This collection of eleven new essays contains the latest developments in analytic feminist philosophy on the topic of pornography. While honoring early feminist work on the subject, it aims to go beyond speech act analyses of pornography and to reshape the philosophical discourse that surrounds pornography. A rich feminist literature on pornography has emerged since the 1980s, with Rae Langton's speech act theoretic analysis dominating specifically Anglo-American feminist philosophy on pornography. Despite the predominance of this literature, there remain considerable disagreements and precious little agreement on many key issues: What is pornography? Does pornography (as Langton argues) constitute women's subordination and silencing? Does it objectify women in harmful ways? Is pornography authoritative enough to enact women's subordination? Is speech act theory the best way to approach pornography? Given the deep divergences over these questions, the first goal of this collection is to take stock of extant debates in order to clarify key feminist conceptual and political commitments regarding pornography. This volume further aims to go beyond the prevalent speech-acts approach to pornography, and to highlight novel issues in feminist pornography-debates, including the aesthetics of pornography, trans* identities and racialization in pornography, and putatively feminist pornography.

Until recently, Spinoza's standing in Anglophone studies of philosophy has been relatively low and has only seemed to confirm Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's assessment of him as "a dead dog." However, an exuberant outburst of excellent scholarship on Spinoza has of late come to dominate work on early modern philosophy. This resurgence is due in no small part to the recent revival of metaphysics in contemporary philosophy and to the increased appreciation of Spinoza's role as an unorthodox, pivotal figure - indeed, perhaps the pivotal figure - in the development of Enlightenment thinking. Spinoza's penetrating articulation of his extreme rationalism makes him a demanding philosopher who offers deep and prescient challenges to all subsequent, inevitably less radical approaches to philosophy. While the twenty-six essays in this volume - by many of the world's leading Spinoza specialists - grapple directly with Spinoza's most important arguments, these essays also seek to identify and explain Spinoza's debts to previous philosophy, his influence on later philosophers, and his significance for contemporary philosophy and for us.

Nietzsche, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics explores how Nietzsche criticizes, adopts, and reformulates Kant's critique of metaphysics and his transcendental idealism. Thing in itself and phenomenon, space and time, intuition and thought, the I and self-consciousness, concepts and judgments, categories and schemata, teleological judgement: building on established and recent literature on these topics in both thinkers, this volume asks whether Nietzsche can - malgr lui - be considered a Kantian of sorts. Nietzsche's intensive engagement with early Neo-Kantians (Lange, Liebmann, Fischer, von Helmholtz) and other contemporaries of his, largely ignored in the Anglophone literature, is also addressed, raising the question whether Nietzsche's positions on Kant's theoretical philosophy are best understood as historically embedded in the often rather loose relation they had to the first Critique. These and other questions are taken up in Nietzsche, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, which in different ways tackles the complexities of Nietzsche's relation to Kant's theoretical philosophy and its reception in nineteenth Century philosophy.

Donald Davidson was one of the 20th Century's deepest analytic thinkers. He developed a systematic picture of the human mind and its relation to the world, an original and sustained vision that exerted a shaping influence well beyond analytic philosophy of mind and language. At its center is an idea of minded creatures as essentially rational animals: Rational animals can be interpreted, their behavior can be understood, and the contents of their thoughts are, in principle, open to others. The combination of a rigorous analytic stance with aspects of humanism so distinctive of Davidsonian thought finds its maybe most characteristic expression when this central idea is brought to bear on the relation of the mental to the physical: Davidson defended the irreducibility of its rational nature while acknowledging that the mental is ultimately determined by the physical.
Davidson made contributions of lasting importance to a wide range of topics -- from general theory of meaning and content over formal semantics, the theories of truth, explanation, and action, to metaphysics and epistemology. His writings almost entirely consist of short, elegant, and often witty papers. These dense and thematically tightly interwoven essays present a profound challenge to the reader.
This book provides a concise, systematic introduction to all the main elements of Davidson's philosophy. It places the theory of meaning and content at the very center of his thought. By using interpretation, and the interpreter, as key ideas it clearly brings out the underlying structure and unified nature of Davidson's work. Kathrin Gluer carefully outlines his principal claims and arguments, and discusses them in some detail. The book thus makes Davidson's thought accessible in its genuine depth, and acquaints the reader with the main lines of discussion surrounding it."

