The daring idea that convention - human decision - lies at the root both of necessary truths and much of empirical science reverberates through twentieth-century philosophy, constituting a revolution comparable to Kant's Copernican revolution. This book provides a comprehensive study of Conventionalism. Drawing a distinction between two conventionalist theses, the under-determination of science by empirical fact, and the linguistic account of necessity, Yemima Ben-Menahem traces the evolution of both ideas to their origins in Poincare's geometric conventionalism. She argues that the radical extrapolations of Poincare's ideas by later thinkers, including Wittgenstein, Quine, and Carnap, eventually led to the decline of conventionalism. This book provides a fresh perspective on twentieth-century philosophy. Many of the major themes of contemporary philosophy emerge in this book as arising from engagement with the challenge of conventionalism.

This book presents both a historical overview of the absorption of Heidegger's thought into English-language philosophical schools as well as a philosophical discussion of his thought provided by contemporary scholars. The text describes the ways in which a philosophical methodology and worldview seemingly so inhospitable to Anglophone academia has managed to find an unlikely home. This volume is roughly divided into two types of contributions: discussions of Heidegger's reception in the English-speaking world, and outstanding examples of English-language Heidegger scholarship. The first type includes both historiographical accounts of the encounters between Heidegger's thought and the Anglo-American world, as well as their philosophical expositions and critiques. The second group of chapters reveal the latest contemporary scholarship by contemporary Heideggerians writing in English. It is moreover the first volume to bring together thinkers from both genealogies of Anglo-American Heideggerianism appealing to students and researchers working in both of these camps.

Animal rights is now a concept that has achieved wide name-recognition. Vegetarianism, and even veganism, is now commonplace, representing a massive transformation in public attitudes. Fifty years ago, the concept of animal rights was almost unheard of and the animal protection movement lay dormant. Even vegetarians were regarded as, at best, cranks and, at worst, dangerous critics of the social order. Yet the late 1960s and early 1970s were a formative time for the contemporary animal rights movement. One of the most important and influential intellectual moments for animal rights occurred at this time at Oxford University among like-minded scholars who would become known as the Oxford Group. The Oxford Group and the Emergence of Animal Rights is about this little known group-a loose friendship group of primarily postgraduate philosophy students who attended the University of Oxford for a short period of time in the late 1960s. The book traces the early development of the Oxford Group and its influence on animal rights theory and activism. It also serves as a case study of how the emergence of important work and the development of new ideas can be explained, as well as how the intellectual development of participants in a friendship group is influenced by their participation in a creative community. For example, would Peter Singer have written his landmark book Animal Liberation-or anything about animal ethics-without being exposed to the other members of the Oxford Group? How would the discipline of animal ethics differ if the group had not produced their edited collection of articles, Animals, Men and Morals? Drawing on previously unpublished correspondence among and interviews with the surviving Oxford Group members, Robert Garner and Yewande Okuleye explore the social and political milieu in which the group formed to understand how such intellectual movements coalesce.

Literacy Heroines is about twelve amazing women who lived and worked in the period 1880-1930 who used their literacy abilities to address major issues in the country in those years, including some we still face today: racism, sexism, voting rights, educational and economic inequality, health disparities and others. They used their exemplary literacy skills to teach, to bring issues to light, to right wrongs, to publish books, articles, pamphlets and other materials to reach their goals. They benefited from focused help in the form of sponsorship from others and provided sponsorship in many forms to others to foster literacy in people young and old. They stand as Literacy Heroines, working in a variety of roles, using their literacy abilities in heroic efforts to serve as respected exemplars and sponsors of literacy for others. They used their grit and willingness to stand up for their principles, took small steps, worked collaboratively, hospitably inviting people to literacy. Ultimately, it should be clear that in one way or another, the Heroines were addressing the many forms of inequality in American society; their lives and work show that literacy is thus a key tool in the struggle for social justice, then and now. Suitable for courses in the history of literacy or writing studies, history of feminism, history of education and related areas.

Following Credit and Faith and Economic Theology, this third volume in the series develops a metaphysics which is missing when trust is ordered around economic theories and institutions. Human existence may be conceived according to its temporal dimensions of appropriation, participation, and offering. Engaging with the Western philosophical tradition from the Neo-Pythagoreans and Plato to Heidegger and Arendt, drawing especially from Augustine and Weil, Goodchild offers striking reconstructions of the meanings of economic, political and religious dimensions of life. The outcome is an elaboration of conceptions of wealth, power, contingency, necessity and grace which give a new orientation to human life and endeavour. Goodchild situates this discussion within the current historical era of the breakdown of global financial capitalism. He draws from the Financial Revolution in England as a time of crisis which illuminates our own. Faced with a range of global crises, Goodchild proposes an alternative between strategies for survival: either submission before a Great Machine of Credit as an autonomous, unthinking system for regulating human behaviour or accession to the necessity of grace as a way of empowering the pursuit of wealth, justice and thought.

