Hollow and Home explores the ways the primary places in our lives shape the individuals we become. It proposes that place is a complex and dynamic phenomenon. Place refers to geographical and constructed places- location, topography, landscape, and buildings. It also refers to the psychological, social, and cultural influences at work at a given location. These elements act in concert to constitute a place. Carlisle incorporates perspectives from writers like Edward S. Casey, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Witold Rybczynski, but he applies theory with a light touch. Placing this literature in dialog with personal experience, he concentrates on two places that profoundly influenced him and enabled him to overcome a lifelong sense of always leaving his pasts behind. The first is Clover Hollow in Appalachian Virginia, where the author lived for ten years among fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-generation residents. The people and places there enabled him to value his own past and primary places in a new way. The story then turns to Carlisle's life growing up in Delaware, Ohio. He describes in rich detail the ways the town shaped him in both enabling and disabling ways. In the end, after years of moving from place to place, Carlisle's experience in Appalachia helped him rediscover his hometown-both the Old Delaware, where he grew up, and the New Delaware, a larger, thriving small city-as his true home. The themes of the book transcend specific localities and speak to the relationship of self and place everywhere.

Returning to the Greek understanding of art to rethink its capacities, Creation and the Function of Art focuses on the relationship between techne and phusis (nature). Moving away from the theoretical Platonism which dominates contemporary understandings of art, this book instead reinvigorates Aristotelian causation. Beginning with the Greek topos and turning to insights from philosophy, pure mathematics, psychoanalysis and biology, Jason Tuckwell re-problematises techne in functional terms. This book examines the deviations at play within logical forms, the subject, and upon phusis to better situate the role of the function in poiesis (art). In so doing, Tuckwell argues that art concerns a genuinely creative labour that cannot be resolved via an ontological or epistemological problem, but which instead constitutes an encounter with the problematic. As such, techne is shown to be a property of the living, of intelligence coupled to action, that not only enacts poiesis or art, but indicates a broader role for creative deviation in nature.

As a composer, Hector Berlioz embodied his century as the quintessential Romantic artist. Niccolo Paganini called him "Beethoven's only heir," and for a young Richard Wagner, he was dazzling as a composer, orchestra conductor, and critic. But Berlioz was known as much for his writings as for his music, and for decades Berlioz scholars have stressed the need for a good English-language anthology of his criticism. Featuring new translations and commentary by Katherine Kolb and Samuel N. Rosenberg, Berlioz on Music: Selected Criticism 1824-1837 is that volume. Berlioz's centrality as a critic results from his literary brilliance, his location in Paris - the music capital of the nineteenth century - and his 28-year tenure at the powerful Journal des debats. As one of its founding editors and principal writers, Berlioz contributed about 250 articles to the publication. Berlioz on Music comprises articles from the first 14 years of Berlioz's public writings, given in chronological order and, with few exceptions, in their entirety. Following chronology affords an overview of Berlioz's evolution as critic and of a key phase in the development of modern musical culture. The volume also presents explanatory data in engagingly composed introductions and footnotes, which elucidate Berlioz's references to persons, musical and literary works, historical events, and more. The reader is allowed to follow musical events during one of the richest periods in French cultural history, including the revolutionary decade surrounding 1830, a year marked by Victor Hugo's victory for the Romantics in the Classical bastion of the Theatre-Francais, by the premiere of Berlioz's Fantastic Symphony, and by the toppling of the Restoration monarchy. The result is an engaging collection of Berlioz's lively prose, presented with scholarly rigor and rendered in accessible English. Music historians, both professional and amateur, as well 19th century European history enthusiasts will find Berlioz on Music a compelling introduction to one of the richest periods of French culture.

When we talk about delusions we may refer to symptoms of mental health problems, such as clinical delusions in schizophrenia, or simply the beliefs that people cling to which are implausible and resistant to counterevidence; these can include anything from beliefs about the benefits of homeopathy to concerns about the threat of alien abduction. Why do people adopt delusional beliefs and why are they so reluctant to part with them? In Why Delusions Matter, Lisa Bortolotti explains what delusions really are and argues that, despite their negative reputation, they can also play a positive role in people's lives, imposing some meaning on adverse experiences and strengthening personal or social identities. In a clear and accessible style, Bortolotti contributes to the growing research on the philosophy of the cognitive sciences, offering a novel and nuanced view of delusions.

