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.

If you are from the West, it is likely that you normally assume that you are a subject who relates to objects and other subjects through actions that spring purely from your own intentions and will. Chinese philosophers, however, show how mistaken this conception of action is. Philosophy of action in Classical China is radically different from its counterpart in the Western philosophical narrative. While the latter usually assumes we are discrete individual subjects with the ability to act or to effect change, Classical Chinese philosophers theorize that human life is embedded in endless networks of relationships with other entities, phenomena, and socio-material contexts. These relations are primary to the constitution of the person, and hence acting within an early Chinese context is interacting and co-acting along with others, human or nonhuman. This book is the first monograph dedicated to the exploration and rigorous reconstruction of an extraordinary strategy for efficacious relational action devised by Classical Chinese philosophers, one which attempts to account for the interdependent and embedded character of human agency-what Mercedes Valmisa calls "adapting" or "adaptive agency" (yin) As opposed to more unilateral approaches to action conceptualized in the Classical Chinese corpus, such as forceful and prescriptive agency, adapting requires heightened self- and other-awareness, equanimity, flexibility, creativity, and response. These capacities allow the agent to "co-raise" courses of action ad hoc: unique and temporary solutions to specific, non-permanent, and non-generalizable life problems. Adapting is one of the world's oldest philosophies of action, and yet it is shockingly new for contemporary audiences, who will find in it an unlikely source of inspiration to cope with our current global problems. This book explores the core conception of adapting both on autochthonous terms and by cross-cultural comparison, drawing on the European and Analytic philosophical traditions as well as on scholarship from other disciplines. Valmisa exemplifies how to build meaningful philosophical theories without treating individual books or putative authors as locations of stable intellectual positions, opening brand-new topics in Chinese and comparative philosophy.

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.

Susannah Ticciati explores Augustine's scriptural interpretation, as well as the ways in which he understands the character of signs in theory. The book explores Augustine's scriptural world via three case studies, each geared towards the healing of a particular modern opposition. The three, interrelated, modern oppositions are rooted in an insufficient semiotic worldview. Ticciati argues they contribute to the alienation of the modern reader not only from Augustine's scriptural world, but more generally from the scriptural world as habitation. Examining the ways in which the therapy for our modern day semiotic illiteracy can be found in the 5th-6th-century Augustine, Ticciati brings close readings of Augustine to bear on significant concerns of our own day: specifically, our modern alienations from the rich world of Scripture.

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.

Although it is difficult for us to fathom, pure monsters do not exist. Terrorists and other serial killers massacre innocent people, yet are perfectly capable of loving their own parents, neighbors, and children. Hitler, sending millions to their death, was contemptuous of meat eaters and a strong advocate of animal welfare. How do we reconcile such moral ambiguities? Do they capture something deep about how we build values? As a developmental scientist, Philippe Rochat explores this possibility, proposing that as members of a uniquely symbolic and self-conscious species aware of its own mortality, we develop uncanny abilities toward lying and self-deception. We are deeply categorical and compartmentalized in our views of the world. We imagine essence where there is none. We juggle double standards and manage contradictory values, clustering our existence depending on context and situations, whether we deal in relation to close kin, colleagues, strangers, lovers, or enemies. We live within multiple, interchangeable moral spheres. This social-contextual determination of the moral domain is the source of moral ambiguities and blatant contradictions we all need to own up to.

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.

In his influential essay "Provisional Painting," Raphael Rubinstein applied the term "provisional" to contemporary painters whose work looked intentionally casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling; who appeared to have deliberately turned away from "strong" painting for something that seemed to constantly risk failure or inconsequence. In this collection of essays, Rubinstein expands the scope of his original article by surveying the historical and philosophical underpinnings of provisionality in recent visual art, as well as examining the works of individual artists in detail. He also engages crucial texts by Samuel Beckett and philosopher Gianni Vattimo. Re-examining several decades of painting practices, Rubinstein argues that provisionality, in all its many forms, has been both a foundational element in the history of modern art and the encapsulation of an attitude that is profoundly contemporary.