The threat to liberal democracy isn't just autocrats - it's a lack of effective action by so-called progressives.

We have the means to build an equitable world without hunger, fuelled by clean energy. Instead, we have a politics driven by scarcity, lives defined by unaffordability and public institutions that no longer deliver on big ideas. It's time for change.

Bestselling authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have spent decades analysing the political, economic and cultural forces that have led us here. In this once-in-a-generation intervention, they unpick the barriers to progress and show how we can, and must, shift the political agenda to one that not only protects and preserves, but also builds. From healthcare to housing, infrastructure to innovation, they lay out a path to a future defined not by fear, but by abundance.

This book introduces generative grammar as an area of study and asks what it tells us about the human mind. Wolfram Hinzen lays the foundation for the unification of modern generative linguistics with the philosophies of mind and language. He introduces Chomsky's program of a "minimalist"
syntax as a novel explanatory vision of the human mind. He explains how the Minimalist Program originated in work in cognitive science, biology, linguistics, and philosophy, and examines its implications for work in these fields. He considers the way the human mind is designed when seen as an
arrangement of structural patterns in nature, and argues that its design is the product not so much of adaptive evolutionary history as of principles and processes that are ahistorical and internalist in character. Linguistic meaning, he suggests, arises in the mind as a consequence of structures
emerging on formal rather than functional grounds. From this he substantiates an unexpected and deeply unfashionable notion of human nature.
Clearly written in nontechnical language and assuming a limited knowledge of the fields it examines and links, Minimal Mind Design will appeal to a wide range of scholars in linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science. It also provides an exceptionally clear insight into the nature and aims of
Chomsky's Minimalist Program.

Two spiritual giants. Seven days. One timeless question.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama were friends for many, many years. Between them, they have endured exile, violence and oppression. And in the face of these hardships, they continued to radiate compassion, humour and above all, joy.

To celebrate His Holiness's eightieth birthday, Archbishop Tutu travelled to the Dalai Lama's home in Dharamsala. The two men spent a week discussing a single burning question: how do we find joy in the face of suffering?

This book is a gift from two of the most important spiritual figures of our time. Full of love, warmth and hope, The Book of Joy offers us the chance to experience their journey from first embrace to final goodbye.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is a revised edition of Walker's well-known book in feminist ethics first published in 1997. Walker's book proposes a view of morality and an approach to ethical theory which uses the critical insights of feminism and race theory to rethink the epistemological and moral position of the ethical theorist, and how moral theory is inescapably shaped by culture and history. The main gist of her book is that morality is embodied in "practices of responsibility" that express our identities, values, and connections to others in socially patterned ways. Thus ethical theory needs to be empirically informed and politically critical to avoid reiterating forms of socially entrenched bias. Responsible ethical theory should reveal and question the moral significance of social differences. The book engages with, and challenges, the work of contemporary analytic philosophers in ethics.
Moral Understandings has been influential in reaching a global audience in ethics and feminist philosophy, as well as in tangential fields like nursing ethics; research ethics; disability ethics; environmental ethics, and social and political theory. This revised edition contains a new preface, a substantive postscript to Chapter 1 about "the subject of moral philosophy"; the addition of a new chapter on the importance of emotion in practices of responsibility; and the addition of an afterword, which responds to critics of the book.

David B. Wong proposes that there can be a plurality of true moralities, moralities that exist across different traditions and cultures, all of which address facets of the same problem: how we are to live well together. Wong examines a wide array of positions and texts within the Western canon as well as in Chinese philosophy, and draws on philosophy, psychology, evolutionary theory, history, and literature, to make a case for the importance of pluralism in moral life, and to establish the virtues of acceptance and accommodation. Wong's point is that there is no single value or principle or ordering of values and principles that offers a uniquely true path for human living, but variations according to different contexts that carry within them a common core of human values. We should thus be modest about our own morality, learn from other approaches, and accommodate different practices in our pluralistic society.

Spencer's popular account of his leading sociological doctrines. Its publication marked the emergence of Spencer as the popular philosopher of the Victorian age. It was a highly influential work in terms of the impetus it gave to the academic pursuit of the new science of sociology and it also played an important role in shaping the outlook of many thoughtful lay persons in the Victorian reading public.

