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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

This edited volume explores the intersection of medicine and philosophy throughout history, calling attention to the role of quantification in understanding the medical body. Retracing current trends and debates to examine the quantification of the body throughout the early modern, modern and early contemporary age, the authors contextualise important issues of both medical and philosophical significance, with chapters focusing on the quantification of temperaments and fluids, complexions, functions of the living body, embryology, and the impact of quantified reasoning on the concepts of health and illness. With insights spanning from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century, this book provides a wide-ranging overview of attempts to ‘quantify’ the human body at various points. Arguing that medicine and philosophy have been constantly in dialogue with each other, the authors discuss how this provided a strategic opportunity both for medical thought and philosophy to refine and further develop. Given today’s fascination with the quantification of the body, represented by the growing profusion of self-tracking devices logging one’s sleep, diet or mood, this collection offers an important and timely contribution to an emerging and interdisciplinary field of study.

This book investigates intersections between the philosophy of nature and Hellenism in British and German Romanticism, focusing primarily on five central literary/philosophical figures: Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich Hoelderlin, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron. Near the end of the eighteenth century, poets and thinkers reinvented Greece as a site of aesthetic and ontological wholeness, a move that corresponded with a refiguring of nature as a dynamically interconnected web in which each part is linked to the living whole. This vision of a vibrant materiality that allows us to become "one with all that lives," along with a Romantic version of Hellenism that wished to reassemble the broken fragments of an imaginary Greece as both site and symbol of this all-unity, functioned as a two-pronged response to subjective anxiety that arose in the wake of Kant and Fichte. The result is a form of resistance to an idealism that appeared to leave little room for a world of beauty, love, and nature beyond the self.

This book presents a multidisciplinary overview of a little known interethnic conflict in the southernmost part of the Americas: the tensions between the Mapuche indigenous people and the settlers of European descent in the Araucania region, in southern Chile. Politically autonomous during the colonial period, the Mapuche had their land confiscated, their population decimated and the survivors displaced and relocated as marginalized and poor peasants by Chilean white settlers at the end of the nineteenth century, when Araucania was transformed in a multi-ethnic region marked by numerous tensions between the marginalized indigenous population and the dominant Chileans of European descent. This contributed volume presents a collection of papers which delve into some of the intercultural dilemmas posed by these complex interethnic relations. These papers were originally published in Spanish and French and provide a sample of the research activities of the Nucleo de Estudios Interetnicos e Interculturales (NEII) at the Universidad Catolica de Temuco, in the capital of Araucania. The NEII research center brings together scholars from different fields: sociocultural anthropology, sociolinguistics, ethno-literature, intercultural education, intercultural philosophy, ethno-history and translation studies to produce innovative research in intercultural and interethnic relations. The chapters in this volume present a sample of this work, focusing on three main topics: The ambivalence between the inclusion and exclusion of indigenous peoples in processes of nation-building. The challenges posed by the incorporation of intercultural practices in the spheres of language, education and justice. The limitations of a functional notion of interculturality based on eurocentric thought and neoliberal economic rationality. Intercultural Studies from Southern Chile: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches will be of interest to anthropologists, linguists, historians, philosophers, educators and a range of other social scientists interested in intercultural and interethnic studies.

