The aim at the core of this book is a synthesis of increasingly popular and culturally significant forms of digital literature on the one hand, and established literary and critical theory on the other: reading digital texts through the lens of canonical theory, but also reading this more traditional theory through the lens of digital texts and related media. In a field which has often regarded the digital as apart from traditional literature and theory, this book highlights continuities in order to analyse digital literature as part of a longer literary tradition. Using examples from social media to video games and works particularly by postmodern and poststructuralist theorists, Digital Literature and Critical Theory contextualises digital forms among their analogue precursors and traces ongoing social developments which find expression in these cultural phenomena, including power dynamics between authors and readers, the individual in (post-)modernity, consumerism, and the potential for intersubjective exchange.

This is the first volume devoted exclusively to the practical philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars. It features original essays by leading Sellars scholars that examine his ethical theory, his theory of practical reasoning, and his theory of intentional agency. While most scholarship on Sellars's philosophy has focused on his epistemology, metaphysics, or philosophy of language and mind, Sellars himself regarded his practical philosophy as central to his overall project of situating rational beings within the natural order. The chapters in this volume address this neglected area of Sellars's philosophy. The chapters are divided into thematic sections covering Sellars's theory of we-intentions - influential in contemporary debates on collective intentionality - naturalism and the manifest image, and the moral point of view. Together, they demonstrate how Sellars's practical philosophy contributes to important debates in contemporary philosophy regarding, for example, expressivist approaches to moral thought and group agency in the collective intentionality literature. Ethics, Practical Reasoning, Agency: Wilfrid Sellars's Practical Philosophy will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in Wilfrid Sellars, American philosophy, and ethics.

Philosophy in the American West explores the physical, ecological, cultural, and narrative environments associated with the western United States, reflecting on the relationship between people and the places that sustain them. The American West has long been recognized as having significance. From Crevecoeur's early observations in Letters from an American Farmer (1782), to Thoreau's reflections in Walden (1854), to twentieth-century thoughts on the legacy of a vanishing frontier, "the West" has played a pivotal role in the American narrative and in the American sense of self. But while the nature of "westernness" has been touched on by historians, sociologists, and, especially, novelists and poets, this collection represents the first attempt to think philosophically about the nature of "the West" and its influence on us. The contributors take up thinkers that have been associated with Continental Philosophy and pair them with writers, poets, and artists of "the West". And while this collection seeks to loosen the cords that tie philosophy to Europe, the traditions of "continental" philosophy-phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and others-offer deep resources for thinking through the particularity of place. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Philosophy, as well as those working in Ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities more broadly.

This book offers two novel claims about Wittgenstein's views and methods on perception as explored in the Philosophical Investigations. The first is an interpretive claim about Wittgenstein: that his views on sensation and perception, including his critique of private language, have their roots in his reflections on sense-datum theories and on what Hymers calls the misleading metaphor of phenomenal space. The second is a major philosophical claim: that Wittgenstein's critique of the misleading metaphor of phenomenal space is of ongoing relevance to current debates concerning first-person authority and the problem of perception because we are still tempted to draw inferences about the phenomenal that only apply to the physical. Many contemporary discussions of these topics are thus premised on the very confusions Wittgenstein sought to dispel. This book will appeal to Wittgenstein scholars who are interested in the Philosophical Investigations and to philosophers of perception who may think that Wittgenstein's views are mistaken, irrelevant, or already adequately appreciated.

The work of Michel Foucault has been influential in the analysis of space in a variety of disciplines, most notably in geography and politics. This collection of essays is the first to focus on what Foucault termed 'heterotopias', spaces that exhibit multiple layers of meaning and reveal tensions within society.

In 1688 the Irish scientist and politician William Molyneux sent a letter to the philosopher John Locke. In it, he asked him a question: could someone who was born blind, and able to distinguish a globe and a cube by touch, be able to immediately distinguish and name these shapes by sight if given the ability to see? The philosophical puzzle offered in Molyneux's letter fascinated not only Locke, but major thinkers such as Leibniz, Berkeley, Diderot, Reid, and numerous others including psychologists and cognitive scientists today. Does such a question represent a philosophical puzzle or a problem that can be solved by experimental tests? Can vision be fully restored after blindness? What is the relation between vision and touch? Are the senses linked through learning or bound at birth? Molyneux's Question and the History of Philosophy is a major collection of essays that explore the long-standing issues Molyneux's problem presents to philosophy of mind, perception and the senses. In addition, the volume considers the question from an interdisciplinary angle, examines the pre-history of the question, and aspects of it that have been ignored, such as perspectives from religion and disability. As such, Molyneux's Question and the History of Philosophy presents a set of philosophically rich, empirically informed, and scientifically rigorous original investigations into this famous puzzle. It will be of great interest to students and researchers in philosophy, psychology, and the cognitive sciences including neuroscience, neurobiology and ophthalmology, as well as those studying the mind, perception and the senses.