For thousands of years, mathematicians have used the timeless art of logic to see the world more clearly. In The Art of Logic, Royal Society Science Book Prize nominee Eugenia Cheng shows how anyone can think like a mathematician - and see, argue and think better.

Learn how to simplify complex decisions without over-simplifying them. Discover the power of analogies and the dangers of false equivalences. Find out how people construct misleading arguments, and how we can argue back.

Eugenia Cheng teaches us how to find clarity without losing nuance, taking a careful scalpel to the complexities of politics, privilege, sexism and dozens of other real-world situations. Her Art of Logic is a practical and inspiring guide to decoding the modern world.

Rhetoric, Humor, and the Public Sphere: From Socrates to Stephen Colbert investigates classical and contemporary understandings of satire, parody, and irony, and how these genres function within a deliberative democracy. Elizabeth Benacka examines the rhetorical history, theorization, and practice of humor spanning from ancient Greece and Rome to the contemporary United States. In particular, this book focuses on the contemporary work of Stephen Colbert and his parody of a conservative media pundit, analyzing how his humor took place in front of an uninitiated audience and ridiculed a variety of problems and controversies threatening American democracy. Ultimately, Benacka emphasizes the importance of humor as a discourse capable of calling forth a group of engaged citizens and a source of civic education in contemporary society.

Gandhi and Philosophy presents a breakthrough in philosophy by foregrounding modern and scientific elements in Gandhi's thought, animating the dazzling materialist concepts in his writings and opening philosophy to the new frontier of nihilism. This scintillating work breaks with the history of Gandhi scholarship, removing him from the postcolonial and Hindu-nationalist axis and disclosing him to be the enemy that the philosopher dreads and needs. Naming the congealing systematicity of Gandhi's thoughts with the Kantian term hypophysics, Mohan and Dwivedi develop his ideas through a process of reason that awakens the possibilities of concepts beyond the territorial determination of philosophical traditions. The creation of the new method of criticalisation - the augmentation of critique - brings Gandhi's system to its exterior and release. It shows the points of intersection and infiltration between Gandhian concepts and such issues as will, truth, violence, law, anarchy, value, politics and metaphysics and compels us to imagine Gandhi's thought anew.

In his work on metaphysics, Spinoza associates reasons with causes or explanations. He contends that there is a reason for whatever exists and whatever does not exist. In his account of the human mind, Spinoza makes reason a peculiarly powerful kind of idea and the only source of our knowledge of objects in experience. In his moral theory, Spinoza introduces dictates of reason, which are action-guiding prescriptions. In politics, Spinoza suggests that reason, with religion, motivates cooperation in society. Reason shapes Spinoza's philosophy, and central debates about Spinoza-including his place in the history of philosophy and in the European Enlightenment-turn upon our understanding of these claims. Spinoza on Reason starts with striking claims in each of these areas, which Michael LeBuffe draws from Spinoza's two great works, the Ethics and the Theological Political Treatise. The book takes each characterization of reason on its own terms, explaining the claims and their historical context. While acknowledging the striking variety of reason's roles, LeBuffe emphasizes the extent to which these different doctrines build upon one another. The result is a rich understanding of the meaning and function of each claim and, in the book's conclusion, an overview of the contribution of reason to the systematic coherence of Spinoza's philosophy.

This book offers an in-depth analysis as to how and why women have been widely associated with madness since ancient times. The first part of the book comprises a historical survey of various perceptions of madness across the centuries, while the second part of the book covers a wide selection of literary works by American and English writers who dealt with this subject in their works. In this part of the book, the authors examine selected works of literature from a feminist perspective by also drawing on the works of influential theorists of feminist criticism. The authors further show how these writers, who have been influenced by various philosophers and theoreticians, critically examine women's madness in their fiction.

This volume collects twelve new essays by leading moral philosophers on a vitally important topic: the ethics of eating meat. Some of the key questions examined include: Are animals harmed or benefited by our practice of raising and killing them for food? Do the realities of the marketplace entail that we have no power as individuals to improve the lives of any animals by becoming vegetarian, and if so, have we any reason to stop eating meat? Suppose it is morally wrong to eat meat-should we be blamed for doing so? If we should be vegetarians, what sort should we be?

