What is at the heart of political resistance? Whilst traditional accounts often conceptualise it as a reaction to power, this volume (prioritising remarks by Michel Foucault) invites us to think of resistance as primary. The author proposes a strategic analysis that highlights how our efforts need to be redirected towards a horizon of creation and change. Checchi first establishes a genealogy of two main trajectories of the history of our present: the liberal subject of rights and the neoliberal ideas of human capital and bio-financialisation. The former emerges as a reactive closure of Etienne de la Boetie's discourse on human nature and natural companionship. The other forecloses the creative potential of Autonomist Marxist conceptions of labour, first elaborated by Mario Tronti. The focus of this text then shifts towards contemporary openings. Initially, Checchi proposes an inverted reading of Jacques Ranciere's concept of politics as interruption that resonates with Antonio Negri's emphasis on Baruch Spinoza's potential qua resistance. Finally, the author stages a virtual encounter between Gilles Deleuze's ontology of matter and Foucault's account of the primacy of resistance with which the text begins. Through this series of explorations, The Primacy of Resistance: Power, Opposition and Becoming traces a conceptual trajectory with and beyond Foucault by affirming the affinity between resistance and creation.

Politics as Radical Creation examines the meaning of democratic practice through the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School. It provides an understanding of democratic politics as a potentially performative good-in-itself, undertaken not just to the extent that it seeks to achieve a certain extrinsic goal, but also in that it functions as a medium for the expression of creative human impulses. Christopher Holman develops this potential model through a critical examination of the political philosophies of Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt. Holman argues that, while Arendt and Marcuse's respective theorizations each ultimately restrict the potential scope of creative human expression, their juxtaposition - which has not been previously explored - results in a more comprehensive theory of democratic existence, one that is uniquely able to affirm the creative capacities of the human being. Yielding important theoretical results that will interest scholars of each theorist and of theories of democracy more generally, Politics as Radical Creation provides a valuable means for rethinking the nature of contemporary democratic practice.

This book offers a new perspective on the motherhood experience. Drawing on existential philosophy and recent phenomenological research into motherhood, the book demonstrates how motherhood can be understood as an existential crisis. It argues that an awareness of the existential issues women face will enable mothers to gain a deeper understanding of the multifaceted aspects of their experience. The book is divided into four sections: Existential Crisis, Maternal Mental Health Crisis, Social Crisis and Working with Existential Crisis, where each section. Each chapter is based on either experiential research or the author's extensive therapeutic experience of working with mothers and reflects different aspects of the motherhood journey, all through the lens of a philosophical existential approach. The book is essential reading for mental health practitioners and researchers working with mothers, midwives and health visitors, but it is also written for mothers, with the aim to offer new insights on this important life transition.

Humans encounter and use animals in a stunning number of ways. The nature of these animals and the justifiability or unjustifiabilitly of human uses of them are the subject matter of this volume.
Philosophers have long been intrigued by animal minds and vegetarianism, but only around the last quarter of the twentieth century did a significant philosophical literature begin to be developed on both the scientific study of animals and the ethics of human uses of animals. This literature had a primary focus on discussion of animal psychology, the moral status of animals, the nature and significance of species, and a number of practical problems. This Oxford Handbook is designed to capture the nature of the questions as they stand today and to propose solutions to many of the major problems. Several chapters in this volume explore matters that have never previously been examined by philosophers.
The authors of the thirty-five chapters come from a diverse set of philosophical interests in the History of Philosophy, the Philosophy of Mind, the Philosophy of Biology, the Philosophy of Cognitive Science, the Philosophy of Language, Ethical Theory, and Practical Ethics. They explore many theoretical issues about animal minds and an array of practical concerns about animal products, farm animals, hunting, circuses, zoos, the entertainment industry, safety-testing on animals, the status and moral significance of species, environmental ethics, the nature and significance of the minds of animals, and so on. They also investigate what the future may be expected to bring in the way of new scientific developments and new moral problems.
This book of original essays is the most comprehensive single volume ever published on animal minds and the ethics of our use of animals.

This is a book about the body and its amazing contribution to the moral mind. The author focuses on the important roles the body plays in moral cognition. What happens to us when we observe moral violations, make moral judgments and engage in moral actions? How does the body affect our moral decisions and shape our moral dispositions? Can embodied moral psychology be consistently pursued as a viable alternative to disembodied traditions of moral philosophy? Is there any school of philosophy where the body is discussed as the underlying foundation of moral judgment and action? To answer these questions, the author analyzes Confucian philosophy as an intriguing and insightful example of embodied moral psychology.