What do thoughts, hopes, paintings, words, desires, photographs, traffic signs, and perceptions have in common? They are all about something, are directed, are contentful - in a way chairs and trees, for example, are not. This book inquires into the source of this power of directedness that some items exhibit while others do not. An approach to this issue prevalent in the philosophy of the past half-century seeks to explain the power of directedness in terms of certain items' ability to reliably track things in their environment. A very different approach, with a venerable history and enjoying a recent resurgence, seeks to explain the power of directedness rather in terms of an intrinsic ability of conscious experience to direct itself. This book attempts a synthesis of both approaches, developing an account of the sources of such directedness that grounds it both in reliable tracking and in conscious experience.

This book is an introduction to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, written in a lively, personal style. Hannan emphasizes the peculiar inconsistencies and tensions in Schopenhauer's thought - he was torn between idealism and realism, and between denial and affirmation of the individual will. In addition to providing a useful summary of Schopenhauer's main ideas, Hannan connects Schopenhauer's thought with ongoing debates in philosophy. According to Hannan, Schopenhauer was struggling half-consciously to break altogether with Kant and transcendental idealism; the anti-Kantian features of Schopenhauer's thought possess the most lasting value. Hannan defends panpsychist metaphysics of will, comparing it with contemporary views according to which causal power is metaphysically basic. Hannan also defends Schopenhauer's ethics of compassion against Kant's ethics of pure reason, and offers friendly amendments to Schopenhauer's theories of art, music, and "salvation." She also illuminates the deep connection between Schopenhauer and the early Wittgenstein, as well as Schopenhauer's influence on existentialism and psychoanalytic thought.

Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray famously insisted on their philosophical differences, and this mutual insistence has largely guided the reception of their thought. What does it mean to return to Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray in light of questions and problems of contemporary feminism, including intersectional and queer criticisms of their projects? How should we now take up, amplify, and surpass the horizons opened by their projects? Seeking answers to these questions, the essays in this volume return to Beauvoir and Irigaray to find what the two philosophers share. And as the authors make clear, the richness of Beauvoir and Irigaray's thought far exceeds the reductive parameters of the Eurocentric, bourgeois second-wave debates that have constrained interpretation of their work. The first section of this volume places Beauvoir and Irigaray in critical dialogue, exploring the place of the material and the corporeal in Beauvoir's thought and, in doing so, reading Beauvoir in a framework that goes beyond a theory of gender and the humanism of phenomenology. The essays in the second section of the volume take up the challenge of articulating points of dialogue between the two focal philosophers in logic, ethics, and politics. Combined, these essays resituate Beauvoir and Irigaray's work both historically and in light of contemporary demands, breaking new ground in feminist philosophy.

Modernism has long been understood as a radical repudiation of the past. Reading against the narrative of modernism-as-break, Pragmatic Modernism traces an alternative strain of modernist thought that grows out of pragmatist philosophy and is characterized by its commitment to gradualism, continuity, and recontextualization. It rediscovers a distinctive response to the social, intellectual, and artistic transformations of modernity in the work of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Dewey, and William James. These thinkers share an institutionally-grounded approach to change which emphasizes habits, continuities, and daily life over spectacular events, heroic opposition, and radical rupture. Pragmatic modernists developed an active, dialectical approach to habit, maintaining a critical stance toward mindless repetitions while refusing to romanticize moments of shock or conflict. Through its analysis of pragmatist keywords, including "habit," "institution," "prediction," and "bigness," Pragmatic Modernism offers new readings of works by James, Proust, Stein, and Andre Breton, among others. It shows, for instance, how Stein's characteristic literary innovation-her repetitions-aesthetically materialize the problem of habit; and how institutions-businesses, museums, newspapers, the law, and even the state itself-help to construct the subtlest of personal observations and private gestures in James's novels. This study reconstructs an overlooked strain of modernism. In so doing, it helps us to reimagine the stark choice between political quietism and total revolution that has been handed down to us as modernism's legacy.

