"The meaning of life is the most urgent of questions," said the existentiallist thinker Albert Camus. And no less a philosopher than Woody Allen has wondered:"How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world, given my waist and shirt size?" "Movies and the Meaning of Life" looks at popular and cult movies, examining their assumptions and insights on meaning-of-life questions: What is reality and how can I know it? (The Truman Show, Contact, Waking Life); How do I find myself and my true identity? (Fight Club, Being John Malkovich, Boys Don't Cry, Memento); How do I find meaning from my interactions with others? (Pulp Fiction, Shadowlands, Chasing Amy); What is the chief purpose in life? (American Beauty, Life is Beautiful, The Shawshank Redemption); and How ought I live my life? (Pleasantville, Spiderman, Minority Report, Groundhog Day).

Kant's Critique of Judgment accounts for the sharing of a common world, experienced affectively, by a diverse human plurality. In order to appreciate Kant's project, Judging Appearances retrieves the connection between appearance and judgment in the Critique of Judgment. Kleist emphasizes the important but neglected idea of a sensus communis, which provides the indeterminate criterion for judgments regarding appearance. Judging Appearances examines the themes of appearance and judgment against the background of Kant's debt to Leibniz and Shaftesbury. Drawing upon treatments by Husserl, Sartre, Ricoeur and Arendt, Kleist delineates the proto-phenomenological method through which Kant uncovers the idea of a sensus communis. Kleist shows that taste is a discipline of opening oneself to appearance, requiring a subject who dwells in a common world of appearances among a diverse human plurality. This volume will prove valuable for anyone interested in a fresh approach to themes at the heart of Kant's aesthetics.

Throughout his philosophical career at Michigan, UCLA, Yale, and Oxford, Robert Merrihew Adams's wide-ranging contributions have deeply shaped the structure of debates in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, history of philosophy, and ethics. Metaphysics and the Good: Themes from the Philosophy of Robert Merrihew Adams provides, for the first time, a collection of original essays by leading philosophers dedicated to exploring many of the facets of Adams's thought, a philosophical outlook that combines Christian theism, neo-Platonism, moral realism, metaphysical idealism, and a commitment to both historical sensitivity and rigorous analytic engagement. Tied together by their aim of exploring, expanding, and experimenting with Adams's views, these eleven essays are coupled with an intellectual autobiography by Adams himself that was commissioned especially for this volume. As the introduction to the volume explains, the purpose of Metaphysics and the Good is to explore Adams's work in the very manner that he prescribes for understanding the ideas of others. By experimenting with Adams's conclusions, "pulling a string here to see what moves over there, so to speak," as Adams puts it, our authors throw into greater relief what makes Adams such an original and stimulating philosopher. In doing so, these essays contribute not only to the exploration of Adams's continuing interests, but they also advance original and important philosophical insights of their own.

This book investigates the relation between Durkheim's sociology, Critical Theory, and the philosophy of social sciences. The book is organized in four sections: confronting Durkheim and other critical traditions; inquiring his social and critical ontology; interrogating the relation between social practices and justice; and discussing his relevance in contemporary politics and political theory. An international group of philosophers, sociologists, and critical theorists contribute to show Durkheim's reflection as an important complement-or an alternative-to the Hegelian-Marxist and post-structuralist conceptions of social critique. In this way, the book intends to inaugurate a new reflection on social critique at the intersection between philosophy and sociological theory.

This book proposes a new reading of Bergsonism based on the admission that time, conceived as duration, stretches instead of passes. This swelling time is full and so excludes the negative. Yet, swelling requires some resistance, but such that it is more of a stimulant than a contrariety. The notion of elan vital fulfills this requirement: it states the immanence of life to matter, thereby deriving the swelling from an internal effort and allowing its conceptualization as self-overcoming. With self-overcoming as the inner dynamics of reality, Bergson dismisses all forms of dualism and reductionist monism because both the absence of negativity and the swelling nature of time posit a creative process yielding a qualitatively diverse world. This graded oneness is how the lower level activates intensification by turning into limitation, making possible higher levels of achievement, in particular through the union of mind and body and the integration of openness and closed sociability.

