The Maimonides Review of Philosophy and Religion is an annual collection of double-blind peer-reviewed articles, which seeks to provide a broad international arena for an intellectual exchange of ideas between the disciplines of philosophy, theology, religion, cultural history, and literature and to showcase their multifarious junctures within the framework of Jewish studies.

This second of a two-volume work provides a new understanding of Western subjectivity as theorized in the Augustinian Rule. A theopolitical synthesis of Antiquity, the Rule is a humble, yet extremely influential example of subjectivity production. In these volumes, Jodra argues that the Classical and Late-Ancient communitarian practices along the Mediterranean provide historical proof of a worldview in which the self and the other are not disjunctive components, but mutually inclusive forces. The Augustinian Rule is a culmination of this process and also the beginning of something new: the paradigm of the monastic self as protagonist of the new, medieval worldview. In the previous volume, Jodra gave us the Mediterranean backstory to Augustine's Rule. In this volume two, he develops his solution to socialism, through a kind of Augustinian communitarianism for today, in full. These volumes therefore restore the unity of the Hellenistic and Judaic world as found by the first Christians, proving that the self and the other are two essential pieces in the construction of our world.

The main hypothesis of the volume is that globalization is a cultural phenomenon. Therefore, the book offers an explanation of how globalization emerged from cultural exchange between groups, nations, and religions. The articles in this volume register the thematically multi-dimensional and theoretically complex contribution of Polish research on globalization. Polish debates on globalization, as presented in this book, on the one hand reflect international disputes and controversies, and on the other hand address local issues. As their crucial feature, the articles in this volume exhibit a special sensitivity to historical and contemporary cultural contexts. They do not approach globalization as an abstract process, instead exploring it through the lens of clearly defined factors.

Almost 100 years have passed since Carl Schmitt gave his controversial definition of the sovereign as the one who decides on the exception in his by now classic Political Theology (1922). Written at a time of crisis, the book sought to establish the institution of sovereignty, not from within a well-functioning governing machine of the state in a situation of normality, but rather as the minimal condition of state order in the moment of governmental breakdown. The book appeared anachronistic already at its publication. Schmitt went against Max Weber's popular thesis defining secularization as a disenchantment of the world characterizing modern societies, and instead suggested that the concepts of modern politics mirrored a metaphysics originating in Christianity and the church. Nevertheless, the concept of political theology has in recent years seen a revival as a field of research in philosophy as well as political theory, as studies in the theological sub-currents of politics, economics and sociality proliferate.

New Perspectives on Power and Political Representation from Ancient History to the Present Day offers a unique perspective on political communication between rulers and ruled from antiquity to the present day by putting the concept of representation center stage. It explores the dynamic relationship between elites and the people as it was shaped by constructions of self-representation and representative claims. The contributors to this volume - specialists in ancient, medieval, early-modern and modern history - move away from reductionist associations of political representation with formal aspects of modern, democratic, electoral, and parliamentarian politics. Instead, they contend that the construction of political representation involves a set of discourses, practices, and mechanisms that, although they have been applied and appropriated in various ways in a range of historical contexts, has stood the test of time.

Neuroscientists often consider free will to be an illusion. Contrary to this hypothesis, the contributions to this volume show that recent developments in neuroscience can also support the existence of free will. Firstly, the possibility of intentional consciousness is studied. Secondly, Libet's experiments are discussed from this new perspective. Thirdly, the relationship between free will, causality and language is analyzed. This approach suggests that language grants the human brain a possibility to articulate a meaningful personal life. Therefore, human beings can escape strict biological determinism.