Several debates of the last years within the research field of contemporary realism - known under titles such as "New Realism," "Continental Realism," or "Speculative Materialism" - have shown that science is not systematically the ultimate measure of truth and reality. This does not mean that we should abandon the notions of truth or objectivity all together, as has been posited repeatedly within certain currents of twentieth century philosophy. However, within the research field of contemporary realism, the concept of objectivity itself has not been adequately refined. What is objective is supposed to be true outside a subject's biases, interpretations and opinions, having truth conditions that are met by the way the world is. The volume combines articles of internationally outstanding authors who have published on either Idealism, Epistemic Relativism, or Realism and often locate themselves within one of these divergent schools of thought. As such, the volume focuses on these traditions with the aim of clarifying what the concept objectivity nowadays stands for within contemporary ontology and epistemology beyond the analytic-continental divide. With articles from: Jocelyn Benoist, Ray Brassier, G. Anthony Bruno, Dominik Finkelde, Markus Gabriel, Deborah Goldgaber, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Johannes Hubner, Andrea Kern, Anton F. Koch, Martin Kusch, Paul M. Livingston, Paul Redding, Sebastian Roedl, Dieter Sturma.

One thing this book attempts to show is that Kant's antinomies open a way towards an overcoming of that nihilism that is a corollary of the understanding of reality that presides over our science and technology. But when Harries is speaking of the antinomy of Being he is not so much thinking of Kant, as of Heidegger. Not that Heidegger speaks of an antinomy of Being. But his thinking of Being leads him and will lead those who follow him on his path of thinking into this antinomy. At bottom, however, the author is neither concerned with Heidegger's nor Kant's thought. He shows that our thinking inevitably leads us into some version of this antinomy whenever it attempts to grasp reality in toto, without loss. All such attempts will fall short of their goal. And that they do so, Harries claims, is not something to be grudgingly accepted, but embraced as a necessary condition of living a meaningful life. That is why the antinomy of Being matters and should concern us all.

This book provides a detailed reassessment of the role and impact of analytic philosophy in the overall philosophical debate. It does so by focusing on several important turning points that have been particularly significant for analytic philosophy's overall history, such as Bertrand Russell's critique of Meinong, and the vindication of Heidegger's famous 'Nothing'- sentence. In particular, the book scrutinizes whether the theses written about such points have been convincingly argued for, or whether they have gained attraction as a type of rhetorical device. Due to its broad nature, this book is of interest to scholars interested in all aspects of philosophy, at both graduate level and above.

This book provides important philosophical insights concerning the kind of creatures we are such that we can experience something we understand as well-being, with these insights then being applied to various areas of social policy and welfare practice. The author defends what he calls The Ontology of Well-Being Thesis (TOWT), addressing ontological questions about the human condition, and how these questions are fundamental to issues concerning what we might know about human well-being and how we should promote it. Yet, surprisingly, these ontological questions are often side-lined in academic, political, and policy and practice based debates about well-being. Addressing these questions, head-on, six features of the human condition are identified via TOWT: human embodiment, finiteness, sociability, cognition, evaluation, and agency. The main argument of the thesis is that these features reveal the conflicting character of human experiences, which can, in turn, have a profound bearing on our experience of well-being. Notably, it is our conflicting experiences of time, emotion, and self-consciousness, which can potentially help us experience well-being in complex and multi-dimensional ways. The author then applies these insights to various social policies and welfare practices, concerning, for example, pensions, disability, bereavement counselling, social prescribing within health settings, the promotion of mental health, and co-production practices. This book is of importance to philosophers, social policy analysts, and welfare practitioners and is also relevant to the fields of psychology, sociology, politics, and the health sciences.

