterprise. For Jurij Lotman and Thomas A. Sebeok, "nature writing is essentially a model of the relationship between humans and nature" (Timo Maran); biosemiotic literary criticism, itself a form of nature writing and thus itself an ecological-niche-making enterprise, will be considered to be a model of modeling, a model of nature naturing. Modes and models of analysis drawn from Thomas A. Sebeok and Marcel Danesi's Forms of Meaning: Modeling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis as well as from Timo Maran's work on "modeling the environment in literature," Edwina Taborsky's writing on Peircean semiosis, and, of course, Jesper Hoffmeyer's formative work in biosemiotics are among the most important organizing elements for this volume.

In this book, Touko Vaahtera explores how "bodies of latent potential," a cultural attachment to the idea of body as potentiality, carries with it hierarchizing hopes about better bodies. Vaahtera combines disability studies, cultural studies, feminist science studies, transgender studies, post-colonial studies, and Foucauldian genealogy to offer a provocative approach that interrogates capacities and capabilities as obvious frameworks for thinking about the body. Vaahtera explores how swimming skills emerged as a specific biopolitical question in Finland, a country that has been described as the "Land of a Thousand Lakes." Through a profound cultural analysis focusing both on Finnish cultural texts on swimming as well as manifold more globalized texts, Vaahtera considers how the legacy of eugenics and colonialism, the hopes of civilization, and homogenizing assumptions about bodies frame how we think about human capacity.

This book analyzes the implication of secular/liberal values in Western and human rights law and its impact on Muslim women. It offers an innovative reading of the tension between the religious and secular spheres. The author does not view the two as binary opposites. Rather, she believes they are twin categories that define specific forms of lives as well as a specific notion of womanhood. This divergence from the usual dichotomy opens the doors for a reinterpretation of secularism in contemporary Europe. This method also helps readers to view the study of religion vs. secularism in a new light. It allows for a better understanding of the challenges that contemporary Europe now faces regarding the accommodation of different religious identities. For instance, one entire section of the book concerns the practice of veiling and explores the contentious headscarf debate. It features case studies from Germany, France, and the UK. In addition, the analysis combines a wide range of disciplines and employs an integrated, comparative, and inter-disciplinary approach. The author successfully brings together arguments from different fields with a comparative legal and political analysis of Western and Islamic law and politics. This innovative study appeals to students and researchers while offering an important contribution to the debate over the role of religion in contemporary secular Europe and its impact on women's rights and gender equality.

This book addresses the manifold crisis of current societies and understands it as a failure of normative social structuration. As an exemplar for this development, it analyses the decline of welfare state models and the corresponding societal compromise. Yet, it evaluates them as a symptom of a wider malaise of normative orders in complex societies. The question thus arises as to how social science can study the ongoing societal transformation. The book frames the phenomenon as 'normative intermittency' to capture its fluid alternation of social structuration and destructuration and develops its analysis in three steps: first, it draws a theoretically reflected symptomatic of its occurrences; it then establishes the sociological diagnosis necessary to understand its unfolding and finally evaluates its political outcomes. Methodologically, the book advocates a complete overhaul of the analytical frames of sociology to gauge the intermittent rhythm of the ongoing societal transformation. Thus, it develops an innovative reading of classical sociological theory beyond a number of unreflected axiomatic assumptions of the current sociological mainstream. Thanks to the assessment of the political outcomes of failing social structuration the book turns to a discussion of the development of possible emancipation paths in the form of 'transformative social action'; reflexively, this accounts for the results of the sociological diagnosis of the crisis of normative social orders. The main analyses within the book scrutinise a number of empirical phenomena that establish normative intermittency in current societies and refer to the major debates that are taking place on the related topics in the state of art of sociological and political theory.

This book focuses on how Indigenous knowledge and methodologies can contribute towards the decolonisation of peace and conflict studies (PACS). It shows how Indigenous knowledge is essential to ensure that PACS research is relevant, respectful, accurate, and non-exploitative of Indigenous Peoples, in an effort to reposition Indigenous perspectives and contexts through Indigenous experiences, voices, and research processes, to provide balance to the power structures within this discipline. It includes critiques of ethnocentrism within PACS scholarship, and how both research areas can be brought together to challenge the violence of colonialism, and the colonialism of the institutions and structures within which decolonising researchers are working. Contributions in the book cover Indigenous research in Aotearoa, Australia, The Caribbean, Hawai'i, Israel, Mexico, Nigeria, Palestine, Philippines, Samoa, USA, and West Papua.