This book offers the first-ever English translation of Oskar Becker's Zur Logik der Modalitaten. This essay, published in 1930, is a pioneering yet often neglected contribution in the context of prewar modal logic research in Europe. Becker's text is complemented by an extended commentary that explains, analyzes and highlights Becker's accomplishments and the philosophical background of his investigations. The commentary provides an in-depth analysis of all of Becker's important contributions, both from a philosophical and logical perspective, making it a very useful book for scholars in both philosophy and logic.

Drawing on classical antiquity and Western and Eastern philosophy, Richard Sorabji tackles in" Self" the question of whether there is such a thing as the individual self or only a stream of consciousness. According to Sorabji, the self is not an undetectable soul or ego, but an embodied individual whose existence is plain to see. Unlike a mere stream of consciousness, it is something that owns not only a consciousness but also a body.
Sorabji traces historically the retreat from a positive idea of self and draws out the implications of these ideas of self on the concepts of life and death, asking: Should we fear death? How should our individuality affect the way we live? Through an astute reading of a huge array of traditions, he helps us come to terms with our uneasiness about the subject of self in an account that will be at the forefront of philosophical debates for years to come. "There has never been a book remotely like this one in its profusion of ancient references on ideas about human identity and selfhood . . . . Readers unfamiliar with the subject also need to know that Sorabji breaks new ground in giving special attention to philosophers such as Epictetus and other Stoics, Plotinus and later Neoplatonists, and the ancient commentators on Aristotle (on the last of whom he is the world's leading authority)."--Anthony A. Long, "Times Literary Supplement"

This book looks at facets in the history of capitalism from the Enlightenment period, through the emergence of the American Empire in the Pacific, and to the contemporary era of neoliberal globalization. This re-telling of history is done by drawing from the works of E. San Juan, Jr. (henceforth, San Juan), considered arguably one of the great contemporary cultural and literary critics of our time. In this author's view, San Juan's lifetime of works offer a living documentation of, among others, the history and thought of the modern world highlighted by the rise of capitalism through the contemporary era of neoliberal globalization, and shepherded to its hegemonic status by what stands today as the preeminent empire of the United States. The book underscores the symbiosis between contemporary capitalism as an economic system based on accumulation on the one hand, and the American imperial state on the other, just as it revisits the colonial project that was carried out in capitalism's wake, the violence and subjugation inflicted on its victims, and how this colonial project has morphed into a new form of colonialism (or neocolonialism) maintained and enforced through the rules and institutional mechanisms of what is popularly known as neoliberal globalization that also provides the ideological and legal rationale for the commodification and the ultimate grab of the global commons reminiscent of the classical, albeit cruder, form of colonialism.

The Development of Ethics is a selective historical and critical study of moral philosophy in the Socratic tradition, with special attention to Aristotelian naturalism. It discusses the main topics of moral philosophy as they have developed historically, including: the human good, human nature, justice, friendship, and morality; the methods of moral inquiry; the virtues and their connections; will, freedom, and responsibility; reason and emotion; relativism, subjectivism, and realism; the theological aspect of morality. This volume examines early modern moral philosophy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Volume 3 will continue the story up to Rawls's Theory of Justice.
The present volume begins with Suarez's interpretation of Scholastic moral philosophy, and examines seventeenth- and eighteenth- century responses to the Scholastic outlook, to see how far they constitute a distinctively different conception of moral philosophy. The treatments of natural law by Grotius, Hobbes, Cumberland, and Pufendorf are treated in some detail. Disputes about moral facts, moral judgments, and moral motivation, are traced through Cudworth, Clarke, Balguy, Hutcheson, Hume, Price, and Reid. Butler's defense of a naturalist account of morality is examined and compared with the Aristotelian and Scholastic views discussed in Volume 1. The volume ends with a survey of the persistence of voluntarism in English moral philosophy, and a brief discussion of the contrasts and connections between Rousseau and earlier views on natural law.
The emphasis of the book is not purely descriptive, narrative, or exegetical, but also philosophical. Irwin discusses the comparative merits of differentviews, the difficulties that they raise, and how some of the difficulties might be resolved. The book tries to present the leading moral philosophers of the past as participants in a rational discussion that is still being carried on, and tries to help the reader to participate in this discussion.

