This book initiates the discussion between psychoanalysis and recent humanist and social scientific interest in a fundamental contemporary topic - the nonhuman. The authors question where we situate the subject (as distinct from the human) in current critical investigations of a nonanthropoentric universe. In doing so they unravel a less-than-human theory of the subject; explore implications of Lacanian teachings in relation to the environment, freedom, and biopolitics; and investigate the subjective enjoyments of and anxieties over nonhumans in literature, film, and digital media. This innovative volume fills a valuable gap in the literature, extending investigations into an important and topical strand of the social sciences for both analytic and pedagogical purposes.

This first comparative study of philosophers and literary theorists Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin examines the relationship between the experience of the modern world and the forms that we use to make sense of that experience. Analyzing their views on art, habit, tradition, and language, this comparative study results in a radical reconsideration of received views about thinkers as well as in a reconsideration of the modernity that Bakhtin and Benjamin lived in and that we continue to inhabit now.

How does perceptual experience make us knowledgeable about the world? In this book Nadja El Kassar argues that an informed answer requires a novel theory of perception: perceptual experience involves conceptual capacities and consists in a relation between a perceiver and the world. Contemporary theories of perception disagree about the role of content and conceptual capacities in perceptual experience. In her analysis El Kassar scrutinizes the arguments of conceptualist and relationist theories, thereby exposing their limitations for explaining the epistemic role of perceptual experience. Against this background she develops her novel theory of epistemically significant perception. Her theory improves on current accounts by encompassing both the epistemic role of perceptual experiences and its perceptual character. Central claims of her theory receive additional support from work in vision science, making this book an original contribution to the philosophy of perception.

This interdisciplinary analysis presents an innovative examination of the nature of pride and humility, including all their slippery nuances and points of connection. By combining insights from visual art, literature, philosophy, religious studies, and psychology, this volume adapts a complementary rather than an oppositional approach to examine how pride and humility reinforce and inform one another. This method produces a robust, substantial, and meaningful description of these important concepts. The analysis takes into account key elements of pride and humility, including self-esteem and self-confidence, human interconnectedness, power's function and limitations, and the role of fear. Shawn R. Tucker explores the many inflections of these terms, inflections that cast them by turns as positive or negative, emboldening or discouraging, and salubrious or vicious depending upon the context and manner in which they are used.

Including two new essays, this remarkable volume is an updated edition of Davidson's classic Essays on Actions and Events (1980). A superb work on the nature of human action, it features influential discussions of numerous topics. These include the freedom to act; weakness of the will; the logical form of talk about actions, intentions, and causality; the logic of practical reasoning; Hume's theory of the indirect passions; and the nature and limits of decision theory.

This book takes you to the "classical academy of shamanism," Siberian tribal spirituality that gave birth to the expression "shamanism." For the first time, in this volume Znamenski has rendered in readable English more than one hundred books and articles that describe all aspects of Siberian shamanism: ideology, ritual, mythology, spiritual pantheon, and paraphernalia. It will prove valuable to anthropologists, historians of religion, psychologists and practitioners of shamanism.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is the first English translation of Causalite' et Lois de La Nature, and is an important contribution to the theory of causation. Max Kistler reconstructs a unified concept of causation that is general enough to adequately deal with both elementary physical processes, and the macroscopic level of phenomena we encounter in everyday life. This book will be of great interest to philosophers of science and metaphysics, and also to students and scholars of philosophy of mind where concepts of causation and law play a prominent role. Contents1. What is a Causal Relation? 2. Laws of Nature and Universal Generalisations 3. Applicability Conditions and the Concept of "Strict Law" 4. Consequences 5. The Nomological Theory of Causation and Causal Responsibility 6. Efficacious Properties and the Instantiation of Laws 7. Causal Responsibility and its Applications Conclusion.

Jacques Derrida's extensive early writings devoted considerable attention to "being as presence," the reality underlying the history of metaphysics. In Derrida on Being as Presence: Questions and Quests, David A. White develops the intricate conceptual structure of this notion by close exegetical readings drawn from these writings. White discusses cardinal concepts in Derrida's revamping of theoretical considerations pertaining to language-signification, context, negation, iterability-as these considerations depend on the structure of being as presence and also as they ground "deconstructive" reading. White's appraisal raises questions invoking a range of problems. He deploys these questions in conjunction with thematically related quests that arise given Derrida's conviction that the history of metaphysics, as variations on being as presence, has concealed and skewed vital elements of reality. White inflects this critical apparatus concerning being as presence with texts drawn from that history-e.g., by Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Hume, Kant, Whitehead. The essay concludes with a speculative ensemble of provisional categories, or zones of specificity. Implementing these categories will ground the possibility that philosophy in general and metaphysics in particular can be pursued in ways which acknowledge the relevance of Derrida's thought when integrated with the philosophical enterprise as traditionally understood.