The Bible has always been a contested legacy. Form late antiquity to the Refomation, debates about the Bible took place at the center of manifold movements that defined Western civilization. In the eigtheenth century, Europe's scriptural inheritance surfaced once again at a critical moment. During the Enlightenment, scholars guided by a new vision of a post-theological age did not simply investigate the Bible, they remade it. In place of the familiar scriptural Bibles that belonged to Christian and Jewish communities, they created a new form: the academic Bible. In this book, Michael Legaspi examines the creation of the academic Bible. Beginning with the fragmentation of biblical interpretation in the centuries after the Reformation, Legaspi shows how the weakening of scriptural authority in the Western churches altered the role of biblical interpretation. In contexts shaped by skepticism and religious strife, interpreters increasingly operated on the Bible as a text to be managed by critical tools. These developments prepared the way for scholars to formalize an approach to biblical study oriented toward the statist vision of the new universities and their sponsors. Focusing on a renowned German scholar of the period, Johann David Michaelis (1717-1791), Legaspi explores the ways that critics reconceived authority of the Bible by creating an institutional framework for biblical interpretation designed to parallel-and replace-scriptural reading. This book offers a new account of the origins of biblical studies, illuminating the relation of the Bible to churchly readers, theological interpreters, academic critics, and people in between. It explains why, in an age of religious resurgence, modern biblical criticism may no longer be in a position to serve as the Bible's disciplinary gatekeeper.

When are borders justified? Who has a right to control them? Where should they be drawn? Today people think of borders as an island's shores. Just as beaches delimit a castaway's realm, so borders define the edges of a territory, occupied by a unified people, to whom the land legitimately belongs. Hence a territory is legitimate only if it belongs to a people unified by a civic identity. Sadly, this Desert Island Model of territorial politics forces us to choose. If we want territories, then we can either have democratic legitimacy, or inclusion of different civic identities-but not both. The resulting politics creates mass xenophobia, migrant-bashing, hoarding of natural resources, and border walls. To escape all this, On Borders presents an alternative model. Drawing on an intellectual tradition concerned with how land and climate shape institutions, it argues that we should not see territories as pieces of property owned by identity groups. Instead, we should see them as watersheds: as interconnected systems where institutions, people, the biota, and the land together create overlapping civic duties and relations, what the book calls place-specific duties. This Watershed Model argues that borders are justified when they allow us to fulfill those duties; that border-control rights spring from internationally-agreed conventions-not from internal legitimacy; that borders should be governed cooperatively by the neighboring states and the states system; and that border redrawing should be done with environmental conservation in mind. The book explores how this model undoes the exclusionary politics of desert islands.

The "Nations" are the "seventy nations": a metaphor which, in the Talmudic idiom, designates the whole of humanity surrounding Israel. In this major collection of essays, Levinas considers Judaism's uncertain relationship to European culture since the Enlightenment, problems of distance and integration. It also includes essays on Franz Rosenzweig and Moses Mendelssohn, and a discussion of central importance to Jewish philosophy in the context of general philosophy. This work brings to the fore the vital encounter between philosophy and Judaism, a hallmark of Levinas's thought.

Much of what we know is acquired by taking things on the word of other people whom we trust and treat as authorities concerning what to believe. But what exactly is it to take someone's word for something? What is it to treat another as an authority concerning what to believe, and what is it to then trust this person for the truth? In Testimony, Trust, and Authority, Benjamin McMyler argues that philosophers have failed to appreciate the nature and significance of our epistemic dependence on the word of others. What others tell us is the case-their testimony, as philosophers use the term-provides us with a reason for belief that is fundamentally unlike the kind of reason for belief provided by other kinds of impersonal evidence. Unlike a footprint in the snow or a bloody knife left at the scene of a crime, a speaker's testimony provides an audience with what McMyler calls a second-personal reason for belief, a reason for belief that serves to parcel out epistemic responsibility for the belief interpersonally between speaker and audience.
Testimony, Trust, and Authority is the most developed articulation and defense of an interpersonal theory of the epistemology of testimony yet to appear. It explains how this position relates to the historical development of philosophical questions about testimony, draws out what is at stake between this position and other competing positions in the contemporary epistemological literature on testimony, highlights and clarifies what is so controversial about this position, and shows how this position connects to broader philosophical issues concerning trust, the second person, and the role of authority in both theoretical and practical rationality. It will be of interest not only to specialists in epistemology but to anyone interested in the nature and significance of human sociality.

