Understanding the human mind and how it relates to the world that we experience has challenged philosophers for centuries. How then do we even begin to think about 'minds' that are not human? Science now has plenty to say about the properties of mind. In recent decades, the mind - both human and otherwise - has been explored by scientists in fields ranging from zoology to astrobiology, computer science to neuroscience. Taking a uniquely broad view of minds and where they might be found - including in plants, aliens, and God - Philip Ball pulls these multidisciplinary pieces together to explore what sorts of minds we might expect to find in the universe. In so doing, he offers for the first time a unified way of thinking about what minds are and what they can do, arguing that in order to understand our own minds and imagine those of others, we need to move on from considering the human mind as a standard against which all others should be measured, and to think about the 'space of possible minds'. By identifying and mapping out properties of mind without prioritizing the human, Ball sheds new light on a host of fascinating questions. What moral rights should we afford animals, and can we understand their thoughts? Should we worry that AI is going to take over society? If there are intelligent aliens out there, how could we communicate with them? Should we? Understanding the space of possible minds also reveals ways of making advances in understanding some of the most challenging questions in contemporary science: What is thought? What is consciousness? And what (if anything) is free will? The more we learn about the minds of other creatures, from octopuses to chimpanzees, and to imagine the potential minds of computers and alien intelligences, the greater the perspective we have on if and how our own is different. Ball's thrillingly ambitious The Book of Minds about the nature and existence of minds is more mind-expanding than we could imagine. In this fascinating panorama of other minds, we come to better know our own.

What is the relationship between the sacred and the political, transcendence and immanence, religion and violence? And how has this complex relation affected the history of Western political reason? In this volume an international group of scholars explore these questions in light of mimetic theory as formulated by Rene Girard (1923-2015), one of the most original thinkers of our time. From Aristotle and his idea of tragedy, passing through Machiavelli and political modernity, up to contemporary biopolitics, this work provides an indispensable guide to those who want to assess the thorny interconnections of sacrality and politics in Western political thought and follow an unexplored yet critical path from ancient Greece to our post-secular condition. While looking at the past, this volume also seeks to illuminate the future relevance of the sacred/secular divide in the so-called 'age of globalization'.

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.

The German-Austrian social theorist and philosopher Leo Kofler (1907-1995) represents what Oskar Negt once called 'unmutilated, living Marxism'. Throughout his life he dealt with issues of history and modernity, Marxist philosophy and the critique of ideology, philosophical anthropology and aesthetics. In this volume, author and Kofler biographer Christoph Junke elucidates the contours of his philosophy of praxis, traces an arc from the socialist classics to postmodernism, and outlines the socialist humanist thinker's enduring relevance. The book also includes six essays by Leo Kofler published in English for the first time. The main work was first published in German as Leo Koflers Philosophie der Praxis: Eine Einfuhrung in sein Denken by Laika Verlag, 2015, ISBN 978-944233-33-8. Copyright by Laika Verlag.

The foremost collection of essays from one of Britain's most important 20th century Marxist writers Considered by many to be the most innovative British Marxist writer of the twentieth century, Christopher Caudwell was killed in the Spanish Civil War at the age of 29. Although already a published writer of aeronautic texts and crime fiction, he was practically unknown to the public until reviews appeared of Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry, which was published just after his death. A strikingly original study of poetry's role, it explained in clear language how the organizing of emotion in society plays a part in social change and development. Caudwell had a powerful interest in how things worked - aeronautics, physics, human psychology, language, and society. In the anti-fascist struggles of the 1930s he saw that capitalism was a system that could not work properly and distorted the thinking of the age. Self-educated from the age of 15, he wrote with a directness that is alien to most cultural theory. Culture as Politics introduces Caudwell's work through his most accessible and relevant writing. Material will be drawn from Illusion and Reality, Studies in a Dying Culture and his essay, "Heredity and Development."

Since the 1980s the number of women regularly directing films has increased significantly in most Western countries: in France, Claire Denis and Catherine Breillat have joined Agnes Varda in gaining international renown, while British directors Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold have forged award-winning careers in feature film. This new volume in the Thinking Cinema series draws on feminist theorists and critics from Simone de Beauvoir on to offer readings of a range of the most important and memorable of these films from the 1990s and 2000s, focusing as it does so on how the films convey women's lives and identities.Mainstream entertainment cinema traditionally distorts the representation of women, objectifying their bodies, minimizing their agency,and avoiding the most important questions about how cinema can 'do justice' to female subjectivity: Kate Ince suggests that the films of independent women directors are progressively redressing the balance, and thereby reinvigorating both the narratives and the formal ambitions of European cinema. Ince uses feminist philosophers to cast a new veil over such films as Sex Is Comedy, Morvern Callar, White Material, and Fish Tank; and includes a timeline ofdevelopments in women's film-making and feminist film theory from 1970 to 2011.

This book offers a rigorous analysis of why commitment matters and the challenges it presents to a range of believers. Peter Forrest treats commitment as a response to lost innocence. He considers the intellectual consequences of this by demonstrating why, for example, we should not believe in angels. He then explores why humans are attached to reason and to humanism, recognising the different commitments made by theist and non-theist humanists. Finally, he analyses religious faith, specifically fideism, defining it by way of contrast to Descartes, Pascal and William James, as well as contemporary philosophers including John Schellenberg and Lara Buchak. Of particular interest to scholars working on the philosophy of religion, the book makes the case both for and against committing to God, recognising that God's divine character sets up an emotional rather than an intellectual barrier to commitment to worship.

In this book, translated into English for the first time, Lelio Demichelis takes on a modern perspective of the concept/process of alienation. This concept-much more profound and widespread today than first described and denounced by Marx-has largely been forgotten and erased. Using the characters of Narcissus, Pygmalion and Prometheus, the author reinterprets and updates Marx, Nietzsche, Anders, Foucault and, in particular, critical theory and the Frankfurt School views on an administered society (where everything is automated and engineered, manifest today in algorithms, AI, machine learning and social networking) showing that, in a world where old and new forms of alienation come together, man is increasingly led to delegate (i.e. alienate) sovereignty, freedom, responsibility and the awareness of being alive.

In an age of internet scrolling and skimming, where concentration and attention are fast becoming endangered skills, it is timely to think about the act of reading and the many forms that it can take. Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution makes the case for thinking about reading in philosophical terms. Boulous Walker argues that philosophy involves the patient work of thought; in this it resembles the work of art, which invites and implores us to take our time and to engage with the world. At its best, philosophy teaches us to read slowly; in fact, philosophy is the art of reading slowly - and this inevitably clashes with many of our current institutional practices and demands. Slow reading shares something in common with contemporary social movements, such as that devoted to slow food; it offers us ways to engage the complexity of the world. With the help of writers as diverse as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Woolf, Adorno, Levinas, Critchley, Beauvoir, Le Doeuff, Irigaray, Cixous, Weil, and others, Boulous Walker offers a foundational text in the emerging field of slow philosophy, one that explores the importance of unhurried time in establishing our institutional encounters with complex and demanding works.