Interpretation has historically been understood as a method to shrink the distance between the interpreter and the interpreted. This view has dominated the comprehension of the interpretation of art: it always entails the interpretation of something, and this something must then govern our effort to understand it. If not, we are left with mere subjective whims. This book tries to modify this well-worn view by altering the dualist position to incorporate the very object within the sense-making activity. Interpretation rather becomes the creative making of something different, and this explains why it is deemed unfinished. The notion of "re-contextualization" covers this in between operation (between work and interpretation), and the very object of interpretation remains just an enabling condition of transference. Interpretation preserves the challenge, by re-making and re-locating meaning.

The growing interest in fragmentalism is one of the most exciting trends in philosophy of time and is gradually reshaping the contemporary debate. Providing an extensive interpretation of this view, Samuele Iaquinto and Giuliano Torrengo articulate a novel theory of the passage of time and argue that it is the most effective in vindicating the inherent dynamism of reality. Iaquinto and Torrengo offer the first full-range application of fragmentalism to a number of metaphysical topics, including the open future, causation, the A-theoretic interpretation of special relativity and time travel. The resulting picture, they argue, conveys the potential of a radically new understanding of time.

Articles gathered in the volume focus on traditional and contemporary debates within the philosophy of language, and on the interfaces between linguistics, philosophy, and logic. The topics of individual contributions cover such diverse issues as analytic accounts of the a priori and implicit definitions, medieval and contemporary theories of fallacy, game-theoretical semantics, modal games in natural language and literary semantics, possible-world theories and paradoxes involving structured propositions, extensions to Dynamic Syntax, semantics of proper names, judgement-dependence, tacit knowledge and linguistic understanding, ontology in semantics, implicit knowledge and theory of meaning, and many more. The multitude of topics shows that the convergence of linguistic, philosophical, formal, and cognitive approaches opens new research perspectives within contemporary philosophy of language and linguistics. The volume includes contributions by (among other authors): Luis Fernandez Moreno (Madrid), Chris Fox (Essex), Ruth Kempson (London), Alexander Miller (Birmingham), Arthur Sullivan (Newfoundland), Mieszko Talasiewicz (Warsaw).

This Handbook brings together philosophical work on how language shapes, and is shaped by, social and political factors. Its 24 chapters were written exclusively for this volume by an international team of leading researchers, and together they provide a broad expert introduction to the major issues currently under discussion in this area. The volume is divided into four parts: Part I: Methodological and Foundational Issues Part II: Non-ideal Semantics and Pragmatics Part III: Linguistic Harms Part IV: Applications The parts, and chapters in each part, are introduced in the volume's General Introduction. A list of Works Cited concludes each chapter, pointing readers to further areas of study. The Handbook is the first major, multi-authored reference work in this growing area and essential reading for anyone interested in the nature of language and its relationship to social and political reality.

Essential reading for students and researchers in metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of mind, and also of interest to those in related discplines where idealist and immaterialist ontology impinge on history, science, and theology.

Kierkegaard's Concepts is a comprehensive, multi-volume survey of the key concepts and categories that inform Kierkegaard's writings. Each article is a substantial, original piece of scholarship, which discusses the etymology and lexical meaning of the relevant Danish term, traces the development of the concept over the course of the authorship, and explains how it functions in the wider context of Kierkegaard's thought. Concepts have been selected on the basis of their importance for Kierkegaard's contributions to philosophy, theology, the social sciences, literature and aesthetics, thereby making this volume an ideal reference work for students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines.

The fifth volume of The History of Evil covers the twentieth century from 1900 through 1950. The period saw the maturation of intellectual movements such as Pragmatism and Phenomenology, and the full emergence of several new academic disciplines; all these provided novel intellectual tools that were used to shed light on a human capacity for evil that was becoming increasingly hard to ignore. An underlying theme of this volume is the effort to reconstruct an understanding of human nature after confidence in its intrinsic goodness and moral character had been shaken by world events. The chapters in this volume cover globally relevant topics such as education, propaganda, power, oppression, and genocide, and include perspectives on evil drawn from across the world. Theological and atheistic responses to evil are also examined in the volume. This outstanding treatment of approaches to evil at a determinative period of modernity will appeal to those with interests in the intellectual history of the era, as well as to those with interests in the political, philosophical and theological movements that matured within it.