This book offers an unprecedented study of the influence of the skepticism of the New Platonic Academy on David Hume's and Immanuel Kant's critiques of metaphysics. By demonstrating how the skeptical teachings of the Academy affected these authors' Enlightened attacks on traditional metaphysics, this book deepens and broadens the burgeoning scholarship on the role that the Ancients schools of skepticism played in the configuration of Modern skeptical outlooks. It bolsters the newfound recognition that we must reconsider the conventional view that the revival of Pyrrhonism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gave birth to Modern skepticism by incorporating the influence of Academic skepticism in the analysis. Giving a new impetus to this line of research, the author argues that Academic ideas and methods informed Hume's and Kant's critique of metaphysics in substantial and thus far unacknowledged ways. Specifically, she demonstrates the centrality of Academic skepticism to Hume's epistemology and critique of religion through a detailed analysis of his theory of belief in the Treatise and the first Enquiry as well as of its application in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Likewise, her analysis reveals how Kant's anti-metaphysical stance, developed in the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason, contains many skeptical insights of Academic inspiration, bequeathed to him by Hume.

This Festschrift celebrates Teddy Seidenfeld and his seminal contributions to philosophy, statistics, probability, game theory and related areas. The 13 contributions in this volume, written by leading researchers in these fields, are supplemented by an interview with Teddy Seidenfeld that offers an abbreviated intellectual autobiography, touching on topics of timeless interest concerning truth and uncertainty. Indeed, as the eminent philosopher Isaac Levi writes in this volume: "In a world dominated by Alternative Facts and Fake News, it is hard to believe that many of us have spent our life's work, as has Teddy Seidenfeld, in discussing truth and uncertainty." The reader is invited to share this celebration of Teddy Seidenfeld's work uncovering truths about uncertainty and the penetrating insights they offer to our common pursuit of truth in the face of uncertainty.

In the nineteenth century, Charles Dickens backed the cause of abolition of the death penalty and wrote comprehensively about it, in public letters and in his novels. At the end of the twentieth century, Jacques Derrida ran two years of seminars on the subject, which were published posthumously. What the novelist and the philosopher of deconstruction discussed independently, this book brings into comparison. Tambling examines crime and punishment in Dickens’s novels Barnaby Rudge, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist and Bleak House and explores those who influenced Dickens’s work, including Hogarth, Fielding, Godwin and Edgar Allen Poe. This book also looks at those who influenced Derrida – Freud, Nietzsche, Foucault and Blanchot – and considers Derrida’s study on terrorism and the USA as the only major democracy adhering to the death penalty. A comprehensive study of punishment in Dickens, and furthering Derrida’s insights by commenting on Shakespeare and blood, revenge, the French Revolution, and the enduring power of violence and its fascination, this book is a major contribution to literary criticism on Dickens and Derrida. Those interested in literature, criminology, law, gender, and psychoanalysis will find it an essential intervention in a topic still rousing intense argument.

This fascinating and thought-provoking book provides much-needed philosophical background for counsellors, therapists and healthcare workers looking for broader, deeper foundations in the struggle to help and make sense of others. While examining the best among twentieth-century philosophy it shows the wealth of inspiration of earlier centuries, and demonstrates with remarkable clarity the way in which the ideas of, and the relations between, these philosophers can inspire, inform and underpin much of counselling and psychotherapy. The author ties the philosophies with practice in a pragmatic and exercise-based way, making it an excellent source for training courses. Each chapter is headed with 'key points' and their application to counselling and psychotherapy, and ends with practical questions, exercises and a detailed bibliography, including extensive listing of relevant websites.

This collection of essays presents a systematic and up-to-date survey of the main aspects of Georg Henrik von Wright's philosophy, tracing the general humanistic leitmotiv to be found in his vast, varied output. The analysis covers the developments in Von Wright's thought up to the end of the 1990s. The essays are arranged thematically to focus on the chief areas of Von Wright's interests: practical rationality; human action and determinism; philosophical logic and theories of norms; research in the analytical tradition; and Wittgenstein studies. Readership: Scholars and students of moral philosophy, logic, psychology, sociology, cognitive science and the history of contemporary philosophy.