This book brings together Foucault's writings on crime and delinquency, on the one hand, and sexuality, on the other, to argue for an anti-carceral feminist Foucauldian approach to sex crimes. The author expands on Foucault's writings through intersectional explorations of the critical race, decolonial, critical disability, queer and critical trans studies literatures on the prison that have emerged since the publication of Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. Drawing on Foucault's insights from his genealogical period, the book argues that those labeled as sex offenders will today be constructed to re-offend twice over, once in virtue of the delinquency with which they are inculcated through criminological discourses and in the criminal punishment system, and second in virtue of the manners in which their sexual offense is taken up as an identity through psychological and sexological discourses. The book includes a discussion of non-retributive responses to crime, including preventative, redistributive, restorative, and transformative justice. It concludes with two appendixes: the original 19th-century medico-legal report on Charles Jouy and its English translation by the author. Foucault, Feminism, and Sex Crimes will be of interest to feminist philosophers, Continental philosophers, Women's and Gender Studies scholars, social and political theorists, as well as social scientists and social justice activists.

Originally published in 1937. This book addresses the importance of the theory of values that rests on a general metaphysical understanding founded on a comprehensive view of all aspects of the world. The author speaks against the absolutist theories with a realistic one encompassing a theory of space and time and considering value as an object of immediate intuition. These great philosophical questions feed into discussions of the philosophy of religion and of science. Garnett distinguishes between spiritual and other values on the ground that the spiritual values are not subjective to satiety, while other values are. He contends that our knowledge of mind is as direct and reliable as our knowledge of the physical world. This is an important early book by an influential 20th Century thinker.

Winner of the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy 2020 Annual Symposium Book Award Stella Gaon provides the first fully philosophical account of the critical nature of deconstruction, and she does so by turning in an original way to psychoanalysis. Drawing on close readings of Freud and Laplanche, Gaon argues that Derridean deconstruction is driven by a normative investment in reason's psychological force. Indeed, deconstruction is more faithful to the principle of reason than the various forms of critical theory prevalent today. For if one pursues the classical demand for rational grounds vigilantly, one finds that claims to ethical or political legitimacy cannot be rationally justified, because they are undone by logical undecidability. Gaon's argument is borne out in the cases of Kantian deontology, Deweyan pragmatism, progressive pedagogy, Habermasian moral theory, Levinasian ethics and others. What emerges is the groundbreaking demonstration that deconstruction is impelled by a quasi-ethical critical drive, and that to read deconstructively is to radicalize the emancipatory practice of reason as self-critique. This important volume will be of great value to critical theorists as well as to Derrida scholars and researchers in social and political thought.

This book provides a wide-ranging, systematic, and comprehensive approach to the moral philosophy of John Dewey, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. It does so by focusing on his greatest achievement in this field: the Ethics he jointly published with James Hayden Tufts in 1908 and then republished in a heavily revised version in 1932. The essays in this volume are divided into two distinct parts. The first features essays that provide a running commentary on the chapters of the 1932 Ethics written by Dewey. Each chapter is introduced, situated within a historical perspective, and then its main achievements are highlighted and discussed. The second part of the book interprets the Ethics and demonstrates its contemporary relevance and vitality. The essays in this part situate the Ethics in the broader interpretive frameworks of Dewey's philosophy, American pragmatism, and 20th-century moral theory at large. Taken together, these essays show that, far from being a mere survey of moral theories, the 1932 Ethics presents the theoretical highpoint in Dewey's thinking about moral philosophy. This book features contributions by some of the most influential Dewey scholars from North America and Europe. It will be of keen interest to scholars and students of American pragmatism, ethics and moral philosophy, and the history of 20th-century philosophy.