This book is a systematic study of Descartes' theory of causation and its relation to the medieval and early modern scholastic philosophy that provides its proper historical context. The argument presented here is that even though Descartes offered a dualistic ontology that differs radically from what we find in scholasticism, his views on causation were profoundly influenced by scholastic thought on this issue. This influence is evident not only in his affirmation in the Meditations of the abstract scholastic axioms that a cause must contain the reality of its effects and that conservation does not differ in reality from creation, but also in the details of the accounts of body-body interaction in his physics, of mind-body interaction in his psychology, and of the causation that he took to be involved in free human action. In contrast to those who have read Descartes as endorsing the "occasionalist" conclusion that God is the only real cause, a central thesis of this study is that he accepted what in the context of scholastic debates regarding causation is the antipode of occasionalism, namely, the view that creatures rather than God are the causal source of natural change. What emerges from the defense of this interpretation of Descartes is a new understanding of his contribution to modern thought on causation.

David Kaplan's intellectual influence on 20th century analytic philosophy has been transformative. He introduced lasting innovations in the philosophy of language and philosophical logic. Just as important, however, is Kaplan's way of doing philosophy; generous but incisive, his profoundly interactive style mentored countless generations of students, many of whom contribute to this volume.
This volume collects new, previously unpublished articles on Kaplan, analyzing a broad spectrum of topics ranging from cutting edge linguistics and the philosophy of mathematics, to metaphysics, the foundations of pragmatics, and the theory of communication.
With its historical introduction and personal tributes, The Philosophy of David Kaplan also reveals much of Kaplan's life and times, highlighting the key players of analytic philosophy of the last century, and underscoring Kaplan's substantial impact on contemporary philosophy.

Terry Pinkard draws on Hegel's central works as well as his lectures on aesthetics, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of history in this deeply informed and original exploration of Hegel's naturalism. As Pinkard explains, Hegel's version of naturalism was in fact drawn from Aristotelian naturalism: Hegel fused Aristotle's conception of nature with his insistence that the origin and development of philosophy has empirical physics as its presupposition. As a result, Hegel found that, although modern nature must be understood as a whole to be non-purposive, there is nonetheless a place for Aristotelian purposiveness within such nature. Such a naturalism provides the framework for explaining how we are both natural organisms and also practically minded (self-determining, rationally responsive, reason-giving) beings. In arguing for this point, Hegel shows that the kind of self-division which is characteristic of human agency also provides human agents with an updated version of an Aristotelian final end of life. Pinkard treats this conception of the final end of "being at one with oneself" in two parts. The first part focuses on Hegel's account of agency in naturalist terms and how it is that agency requires such a self-division, while the second part explores how Hegel thinks a historical narration is essential for understanding what this kind of self-division has come to require of itself. In making his case, Hegel argues that both the antinomies of philosophical thought and the essential fragmentation of modern life are all not to be understood as overcome in a higher order unity in the "State." On the contrary, Hegel demonstrates that modern institutions do not resolve such tensions any more than a comprehensive philosophical account can resolve them theoretically. The job of modern practices and institutions (and at a reflective level the task of modern philosophy) is to help us understand and live with precisely the unresolvability of these oppositions. Therefore, Pinkard explains, Hegel is not the totality theorist he has been taken to be, nor is he an "identity thinker," a la Adorno. He is an anti-totality thinker.