From the twentieth century in the twenty-first, psychoanalysis and deconstruction have challenged, and continue to challenge, our conceptions of subjectivity and selfhood. Psychoanalysis revealed that even in our innermost households we are never quite alone; rather, instances of "otherness" incessantly interfere in our most intimate relation to ourselves, forcing us to adapt continuously. Deconstruction, inheriting both this psychoanalytic disclosure and Heidegger's destruction of the history of metaphysics, went to the foundations of the Western constructions of "the subject" and "the self," only to find how a destabilizing otherness was always already haunting them. What, if anything, remains of the self in the aftermath? Early on in the wake of deconstruction, a certain misconceived and simplified notion of the "death of the subject" was proclaimed and in recent years more or less successful attempts have been made at reviving the notions of "the subject," "the self," and "agency." In contrast to these attempts at revival, this book offers a two-pronged approach: On the one hand, it argues that neither psychoanalysis nor deconstruction propounds a simple annihilation of the subject or liquidation of the self; on the other hand, however, neither do they pave the way for a "return to the subject" or "resurrection of the self" that would allow us once again to become confident about our presence to ourselves. Instead, this book suggests that if we set ourselves the task of taking up the heritage from psychoanalysis and deconstruction in a serious manner, we are obliged to retrace the subject and the self as undergoing perpetual auto-deconstruction.

Thomas Aquinas (1224-74) was born in Naples of a powerful Italian family. He took part in the major philosophical and theological controversies of his day and fought the decisive battle which re-admitted the study of the works of Aristotle. In his work he attempted to harmonise the rational insights of the classical world with revealed Christian truths. [He reinterpreted the Augustinian view of history and politics by concluding that the state did have positive value in itself, as an expression of God's providence and will for mankind. Man fulfilled himself in two ways - as a good citizen and as a Christian seeking salvation. Aquinas is therefore seen as reconciling the views of the pagan Aristotle with the teachings of Christianity.] Aquinas' theory of the state helped to put European political thought on a new plane. This wide-ranging collection of papers investigates and illuminates various aspects of Aquinas' thought regarding Church and State, society, natural law, justice and political authority.

Thomas More (1478-1535), English statesman, author and saint, was a lawyer, politician and diplomat, a leading member of the Renaissance of northern Europe and a defender of the Roman Catholic faith. In the history of political thought More is remembered as the author of Utopia, a little book which gave rise to a genre of literature and a name for a mode of theorising, which explicitly criticises existing political and social arrangements from a radical perspective and also offers new ideals and illustrates how these might be realised in an imaginery society. For over four hundred years the meaning of More's Utopia has confounded scholars. Many of the ideas advanced in the book, e.g. on rational religion and religious toleration, seem to be at odds with the events of More's political career and his practical religious position. Moreover there is much disagreement about the meaning and importance of the substantial satiric elements it contains. This collection contains a great variety of authoritative articles which not only investigate More's life and the influences on his work, but also offer the reader a selection of the various interpretations and comparisons of his writings that scholars have made in the course of this century.

Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), the Dutch jurist and philosopher, is a key theorist of the post-mediaeval state. According to Grotius, the state is not subject to any terrestrial superior, either political or ecclesiastical. His political writings develop the consequences of this condition including the construction of state authority in terms of 'natural rights', acknowledging the right to self-protection and the needs of individuals. A further development is the idea that the state is the instrument of justice beyond its own boundaries. He asserted that there were universal moral standards that could be used to judge questions of international conflict. This universal morality was based on two prinicples: that self-preservation is always legitimate; and that wanton injury of another is always illegitimate. [On this foundation, rules for reconciling conflict could be erected and the existence of civil society explained.] These views have characterised much political thought from Grotius' day to the present and have played their part in the history of international law. This collection of articles presents in chronological order the writings of 20th century authors on Grotius and covers such topics as the life of Grotius, the evolution of his ideas, his contribution to the theory of 'natural law' and his wider significance as a political thinker.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is best known for his development of the concept of sovereignty, which was treated most clearly in his great work, Leviathan. Whilst Hobbes was not the first theorist of sovereignty, he remains perhaps the most thorough exponent of the concept. His accounts of morality and religion, as well as of government, are set out in a way that precludes legitimate challenge to the sovereign's authority: and the soovereign, whether monarchical or republican or parliamentary, was taken by Hobbes to be fundamental to civil life. Much of the literature on Hobbes has been devoted to his work on sovereignty. However, this does not exhaust the interest of Hobbes' thought, and recent scholars have also investigated such topics as his conception of historiography, his natural philosophy and his account of religion, and considered how these relate to his political thought. The articles selected in these three volumes reflect these concerns and offer an exploration of Hobbes' political philosophy.