The concept of a relational self has been prominent in feminism, communitarianism, narrative self theories, and social network theories, and has been important to theorizing about practical dimensions of selfhood. However, it has been largely ignored in traditional philosophical theories of personal identity, which have been dominated by psychological and animal theories of the self. This book offers a systematic treatment of the notion of the self as constituted by social, cultural, political, and biological relations. The author's account incorporates practical concerns and addresses how a relational self has agency, autonomy, responsibility, and continuity through time in the face of change and impairments. This cumulative network model (CNM) of the self incorporates concepts from work in the American pragmatist and naturalist tradition. The ultimate aim of the book is to bridge traditions that are often disconnected from one another-feminism, personal identity theory, and pragmatism-to develop a unified theory of the self.

This book re-examines the roles of causation and cognition in early modern philosophy. The standard historical narrative suggests that early modern thinkers abandoned Aristotelian models of formal causation in favor of doctrines that appealed to relations of efficient causation between material objects and cognizers. This narrative has been criticized in recent scholarship from at least two directions. Scholars have emphasized that we should not think of the Aristotelian tradition in such monolithic terms, and that many early modern thinkers did not unequivocally reduce all causation to efficient causation. In line with this general approach, this book features original essays written by leading experts in early modern philosophy. It is organized around five guiding questions: What are the entities involved in causal processes leading to cognition? What type(s) or kind(s) of causality are at stake? Are early modern thinkers confined to efficient causation or do other types of causation play a role? What is God's role in causal processes leading to cognition? How do cognitive causal processes relate to other, non-cognitive causal processes? Is the causal process in the case of human cognition in any way special? How does it relate to processes involved in the case of non-human cognition? The essays explore how fifteen early modern thinkers answered these questions: Francisco Suarez, Rene Descartes, Louis de la Forge, Geraud de Cordemoy, Nicolas Malebranche, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch de Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Ralph Cudworth, Margaret Cavendish, John Locke, John Sergeant, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Thomas Reid. The volume is unique in that it explores both well-known and understudied historical figures, and in that it emphasizes the intimate relationship between causation and cognition to open up new perspectives on early modern philosophy of mind and metaphysics.

Science and philosophy both express, and attempt to quench, the distinctively human thirst for knowledge. Today, their mutual relationship has become one of conflict or indifference rather than cooperation. At the same time, scientists and philosophers alike have moved away from at least some of our ordinary beliefs. But what can scientific and philosophical theories tell us about the world, in isolation from each other? And to what extent does a sophisticated investigation into the nature of things force us to question commonsense beliefs? This book defends a form of naturalism which preserves the autonomy of metaphysics - the part of philosophy that aims to uncover the fundamental features of reality - while also keeping science centre stage. The proposed methodological perspective allows one to seek the right equilibrium between science, metaphysics and common sense. This is illustrated via three case studies, which provide a clear discussion of key philosophical issues.

This book posits that a singular paradigm in social theory can be discovered by reconstructing the conceptual grammar of Gabriel Tarde's micro-sociology and by understanding the ways in which Gilles Deleuze's micro-politics and Michel Foucault's micro-physics have engaged with it. This is articulated in the infinite social multiplicity-invention-imitation-opposition-open system. Guided by infinitist ontology and an epistemology of infinitesimal difference, this paradigm offers a micro-socio-logic capable of producing new ways of understanding social life and its vicissitudes. In the field of social theory, this can be called the infinitesimal revolution.

Originally published in 1960, The Future of Man is a chronicle of Professor Medwar's Reith lectures of 1959. The book outlines his predictions about the future estate of man, with the 'process of foretelling, rather than with what is actually foretold'. He asks, can we predict the future size of populations? What is the evidence and theoretical background for the belief that human intelligence is declining? Could human beings become uniformly excellent or is inborn diversity and inequality a necessary part of the texture of human populations? The lectures tried to answer these questions and attempts to end with a definition of the biological standing of man. This book will be of interest to anthropologists, biologists and natural historians.

This book explores a topic that has recently become the subject of increased philosophical interest: how can imagination be put to epistemic use? Though imagination has long been invoked in contexts of modal knowledge, in recent years philosophers have begun to explore its capacity to play an epistemic role in a variety of other contexts as well. In this collection, the contributors address an assortment of issues relating to epistemic uses of imagination, and in particular, they take up the ways in which our imaginings must be constrained so as to justify beliefs and give rise to knowledge. These constraints are explored across several different contexts in which imagination is appealed to for justification, namely reasoning, modality and modal knowledge, thought experiments, and knowledge of self and others. Taken as a whole, the contributions in this volume break new ground in explicating when and how imagination can be epistemically useful. Epistemic Uses of Imagination will be of interest to scholars and advanced students who are working on imagination, as well as those working more broadly in epistemology, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind.