Ex nihilo nihil fit. Philosophy, especially great philosophy, does not appear out of the blue. In the current volume, a team of top scholars-both up-and-coming and established-attempts to trace the philosophical development of one of the greatest philosophers of all time. Featuring twenty new essays and an introduction, it is the first attempt of its kind in English and its appearance coincides with the recent surge of interest in Spinoza in Anglo-American philosophy. Spinoza's fame-or notoriety-is due primarily to his posthumously published magnum opus, the Ethics, and, to a lesser extent, to the 1670 Theological-Political Treatise. Few readers take the time to study his early works carefully. If they do, they are likely to encounter some surprising claims, which often diverge from, or even utterly contradict, the doctrines of the Ethics. Consider just a few of these assertions: that God acts from absolute freedom of will, that God is a whole, that there are no modes in God, that extension is divisible and hence cannot be an attribute of God, and that the intellectual and corporeal substances are modes in relation to God. Yet, though these claims reveal some tension between the early works and the Ethics, there is also a clear continuity between them. Spinoza wrote the Ethics over a long period of time, which spanned most of his philosophical career. The dates of the early drafts of the Ethics seem to overlap with the assumed dates of the composition of the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well Being and precede the publication of Spinoza's 1663 book on Descartes' Principles of Philosophy. For this reason, a study of Spinoza's early works (and correspondence) can illuminate the nature of the problems Spinoza addresses in the Ethics, insofar as the views expressed in the early works help us reconstruct the development and genealogy of the Ethics. Indeed, if we keep in mind the common dictum "nothing comes from nothing "-which Spinoza frequently cites and appeals to-it is clear that great works like the Ethics do not appear ex nihilo. In light of the preeminence and majesty of the Ethics, it is difficult to study the early works without having the Ethics in sight. Still, we would venture to say that the value of Spinoza's early works is not at all limited to their being stations on the road leading to the Ethics. A teleological attitude of such a sort would celebrate the works of the "mature Spinoza " at the expense of the early works. However, we have no reason to assume that on all issues the views of the Ethics are better argued, developed, and motivated than those of the early works. In other words, we should keep our minds open to the possibility that on some issues the early works might contain better analysis and argumentation than the Ethics.

This new book by Michael Slote argues that Western philosophy on the whole has overemphasized rational control and autonomy at the expense of the important countervailing value and virtue of receptivity. Recently the ideas of caring and empathy have received a great deal of philosophical and public attention, but both these notions rest on the deeper and broader value of receptivity, and in From Enlightenment to Receptivity, Slote seeks to show that we need to focus more on receptivity if we are to attain a more balanced sense and understanding of what is important to us.
Beginning with a critique of Enlightenment thinking that calls into question its denial of any central role to considerations of emotion and empathy, he goes on to show how a greater emphasis on these factors and on the receptivity that underlies them can give us a more realistic, balanced, and sensitive understanding of our core ethical and epistemological values. This means rejecting post-modernism's blanket rejection of reason and of compelling real values and recognizing, rather, that receptivity should play a major role in how we lead our lives as individuals, in how we relate to nature, in how we acquire knowledge about the world, and in how we relate morally and politically with others.

A unifying theme of Loeb's work is epistemological - that Descartes and Hume advance theories of knowledge that rely on a substantial 'naturalistic' component, adopting one or another member of a cluster of psychological properties of beliefs as the goal of inquiry and the standard for assessing belief-forming mechanisms. Thus Loeb shows a surprising affinity between the epistemologies of the two figures -- surprising because they are often thought of as polar opposites in this respect.
Descartes and Hume are unique in that their philosophical texts are accessible beyond just a narrow audience in the history of philosophy; their ideas continue to be a vital part of the field at large. This volume will thus appeal to advanced students and scholars not just in the history of early modern philosophy but in epistemology and other core areas of the discipline.