The work of David Hume (1711-76), the Scottish historian and philosopher, constitutes a break with the assumptions of his predecessors who suggested that our ideas and practices answered to a rational design, whether divine or human. Instead Hume emphasized the origins of our ideas in sensation, suggested that reason was properly the slave of the passions, and located the origins of social and political institutions in utility and sentiment. Hume's philosophy found its complement in his political essays and History of England, which emhphasized unintended results and the complexity of the historical process. Altogether Hume's work constitutes the first thoroughgoing attempt since the rise of Christianity to characterize human experience in terms that offered an alternative to theologically-based or para-theological theories. As such, its importance for subsequent developments, like that of Kant's work, is not to be underestimated. This significant anthology contains articles on different aspects of his thought - his historical works, his political scepticism, his concepts of justice, liberty and property and moral evaluation.

The Case for the Enlightenment is a comparative study of the emergence of Enlightenment in Scotland and in Naples. Challenging the tendency to fragment the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe into multiple Enlightenments, the distinguished intellectual historian John Robertson demonstrates the extent to which thinkers in two societies at the opposite ends of Europe shared common intellectual preoccupations. Before 1700, Scotland and Naples faced a bleak future as backward, provincial kingdoms in a Europe of aggressive commercial states. Yet by 1760, Scottish and Neapolitan thinkers were in the van of those advocating the cause of Enlightenment by means of political economy. By studying the social and institutional contexts of intellectual life in the two countries, and the currents of thought promoted within them, The Case for the Enlightenment explains this transformation. John Robertson pays particular attention to the greatest thinkers in each country, David Hume and Giambattista Vico.

Problems from Philosophy is an introduction to philosophy organized around the great philosophical problems the existence of God, the nature of the mind, human freedom, the limits of knowledge, and the truth about ethics. It begins by reflecting on the life of the first great philosopher, Socrates. Then it takes up the fundamental question of whether God exists. Next comes a discussion of death and the soul, which leads to a chapter about persons. The later chapters of the book are about whether objective knowledge is possible in science and ethics. Each chapter is self-contained and may be read independently of the others. Problems from Philosophy represents the final work of author and philosopher James Rachels. In it, he brings the same liveliness and clarity to the introduction of philosophy that he brings to his best-selling ethics text, The Elements of Moral Philosophy. The second and third edition have been revised by Rachels' son Stuart, who carefully has carefully refined his father's work to further strengthen its clarity and accessibility.

'Fear God, honour the king.' Sixteenth-century people were supposed to do both. But what was the king entitled to command? And what if he ordered one thing and God's law said another? In this fascinating and original study, James Burns examines these questions by focusing on a neglected area of study: the Scottish experience. The sixteenth century in Scotland was a time of intense political and religious conflict, which generated a substantial literature of political debate. This debate was of such intensity that James VI, the first king to rule over Scotland and England, wrote his own book on the subject: 'The True Lawe of Free Monarchies'. Some of the substantial literature of political debate has long been recognized as important in the wider history of European political thought. Knox and Buchanan as exponents of 'resistance theory', Blackwood and Barclay as defenders of 'absolute' monarchy, have had that recognition. James VI, uniquely expounding 'divine right' principles from the throne, has likewise had his place. More recently, the significance of the late-scholastic theory of John Mair has been increasingly acknowledged. This book, however, is the first attempt to bring together systematically these and less familiar elements in a rich and varied body of political thought. The Scottish response to monarchical government not only provides a microcosmic view of European thinking on the subject, it also contributes substantially to our understanding of the Scottish element in the new 'British' polity which was emerging at the end of the period.

Bruce Haddock's lucid and original textbook combines historical and theoretical analysis, setting political thought in the context of the emerging institutional, cultural and economic framework of the modern world. From the colossal impact of the French and American revolutions, through reaction and constitutional consolidation, the book traces the contrasting criteria invoked to justify particular forms of political order from 1789 to the present day. Its chapters are organized around key themes such as liberty, welfare, the nation-state and totalitarianism, focusing on the response of theorists to fundamental ideological and political controversies. Major thinkers covered include Kant, Burke, Hegel, Tocqueville, Marx, Mill, Mazzini, Lenin, Schmitt, Hayek, Oakeshott and Rawls.