Kierkegaard's Either/Or can be read in multiple ways. One important possible reading at the present time is to read it as a critique of the sexual stereotyping of women (and, implicitly, the stereotyping of men as well) and gender relations that characterize modern Western thought. The stereotyping is not simple and unvarigated. To mention two extremes, Kierkegaard's presentation of gender relations range from the outrageous subjugation and domination of woman shown in the "Diary of the Seducer," with which Kierkegaard closes the first volume of Either/Or, to the affectionate and gentle love that characterizes the relation of Judge William and his wife in the second volume, where the best face is put upon bourgeois marriage. In Either/Or, Part One, Kierkegaard presents what he calls the aesthetic form of life. There he focuses on a large variety of the stereotypical views of women, from a sentimental and whining appraisal of her position in the world, through the view that sexual exploitation is an uncontrollable natural instinct and/or drive for which men are not morally responsible, to the view that women is a jest, not to be taken seriously as a moral and responsible being, and then that she is just there as a sexual object or plaything to be reflectively seduced on the male's terms and for his pleasure or rejection, whatever suits him at the moment. Needless to say, this great variety of views of the "uses" of woman has provoked a large critique, and just as predictable, that critique is as varied as the intellectual tools available for the analysis of a work that is as literary as it is philosophic. The present collection of essays treats these and many other of the most important issues raised in Either/Or in fresh and perceptive ways. Even where familiar themes are argued, the authors introduce innovative interpretive models, new approaches and new materials are appealed to, or new rebuttal arguments against previously held positions are offered. Several of the articles, for instance, appropriate or criticize methods or insights derived from postmodernism and/or feminist philosophy; an approach that would have been unlikely two decades ago.

This book discusses the influence of creative work on human life, and the role it has played in shaping human civilization since antiquity. To do so, it analyzes the history of thought on creative work from three civilizations: Greek, Indian, and Chinese, as well as contemporary neurological studies on consciousness. According to the classical Greeks, humans are instinctively predisposed to use creative work to gain truth, wisdom and happiness; the Indians consider that Dharma (duty, morality, etc.) can be achieved only through work (karma); and for the Chinese, creative work is needed to attain the supreme wisdom (Dao). Modern studies on consciousness show that our brain creates a personal self-model (ego tunnel) when we learn things creatively, and developing such skills provides lifelong protection for the brain. In the 21st century, human involvement in creative work is declining as we use mechanized systems to gain more and more profit, but the wealth falls into the hands of the few superrich: the Plutonomy. As creative work is taken over by AI systems, human work is reduced to operating those machines, and this in turn leads to an exponential growth in the number of part-time workers (Precariat). The declining value of human life today is a consequence of this change in society. Further, reducing creative work means we have no way to distribute wealth, nor do we have any means to address problems like the lack of enthusiasm in the young; the health crisis due to lack of physical activity; or the environmental crisis due to the high demand for energy to run mechanized systems. This book explores these issues.

'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.

Foundations of Mind collects the essays which established Tyler Burge as a leading philosopher of mind. This second volume of his papers offers nineteen pieces published between 1975 and 2003, including the influential series that develops anti-individualism. Burge contributes three essay-length postscripts, a substantial new paper on consciousness, and an introduction which surveys his work in this area. The foundations that Burge reflects on are conditions in the individual or the wider world that determine the natures of mental kinds. The conditions include causal, social, psychological conditions, and conditions of phenomenal consciousness. Some of these are basic conditions under which minds are possible. The book is essential reading for philosophers of mind, and should engage a wider public interested in basic philosophical issues.

The definitive edition of Foucault's articles, interviews, and seminars.
Few philosophers have had as strong an influence on the twentieth century as Michel Foucault. His work has affected the teaching of any number of disciplines and remains, twenty years after his death, critically important. This newly available edition is drawn from the complete collection of all of Foucault's courses, articles, and interviews, and brings his most important work to a new generation of readers.
"Ethics" (edited by Paul Rabinow) contains the summaries of Foucault's renowned courses at the College de France, paired with key writings and interviews on friendship, sexuality, and the care of the self and others.

Examining Georges Canguilhem's enduring attention to the problem of error, from his early writings to Michel Foucault's first major responses to his work, this pathbreaking book shows that the historian of science was also a centrally important philosopher in postwar France. Samuel Talcott elucidates Canguilhem's contributions by drawing on previously neglected publications and archival sources to trace the continuity of commitment that led him to alter his early anti-vitalist, pacifist positions in the face of political catastrophe and concrete human problems. Talcott shows how Canguilhem critically appropriated the philosophical work of Alain, Bergson, Bachelard, and many others while developing his own distinct writings on medicine, experimentation, and scientific concepts in an ethical and political endeavor to resist alienation and injustice. And, while suggesting Canguilhem's sometimes surprising philosophical importance for a range of younger thinkers, the book demonstrates Foucault's own critical allegiance to Canguilhem's spirit, techniques, and investigations.