The Oxford Handbooks series is a major new initiative in academic publishing. Each volume offers an authoritative and up-to-date survey of original research in a particular subject area. Specially commissioned essays from leading figures in the discipline give critical examinations of the progress and direction of debates. Oxford Handbooks provide scholars and graduate students with compelling new perspectives upon a wide range of subjects in the humanities and social sciences.
The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy is the definitive guide to the major themes of the continental Euopean tradition in philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Brian Leiter and Michael Rosen have assembled a stellar group of contributors who provide a thematic treatment of continental philosophy, treating its subject matter philosophically and not simply as a series of museum pieces from the history of ideas. The scope of the volume is broad, with discussions covering a wide range of philosophical movements including German Idealism, existentialism, phenomenology, Marxism, postmodernism, and critical theory, as well as thinkers like Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and Foucault. This Handbook will be an essential reference point for graduate students and professional academics working on continental philosophy, as well as those with an interest in European literature, the history of ideas, and cultural studies.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year A Tablet Best Book of the Year Winner of a Christianity Today Book Award "One finds big nuggets of insight, useful to almost anybody with an interest in the progress of human society." -The Economist "Taylor takes on the broad phenomenon of secularization in its full complexity...[A] voluminous, impressively researched and often fascinating social and intellectual history." -Jack Miles, Los Angeles Times "A Secular Age is a work of stupendous breadth and erudition." -John Patrick Diggins, New York Times Book Review "A culminating dispatch from the philosophical frontlines. It is at once encyclopedic and incisive, a sweeping overview that is no less analytically rigorous for its breadth." -Steven Hayward, Cleveland Plain Dealer "[A] thumping great volume." -Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian "Very occasionally there appears a book destined to endure. A Secular Age is such a book." -Edward Skidelsky, Daily Telegraph "It is refreshing to read an inquiry into the condition of religion that is exploratory in its approach." -John Gray, Harper's "A Secular Age represents a singular achievement." -Christopher J. Insole, Times Literary Supplement "A determinedly brilliant new book." -London Review of Books

This edited collection provides new perspectives on some metaphysical questions arising in quantum mechanics. These questions have been long-standing and are of continued interest to researchers and graduate students working in physics, philosophy of physics, and metaphysics. It features contributions from a diverse set of researchers, ranging from senior scholars to junior academics, working in varied fields, from physics to philosophy of physics and metaphysics. The contributors reflect on issues about fundamentality (is quantum theory fundamental? If so, what is its fundamental ontology?), ontological dependence (how do ordinary objects exist even if they are not fundamental?), realism (what kind of realism is compatible with quantum theory?), indeterminacy (can the world itself exhibit ontological indeterminacy?). The book contains contributions from both physicists (including Nobel Prize winner Gerard 't Hooft), science communicators and philosophers.

This book explores the impact of biblical reading practices on scientific thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Looking beyond the canonical figures of science and exploring the full European stage, the collection addresses the presuption that natural philosophers forged their new sciences despite rather than because of the pervasive bible-centeredness of early modern thought. The essays engage iwth long-running debates ofer religion and science, and the supposition that scriptural exegesis was a hindrance rather than a catalyst to science.

But who do you say that I am?"" asks Jesus at the decisive turning point in the Gospel. Simon Peter answers correctly at first but is soon corrected when he protests the revelation of the Cross. Christians in every age are called to confess the right faith in Jesus, who suffered, died, and rose for our salvation. Our own period is beset by a crisis of faith in Jesus, which has had manifold deleterious effects on our lives, our Christian communities, and our world. For the sake of addressing this crisis, the Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal at Ave Maria University and the Thomistic Institute of the Pontifical Faculty at the Dominican House of Studies cosponsored an international conference that took place at Ave Maria University under the title Thomas Aquinas and the Crisis of Christology. Beginning with a gripping foreword by Archbishop J. Augustine Di Noia, OP, of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, this volume gathers together several of the excellent conference presentations given by scholars working in North America, South America, Europe, and Western Asia. These studies consider both formulations of who Christ is and of how we are under his judgement. With help from Thomas Aquinas and the Thomistic tradition, this work engages today's crisis of Christology as seen in multiple theological topics and offers models of faith to answer Jesus' question for ourselves, ""But who do you say that I am?