This is a reissue, with new introduction, of Susan Sauve Meyer's 1993 book, in which she presents a comprehensive examination of Aristotle's accounts of voluntariness in the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics. She makes the case that these constitute a theory of moral responsibility--albeit one with important differences from modern theories.
Highlights of the discussion include a reconstruction of the dialectical argument in the Eudemian Ethics II 6-9, and a demonstration that the definitions of 'voluntary' and 'involuntary' in Nicomachean Ethics III 1 are the culmination of that argument. By identifying the paradigms of voluntariness and involuntariness that Aristotle begins with and the opponents (most notably Plato) he addresses, Meyer explains notoriously puzzling features of the Nicomachean account--such as Aristotle's requirement that involuntary agents experience pain or regret. Other familiar features of Aristotle's account are cast in a new light. That we are responsible for the characters we develop turns out not to be a necessary condition of responsible agency. That voluntary action has its "origin" in the agent and that our actions are "up to us to do and not to so"--often interpreted as implying a libertarian conception of agency--turn out to be perfectly compatible with causal determinism, a point Meyer makes by locating these locutions in the context of a Aristotle's general understanding of causality. While Aristotle does not himself face or address worries that determinism is incompatible with responsibility, his causal repertoire provides the resources for a powerful response to incompatibilist arguments. On this and other fronts Aristotle's is a view to be taken seriously by theorists of moral responsibility.

The papers in this volume are in honor of Bowman L. Clarke. Bowman Clarke earned degrees from Millsaps College, the University of Mississippi, and Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, including the PhD in philosophy from Emory in 1961. He spent most of his academic career, a total of twenty-nine years, as a member of the Philosophy Department of the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, from which he retired in 1990. He also served as Head of the Department for several years. He has held many positions of distinction in professional societies, including President of the Georgia Philosophical Society, President of the Society for the Philosophy of Religion, and President of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology. He also served as Editor-in Chief of the International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion from 1975-1989. Professor Clarke is the author of Language and Natural Theology (The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1966) as well as numerous articles in professional journals. He has made major contributions in the areas of the philosophy of religion, the study of the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, and the development of the calculus of individuals. ix J. F. Harris (ed. ), Logic, God and Metaphysics, ix. (c) 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Introduction The title for this volume, Logic, God, and Metaphysics, was chosen very carefully and deliberately. The papers in this volume are directed at the issues and problems which lie in the domain of the juncture of these three different areas of philosophical inquiry."

Areas covered in this text include: tense and tenselessness; periods and instants; the measurement of time; and time, change and causation. The author attempts to show how considerations in the philosophy of logic and language are needed to settle many of the issues here. For example, the debate about tenselessness turns out to hinge on whether a genuinely tense-free language is conceivable; and the possibility of time without change is grounded in what makes duration-statements have the sense they do.

This book constitutes the first treatment of C. S. Peirce's unique concept of habit. Habit animated the pragmatists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, who picked up the baton from classical scholars, principally Aristotle. Most prominent among the pragmatists thereafter is Charles Sanders Peirce. In our vernacular, habit connotes a pattern of conduct. Nonetheless, Peirce's concept transcends application to mere regularity or to human conduct; it extends into natural and social phenomena, making cohesive inner and outer worlds. Chapters in this anthology define and amplify Peircean habit; as such, they highlight the dialectic between doubt and belief. Doubt destabilizes habit, leaving open the possibility for new beliefs in the form of habit-change; and without habit-change, the regularity would fall short of habit - conforming to automatic/mechanistic systems. This treatment of habit showcases how, through human agency, innovative regularities of behavior and thought advance the process of making the unconscious conscious. The latter materializes when affordances (invariant habits of physical phenomena) form the basis for modifications in action schemas and modes of reasoning. Further, the book charts how indexical signs in language and action are pivotal in establishing attentional patterns; and how these habits accommodate novel orientations within event templates. It is intended for those interested in Peirce's metaphysic or semiotic, including both senior scholars and students of philosophy and religion, psychology, sociology and anthropology, as well as mathematics, and the natural sciences.

If we want to be autonomous, what do we want? The author shows that contemporary value-neutral and metaphysically economical conceptions of autonomy, such as that of Harry Frankfurt, face a serious problem. Drawing on Plato, Augustine, and Kant, this book provides a sketch of how "ancient" and "modern" can be reconciled to solve it. But at what expense? It turns out that the dominant modern ideal of autonomy cannot do without a costly metaphysics if it is to be coherent.

Franz Brentano is recognised as one of the most important philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This work, first published in English in 1988, besides being an important contribution to metaphysics in its own right, has considerable historical importance through its influence on Husserl's views on internal time consciousness. The work is preceded by a long introduction by Stephan K?rner in collaboration with Brentano's literary executor.

