Sleep is quite a popular activity, indeed most humans spend around a third of their lives asleep. However, cultural, political, or aesthetic thought tends to remain concerned with the interpretation and actions of those who are awake. How to Sleep argues instead that sleep is a complex vital phenomena with a dynamic aesthetic and biological consistency. Arguing through examples drawn from contemporary, modern and renaissance art; from literature; film and computational media, and bringing these into relation with the history and findings of sleep science, this book argues for a new interplay between biology and culture. Meditations on sex, exhaustion, drugs, hormones and scientific instruments all play their part in this wide-ranging exposition of sleep as an ecology of interacting processes. How to Sleep builds on the interlocking of theory, experience and experiment so that the text itself is a lively articulation of bodies, organs and the aesthetic systems that interact with them. This book won't enhance your sleeping skills, but will give you something surprising to think about whilst being ostensibly awake.

Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde documents the collaborations and conflicts essential to the history of the post-war avant-garde. It offers a study of composer Morton Feldman's associations and friendships with artists like John Cage, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Frank O'Hara, Charlotte Moorman, and others. Arguing that friendship and mourning sustained the collective aesthetics of the New York School, Dohoney has written an emotional and intimate revision of New York modernism from the point of view of Feldman's agonistic community.

Context and the Attitudes collects thirteen seminal essays by Mark Richard on semantics and propositional attitudes. These essays develop a nuanced account of the semantics and pragmatics of our talk about such attitudes, an account on which in saying what someone thinks, we offer our words as a 'translation' or representation of the way the target of our talk represents the world. A broad range of topics in philosophical semantics and the philosophy of mind are discussed in detail, including: contextual sensitivity; pretense and semantics; negative existentials; fictional discourse; the nature of quantification; the role of Fregean sense in semantics; 'direct reference' semantics; de re belief and the contingent a priori; belief de se; intensional transitives; the cognitive role of tense; and the prospects for giving a semantics for the attitudes without recourse to properties or possible worlds. Richard's extensive, newly written introduction gives an overview of the essays. The introduction also discusses attitudes realized by dispositions and other non-linguistic cognitive structures, as well as the debate between those who think that mental and linguistic content is structured like the sentences that express it, and those who see content as essentially unstructured.

By offering a new way of thinking about the role of politically engaged art, Susan Best opens up a new aesthetic field: reparative aesthetics. The book identifies an innovative aesthetic on the part of women photographers from the southern hemisphere, who against the dominant modes of criticality in political art, look at how cultural production can be reparative. The winner of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand best book award in 2017, Reparative Aesthetics contributes an entirely new theory to the interdisciplinary fields of aesthetics, affect studies, feminist theory, politics and photography. Conceptually innovative and fiercely original this book will move us beyond old political and cultural stalemates and into new terrain for analysis and reflection.

Fusing speculative realism, analytical and linguistic philosophy this book theorises the fundamental impact the experience of reading has on us. In reading, language provides us with a world and meaning becomes perceptible. We can connect with another subjectivity, another place, another time. At its most extreme, reading changes our understanding of the world around us. Metanoia- meaning literally a change of mind or a conversion-refers to this kind of new way of seeing. To see the world in a new light is to accept that our thinking has been irrevocably transformed. How is that possible? And is it merely an intellectual process without any impact on the world outside our brains? Innovatively tackling these questions, this book mobilizes discussions from linguistics, literary theory, philosophy of language, and cognitive science. It re-articulates linguistic consciousness by underlining the poetic, creative moment of language and sheds light on the ability of language to transform not only our thinking but the world around us as well.

Shedding new light on a controversial and intriguing issue, this book will reshape the debate on how the Judeo-Christian tradition views the morality of personal and national self-defense. Are self-defense, national warfare, and revolts against tyranny holy duties-or violations of God's will? Pacifists insist these actions are the latter, forbidden by Judeo-Christian morality. This book maintains that the pacifists are wrong. To make his case, the author analyzes the full sweep of Judeo-Christian history from earliest times to the present, combining history, scriptural analysis, and philosophy to describe the changes and continuity of Jewish and Christian doctrine about the use of lethal force. He reveals the shifting patterns of thought in both religions and presents the strongest arguments on both sides of the issue. The book begins with the ancient Hebrews and Genesis and covers Jewish history through the Holocaust and beyond. The analysis then shifts to the story of Christianity from its origins, through the Middle Ages and the Reformation, up the present day. Based on this scrutiny, the author concludes that-contrary to popular belief-the legitimacy of self-defense is strongly supported by Judeo-Christian scripture and commentary, by philosophical analysis, and by the respect for human dignity and human rights on which both Judaism and Christianity are based. Takes a multidisciplinary approach, directly engaging with leading writers on both sides of the issue Examines Jewish and Christian sacred writings and commentary and explores how interpretations have changed over time Offers careful analysis of topics such as the political systems of the ancient Hebrews, the Papacy's struggle for independence, the ways in which New England ministers incited the American Revolution, and the effects of the Vietnam War on the American Catholic church's views on national self-defense Covers the many sects that have played crucial roles in the debate over the legitimacy of armed force, including Gnostics, Manicheans, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Quakers Engages with the ideas of leading Jewish philosophers such as Rashi and Maimonides; Christian philosophers such as Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, and Sidney; and the most influential modern exponents of pacifism, such as Dorothy Day, the Berrigan Brothers, and John Howard Yoder