This book is the first volume featuring the work of American women philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century. It provides selected papers authored by Mary Whiton Calkins, Grace Andrus de Laguna, Grace Neal Dolson, Marjorie Glicksman Grene, Marjorie Silliman Harris, Thelma Zemo Lavine, Marie Collins Swabey, Ellen Bliss Talbot, Dorothy Walsh and Margaret Floy Washburn. The book also provides the historical and philosophical background to their work. The papers focus on the nature of philosophy, knowledge, the philosophy of science, the mind-matter nexus, the nature of time, and the question of freedom and the individual. The material is suitable for scholars, researchers and advanced philosophy students interested in (history of) philosophy; theories of knowledge; philosophy of science; mind, and reality.

In On the Parts of Animals, Aristotle develops his systematic principles for biological investigation and explanation, and applies those principles to explain why the different animals have the different parts that they do. This new translation and commentary reflects the subtlety and detail of Aristotle's reasoning.

This engaging volume sheds light on the central role the turn to the body plays in the philosophies of Spinoza and Nietzsche, providing an ideal starting point for understanding their work. Ioan explores their critiques of traditional morality, as well as their accounts of ethics, freedom and politics, arguing that we can best compare their respective philosophical physiologies, and their broader philosophical positions, through their shared interest in the notion of power. In spite of significant differences, Ioan shows the ways in which the two thinkers share remarkable similarities, delving into their emphatic appeal to the body as the key to solving fundamental philosophical problems, both theoretical and practical.

The Red and the Real offers a new approach to longstanding philosophical puzzles about what colors are and how they fit into the natural world. Jonathan Cohen argues for a role-functionalist treatment of color - a view according to which colors are identical to certain functional roles involving perceptual effects on subjects. Cohen first argues (on broadly empirical grounds) for the more general relationalist view that colors are constituted in terms of relations between objects, perceivers, and viewing conditions. He responds to semantic, ontological, and phenomenological objections against this thesis, and argues that relationalism offers the best hope of respecting both empirical results and ordinary belief about color. He then defends the more specific role functionalist-account by contending that the latter is the most plausible form of color relationalism.

This volume investigates what is beyond the Principle of Non-Contradiction. It features 14 papers on the foundations of reasoning, including logical systems and philosophical considerations. Coverage brings together a cluster of issues centered upon the variety of meanings of consistency, contradiction, and related notions. Most of the papers, but not all, are developed around the subtle distinctions between consistency and non-contradiction, as well as among contradiction, inconsistency, and triviality, and concern one of the above mentioned threads of the broadly understood non-contradiction principle and the related principle of explosion. Some others take a perspective that is not too far away from such themes, but with the freedom to tread new paths. Readers should understand the title of this book in a broad way,because it is not so obvious to deal with notions like contradictions, consistency, inconsistency, and triviality. The papers collected here present groundbreaking ideas related to consistency and inconsistency.

Well-Being and Death addresses philosophical questions about death and the good life: what makes a life go well? Is death bad for the one who dies? How is this possible if we go out of existence when we die? Is it worse to die as an infant or as a young adult? Is it bad for animals and fetuses to die? Can the dead be harmed? Is there any way to make death less bad for us? Ben Bradley defends the following views: pleasure, rather than achievement or the satisfaction of desire, is what makes life go well; death is generally bad for its victim, in virtue of depriving the victim of more of a good life; death is bad for its victim at times after death, in particular at all those times at which the victim would have been living well; death is worse the earlier it occurs, and hence it is worse to die as an infant than as an adult; death is usually bad for animals and fetuses, in just the same way it is bad for adult humans; things that happen after someone has died cannot harm that person; the only sensible way to make death less bad is to live so long that no more good life is possible.