After 9/11/2001, gendered narratives of humiliation and revenge proliferated in the U.S. national imaginary. How is it that gender, which we commonly take to be a structure at the heart of individual identity, is also at stake in the life of the nation? What do we learn about gender when we pay attention to how it moves and circulates between the lived experience of the subject and the aspirations of the nation in war? What is the relation between national sovereignty and sovereign masculinity? Through examining practices of torture, extra-judicial assassination, and first person accounts of soldiers on the ground, Bonnie Mann develops a new theory of gender. It is neither a natural essence nor merely a social construct. Gender is first and foremost an operation of justification which binds the lived existence of the individual subject to the aspirations of the regime. Inspired by a reexamination of the work of Simone de Beauvoir, the author exposes how sovereign masculinity hinges on the nation's ability to tap into and mobilize the structure of self-justification at the heart of masculine identity. At the national level, shame is repeatedly converted to power in the War on Terror through hyperbolic displays of agency including massive aerial bombardment and practices of torture. This is why, as Mann demonstrates, the phenomenon of gender itself demands a four-dimensional analysis that moves from the phenomenological level of lived experience, through the collective life of a people expressed in the social imaginary and the operations of language, to the material relations that prevail in our times.

Plato's "Phaedo", Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit" and Heidegger's "Being and Time" are three of the most profound meditations on variations of the ideas that to practice philosophy is to practice how to die. This study traces how these variations are connected with each other and with the reflections of this idea to be found in the works of other ancient and modern philosophers - including Neitzsche, Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and levinas. The book also shows how this philosophical thanatology motivates or is motivated by experiences documented in psychoanalysis and in the anthropology of Western and Oriental religions and myths.

Iris Murdoch's philosophy has long attracted readers searching for a morally serious yet humane perspective on human life. Her eloquent call for "a theology which can continue without God" has been especially attractive to those who find that they can live neither with religion nor without it. By developing a form of thinking that is neither exclusively secular nor traditionally religious, Murdoch sought to recapture the existential or spiritual import of philosophy. Long before the current wave of interest in spiritual exercises, she approached philosophy not only as an academic discourse, but as a practice whose aim is the transformation of perception and consciousness. As she put it, a moral philosophy should be capable of being "inhabited"; that is, it should be "a philosophy one could live by."
In A Philosophy to Live By, Maria Antonaccio argues that Murdoch's thought embodies an ascetic model of philosophy for contemporary life. Extending and complementing the argument of her earlier monograph, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch, this new work establishes Murdoch's continuing relevance by engaging her thought with a variety of contemporary thinkers and debates in ethics from a perspective informed by Murdoch's philosophy as a whole. Among the prominent philosophers engaged here are Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, Stephen Mulhall, John Rawls, Pierre Hadot, and Michel Foucault, and theologians such as Stanley Hauerwas, David Tracy, William Schweiker, and others. These engagements represent a sustained effort to think with Murdoch, yet also beyond her, by enlisting the resources of her thought to explore wider debates at the intersections of moral philosophy, religion, art, and politics, and in doing so, to illuminate the distinctive patterns and tropes of her philosophical style.

In the face of ongoing religious conflicts and unending culture wars, what are we to make of liberalism's promise that it alone can arbitrate between church and state? In this wide-ranging study, John Perry examines the roots of our thinking on religion and politics, placing the early-modern founders of liberalism in conversation with today's theologians and political philosophers.
From the story of Antigone to debates about homosexuality and bans on religious attire, it is clear that liberalism's promise to solve all theo-political conflict is a false hope. The philosophy connecting John Locke to John Rawls seeks a world free of tragic dilemmas, where there can be no Antigones. Perry rejects this as an illusion. Disputes like the culture wars cannot be adequately comprehended as border encroachments presided over by an impartial judge. Instead, theo-political conflict must be considered a contest of loyalties within each citizen and believer. Drawing on critics of Rawls ranging from Michael Sandel to Stanley Hauerwas, Perry identifies what he calls a 'turn to loyalty' by those who recognize the inadequacy of our usual thinking on the public place of religion. The Pretenses of Loyalty offers groundbreaking analysis of the overlooked early work of Locke, where liberalism's founder himself opposed toleration.
Perry discovers that Locke made a turn to loyalty analogous to that of today's communitarian critics. Liberal toleration is thus more sophisticated, more theologically subtle, and ultimately more problematic than has been supposed. It demands not only governmental neutrality (as Rawls believed) but also a reworked political theology. Yet this must remain under suspicion for Christians because it places religion in the service of the state. Perry concludes by suggesting where we might turn next, looking beyond our usual boundaries to possibilities obscured by the liberalism we have inherited.