Featuring leading scholars from philosophy and religious studies, The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics dispels the myth that Indian thinkers and philosophers were uninterested in ethics. This comprehensive research handbook traces Indian moral philosophy through classical, scholastic Indian philosophy, pan-Indian literature including the Epics, Ayurvedic medical ethics, as well as recent, traditionalist and Neo-Hindu contributions. Contrary to the usual myths about India (that Indians were too busy being religious to care about ethics), moral theory constitutes the paradigmatic differentia of formal Indian philosophy, and is reflected richly in popular literature. Many of the papers make this clear by an analytic explication that draws critical comparisons and contrasts between classical Indian moral philosophy and contemporary contributions to ethics. By critically addressing ethics as a sub-discipline of philosophy and acknowledging the mistaken marginalization of Indian moral philosophy, this handbook reveals how Indian contributions can illuminate contemporary philosophical research on ethics. Unlike previous approaches to Indian ethics, this volume is organized in accordance with major topics in moral philosophy. The volume contains an extended introduction, exploring topics in moral semantics, the philosophy of thought, (metaethical and normative) ethical theory, and the politics of scholarship, which serve to show how the diversity of Indian moral philosophy is a contribution to the discipline of ethics. With an overview of Indian moral theory, and a glossary, this is a valuable guide to understanding the past, present and future research directions of a central component of Indian philosophy.

Elinor Ostrom, co-recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics, argues that in studying social order, we should not be limited to only the conceptions of order derived from the work of Adam Smith and Thomas Hobbes. To be precise, we should not limit ourselves to theoretical frameworks of The State and to theoretical frameworks of The Market. We need approaches that match the extensive variety of institutional arrangements existent in the world. In this book, Paul Dragos Aligica discusses some of the most challenging ideas emerging out of the research program on institutional diversity associated with Ostrom and her associates, while outlining a set of new research directions and an original interpretation of the significance and future of this program.

In Earth and Mind : Dreaming, Writing, Being Michael Bishop examines the very recent work of nine major contemporary French and Francophone writers : Yves Bonnefoy, Jacqueline Risset, Salah Stetie, Venus Khoury-Ghata, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Andre Velter, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Jean-Claude Pinson and Jacques Dupin. The issue of writing's complex relation to the experience of the earth is of central pertinence, involving questions of dreaming, voice, figurativity, emotion, desire, revolt, metaphysics, meaning, poiein and being. Discussion entails close reading of works as well as broad contextualisation and a sensitivity to interrelevancies from writer to writer. Bishop's book is intended as a companion to his 2014 Dystopie et poiein, agnose et reconnaissance. Seize etudes sur la poesie francaise et francophone contemporaine.

Georg Lukacs was one of the most important intellectuals and philosophers of the 20th century. His last great work was an systematic social ontology that was an attempt to ground an ethical and critical form of Marxism. This work has only now begun to attract the interest of critical theorists and philosophers intent on reconstructing a critical theory of society as well as a more sophisticated framework for Marxian philosophy. This collection of essays explores the concept of critical social ontology as it was outlined by Georg Lukacs and the ways that his ideas can help us construct a more grounded and socially relevant form of social critique.

'Nobody knows how to write'. Thus opens this carefully nuanced and accessible collection of essays by one of the most important writer-philosophers of the 20th century, Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998). First published in French in 1991 as Lectures d'enfance, these essays have never been printed as a collection in English. In them, Lyotard investigates his idea of infantia, or the infancy of thought that resists all forms of development, either human or technological. Each essay responds to works by writers and thinkers who are central to cultural modernism, such as James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Sigmund Freud. This volume - with a new introduction and afterword by Robert Harvey and Kiff Bamford - contextualises Lyotard's thought and demonstrates his continued relevance today.

Greek Heroes in and out of Hades is a study on heroism and mortality from Homer to Plato. In a collection of thirty enjoyable essays, Stamatia Dova combines intertextual research and thought-provoking analysis to shed new light on concepts of the hero in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Bacchylides 5, Plato's Symposium, and Euripides' Alcestis. Through systematic readings of a wide range of seemingly unrelated texts, the author offers a cohesive picture of heroic character in a variety of literary genres. Her characterization of Achilles, Odysseus, and Heracles is artfully supported by a comprehensive overview of the theme of descent to the underworld in Homer, Bacchylides, and Euripides. Aimed at the specialist as well as the general reader, Greek Heroes in and out of Hades brings innovative Classical scholarship and insightful literary criticism to a wide audience.