Wittgenstein was centrally concerned with the puzzling nature of the mind, mathematics, morality and modality. He also developed innovative views about the status and methodology of philosophy and was explicitly opposed to crudely "scientistic" worldviews. His later thought has thus often been understood as elaborating a nuanced form of naturalism appealing to such notions as "form of life", "primitive reactions", "natural history", "general facts of nature" and "common behaviour of mankind". And yet, Wittgenstein is strangely absent from much of the contemporary literature on naturalism and naturalising projects. This is the first collection of essays to focus explicitly on the relationship between Wittgenstein and naturalism. The volume is divided into four sections, each of which addresses a different aspect of naturalism and its relation to Wittgenstein's thought. The first section considers how naturalism could or should be understood. The second section deals with some of the main problematic domains-consciousness, meaning, mathematics-that philosophers have typically sought to naturalise. The third section explores ways in which the conceptual nature of human life might be continuous in important respects with animals. The final section is concerned with the naturalistic status and methodology of philosophy itself. This book thus casts a fresh light on many classical philosophical issues and brings Wittgensteinian ideas to bear on a number of current debates-for example experimental philosophy, neo-pragmatism and animal cognition/ethics-in which naturalism is playing a central role.

Translated by:
J.N. Findlay

This volume of new essays explores the relationship between the thought of Wittgenstein and the key figures of phenomenology: Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. It is the first book to provide an overview of how Wittgenstein's philosophy in its different phases, including his own so-called phenomenological phase, relates to the variety of phenomenological approaches developed in continental Europe. In so doing, the volume seeks to throw light on both sides of the comparison, and to clarify more broadly the relations between analytic and phenomenological philosophy. However, rather than treating the interpretation of either phenomenological philosophy or Wittgenstein as an already settled issue, several chapters in the volume examine and question received views regarding them, and develop alternatives to such views. Wittgenstein and Phenomenology will be of interest to scholars working in philosophical methodology and metaphilosophy, the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and logic, and ethics.

Unlike those who view Heidegger as an idealist, Taylor Carman asserts that Heidegger is best understood as a realist and offers a new interpretation of his major work, Being and Time. Among the book's distinctive features are an interpretation explicitly oriented within a Kantian framework (often taken for granted in readings of Heidegger) and an analysis of Dasein in relation to recent theories of intentionality; notably those of Dennett and Searle.

The Psychoanalysis of the Absurd offers an interdisciplinary study of Existentialism and Phenomenology and their importance to the clinical work of Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. The concept of Absurdity, developed by Camus, has never been applied to the therapeutic situation or directly contrasted with its antithesis; the search for personal meaning. The book begins with narrative accounts of the historical development of Psychoanalysis, Existentialism and Phenomenology in 20th century Europe. The focus here is on fin de siecle Vienna and Paris between the Wars as the principal incubators of the two disciplines. Accompanied by composite case illustrations, Leffert then explores his own development of the Psychoanalysis of the Absurd, drawing on the work of Camus, Heidegger and Sartre. Absurdity is first discussed in relation to the Bio-Psycho-Social Self and Dasein is posited as a bridge concept, with personal meaning as the antithesis to Absurdity, before being discussed in relation to the world and how it impinges on self. A final chapter attempts to tie together particular issues raised by the book: Subjective well-being, Meaning, thrownness, Absurdity, Death and Death Anxiety and how we have become technologically enhanced human beings. Existential psychotherapy and psychoanalysis have, until now, largely gone their own way: the goal of this book is to fold them back into Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Establishing that the concept of Absurdity is of singular clinical importance to both diagnosis and therapeutic action, this book will be of great interest to clinicians, philosophers, and interdisciplinary scientists.

The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was one of the greatest intellectuals of the twentieth century. His work has had a profound impact not only within anthropology but also linguistics, sociology and philosophy. In this short book he examines the nature and role of myth in human history, distilling a lifetime of writing into a few sharp insights. It is a crystalline overview of many of the basic ideas underlying his work, including the theory of structuralism and the difference between 'primitive' and 'scientific' thought and shows why Levi-Strauss remains a hugely important intellectual figure. With a new foreword by Patrick Wilcken.

This book offers a systematic framework for thinking about the relationship between language and technology and an argument for interweaving thinking about technology with thinking about language. The main claim of philosophy of technology-that technologies are not mere tools and artefacts not mere things, but crucially and significantly shape what we perceive, do, and are-is re-thought in a way that accounts for the role of language in human technological experiences and practices. Engaging with work by Wittgenstein, Heidegger, McLuhan, Searle, Ihde, Latour, Ricoeur, and many others, the author critically responds to, and constructs a synthesis of, three "extreme", idealtype, untenable positions: (1) only humans speak and neither language nor technologies speak, (2) only language speaks and neither humans nor technologies speak, and (3) only technology speaks and neither humans nor language speak. The construction of this synthesis goes hand in hand with a narrative about subjects and objects that become entangled and constitute one another. Using Words and Things thus draws in central discussions from other subdisciplines in philosophy, such as philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics, to offer an original theory of the relationship between language and (philosophy of) technology centered on use, performance, and narrative, and taking a transcendental turn.