This is a concise introduction to the life and work of the Italian militant and political thinker, Antonio Gramsci. As head of the Italian Communist Party in the 1920s, Gramsci was arrested and condemned to 20 years' imprisonment by Mussolini's fascist regime. It was during this imprisonment that Gramsci wrote his famous Prison Notebooks - over 2,000 pages of profound and influential reflections on history, culture, politics, philosophy and revolution. An Introduction to Antonio Gramsci retraces the trajectory of Gramsci's life, before examining his conceptions of culture, politics and philosophy. Gramsci's writings are then interpreted through the lens of his most famous concept, that of 'hegemony'; Gramsci's thought is then extended and applied to 'think through' contemporary problems to illustrate his distinctive historical methodology. The book concludes with a valuable examination of Gramsci's legacy today and useful tips for further reading. George Hoare and Nathan Sperber make Gramsci accessible for students of history, politics and philosophy keen to understand this seminal figure in 20th-century intellectual history.

This book is a unique attempt to systematize the latest research on all that music connotes. Musicological reflections on musically expressive content have been pursued for some decades now, in spite of the formalist prejudices that can still hindermusicians and music lovers. The author organizes this body of research so that both professionals and everyday listeners can benefit from it - in plain English, but without giving up the level of depth required by the subject matter. Two criteria have guided his choice among the many ways to speak about musical meaning: its relevance to performance, and its suitability to the teaching context. The legacy of the so-called art music, without an interpretive approach that links ancient traditions to our present, runs the risk of missing the link to the new generations of musicians and listeners. Complementing the theoretical, systematic content, each chapter includes a wealth of examples, including the so-called popular music.

In ""The Historian's Conscience"", Macintyre and thirteen other Australian historians put history and the history profession under the microscope. Eminent contributors include Alan Atkinson, Graeme Davison, Greg Dening, John Hirst, Beverley Kingston, Marilyn Lake, and Iain McCalman. They not only ask but answer the hard questions about writing and researching history. How do historians choose their histories? What sort of emotional investment do they make in their subjects, and how do they control their sympathies? How do they deal with unpalatable discoveries? To whom are historians responsible? And for whom are they entitled to speak? Intellectually provocative, often personally revealing, always engaged, ""The Historian's Conscience"" is a 'must read'.

Are we oblivious to the wonders of human consciousness? Stephen DeBerry suggests that we must reintegrate the concept of consciousness into mainstream psychology. He develops, from a general systems perspective, a model of consciousness which he uses to explore the effects of technology - the accelerated and pervasive television video universe - on the quality of our lives. What role has modern technology played in the shifting of human consciousness from intrapersonal and interpersonal dimensions to the predominantly impersonal dimension where only the material world matters? The intent of this volume is to provoke questions and dialogue. A cross-disciplinary study of the relationship of human consciousness and cultural pathology, it is intended for anyone who critically thinks that life has more purpose than we allow it. DeBerry's book presents a new model of human consciousness. It also takes a penetrating look at one of the most serious cultural changes of contemporary life: the relationship of consciousness and technology. The first six chapters function as building blocks that construct DeBerry's model by exploring the use of scientific paradigms to study consciousness; by offering a scientific and philosophic background; by introducing a general systems theory; and by describing concepts of perspective and focus, time and space, values and reality assumptions, and language. Chapter seven demonstrates how concept distortions have externalized consciousness. DeBerry's model is then related to issues of contemporary culture and community. Technology's contribution to distortions in consciousness is explored in chapter nine. The volume concludes with a discussion of the contemporary psychopathology of everyday life. Intended for courses in graduate psychology, this volume's interdisciplinary perspective makes it equally relevant for courses in sociology, anthropology, humanistic philosophy, human studies, and social ecology.

The Risk of Freedom presents an in-depth analysis of the philosophy of Jan Patocka, one of the most influential Central European thinkers of the twentieth century, examining both the phenomenological and ethical-political aspects of his work. In particular, Francesco Tava takes an original approach to the problem of freedom, which represents a recurring theme in Patocka's work, both in his early and later writings. Freedom is conceived of as a difficult and dangerous experience. In his deep analysis of this particular problem, Tava identifies the authentic ethical content of Patocka's work and clarifies its connections with phenomenology, history of philosophy, politics and dissidence. The Risk of Freedom retraces Patocka's philosophical journey and elucidates its more problematic and less evident traits, such as his original ethical conception, his political ideals and his direct commitment as a dissident.

This book argues that contemporary liberal democracy is reaching a crisis. Brendan Sweetman contends that this crisis arises from a contentious pluralism involving the rise of incommensurable worldviews that emerge out of the absolutizing of freedom over time in a democratic setting. This clash of worldviews is further complicated by a loss of confidence in reason and by the practical failure of public discourse. A contributory factor is the growing worldview of secularism which needs to be distinguished from both the process of secularization and the concept of the secular state. After describing the crisis, and exploring these themes, and also rejecting proposed solutions from recent liberal political theory, Sweetman develops an approach to pluralist disagreement which requires a re-envisioning of the relationship between religion, secularism and politics, and which allows a limited place for all worldviews in the state, including religious worldviews. Engaging with the work of Philip Kitcher, Robert Audi, John Rawls, A.C. Grayling, Martin Luther King, Cecile Laborde, John Stuart Mill, John Locke, and Plato, Sweetman's approach is a formidable innovation in the quest to maintain a free and fair society.