Americans have a deeply ambivalent relationship to guns. The United States leads all nations in rates of private gun ownership, yet stories of gun tragedies frequent the news, spurring calls for tighter gun regulations. The debate tends to be acrimonious and is frequently misinformed and illogical. The central question is the extent to which federal or state governments should regulate gun ownership and use in the interest of public safety. In this volume, David DeGrazia and Lester Hunt examine this policy question primarily from the standpoint of ethics: What would morally defensible gun policy in the United States look like? Hunt's contribution argues that the U.S. Constitution is right to frame the right to possess a firearm as a fundamental human right. The right to arms is in this way like the right to free speech. More precisely, it is like the right to own and possess a cell phone or an internet connection. A government that banned such weapons would be violating the right of citizens to protect themselves. This is a function that governments do not perform: warding off attacks is not the same thing as punishing perpetrators after an attack has happened. Self-protection is a function that citizens must carry out themselves, either by taking passive steps (such as better locks on one's doors) or active ones (such as acquiring a gun and learning to use it safely and effectively). DeGrazia's contribution features a discussion of the Supreme Court cases asserting a constitutional right to bear arms, an analysis of moral rights, and a critique of the strongest arguments for a moral right to private gun ownership. He follows with both a consequentialist case and a rights-based case for moderately extensive gun control, before discussing gun politics and advancing policy suggestions. In debating this important topic, the authors elevate the quality of discussion from the levels that usually prevail in the public arena. DeGrazia and Hunt work in the discipline of academic philosophy, which prizes intellectual honesty, respect for opposing views, command of relevant facts, and rigorous reasoning. They bring the advantages of philosophical analysis to this highly-charged issue in the service of illuminating the strongest possible cases for and against (relatively extensive) gun regulations and whatever common ground may exist between these positions.

Some philosophers hold that trust grows fragile when people become too rational. They advocate a retreat from reason and a return to local, traditional values. Others hold that truly rational people are both trusting and trustworthy. Everything hinges on what we mean by 'reason' and 'rational'. If these are understood in an egocentric, instrumental fashion, then they are indeed incompatible with trust. With the help of game theory, Martin Hollis argues against that narrow definition and in favour of a richer, deeper notion of reason founded on reciprocity and the pursuit of the common good. Within that framework he reconstructs the Enlightenment idea of citizens of the world, rationally encountering, and at the same time finding their identity in, their multiple commitments to communities both local and universal.

The World We Want compares the future world that Enlightenment intellectuals had hoped for with our own world at present. In what respects do the two worlds differ, and why are they so different? To what extent is and isn't our world the world they wanted, and to what extent do we today still want their world? Unlike previous philosophical critiques and defenses of the Enlightenment, the present study focuses extensively on the relevant historical and empirical record first, by examining carefully what kind of future Enlightenment intellectuals actually hoped for; second, by tracking the different legacies of their central ideals over the past two centuries.
But in addition to documenting the significant gap that still exists between Enlightenment ideals and current realities, the author also attempts to show why the ideals of the Enlightenment still elude us. What does our own experience tell us about the appropriateness of these ideals? Which Enlightenment ideals do not fit with human nature? Why is meaningful support for these ideals, particularly within the US, so weak at present? Which of the means that Enlightenment intellectuals advocated for realizing their ideals are inefficacious? Which of their ideals have devolved into distorted versions of themselves when attempts have been made to realize them? How and why, after more than two centuries, have we still failed to realize the most significant Enlightenment ideals? In short, what is dead and what is living in these ideals?

