Challenging existing methodological conceptions of the analytic approach to aesthetics, Jukka Mikkonen brings together philosophy, literary studies and cognitive psychology to offer a new theory on the cognitive value of reading fiction. Philosophy, Literature and Understanding defends the epistemic significance of narratives, arguing that it should be explained in terms of understanding rather than knowledge. Mikkonen formulates understanding as a cognitive process, which he connects to narrative imagining in order to assert that narrative is a central tool for communicating understanding. Demonstrating the effects that literary works have on their readers, he examines academic critical analysis, responses of the reading public and nonfictional writings that include autobiographical testimony to their writer's influences and attitudes to life. In doing so, he provides empirical evidence of the cognitive benefits of literature and of how readers demonstrate the growth of their understanding. By drawing on the written testimony of the reader, this book is an important intervention into debates on the value of literature that incorporates understanding in new and imaginative ways.

The Philosophy of Matter is a journey in thinking through the material fate of the earth itself; its surfaces and undercurrrents, ecologies, environments and irreparable cracks. With figures such as Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres as philosophical guides and writings on New Materialism, Posthumanism and Affect Theory as intellectual context, Rick Dolphijn proposes a radical rethinking of some of the basic themes of philosophy: subjectivity, materiality, body (both human and otherwise) and the act of living. This rethink is a work of imagination and meditation in order to conceive of "another earth for another people". It is a homage to courageous thinking that dares to question the religious, capitalist and humanist realities of the day. A poetic philosophy of how to live in troubling times when even the earth beneath us feels unstable, Dolphijn offers a way to think about the world with depth, honesty and glimpses of hope.

With notes and an apparatus, a new translation of Hegel's essay "Machiavelli's "The Prince" and Italy," and the first pages of "The Prince" in the original Italian

At the end of an industrious political career in conflict-riven Italy, the Florentine diplomat Niccolo Machiavelli composed his masterpiece "The Prince," a classic study of power and politics, and a manual of ruthlessness for any ambitious ruler. Controversial in his own time, the work made Machiavelli's name a byword for manipulative scheming, and had an impact on such major figures as Napoleon and Frederick the Great. It contains principles as true today as when they were first written almost five centuries ago.

This collection provides the first in-depth introduction to the theory of the religious imagination put forward by renowned philosopher Douglas Hedley, from his earliest essays to his principal writings. Featuring Hedley's inaugural lecture delivered at Cambridge University in 2018, the book sheds light on his robust concept of religious imagination as the chief power of the soul's knowledge of the Divine and reveals its importance in contemporary metaphysics, ethics and politics. Chapters trace the development of the religious imagination in Christian Platonism from Late Antiquity to British Romanticism, drawing on Origen, Henry More and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, before providing a survey of alternative contemporary versions of the concept as outlined by Karl Rahner, Rene Girard and William P. Alston, as well as within Indian philosophy. By bringing Christian Platonist thought into dialogue with contemporary philosophy and theology, the volume systematically reveals the relevance of Hedley's work to current debates in religious epistemology and metaphysics. It offers a comprehensive appraisal of the historical contribution of imagination to religious understanding and, as such, will be of great interest to philosophers, theologians and historians alike.

Connecting several strands of Aristotle's thought, Zoli Filotas sheds light on one of the axioms of Aristotle's ethics and political philosophy - that every community has a ruler - and demonstrates its relevance to his ideas on personal relationships. Aristotle and the Ethics of Difference, Friendship, and Equality reveals a pluralistic theory of rule in Aristotle's thought, tracing it through his corpus and situating it in a discussion among such figures as Gorgias, Xenophon, and Plato. Considering the similarities and differences among various forms of rule, Filotas shows that for Aristotle even virtuous friends must exercise a version of rule akin to that of slaveholders. He also explores why Aristotle distinguishes the hierarchical rule over women from both the mastery of slaves and the political rule exercised by free and equal citizens. In doing so, he argues that natural and social differences among human beings play a complex, and troubling, role in Aristotle's reasoning. Illuminating and thought-provoking, this book reveals Aristotle's ambivalence about political relations and the equal treatment they involve and offers an engaging inquiry into how he understood the common structures of human relationships.

Horst Ruthrof revisits Husserl's phenomenology of language and highlights his late writings as essential to understanding the full range of his ideas. Focusing on the idea of language as imaginable as well as the role of a speech community in constituting it, Ruthrof provides a powerful re-assessment of his methodological phenomenology. From the Logical Investigations to untranslated portions of his Nachlass, Ruthrof charts all the developments and amendments in his theorizations. Ruthrof argues that it is the intersubjective character to linguistic meaning that is so emblematic of Husserl's position. Bringing his study up to the present day, Ruthrof discusses mental time travel, the evolution of language, and protosyntax in the context of Husserl's late writings, progressing a comprehensive new phenomenological ontology of language with wide-ranging implications for philosophy, linguistics, and cultural studies.

Responding to the call of the Second Vatican Council, this introduction to moral theology shows how virtue ethics and a global perspective shape the call to faithful discipleship today.

This study illuminates the complex interplay between Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy and architecture. Presenting their wide-ranging impact on late 20th- and 21st-century architecture, each chapter focuses on a core Deleuzian/Guattarian philosophical concept and one key work of architecture which evokes, contorts, or extends it. Challenging the idea that a concept or theory defines and then produces the physical work and not vice versa, Chris L. Smith positions the relationship between Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy and the field of architecture as one that is mutually substantiating and constitutive. In this framework, modes of architectural production and experimentation become inextricable from the conceptual territories defined by these two key thinkers, producing a rigorous discussion of theoretical, practical, and experimental engagements with their ideas.

Logics of Worlds stands as one of the most important texts in contemporary thought. Conceived as the sequel to Alan Badiou's Being and Event, the book expands upon and elucidates the questions that were posed in the first book. As a complex theory of worlds, the text has, for the most part, been misunderstood, but in William Watkin's diligent and critical close reading of the book, he makes the case for Logics of Worlds being the essential Badiou book for anyone interested in existence, meaning and the potential for radical change. For Watkin, this recasting of ontology is followed by a transformation of logic, which is not only a theory of being, but of appearing and allows Badiou to give new meaning to the object, body and relation. To do this, he explores these concepts through architecture, astronomy and renowned thinkers such as Kant, Hegel and Kierkegaard. For students of French Continental philosophy, ontology and Badiou himself, Watkin's commentary on the philosopher's text provides a brilliant and incisive new interpretation of this underrated work by the leading Continental philosopher of our time.