In A Theory of Environmental Leadership, Mark Manolopoulos draws on his original model of leading outlined in his cutting-edge book Following Reason to derive and develop the first properly systematic model of eco-leadership. Suppose humanity's relation with the Earth may be described in terms of leadership "stages" or modalities: once upon a time, the Earth led or ruled humanity, and now we humans rule or lead the Earth. When the Earth led, the Earth flourished; now that humankind leads, the Earth flounders - ecological crises multiply and intensify. However, there might be a third stage or modality of leadership: humanity leading for the Earth, leading in a way that allows the world, including humans, to re-flourish. What would be the nature of this truly environmental form of leadership? A Theory of Environmental Leadership identifies and critically analyzes the two basic and incompatible positions associated with the way we construe and interact with the non-human: anthropocentrism (human supremacism) and ecocentrism (ecological egalitarianism). By rigorously analyzing and leveraging this polarity, this book outlines an innovative theory of eco-leadership together with some of its confronting-but-necessary measures. Expansive and incredibly timely, A Theory of Environmental Leadership is ideal for a range of audiences, from scholars and students of environmental leadership studies to activists and policymakers. The book's remarkable clarity and engaging character also makes it suitable for the general public.

This work will draw upon the expertise of the editors as authors and various contributors in order to present several different perspectives with the goal of approaching and understanding when ethical lines are crossed. In order to achieve this goal, comparisons of various canons of ethics from related fields such as medicine, law, the military, science and politics will be examined and applied. Case studies will be presented throughout to illustrate ethical dilemmas and challenge the reader with the goal of greater understanding.
* First book to comprehensively address ethics in forensics beyond the laboratory
* Real-life cases presented involving unethical behavior to illustrate concepts
* Discusses ethical considerations while delineating opinion from fact in testimony
* Places forensic ethics within the canons of the legal and medical systems

This book comments on growing authoritarianism in democracy and suggests how it ought to be instead. It asks if some degree of authoritarianism is the need of the hour to address potentially existential issues facing the human race. Readers are encouraged to analyse the state of democracy in their own countries and verify if it meets their expectations, or if it is just a myth or an imposter, or a necessary but imperfect compulsion in the absence of a perfect alternative. The book presents a commentary on the state of democracy in some of the world's leading democracies. It aims to challenge the human mind, which seems to be getting accustomed to not having to think, thanks to a constant bombardment of information-real and fake and in-between-that it receives through social and print media, which is freely accessible through smartphone to which it has become addicted. It discusses how the drivers of capitalism - through their business-like connections with powerful and influential politicians and celebrities-could be cleverly manipulating the gullible human mind and exploiting the system to their own material benefit.

Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present sheds new light on literary representations of precarious labor from 1840 until the present. With contributions by experts in American, British, French, German and Swedish culture, this book examines how literature has shaped the understanding of socio-economic precarity, a concept that is mostly used to describe living and working conditions in our contemporary neoliberal and platform economy. This volume shows that authors tried to develop new poetic tools and literary techniques to translate the experience of social regression and insecurity to readers. While some authors critically engage with normative models of work by zooming in on the physical and affective backlash of being a precarious worker, others even find inspiration in their own situations as writers trying to survive. Furthermore, this volume shows that precarity is not an exclusively contemporary phenomenon and that literature has always been a central medium to (critically) register forms of social insecurity. By retrieving parts of that archive, this volume paves the way to a historically nuanced view on contemporary regimes of precarious work.

Cinema articulates the economic anxieties of each generation of filmmakers and audiences. It has an influence on people's views on various economic issues and many orders of magnitude larger than that of economics as a discipline. This book offers a sweeping study of the representation of economics in cinema across a wide range of areas and genres, from the conflicts over resources in the lawless Old West to the post-scarcity societies of science fiction futures. This book studies how films have portrayed trade unions, scarcity, money, businesses, innovators, migrant workers, working women, globalization, the stock market, and the automation of work. It aims to be useful to those who are interested in cinema with economic themes and to those who want to learn about economics through cinema.

Many Heavens, One Earth is a collection of first-person voices from nine of the world religions. In fifteen articles, devotees and scholars reveal the contributions these traditions make to informing and motivating an ecological response to the environmental issues that beset planet earth. The spiritual messages of world religions have an indispensable and decisive role to play in addressing these environmental problems, for, at their root, these ecological issues are spiritual problems: Unless greed is replaced by moderation and sharing, materialism by spiritual insights and values, consumerism by restraint and simpler living, exploitation by respect and service, and pollution by caring and protection, nature's hospitality will be foolishly rebuffed, and therefore our descendants will inherit a polluted and depleted earth. Religion can be, and must be, a part of this replacement. Since at least 90% of the world's people claim allegiance to various major world religious traditions, religion can exert a crucial and transforming influence.