The book also confronts challenging questions about the status of moral and political principles. Cultural and moral controversy is characteristic of our everyday experience. In recent decades, however, the foundations of political and ethical theory have been widely questioned. Haddock highlights the emergence of a dilemma that faces all citizens: how we make judgements of value from embedded positions in social and cultural communities.

A History of Political Thought: 1789 to the Present will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, history and philosophy.

Although the impact of works such as Common Sense and The Rights of Man has led historians to study Thomas Paine's role in the American Revolution and political scientists to evaluate his contributions to political theory, scholars have tacitly agreed not to treat him as a literary figure. This book not only redresses this omission, but also demonstrates that Paine's literary sensibility is particularly evident in the very texts that confirmed his importance as a theorist. And yet, because of this association with the 'masses', Paine is often dismissed as a mere propagandist. Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution recovers Paine as a transatlantic popular intellectual who would translate the major political theories of the eighteenth century into a language that was accessible and appealing to ordinary citizens on both sides of the Atlantic.

This history of ideas in American psychology divides 11 decades into three periods, marked out by specific themes central to psychologists over the years. Initially, the legacy of mind-body dualism challenged scientists to make coherent a single universe of mental and physical phenomena, but efforts were hampered by languages that embody mental, physical, and metaphysical commitments. This struggle began with James, whose work remains enormously relevant, is exacerbated by Titchener, whose mentalism provokes a reaction by Watson, whose physicalistic bias provoked a vastly expanded realm opened by Gestalt.

The second period, from Freud to Skinner, shifted the focus from mind and body to experimental and clinical settings for the acquisition and application of psychological knowledge. Tolman, Hebb, Rogers, Hull, Piaget, and Skinner each sought to create a psychology that could bridge these two settings, often reducing one to the other, but often inventing ideas for psychology that vastly changed the earlier preoccupation with mind-body dualism. In the third period, feminists, phenomenologists, and post modern thinkers recentered psychology. The cultural acceptance of psychology as a point of view on virtually any issue led to a proliferation of diversity even greater than in the second period. The integration of psychology into employment roles in most segments of society made psychology more diverse and less unified than ever. An important resource for all scholars, students, and researchers involved with the history of ideas and American psychology.

The collection covers the foundations of business cycle theory from the mid-nineteenth century through to the work immediately affected by the publication of Keynes's General Theory.With the revival of interest in real business cycles in the last ten years, these volumes provide a substantial selection of the intellectual achievements in this area developed by previous generations; any of such achievements were temporarily obscured by the success of Keynes's work.

Since the birth of modernity, Western thought has been at war with cliches. The association of philosophical and cultural integrity with originality, and the corresponding need for invention and novelty, has been a distinct concern of a whole spectrum of ideas and movements, from Nietzsche's polemics against the 'herd', the 'shock of the new' of the artistic avant-garde, the Frankfurt School's critique of mass culture, to Orwell's defence of political dialogue from 'dying metaphors'. This book is the first examination of the cliche as a philosophical concept. Challenging the idea that cliches are lazy or spurious opposites to genuine thinking, it instead locates them as a dynamic and contestable boundary between 'thought' and 'non-thought'. The book unpacks the constituent phenomena of cliches - repetition, circulation, the readymade, same-ness - through readings of 'anti-philosophical' thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Paulhan, de Certeau, Derrida, Sloterdijk, Badiou and Groys. In doing so, the book critically articulates the techniques and technologies through which the boundary between 'thought' and 'non-thought' is formed in modern Western philosophy. Rejecting the idea that cliches should be dismissed out of hand on normative frameworks of 'good' and 'bad' thinking, or 'new' and 'old' ideas, it instead interrogates the material, cultural and archival ground on which these frameworks are built.

Italian intellectuals played an important role in the shaping of international politics during the Cold War. The visions of the world that they promulgated, their influence on public opinion and their ability to shape collective speech, whether in agreement with or in opposition to those in power, have been underestimated and understudied. This volume marks one of the first serious attempts to assess how Italian intellectuals understood and influenced Italy's place in the post-World War II world. The protagonists represent the three key post-war political cultures: Catholic, Marxist and Liberal Democratic. Together, these essays uncover the role of such intellectuals in institutional networks, their impact on the national and transnational circulation of ideas and the relationships they established with a variety of international associations and movements.