Bernard Bolzano (1781-1850) is increasingly recognized as one of the greatest nineteenth-century philosophers. A philosopher and mathematician of rare talent, he made ground-breaking contributions to logic, the foundations and philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of religion. Many of the larger features of later analytic philosophy (but also many of the details) first appear in his work: for example, the separation of logic from psychology, his sophisticated understanding of mathematical proof, his definition of logical consequence, his work on the semantics of natural kind terms, or his anticipations of Cantor's set theory, to name but a few. To his contemporaries, however, he was best known as an intelligent and determined advocate for reform of Church and State. Based in large part on a carefully argued utilitarian practical philosophy, he developed a program for the non-violent reform of the authoritarian institutions of the Hapsburg Empire, a program which he himself helped to set in motion through his teaching and other activities. Rarely has a philosopher had such a great impact on the political culture of his homeland. Persecuted in his lifetime by secular and ecclesiastical authorities, long ignored or misunderstood by philosophers, Bolzano's reputation has nevertheless steadily increased over the past century and a half. Much discussed and respected in Central Europe for over a century, he is finally beginning to receive the recognition he deserves in the English-speaking world. This book provides a comprehensive and detailed critical introduction to Bolzano, covering both his life and works.

In a world riven with conflict, violence and war, this book proposes a philosophical defense of pacifism. It argues that there is a moral presumption against war and unless that presumption is defeated, war is unjustified. Leading philosopher of nonviolence Robert Holmes contends that neither just war theory nor the rationales for recent wars (Vietnam, the Gulf War, the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars) defeat that presumption, hence that war in the modern world is morally unjustified. A detailed, comprehensive and elegantly argued text which guides both students and scholars through the main debates (Just War Theory and double effect to name a few) clearly but without oversimplifying the complexities of the issues or historical examples.

This volume traces the topic of affect across Lyotard's corpus and accounts for Lyotard's crucial and original contribution to the thinking of affect. Highlighting the importance of affect in Lyotard's philosophy, this work offers a unique contribution to both affect theory and the reception of Lyotard. Affect indeed traverses Lyotard's philosophical corpus in various ways and under various names: "figure" or "the figural" in Discourse, Figure, "unbound intensities" in his "libidinal" writings, "the feeling of the differend" in The Differend, "affect" and "infantia" in his later writings. Across the span of his work, Lyotard insisted on the intractability of affect, on what he would later call the "differend" between affect and articulation. The singular awakening of sensibility, affect both traverses and escapes articulation, discourse, and representation. Lyotard devoted much of his attention to the analysis of this traversal of affect in and through articulation, its transpositions, translations, and transfers. This volume explores Lyotard's account of affect as it traverses the different fields encompassed by his writings (philosophy, the visual arts, the performing arts, literature, music, politics, psychoanalysis as well as technology and post-human studies).

Textbooks and other popular venues commonly present science as a progressive "brick-by-brick" accumulation of knowledge and facts. Despite its hallowed history and familiar ring, this depiction is nowadays rejected by most specialists. There currently are two competing models of the scientific enterprise: reductionism and antireductionism. Neither provides an accurate depiction of the productive interaction between knowledge and ignorance, supplanting the old metaphor of the "wall" of knowledge. This book explores an original conception of the nature and advancement of science. Marco J. Nathan's proposed shift brings attention to a prominent, albeit often neglected, construct-the black box-which underlies a well-oiled technique for incorporating a productive role of ignorance and failure into the acquisition of empirical knowledge. The black box is a metaphorical term used by scientists for the isolation of a complex phenomenon that they have deliberately set aside or may not yet fully understand. What is a black box? How does it work? How do we construct one? How do we determine what to include and what to leave out? What role do boxes play in contemporary scientific practice? Nathan's monograph develops an overarching framework for thinking about black boxes and discusses prominent historical cases that used it, including Darwin's view of inheritance in his theory of evolution and the "stimulus-response model" in psychology, among others. By detailing some fascinating episodes in the history of biology, psychology, and economics, Nathan revisits foundational questions about causation, explanation, emergence, and progress, showing how the insights of both reductionism and antireductionism can be reconciled into a fresh and exciting approach to science.