This book is a radical reappraisal of positivism as a major movement in philosophy, science and culture. In examining positivist movement and its contemporary impact, the author had six goals. First, to provide a more precise and systematic definition of the notion of positivism. Second, to describe positivism as a trend of thought concerned not only with the theory of knowledge and philosophy of science, but also with problems of ethics, social, and political philosophy. Third, to examine the development of positivism as a movement: it was born in the 18th century during the Enlightenment, took the form of social positivism in the 19th century, was transformed at the turn of the 20th century with the emergence of empirio-criticism, and became logical positivism (or logical empiricism) in the 20th century. Fourth, to reveal the external and internal factors of this evolution. Fifth, to disclose the relation of positivism to other trends of philosophy. Sixth, to determine the influence the positive mind had upon other cultural phenomena, such as the natural and social sciences, law, politics, arts, religion, and everyday life.

In Essays on the History of Ethics Michael Slote collects his essays that deal with aspects of both ancient and modern ethical thought and seek to point out conceptual/normative comparisons and contrasts among different views. Arranged in chronological order of the philosopher under discussion, the relationship between ancient ethical theory and modern moral philosophy is a major theme of several of the papers and, in particular, Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, and/or utilitarianism feature centrally in (most of) the discussions.
One essay seeks to show that there are three main ways to conceive the relationship between human well-being and virtue: one is dualistic a la Kant (they are disparate notions); one is the sort of reductionism familiar from the history of utilitarianismm; and one, not previously named by philosophers, is implicit in the approach the Stoics, Plato, and Aristotle take (in their different ways) to the topic of virtue and well-being. Slote names this third approach "elevationism" and argue that it is more promising than either reductionism or dualism.
Two of the essays are narrowly focused on Hume's ethics, and one seeks to show that even Kant's opponents have reason to accept a number of important and original Kantian ideas. Finally, the two last essays in the volume talk about ethical thought during the last half of the twentieth century and the first few years of the twenty-first, arguing that the care ethics of Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings has a distinctive and important contribution to make to ongoing ethical theorizing--and to our understanding of the history of ethics as well.

Relativism has dominated many intellectual circles, past and present, but the twentieth century saw it banished to the fringes of mainstream analytic philosophy. Of late, however, it is making something of a comeback within that loosely configured tradition, a comeback that attempts to capitalize on some important ideas in foundational semantics. Relativism and Monadic Truth aims not merely to combat analytic relativism but also to combat the foundational ideas in semantics that led to its revival. Doing so requires a proper understanding of the significance of possible worlds semantics, an examination of the relation between truth and the flow of time, an account of putatively relevant data from attitude and speech act reporting, and a careful treatment of various operators. Throughout, Herman Cappelen and John Hawthorne contrast relativism with a view according to which the contents of thought and talk are propositions that instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth simpliciter and falsity simpliciter. Such propositions, they argue, are the semantic values of sentences (relative to context), the objects of illocutionary acts, and, unsurprisingly, the objects of propositional attitudes.

Spinoza rejects fundamental tenets of received morality, including the notions of Providence and free will. Yet he retains rich theories of good and evil, virtue, perfection, and freedom. Building interconnected readings of Spinoza's accounts of imagination, error, and desire, Michael LeBuffe defends a comprehensive interpretation of Spinoza's enlightened vision of human excellence. Spinoza holds that what is fundamental to human morality is the fact that we find things to be good or evil, not what we take those designations to mean. When we come to understand the conditions under which we act-that is, when we come to understand the sorts of beings that we are and the ways in which we interact with things in the world-then we can recast traditional moral notions in ways that help us to attain more of what we find to be valuable.
For Spinoza, we find value in greater activity. Two hazards impede the search for value. First, we need to know and acquire the means to be good. In this respect, Spinoza's theory is a great deal like Hobbes's: we strive to be active, and in order to do so we need food, security, health, and other necessary components of a decent life. There is another hazard, however, that is more subtle. On Spinoza's theory of the passions, we can misjudge our own natures and fail to understand the sorts of beings that we really are. So we can misjudge what is good and might even seek ends that are evil. Spinoza's account of human nature is thus much deeper and darker than Hobbes's: we are not well known to ourselves, and the self-knowledge that is the foundation of virtue and freedom is elusive and fragile.