In this comprehensive study of Wittgenstein's modal theorizing, Raymond Bradley offers a radical reinterpretation of Wittgenstein's early thought. He presents both an interpretive and a philosophical thesis. His interpretive thesis is that Wittgenstein's Tractatus presents a view of the world in which possibilities are given an important ontological status. Contrary to most interpreters, Bradley contends that Wittgenstein's ontology is central to his enterprise, and not simply a by-product of certain of his views on language. On Bradley's reading, the Tractatus offers a version of modal realism. He further demonstrates the unexpected existence of deep differences both in content and aims between the logical atomism of Wittgenstein and that of Russell. A unique feature of Bradley's argument here is his reliance on Wittgenstein's Notebooks, which he believes offer indispensable guidance to the interpretation of difficult passages in the Tractatus. Bradley then goes on to argue that Wittgenstein's account of modality - and the related notion of possible worlds - is in fact superior to any of the currently popular theories in this area. In this context, he examines and critiques the work of such figures as Adams, Carnap, Hintikka, Lewis, Rescher, and Stalnaker.

Possibility offers a new analysis of the metaphysical concepts of possibility and necessity, one that does not rely on any sort of 'possible worlds'. The analysis proceeds from an account of the notion of a physical object and from the positing of properties and relations. It is motivated by considerations about how we actually speak of and think of objects. Michael Jubien discusses several closely related topics, including different purported varieties of possible worlds, the doctrine of 'essentialism', natural kind terms, and alleged examples of necessity a posteriori. The book also offers a new theory of the functioning of proper names, both actual and fictional, and the discussion of natural kind terms and necessity a posteriori depends in part on this theory.

This book offers a solution for the problem of structure and agency in sociological theory by developing a new pair of fundamental concepts: metric and nonmetric. Nonmetric forms, arising in a crowd made out of innumerable individuals, correspond to social groups that divide the many individuals in the crowd into insiders and outsiders. Metric forms correspond to congested zones like traffic jams on a highway: individuals are constantly entering and leaving these zones so that they continue to exist, even though the individuals passing through them change. Building from these concepts, we can understand "agency" as a requirement for group identity and group membership, thus associating it with nonmetric forms, and "structure" as a building-up effect following the accumulation of metric forms. This reveals the contradiction between structure and agency to be a case of forced perspective, leaving us victim to an optical illusion.

Since immemorial times, persons have been engaged in disputes in metaphysics. This book reacts to this fact by supporting five theses. Thesis 1 is that disputes are micro-wars that have a significant social importance; they involve conflicting parties who may resort to some kind of violence and depend on normative factors. Thesis 2 is that disputes can be approached from right-wing or left-wing stances. Thesis 3 is that the grounds for endorsing an approach to a dispute are problematic starting points that may be rationally rejected. Thesis 4 is that disputes have an incommensurable greatness. Thesis 5 is that right-wing approaches to disputes may be less appealing than the left-wing one championed by the book for those who endorse that one is to avoid expressing "subtle" violence. This is the violence expressed by those who suggest that others who disagree with one's criteria to deal with disputes fall short of logos or act as if such others did not exist.

This book presents an alternative reading of the respective works of Moses Maimonides and Baruch Spinoza. It argues that both thinkers are primarily concerned with the singular perfection of the complete human being rather than with attaining only rational knowledge. Complete perfection of a human being expresses the unique concord of concrete activities, such as ethics, politics, and psychology, with reason. The necessity of concrete historical activities in generating perfection entails that both thinkers are not primarily concerned with an "escape" to a metaphysical realm of transcendent or universal truths via cognition. Instead, both are focused on developing and cultivating individuals' concrete desires and activities to the potential benefit of all. This book argues that rather than solely focusing on individual enlightenment, both thinkers are primarily concerned with a political life and the improvement of fellow citizens' capacities. A key theme throughout the text is that both Maimonides and Spinoza realize that an apolitical life undermines individual and social flourishing.

This book breaks new ground by showing that the work of David Foster Wallace originates from and functions in the space between philosophy and literature. Philosophy is not a mere supplement to or decoration of his writing, nor does he use literature to illustrate pre-established philosophical truths. Rather, for Wallace, philosophy and literature are intertwined ways of experiencing and expressing the world that emerge from and amplify each other. The book does not advance a fixed or homogenous interpretation of Wallace's oeuvre but instead offers an investigative approach that allows for a variety of readings. The volume features fourteen new essays by prominent and promising Wallace scholars, divided into three parts: one on general aspects of Wallace's oeuvre - such as his aesthetics, form, and engagement with performance - and two parts with thematic focuses, namely 'Consciousness, Self, and Others' and 'Embodiment, Gender, and Sexuality'. -- .