This volume brings together fourteen major essays on truth, naturalism, expressivism and representationalism, by one of contemporary philosophy's most challenging thinkers. Huw Price weaves together Quinean minimalism about truth, Carnapian deflationism about metaphysics, Wittgensteinian pluralism about the functions of declarative language, and Rortyian skepticism about representation to craft a powerful and sustained critique of contemporary naturalistic metaphysics. In its place, he offers us not nonnaturalistic metaphysics, or philosophical quietism, but a new positive program for philosophy, cast from a pragmatist mold. This collection will be essential reading for anyone interested naturalism, pragmatism, truth, expressivism, pluralism and representationalism, or in deep questions about the direction and foundations of contemporary philosophy. It will be especially important to practitioners of analytic metaphysics, if they wish to confront the presuppositions of their own discipline. Price recommends a modest explanatory naturalism, in the sense of Hume: naturalism about own linguistic behavior, regarded as a behavior of natural creatures in a natural environment. He shows how this viewpoint privileges use and function over truth and reference, and expression over representation, as useful theoretical categories for the core philosophical project; and thereby undermines the semantic presuppositions of contemporary analytic metaphysics. At the same time, it offers an attractive resolution of the so-called "placement problems", that so preoccupy metaphysical naturalists-a global expressivism, with affinities both to the more local expressivism of writers such as Blackburn and Gibbard, and to Brandom's global inferentialism.

The themes of this volume are the politics of nonconformist radicalism, the universality of natural law and the existence of a moral sense. It also includes Spencer's vision of a pure democracy, in which the vote was available to all, regardless of age, sex or property or qualification.

This book is not aimed at exhuming Kant, but resurrecting him. It is inspired by the Critique of Pure Reason , yet is not about it: perhaps over-ambitiously, it tries to delineate not Kant's metaphysics of experience but the truth of the matter. The author shows rather than says where he agrees and disagrees with the first Critique , in so far as he understood that profound but obscure, over-systematic yet carelessly written, inspiring and infuriating, magnificent but flawed masterpiece. The book attempts a highly systematic presentation, in which the very form of the work reflects the content of the arguments. Kant is often derided for the extent to which he allows his penchant for architectonic structure to distort his insights, but it is argued that he had the right instinct in assuming that there must be some systematic way in which the necessary conditions for experience fit together. The contemporary trend in analytical philosophy seems to be towards ever more specialized, jargon-infested work, and there is a need to draw things together into a wider view that can be more generally appreciated.

This book, which takes account of everything that survives from the manuscripts Hegel produced during his first academic career at the University of Jena, is the first comprehensive survey of the development of Hegel's mature system.

Political theory is traditionally concerned with the justification and limits of state power. It asks: Can states legitimately direct and coerce non-consenting subjects? If they can, what limits, if any, constrain sovereign power? Public law is concerned with the justification and limits of judicial power. It asks: On what grounds can judges 'read down' or 'read in' statutory language against the apparent intention of the legislature? What limits, if any, are appropriate to these exercises of judicial power? This book develops an original constitutional theory of political authority that yields novel answers to both sets of questions. Fox-Decent argues that the state is a fiduciary of its people, and that this fiduciary relationship grounds the state's authority to announce and enforce law. The fiduciary state is conceived of as a public agent of necessity charged with guaranteeing a regime of secure and equal freedom. Whereas the social contract tradition struggles to ground authority on consent, the fiduciary theory explains authority with reference to the state's fiduciary obligation to respect legal principles constitutive of the rule of law. This obligation arises from the state's possession of irresistible public powers. The author begins with a discussion of Hobbes's conception of legality and the problem of discretionary power in administrative law. Drawing on Kant, he sketches a theory of fiduciary relations, and develops the argument through three parts. Part I shows that it is possible for the state to stand in a public fiduciary relationship to its people through a discussion of Crown-Native fiduciary relations recognized by Canadian courts. Part II sets out the theoretical underpinnings of the fiduciary theory of the state. Part III explores the implications of the fiduciary theory for administrative law and common law constitutionalism. The final chapter situates the theory within a broader philosophical discussion of the rule of law.

Beautifully packaged daily doses of Stoic wisdom, from the author of The Obstacle is the Way.

'No role is so well suited to philosophy as the one you happen to be in right now.' - Marcus Aurelius

The Stoics' unique blend of practicality and wisdom has been inspiring the most successful among us for centuries, from Roman Emperors to Barack Obama, and most recently via Ryan Holiday's bestselling The Obstacle is the Way. If that book introduced readers to the idea that what is in the way is the way, The Daily Stoic widens our view on the Stoic philosophy and shows that it can be applied to any problem.

From how to manage failure to getting what you want, the ideas of Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and others continue to be vitally relevant to today's doers and thinkers. Here, in bold new translations of the ancient classics, language is stripped down to reveal powerful aphorisms that cut straight to the heart of our day-to-day challenges.