'There may be other professors of geriatric medicine who have chosen to write down their views on life, the universe and everything...Raymond Tallis is unusual in that he is philosophically well educated and alert: his books are genuine contributions to professional debate and must be assessed as such.' - Stephen R.L. Clarke, The Times Literary Supplement. Perceptive, passionate and often controversial, Raymond Tallis's latest debunking of Kulturkritik delves into a host of ethical and philosophical issues central to contemporary thought, raising questions we cannot afford to ignore. After reading Enemies of Hope, those minded to misrepresent mankind in ways that are almost routine amongst humanist intellectuals may be inclined to think twice. By clearing away the 'hysterical humanism' of the present century Enemies of Hope frees us to start thinking constructively about the way forward for humanity in the next.

This text offers an examination of the jurisprudential aspects of Kant's international thought, with reference to the argument of his treatise, "Perpetual Peace" (1795). In the book, Kant's international thought is situated in the wider context of his moral and political philosophy. Particular attention is given to explaining how Kant saw law as providing the basis for peace among men and states in the international sphere, and how in his exposition of the elements of the law of peace, he broke with the secular natural law tradition of Grotius, Hobbes, Wolff and Vattel.

Henri Lefebvre's Critical Theory of Space offers a rigorous analysis and revival of Lefebvre's works and the context in which he produced them. Biagi traces the historical-critical time-frame of Lefebvre's intellectual investigations, bringing to light a theoretical constellation in which historical methods intersect with philosophical and sociological issues: from Marxist political philosophy to the birth of urban sociology; from rural studies to urban and everyday life studies in the context of capitalism. Examining Lefebvre's extended investigations into the urban sphere as well as highlighting his goal of developing a "general political theory of space" and of innovating Marxist thought, and clarifying the various (more or less accurate) meanings attributed to Lefebvre's concept of the "right to the city" (analysed in the context of the French and international sociological and philosophical-political debate), Henri Lefebvre's Critical Theory of Space ultimately brings the contours of Lefebvre's innovative perspective-itself developed at the end of the "short twentieth century"-back into view in all its richness and complexity.

This book challenges the standard view that modern hermeneutics begins with Friedrich Ast and Friedrich Schleiermacher, arguing instead that it is the dialectic of reflective and teleological reason in Kant's Critique of Judgment that provides the actual proto-hermeneutic foundation. It is revolutionary in doing so by replacing interpretive truth claims by the more appropriate claim of rendering opaque contexts intelligible. Taking Gadamer's comprehensive analysis of hermeneutics in Truth and Method (1960) as its point of departure, the book turns to Kant's Critiques, reviewing his major concepts as a coherent system in relation to his sensus communis. At the heart of the book is the interaction between reflective, bottom-up search and teleological, top-down interpretative projection as provided in Part II of the third Critique. This text contends that Kant's broad definition of nature invites the liberation of the reflective-teleological judgment from its biological exemplifications and so permits us to establish its generalised status as a path-breaking, methodological tool. Kant's dialectic of reflective search and meaning bestowing, stipulated teleology is asserted to anticipate a series of motifs commonly associated with hermeneutics. Figures covered include Dilthey, Husserl, Ingarden, Heidegger, Gadamer, Apel, Habermas, Ricoeur, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Vattimo, Nancy and Caputo. Their collective contributions to interpretation allow for a review of the evolution of hermeneutics from the perspective of the Kantian critique of the limitations of human cognition. The book is written for the informed, general reader, but will likewise appeal to advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers in the humanities and social sciences.

This book participates in the ongoing debate about the alleged "death of theory" and the current post-theoretical condition, arguing that the "finitude" of theoretical projects does not mean "end", but rather contingency and transformation of thinking, beyond irreconcilable doctrines. Contributors from different cultural and scholarly backgrounds and based in three different continents propose new areas of investigation and interpretive possibilities, reopening dialogues with past and present discourses from a plurality of perspectives and locations. After a first section that reassesses the status and scopes of critique, theory, and literature, the book foregrounds new or neglected critical vocabulary, literary paradigms, and narrative patterns to reread texts at the intersection with other branches of the humanities-history, philosophy, religion, and pedagogy. It then explores geopolitical, cultural, and epistemological domains that have been historically and ideologically overdetermined (such as postsocialist, postcolonial, and cosmopolitan spaces), recodifying them as unstable sites of both conflicts and convergences. By acknowledging the spatio-temporal and cultural delimitations of any intellectual practice, the book creates awareness of our own partiality and incompleteness, but treats boundaries as zones of contact, exchange, and conceptual mobility that promote crossings and connections.