Rom Harre's career spans more than 40 years of original contributions to the development of both psychology and other human and social sciences. Recognized as a founder of modern social psychology, he developed the microsociological approach 'ethogenics' and facilitated the discursive turn within psychology, as well as developed the concept of positioning theory. Used within both philosophy and social scientific approaches aimed at conflict analysis, analyses of power relations, and narrative structures, the development and impact of positioning theory can be understood as part of a second cognitive revolution. Whereas the first cognitive revolution involved incorporating cognition as both thoughts and feelings as an ineliminable part of psychology and social sciences, this second revolution released this cognition from a focus on individuals, and towards a focus of understanding individuals as participating in public practices using public discourses as part of their cognition. This edited volume adds to the scholarly conversation around positioning theory, evaluates Rom Harre's significance for the history and development of psychology, and highlights his numerous theoretical contributions and their lasting effects on the psychological and social sciences. Included among the chapters: What is it to be a human being? Rom Harre on self and identity The social philosophy of Harre as a philosophy of culture The discursive ontology of the social world Ethics in socio-cultural psychologies Discursive cognition and neural networks The Second Cognitive Revolution: A Tribute to Rom Harre is an indispensable reader for anyone interested in his cognitive-historical turn, and finds an audience with academics and researchers in the social and human science fields of cognitive psychology, social psychology, discursive psychology, philosophy, sociology, and ethnomethodology.

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.

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 volume collects seventeen new essays by well-established and junior scholars on the philosophical relevance of metaxological philosophy and its main proponent, William Desmond. The volume mines metaxological thought for its salience in contemporary discussions in Continental philosophy, specifically in the fields of metaphysics, philosophy of religion, ethics, and aesthetics. Among others, topics under discussion include the goodness of being, the existence and nature of God, and the aesthetic dimensions of human becoming. Interest in metaxological philosophy has been on the rise in recent years, and this volume provides both a practical introduction and thorough engagements with it by experts in the field. The volume concludes with a series of responses by William Desmond on the issues raised by the contributors.

The book provides philosophical interpretations of pragmatic issues. It concentrates on well-established concepts such as presupposition, entailment, implicature, speech acts, subsentential speech acts, different cases of meaning as use, expressive meanings and expressive commitments, as well as the relation between knowledge and belief. The discussion goes beyond linguistic investigations and offers a wide philosophical perspective.

Weird Fiction: A Genre Study presents a comprehensive, contemporary analysis of the genre of weird fiction by identifying the concepts that influence and produce it. Focusing on the sources of narrative content-how the content is produced and what makes something weird-Michael Cisco engages with theories from Deleuze and Guattari to explain how genres work and to understand the relationship between identity and the ordinary. Cisco also uses these theories to examine the supernatural not merely as a horde of tropes, but as a recognition of the infinity of experience in defiance of limiting norms. The book also traces the sociopolitical implications of weird fiction, studying the differentiation of major and minor literatures. Through an articulated theoretical model and close textual analysis, readers will learn not only what weird fiction is, but how and why it is produced.

This book offers a new look at emergence in terms of a hierarchical emergent ontology. Emergence is recognised as a universal principle, as universal as the principle of evolution. This is achieved by setting out the ontological criteria of emergence and such criteria's various roles. The traditional dichotomies are overcome, e.g., the synchronic and diachronic perspectives are unified, allowing a single, universal principle of emergence to be applied across various fields of science. As exemplars of its practical utility in both explanation and prediction, this new approach is applied to three different scientific areas: cellular automata, quantum Hall effects, and the neural network of the mind. It proves that the resulting metaphysics of hierarchical emergent ontology plays a fundamental role in unifying science, an impossible task under classical reductionism.