Putting the New Materialist figure of diffraction to use in a set of readings - in which cultural texts are materially read against their contents and their themes, against their readers or against other texts - this volume proposes a critical intervention into the practice of reading itself. In this book, reading and reading methodology are probed for their materiality and re-considered as being inevitably suspended between, or diffracted with, both matter and discourse. The history of literary and cultural reading, including poststructuralism and critical theory, is revisited in a new light and opened-up for a future in which the world and reading are no longer regarded as conveniently separate spheres, but recognized as deeply entangled and intertwined. Diffractive Reading ultimately represents a new reading of reading itself: firstly by critiquing the distanced perspective of critical paradigms such as translation and intertextuality, in which texts encountered, processed or otherwise subdued; secondly, showing how all literary and cultural readings represent different 'agential cuts' in the world-text-reader constellation, which is always both discursive and material; and thirdly, the volume materializes, dynamizes and politicizes the activity of reading by drawing attention to reading's intervention in, and (co)creation of, the world in which we live.

This important study takes a new approach to understanding Italian Renaissance humanism, based not on scholarly paradigms or philosophical concepts but on a neglected yet indispensable perspective: the humanists' understanding of themselves. Through a series of close textual studies, Patrick Baker excavates what humanists thought was important about humanism, how they viewed their own history, what goals they enunciated, what triumphs they celebrated - in short, he attempts to reconstruct humanist identity. What emerges is a small, coherent community dedicated primarily not to political ideology, a philosophy of man, an educational ethos, or moral improvement, but rather to the pursuit of classical Latin eloquence. Grasping the significance this stylistic ideal had for the humanists is essential to understanding both their sense of themselves and the importance they and others attached to their movement. For eloquence was no mere aesthetic affair but rather appeared to them as the guarantor of civilisation itself.

Beyond its housing estates and identikit high streets there is another Britain. This is the Britain of mist-drenched forests and unpredictable sea-frets: of wraith-like fog banks, druidic mistletoe and peculiar creatures that lurk, half-unseen, in the undergrowth, tantalising and teasing just at the periphery of human vision. How have the remarkably persistent folkloric traditions of the British Isles formed and been formed by the identities and psyches of those who inhabit them? In her sparkling new history, Carolyne Larrington explores the diverse ways in which a myriad of imaginary and fantastical beings has moulded the cultural history of the nation. Fairies, elves and goblins here tread purposefully, sometimes malignly, over an eerie, preternatural landscape that also conceals brownies, selkies, trows, knockers, boggarts, land-wights, Jack o'Lanterns, Barguests, the sinister Nuckleavee, or water-horse, and even Black Shuck: terrifying hell-hound of the Norfolk coast with eyes of burning coal. Focusing on liminal points where the boundaries between this world and that of the supernatural grow thin those marginal tide-banks, saltmarshes, floodplains, moors and rock-pools wherein mystery lies the author shows how mythologies of Mermen, Green men and Wild-men have helped and continue to help human beings deal with such ubiquitous concerns as love and lust, loss and death and continuity and change. Evoking the Wild Hunt, the ghostly bells of Lyonesse and the dread fenlands haunted by Grendel, and ranging the while from Shetland to Jersey and from Ireland to East Anglia, this is a book that will captivate all those who long for the wild places: the mountains and chasms where Gog, Magog and their fellow giants lie in wait."

Humanists look up to Hellas as the cradle of European culture. The book spans nearly five centuries of a later epoch of this worthy tradition. Starting with the awesome high-mediaeval Cathars, the exposition proceeds in chronological order. Eventually, we meet Giordano Bruno and Lucilio Vanini, both of them red-letter heretics. The work affords cognisance of a neglected branch of learning. History of morals in general, and that of the struggle of faith and reason in particular, provides in-depth insights into the allotted fate of dissentient man. A potentially fateful nexus appears to be interweaving between book and author. Organised religion is evermore based on the politically beneficial idea of anthropomorphism or metaphysical projection. For has Man not made God in his image?

The Marquis de Condorcet was one of the few Enlightenment ideologists to witness the French Revolution and participate as an elected politician at the centre of events during France's transition from monarchy to republic. Condorcet and Modernity explores the interaction between Condorcet's political theory, legislative pragmatism, public policy proposals and the management of change. David Williams examines key topics including rights, the civil order, the Church, the slave trade, women's civil rights, judicial reform, voting and representation, economics, monarchy, power and revolution. He explores the complex links between Condorcet as the visionary ideologist and Condorcet as the pragmatic legislator, and between Condorcet's concept of modernity - the application of 'social arithmetic' to government policies. Based on an extensive array of both printed and manuscript sources, this major contribution to enlightenment studies is a full treatment of Condorcet's politics.