This study is a systematic investigation into the metaphysical foundations of identity over time. David Oderberg elaborates and evaluates the most common theory about the persistence of objects through time and change, namely the classical theory of spatio-temporal continuity. He shows how the theory requires an ontology of temporal parts, according to which objects are made up of temporally extended segments or stages.;This ontology is criticized as unwarranted by modern space-time physics, and as internally incoherent. The author argues that identity over time should be seen as a primitive or unanalyzable phenomenon, and that the so-called puzzle cases and paradoxes of identity can be dealt with without recourse to such an ontology.

Arguing for the thematic and structural unity in Heideggers thought from Being and Time right through to the later writings, this book focuses on the summons to authenticity; labeling the move as the key to identifying recurring patterns and themes in Heideggers protracted confrontation with modernity. Heidegger's thinking in the decades following the publication of Being and Time is often deemed irreconcilable with that work. Critics contrast the notion of resoluteness. in Being and Time with Heideggers post-war account of releasement in an attempt to establish a discrepancy between the allegedly voluntarist humanism of his early work and the supposedly anti-humanist thinking of his later work. By contrast, Mahon O Brien argues for the structural and thematic coherence of Heidegger's movement from authenticity to the search for an authentic free relation to the world as captured by the term releasement. By demonstrating the structural and thematic unity of Heidegger s thought in its entirety, O Brien paves the way for a more measured and philosophically grounded understanding of the issues at stake in the Heidegger controversy.

This book aims to develop a philosophical theory of extrinsic properties - of properties whose instantiation by an object does not only depend on what the object itself is like, but also on features of its environment. Various accounts of the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction are analysed in detail, and it is argued that the most promising approach to defining this distinction is to consider extrinsic properties as a particular type of relational property. Moreover, it is shown that two key notions in the metaphysics of properties, the supervenience relation and the dispositional/categorical distinction, whose scope is usually restricted to intrinsic properties, can fruitfully be applied to extrinsic properties as well.

There is no alternative to postmetaphysical thinking : this statement, made by Jurgen Habermas in 1988, has lost none of its relevance. Postmetaphysical thinking is, in the first place, the historical answer to the crisis of metaphysics following Hegel, when the central metaphysical figures of thought began to totter under the pressure exerted by social developments and by developments within science. As a result, philosophy s epistemological privilege was shaken to its core, its basic concepts were de-transcendentalized, and the primacy of theory over practice was opened to question. For good reasons, philosophy lost its extraordinary status , but as a result it also courted new problems. In Postmetaphysical Thinking II, the sequel to the 1988 volume that bears the same title (English translation, Polity 1992), Habermas addresses some of these problems. The first section of the book deals with the shift in perspective from metaphysical worldviews to the lifeworld, the unarticulated meanings and assumptions that accompany everyday thought and action in the mode of background knowledge . Habermas analyses the lifeworld as a space of reasons even where language is not (yet) involved, such as, for example, in gestural communication and rituals. In the second section, the uneasy relationship between religion and postmetaphysical thinking takes centre stage. Habermas picks up where he left off in 1988, when he made the far-sighted observation that philosophy, even in its postmetaphysical form, will be able neither to replace nor to repress religion , and explores philosophy s new-found interest in religion, among other topics. The final section includes essays on the role of religion in the political context of a post-secular, liberal society. This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy, religion and the social sciences and humanities generally.

For over thirty years, discursive psychology has offered a robust challenge to cognitivist approaches to psychology, demonstrating the relevance of discursive practices for understanding psychological topics and social interaction. Matters of embodiment - the visceral, sensory, physical aspects of psychology - have, however, so far received much less attention. This book is the first text to address the theoretical and analytical challenges raised by bodies in interaction for discursive psychology. The book brings together international experts, each of which tackles a different topic area and interactional setting to examine embodiment as a social object. The authors consider the issue of subject-object relations and how 'inner' psychological subject-side states are constructed and enacted in relation to object-side states through embodied discursive practices. How do bodily processes become particular kinds of embodiment through and within social interaction? How are bodies psychologised as social objects? Moving beyond dualisms of the subject/object that construct an 'inner' and 'outer' psychological state, the book pushes forward contemporary theory and analysis within discursive psychology. Discursive Psychology and Embodiment is therefore an essential resource for researchers across the social sciences working within discourse, social interaction, and the 'turn to the body'.

This title presents a major statement on the dominant philosophy of science by one of the world's leading metaphysicians. Brian Ellis's new book develops the metaphysics of scientific realism to the point where it begins to take on the characteristics of a first philosophy. As most people understand it, scientific realism is not yet such a theory. It is not sufficiently general, and has no plausible applications in fields other than the well-established sciences. Nevertheless, Ellis demonstrates that the original arguments that led to scientific realism may be deployed more widely than they originally were to fill out a more complete picture of what there is. Ellis shows that realistic theories of quantum mechanics, time, causality and human freedom can all be developed satisfactorily, and moral theory can be recast to fit within this comprehensive metaphysical framework.