Cognition is a paradoxical process, from the moment of the formation of human subjectivity, through its relationship with the Other (or more precisely: l'autre) and with the world, to the ontological status of the world as such. This is what this book has at stake. The book deals with selected aspects of poststructural thought which are introduced into the language of contemporary science, prose, and poetry. Such an enterprise is possible by treating philosophy, science, and poetry as languages which can try to enter into a dialogue through metaphors. This is the ground on which the project is implemented.

This book presents a systematic discussion of the development of Husserl's concept of the a priori from his early and through his later writings. The chapters contained herein analyze the different phases and aspects of Husserl's phenomenology of the a priori in light of his twofold notion of reason, construed as both ontological and transcendental. Starting from the assessment of the introduction of the notion of a priori knowledge in the context of the Logical Investigations, this text uniquely explores its development during the Goettingen years. It is at this time during his work on The Crisis of European Sciences, that Husserl comes to see the a priori as a criterion to interpret the history of philosophy, notably, modern philosophy. This book sheds light upon such concepts as: essence and eidos; ideation, eidetic attitude and eidetic reduction; as well as formal and material, innate and contingent a priori. The author argues that the a priori becomes for Husserl the expression of an ontological form of rationality, i.e., the rationality immanent to being. This book appeals to students and researchers working on Husserl and phenomenology.

This sixth volume of The History of Evil charts the era 1950-2018, with topics arising after the atrocities of World War II, while also exploring issues that have emerged over the last few decades. It exhibits the flourishing of analytic philosophy of religion since the War, as well as the diversity of approaches to the topic of God and evil in this era. Comprising twenty-one chapters from a team of international contributors, this volume is divided into three parts, God and Evil, Humanity and Evil and On the Objectivity of Human Judgments of Evil. The chapters in this volume cover relevant topics such as the evidential argument from evil, skeptical theism, free will, theodicy, continental philosophy, religious pluralism, the science of evil, feminist theorizations, terrorism, pacifism, realism and relativism. This outstanding treatment of the history of evil will appeal to those with particular interests in the ideas of evil and good

The fourth volume of The History of Evil explores the key thinkers and themes relating to the question of evil in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The very idea of "evil" is highly contentious in modern thought and this period was one in which the concept was intensely debated and criticized. The persistence of the idea of evil is a testament to the abiding significance of theology in the period, not least in Germany. Comprising twenty-two chapters by international scholars, some of the topics explored include: Berkeley on evil, Voltaire and the Philosophes, John Wesley on the origins of evil, Immanuel Kant on evil, autonomy and grace, the deliverance of evil: utopia and evil, utilitarianism and evil, evil in Schelling and Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and the genealogy of evil, and evil and the nineteenth-century idealists. This volume also explores a number of other key thinkers and topics within the period. This outstanding treatment of the history of evil at the crucial and determinative inception of its key concepts will appeal to those with particular interests in the ideas of evil and good.

As a growing area of research, the philosophy of time is increasingly relevant to different areas of philosophy and even other disciplines. This book describes and evaluates the most important debates in philosophy of time, under several subject areas: metaphysics, epistemology, physics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, rationality, and art. Questions this book investigates include the following. Can we know what time really is? Is time possible, especially given modern physics? Must there be time because we cannot think without it? What do we experience of time? How might philosophy of time be relevant to understanding the mind-body relationship or evidence in cognitive science? Can the philosophy of time help us understand biases toward the future and the fear of death? How is time relevant to art-and is art relevant to philosophical debates about time? Finally, what exactly could time travel be? And could time travel satisfy emotions such as nostalgia and regret? Through asking such questions, and showing how they might be best answered, the book demonstrates the importance philosophy of time has in contemporary thought. Each of the book's ten chapters begins with a helpful introduction and ends with study questions and an annotated list of further reading. This and a comprehensive bibliography at the end of the book prepare the reader to go further in their study of the philosophy of time.

A rigorous investigation of Socrates' early education, pinpointing the thought that led Socrates to turn from natural science to the study of morality, ethics, and politics Plato's Parmenides is regarded as a canonical work in ontology. Depicting a conversation between Parmenides of Elea and a young Socrates, the dialogue presents a rigorous examination of Socrates' theory of the forms, the most influential account of being in the philosophic tradition. In this commentary on the Parmenides, Alex Priou argues that the dialogue is, in actuality, a reflection on politics. Priou begins from the accepted view that the conversation consists of two discrete parts -- a critique of the forms, followed by Socrates' philosophical training -- but finds a unity to the dialogue yet to be acknowledged. By paying careful attention to what Parmenides calls the "greatest impasse" facing Socrates' ontology, Priou reveals a political context to the conversation. The need in society for order and good rule includes the need, at a more fundamental level, for an adequate andefficacious explanation of being. Recounting here how a young Socrates first learned of the primacy of political philosophy, which would become the hallmark of his life, Becoming Socrates shows that political philosophy, and not ontology, is "first philosophy." Alex Priou is an instructor in the Herbst Program in the Humanities in Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder.