This book argues that "race" and "whiteness" are central to the construction of the modern world. Constructive Theology needs to take them seriously as primary theological problems. In doing so, Constructive Theology must fundamentally change its approach, and draw from the emerging field of Philosophy of Race. Christopher M. Baker develops a genealogy of race that understands "whiteness" as a kind secular soteriology, and develops a counternarrative theological method informed by resources from Philosophy of Race. He then deploys that method to read science fiction cinema and superhero stories as cultural, racial, and theological documents that can be critically engaged and redeployed as counternarratives to dominant racial narratives.

This volume examines modern scepticism in all main philosophical areas: epistemology, science, metaphysics, morals, and religion. It features sixteen essays that explore its importance for modern thought. The contributions present diverse, mutually enriching interpretations of key thinkers, from Montaigne to Nietzsche. The book includes a look both at the relationship between Montaigne and Pascal and at Montaigne's criticism of religious rationalism. It turns its attention to an investigation into the links between ancient scepticism and Bacon's Doctrine of the Idols, as well as into the ancient problem of the criterion in Cartesian philosophy. Next, three essays focus on more general topics, like modern sceptical disturbances, clandestine literature and irreligion. Two essays investigate the role of scepticism in Bayle's moral thinking and his theory of religious toleration. Hume's sceptical philosophy is the subject of two papers by distinguished scholars. In addition, many contributors address the presence of scepticism in Kant and in the German Idealism, such as the role of Schulze's scepticism in the works of the young Hegel. The book closes with a paper on Nietzsche and scepticism, and an essay on the role of Popkin's and Schmitt's works on modern scepticism. This collection continues along a rich, fruitful path opened by Richard H. Popkin and pursued by many important scholars, like Gianni Paganini, John-Christian Laursen, and Jose Raimundo Maia Neto. It re-establishes that necessary dialogue between researchers of scepticism from all over the Americas, which began with Popkin, Oswaldo Porchat and Ezequiel de Olaso long ago. This insightful reflection on modern European scepticism will also serve as an important resource in the history of modern philosophy.

The volume provides a thorough look into Marina Sbisà’s distinctive, Austinian-inspired approach to speech acts. By gathering original essays from a world-class lineup of philosophers of language, linguists, social epistemologists, action theorists, and communication scholars, the collection provides the first comprehensive critical treatment of Sbisa’s outstanding contribution to speech act theory.

This volume emphasizes the diversity and fruitfulness of early modern mechanism as a program, as a concept, as a model. Mechanistic study of the living body but also of the mind and mental processes are examined in careful historical focus, dealing with figures ranging from the first-rank (Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Cudworth, Gassendi, Locke, Leibniz, Kant) to less well-known individuals (Scaliger, Martini) or prominent natural philosophers who have been neglected in recent years (Willis, Steno, etc.). The volume moves from early modern medicine and physiology to late Enlightenment and even early 19th-century psychology, always maintaining a conceptual focus. It is a contribution to a newly active field in the history and philosophy of early modern life science. It is of interest to scholars studying the history of medicine and the development of mechanistic theories.

Immanuel Kant's work changed the course of modern philosophy; Karl Ameriks examines how. He compares the philosophical system set out in Kant's Critiques with the work of the major philosophers before and after Kant. Individual essays provide case studies in support of Ameriks's thesis that late 18th-century reactions to Kant initiated an historical turn, after which historical and systematic considerations became joined in a way that fundamentally distinguishes philosophy from science and art.

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"