Presented in a page-per-day format, this daily resource of Stoic inspiration combines quotations with calls to further reflection - and action. Arranged topically, this guide features twelve principles for overcoming obstacles and achieving greater satisfaction. It introduces readers to a new daily ritual and new orientation that will bring them balanced action, insight, effectiveness, and serenity.

All normal human beings alive in the last fifty thousand years appear to have possessed, in Mark Turner's phrase, "irrepressibly artful minds." Cognitively modern minds produced a staggering list of behavioral singularities--science, religion, mathematics, language, advanced tool use, decorative dress, dance, culture, art--that seems to indicate a mysterious and unexplained discontinuity between us and all other living things. This brute fact gives rise to some tantalizing questions: How did the artful mind emerge? What are the basic mental operations that make art possible for us now, and how do they operate? These are the questions that occupy the distinguished contributors to this volume, which emerged from a year-long Getty-funded research project hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. These scholars bring to bear a range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives on the relationship between art (broadly conceived), the mind, and the brain. Together they hope to provide directions for a new field of research that can play a significant role in answering the great riddle of human singularity.

Since the late 1970's, the main research program for understanding intentionality - the mind's ability to direct itself onto the world - has been based on the attempt naturalize intentionality, in the sense of making it intelligible how intentionality can occur in a perfectly natural, indeed entirely physical, world. Some philosophers, however, have remained skeptical of this entire approach. In particular, some have argued that phenomenal consciousness - the subjective feel of conscious experience - has an essential role to play in the theory of intentionality, a role missing in the naturalization program. Thus a number of authors have recently brought to the fore the notion of phenomenal intentionality, as well as a cluster of nearby notions. There is a vague sense that their work is interrelated, complementary, and mutually reinforcing, in a way that suggests a germinal research program. With twelve new essays by philosophers at the forefront of the field, this volume is designed to launch this research program in a more self-conscious way, by exploring some of the fundamental claims and themes of relevance to this program.

The essays in this volume answer to anxieties that the pragmatist tradition has had little to say about justice. While both the classical and neo-pragmatist traditions have produced a conspicuously small body of writing about the idea of justice, a common subtext of the essays in this volume is that there is in pragmatist thought a set of valuable resources for developing pragmatist theories of justice, for responding profitably to concrete injustices, and for engaging with contemporary, prevailing, liberal theories of justice. Despite the absence of conventionally philosophical theories of justice in the pragmatist canon, the writings of many pragmatists demonstrate an obvious sensitivity and responsiveness to injustice. Many pragmatists were and are moved by a deep sense of justice-by an awareness of the suffering of people, by the need to build just institutions, and a search for a tolerant and non-discriminatory culture that regards all people as equals. Three related and mutually reinforcing ideas to which virtually all pragmatists are committed can be discerned: a prioritization of concrete problems and real-world injustices ahead of abstract precepts; a distrust of a priori theorizing (along with a corresponding fallibilism and methodological experimentalism); and a deep and persistent pluralism, both in respect to what justice is and requires, and in respect to how real-world injustices are best recognized and remedied. Ultimately, Pragmatism and Justice asserts that pragmatism gives us powerful resources for understanding the idea of justice more clearly and responding more efficaciously to a world rife with injustice.

This is an introduction the thought of Robert Holcot, a great and influential but often underappreciated medieval thinker. Holcot was a Dominican friar who flourished in the 1330's and produced a diverse body of work including scholastic treatises, biblical commentaries, and sermons. By viewing the whole of Holcot's corpus, this book provides a comprehensive account of his thought. Challenging established characterizations of him as a skeptic or radical, this book shows Holcot to be primarily concerned with affirming and supporting the faith of the pious believer. At times, this manifests itself as a cautious attitude toward absolutists' claims about the power of natural reason. At other times, Holcot reaffirms, in Anselmian fashion, the importance of rational effort in the attempt to understand and live out one's faith. Over the course of this introduction the authors unpack Holcot's views on faith and heresy, the divine nature and divine foreknowledge, the sacraments, Christ, and political philosophy. Likewise, they examine Holcot's approach to several important medieval literary genres, including the development of his unique "picture method," biblical commentaries, and sermons. In so doing, John Slotemaker and Jeffrey Witt restore Holcot to his rightful place as one of the most important thinkers of his time.