In the same spirit as his most recent book, Living With Nietzsche, and his earlier study In the Spirit of Hegel, Robert Solomon turns to the existential thinkers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, in an attempt to get past the academic and political debates and focus on what is truly interesting and valuable about their philosophies. Solomon makes the case that--despite their very different responses to the political questions of their day--Camus and Sartre were both fundamentally moralists, and their philosophies cannot be understood apart from their deep ethical commitments. He focuses on Sartre's early, pre-1950 work, and on Camus's best known novels The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall. Throughout Solomon makes the important point that their shared interest in phenomenology was much more important than their supposed affiliation with "existentialism." Solomon's reappraisal will be of interest to anyone who is still or ever has been fascinated by these eccentric but monumental figures.

In George Berkeley's two most important works, the Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues Bewtween Hylas and Philonous, he argued that there is no such thing as matter: only minds and ideas exist, and physical things are nothing but collections of ideas. In defense of this idealism, he advanced a battery of challenging arguments purporting to show that the very notion of matter is self-contradictory or meaningless, and that even if it were possible for matter to exist, we could not know that it does; and he then put forward an alternative world-view that purported to refute both skepticism and atheism.
Using the tools of contemporary analytic philosophy, Georges Dicker here examines both the destructive and the constructive sides of Berkeley's thought, against the background of the mainstream views that he rejected. Dicker's accessible and text-based analysis of Berkeley's arguments shows that the Priniciples and the Dialogues dovetail and complement each other in a seamless way, rather than being self-contained. Dicker's book avoids the incompleteness that results from studying just one of his two main works; instead, he treats the whole as a visionary response to the issues of modern philosophy- such as primary and secondary qualities, external-world skepticism, the substance-property relation, the causal roles of human agents and of God. In addition to relating Berkeley's work to his contemporaries, Dicker discusses work by today's top Berkeley scholars, and uses notions and distinctions forged by recent and contemporary analytic philosophers of perception. Berkeley's Idealism both advances Berkeley scholarship and serves as a useful guide for teachers and students.

One of America's most celebrated poets, Emily Dickinson was virtually unpublished in her lifetime. When a slim volume of her poems emerged on the American scene in 1890, her work created shockwaves that have not subsided yet. Famously precise and sparse, Emily Dickinson's poetry is often described as philosophical, both because her poetry grapples with philosophical topics like death, spirituality, and the darkening operations of the mind, and because she approaches those topics in a characteristically philosophical manner: analyzing and extrapolating from close observation, exploring alternatives, and connecting thoughts into cumulative demonstrations. But unlike Lucretius or Pope, she cannot be accused of producing versified treatises. Many of her poems are unsettling in their lack of conclusion; their disparate insights often stand in conflict; and her logic turns crucially on imagery, juxtaposition, assonance, slant rhyme, and punctuation. The six chapters of this volume collectively argue that Dickinson is an epistemically ambitious poet, who explores fundamental questions by advancing arguments that are designed to convince. Dickinson exemplifies abstract ideas in tangible form and habituates readers into productive trains of thought-she doesn't just make philosophical claims, but demonstrates how poetry can make a distinct contribution to philosophy. All essays in this volume, drawn from both philosophers and literary theorists, serve as a counterpoint to recent critical work, which has emphasized Dickinson's anguished uncertainty, her nonconventional style, and the unsettled status of her manuscripts. On the view that emerges here, knowing is like cleaning, mending, and lacemakingL a form of hard, ongoing work, but one for which poetry is a powerful, perhaps indispensable, tool.