As with any rich philosophical tradition in a period of intensive growth, process philosophy may seem confusing to the uninitiated, or even to the initiated. There is simply so much going on that one may, so to speak, lose the forest for the trees. The purpose of this book is to organize and arrange selected examples of contemporary work in process philosophy, with opening commentaries by leading Whiteheadian scholars, to give the reader a taste of the global vision of process currently expressed within this field of philosophy. This book is split into two parts: the first discussing the historical roots of and future perspectives for basic concepts of process thinking, and the second presenting original contemporary work in extending and re-interpreting the basic metaphysical structure of process.

In Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism David Enoch develops, argues for, and defends a strongly realist and objectivist view of ethics and normativity more broadly. This view--according to which there are perfectly objective, universal, moral and other normative truths that are not in any way reducible to other, natural truths--is familiar, but this book is the first in-detail development of the positive motivations for the view into reasonably precise arguments. And when the book turns defensive--defending Robust Realism against traditional objections--it mobilizes the original positive arguments for the view to help with fending off the objections.
The main underlying motivation for Robust Realism developed in the book is that no other metaethical view can vindicate our taking morality seriously. The positive arguments developed here--the argument from the deliberative indispensability of normative truths, and the argument from the moral implications of metaethical objectivity (or its absence)--are thus arguments for Robust Realism that are sensitive to the underlying, pre-theoretical motivations for the view.

This book provides a systematic reading of Martin Heidegger's project of "fundamental ontology," which he initially presented in Being and Time (1927) and developed further in his work on Kant. It shows our understanding of being to be that of a small set of a priori, temporally inflected, "categorial" forms that articulate what, how, and whether things can be. As selves bound to and bounded by the world within which we seek to answer the question of how to live, we imaginatively generate these forms in order to open ourselves up to those intra-worldly entities which determinately instantiate them. This makes us, as selves, the source and unifying ground of being. But this ground is hidden from us - until we do fundamental ontology. In showing how Heidegger develops these ideas, the author challenges key elements of the anti-Cartesian framework that most readers bring to his texts, arguing that his Kantian account of being has its roots in the anti-empiricism and Augustinianism of Descartes, and that his project relies implicitly on an essentially Cartesian "meditational" method of reflective self-engagement that allows being to be brought to light. He also argues against the widespread tendency to see Heidegger as presenting the basic forms of being as in any way normative, from which he concludes, partially against Heidegger himself, that fundamental ontology is, while profound and worth pursuing for its own sake, inert with respect to the question of how to live. The Bounds of Self will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on Heidegger, Kant, phenomenology, and existential philosophy.

Formal ontology combines two ideas, one originating with Husserl, the other with Frege: that of ontology of the formal aspects of all objects, irrespective of their particular nature, and ontology pursued by employing the tools of modern formal disciplines, notably logic and semantics. These two traditions have converged in recent years and this is the first collection to encompass them as a whole in a single volume. It assembles essays from authors around the world already widely known for their work in formal ontology, and illustrates that through the application of formal methods the ancient discipline of ontology may be put on a firm methodological basis. The essays not only illuminate the nature of ontology and its relation to other areas, in language, logic and everyday life, but also demonstrate that common issues from the analytical and phenomenological traditions may be discussed without ideological barriers. Audience: advanced students of and specialists in philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, computer science, database engineering.

This book addresses the importance of space and time, of existence unperceived, of publicity and action, and of natural laws. These are examined in a single argument which extends from Chapter Three to Chapter Seven and in the course of which the essential features of any comprehensible world are either assumed or derived. In Chapter Two, before this argument begins, the book introduces and argues for the methods by which this general argument is developed. In Chapter One, the book attempts to show why it is important to consider the essential features of any comprehensible world. This chapter forms a prolegomenon to the inquiry. The argument in it is of a somewhat more impressionistic nature than the argument later in the inquiry; and so it is probably important to point out that the conclusions reached in the inquiry itself are practically independent of the argument of the first chapter. Those that are totally unconvinced by it may still be persuaded by the general argument which follows.