Der Erste Band dieser Reihe gibt den philosophischen Briefwechsel von 1663 bis 1685 in 260 Briefen wieder, wobei die Briefe von Leibniz an seine Partner dominieren. Mit dem fruhesten der heute bekannten Leibniz-Briefe, geschrieben in der Jenaer Studienzeit an seinen Lehrer Jakob Thomasius in Leipzig, beginnt der Band und endet mit der Vorbereitung der ersten grosseren metaphysischen Konzeption der hannoverschen Zeit, dem Discours de Metaphysique (1685/86). Dazwischen liegt eine umfangreiche Korrespondenz, seine Partner sind u. a. Antoine Arnauld, Benedictus de Spinoza, Otto von Guericke, Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus und Nicolas Malebranche. Der Band wurde nach den bis 1950 geltenden Prinzipien der Akademie-Ausgabe bearbeitet und ohne kritischen Apparat, lediglich mit einem Personenverzeichnis versehen, veroffentlicht."

This book tells a great philosophical tale. The backstory of this tale is simple: the famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein published only one philosophical book during his lifetime: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He left the lion’s share of his philosophical writings to posterity in the form of unpublished manuscripts and typescripts amounting to more than 18,000 pages. In his will, Wittgenstein entrusted three of his former students – Elizabeth Anscombe, Rush Rhees and Georg Henrik von Wright – with the task of publishing from his writings what they thought fit. During the subsequent decades, these literary heirs edited the volumes that the learned world has come to know as the influential works of Wittgenstein. Now, the essays in this book tell about Wittgenstein’s literary heirs in their ambition to publish the writings of their beloved teacher. This history of the posthumous publication processes for Wittgenstein’s writings will extinguish the genius cult that still exists in some historiographies of philosophy. This cult is partly responsible for the impression that great philosophical works fall from the window of an ivory tower, in completed form, printed and bound, just in order to hit and inspire the next genius philosopher walking by. In actual fact, in the history of philosophy, there are a number of cases in which it takes the great philosophers’ pupils and followers to bring their teachers’ thought into a publishable form. Indeed, this is how literary tradition of Western philosophy begins. In the case of Wittgenstein’s writings, this book opens, at least to some extent, the black box of the discipulary production processes of the making of a classic philosopher.

This volume presents thirteen original essays which explore both traditional and contemporary aspects of the metaphysics of relations. It is uncontroversial that there are true relational predications-'Abelard loves Eloise', 'Simmias is taller than Socrates', 'smoking causes cancer', and so forth. More controversial is whether any true relational predications have irreducibly relational truthmakers. Do any of the statements above involve their subjects jointly instantiating polyadic properties, or can we explain their truths solely in terms of monadic, non-relational properties of the relata? According to a tradition dating back to Plato and Aristotle, and continued by medieval philosophers, polyadic properties are metaphysically dubious. In non-symmetric relations such as the amatory relation, a property would have to inhere in two things at once-lover and beloved-but characterise each differently, and this puzzled the ancients. More recent work on non-symmetric relations highlights difficulties with their directionality. Such problems offer clear motivation for attempting to reduce relations to monadic properties. By contrast, ontic structural realists hold that the nature of physical reality is exhausted by the relational structure expressed in the equations of fundamental physics. On this view, there must be some irreducible relations, for its fundamental ontology is purely relational. The Metaphysics of Relations draws together the work of a team of leading metaphysicians, to address topics as diverse as ancient and medieval reasons for scepticism about polyadic properties; recent attempts to reduce causal and spatiotemporal relations; recent work on the directionality of relational properties; powers ontologies and their associated problems; whether the most promising interpretations of quantum mechanics posit a fundamentally relational world; and whether the very idea of such a world is coherent. From those who question whether there are relational properties at all, to those who hold they are a fundamental part of reality, this book covers a broad spectrum of positions on the nature and ontological status of relations, from antiquity to the present day.

This book offers an exploration of the postcolonial hybrid experience in anglophone Caribbean plays and performance from a feminist perspective. In a hitherto unattempted consideration of Caribbean theatre and performance, this study of gendered identities chronicles the postcolonial hybrid experience - and how it varies in the context of questions of sex, performance and social designation. In the process, it examines the diverse performances of the anglophone Caribbean. The work includes works by Caribbean anglophone playwrights like Derek Walcott, Mustapha Matura, Michael Gikes, Dennis Scott, Trevor Rhone, Earl Lovelace and Errol John with more recent works of Pat Cumper, Rawle Gibbons and Tony Hall. The study would also engage with Carnival, calypso and chutney music, while commenting on its evolving influences over the hybrid imagination. Each section covers the dominant socio-political thematics associated with the tradition and its effect on it, followed by an analysis of contemporaneously significant literary and cultural works - plays, carnival narrative and calypso and chutney lyrics as well as the experiences of performers. From Lovelace's fictional Jestina to the real-life Drupatee, the book critically explores the marginalization of female performances while forming a hybrid identity.

This book focuses on the cohering elements across various texts and traditions of India. It engages with several significant works from the Sanskrit tradition and emphasizes the need to move beyond colonial and postcolonial engagements with the enduring cultural pasts of India. The chapters are grouped in three main parts: accented rhythms, dispersed mnemoscapes and inventive iterations. It addresses questions such as: what enabled cultural communication across very divergent geographical, temporal, locational contexts and among different cultural formations of India over millennia? What is this shareable impulse that pulsates across the domains of dance, sculpture, painting, poetry, dharma, music, medicine, the lore of rivers and the epics? It explains how modern Indian languages and especially their creative and reflective nodes are unthinkable without the intricately woven textures of these interfaces and their responsive receptions. This book is of interest to philosophers, humanities students, researchers and professors as well as people interested in exploring alternatives to European traditions of thought without an alibi.

In this erudite book, Ian Adamson provides a comprehensive history of Gresham College in the seventeenth century, particularly its contribution to the intellectual, educational, and administrative life of London and England. He analyses its relationship with the Tudor and Stuart courts, the Corporation of London, the universities, and the Royal Society, and assesses the quality and effectiveness of all the professors elected during this period. Finally, he explains the presence in the College of Ben Jonson and Sir Kenelm Digby, why it is likely that Shakespeare was often in attendance, and the enduring impact of John Ward’s collective biography of the professors.

Across his relatively short and eccentric authorial career, Soren Kierkegaard develops a unique, and provocative, account of what it is to become, to be, and to lose a self, backed up by a rich phenomenology of self-experience. Yet Kierkegaard has been almost totally absent from the burgeoning analytic philosophical literature on self-constitution and personal identity. How, then, does Kierkegaard's work appear when viewed in light of current debates about self and identity-and what does Kierkegaard have to teach philosophers grappling with these problems today? The Naked Self explores Kierkegaard's understanding of selfhood by situating his work in relation to central problems in contemporary philosophy of personal identity: the role of memory in selfhood, the relationship between the notional and actual subjects of memory and anticipation, the phenomenology of diachronic self-experience, affective alienation from our past and future, psychological continuity, practical and narrative approaches to identity, and the intelligibility of posthumous survival. By bringing his thought into dialogue with major living and recent philosophers of identity (such as Derek Parfit, Galen Strawson, Bernard Williams, J. David Velleman, Marya Schechtman, Mark Johnston, and others), Stokes reveals Kierkegaard as a philosopher with a significant-if challenging-contribution to make to philosophy of self and identity.

This book traces the historical postcolonial journey of four generations of Jamaican psychiatrists challenging the European colonial 'civilizing mission' of psychiatric care. It details the process of deinstitutionizing patients with chronic mental illness using psychohistoriographic cultural therapy, by engaging them in creating sociodrama and poetry writing, not only to express and reverse the stigma contributing to their marginalized status, but also to reconnect them to a centuries-long history of oppression. The author thereby demonstrates that psychological decolonization requires a seminal understanding of the complex mental inter-relationship between slaves and slaveowners. Further, it is shown how the model analyzes the antipodal dialectic history of descendants of Africans enslaved in the New World by brutish British Imperialists suffering from the European psychosis of white supremacy. Drawing together a detailed description of the sociopoem Madnificent Irations, with an examination of Jamaica's political and social history, and the author's personal experience, this compelling work marks an important contribution to decolonial literature. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of postcolonial studies, critical race theory, the history of psychology and community psychology.