Bernard Williams' Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy is widely regarded as one of the most important works of moral philosophy in the last fifty years. Williams's powerful sceptical critique of the "morality system" sent shockwaves through philosophy, the implications of which are still being reckoned with thirty years later. In this outstanding collection of new essays, fourteen internationally-recognised philosophers examine the enduring contribution that Williams's book continues to make to ethics. After a detailed topical summary of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy by Adrian Moore, the full scope of the work is assessed, including the role of Aristotle and Hume in Williams' thought and his arguments concerning the history of philosophy; the nature of virtue, the good life, practical reason, and deliberation; and the themes of duty, blame and inauthenticity. Ethics Beyond the Limits is required reading for students and researchers in ethics, metaethics, and moral psychology, and highly recommended for anyone studying the work of Bernard Williams.

At the time when existentialism was a dominant intellectual and cultural force, a number of commentators observed that some of the language of existential philosophy, not least its interpretation of human existence in terms of nothingness, evoked the language of so-called mystical writers. This book takes on this observation and explores the evidence for the influence of mysticism on the philosophy of existentialism. It begins by delving into definitions of mysticism and existentialism, and then traces the elements of mysticism present in German and French thought during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book goes on to make original contributions to the study of figures including Kierkegaard, Buber, Heidegger, Beauvoir, Sartre, Marcel, Camus, Weil, Bataille, Berdyaev, and Tillich, linking their existentialist philosophy back to some of the key concerns of the mystical tradition. Providing a unique insight into how these two areas have overlapped and interacted, this study is vital reading for any academic with an interest in twentieth-century philosophy, theology and religious studies.

Cultural anxieties about fatness and the attendant stigmatisation of fat bodies, have lent a medical authority and cultural legitimacy to what can be described as 'fat-phobia'. Against the backdrop of the ever-growing medicalisation, pathologisation, and commodification of fatness, coupled with the moral panic over an alleged 'obesity epidemic', this volume brings together the latest scholarship from various critical disciplines to challenge existing ideas of fat and fat embodiment. Shedding light on the ways in which fat embodiment is lived, experienced, regulated and (re)produced across a range of cultural sites and contexts, Queering Fat Embodiment destabilises established ideas about fat bodies, making explicit the intersectionality of fat identities and thereby countering the assertion that fat studies has in recent years reproduced a white, ableist, heteronormative subjectivity in its analyses. A critical queer examination on fatness, Queering Fat Embodiment will be of interest to scholars of cultural and queer theory, sociology and media studies, working on questions of embodiment, stigmatisation and gender and sexuality.

"There is always an atheism to be extracted from a religion," Deleuze and Guattari write in their final collaboration, What Is Philosophy? Their claim that Christianity "secretes" atheism "more than any other religion," however, reflects the limits of their archive. Theological projects seeking to engage Deleuze remain embedded within Christian theologies and intellectual histories; whether they embrace, resist, or negotiate with Deleuze's atheism, the atheism in question remains one extracted from Christian theology, a Christian atheism. In Sufi Deleuze, Michael Muhammad Knight offers an intervention, engaging Deleuzian questions and themes from within Islamic tradition. Even if Deleuze did not think of himself as a theologian, Knight argues, to place Deleuze in conversation with Islam is a project of comparative theology and faces the challenge of any comparative theology: It seemingly demands that complex, internally diverse traditions can speak as coherent, monolithic wholes. To start from such a place would not only defy Islam's historical multiplicity but also betray Deleuze's model of the assemblage, which requires attention to not only the organizing and stabilizing tendencies within a structure but also the points at which a structure resists organization, its internal heterogeneity, and unpredictable "lines of flight." A Deleuzian approach to Islamic theology would first have to affirm that there is no such thing as a universal "Islamic theology" that can speak for all Muslims in all historical settings, but rather a multiplicity of power struggles between major and minor forces that contest each other over authenticity, authority, and the making of "orthodoxy." The discussions in Sufi Deleuze thus highlight Islam's extraordinary range of possibilities, not only making use of canonically privileged materials such as the Qur'an and major hadith collections, but also exploring a variety of marginalized resources found throughout Islam that challenge the notion of a singular "mainstream" interpretive tradition. To say it in Deleuze's vocabulary, Islam is a rhizome.

The central task of phenomenology is to investigate the nature of consciousness and its relations to objects of various types. The present book introduces students and other readers to several foundational topics of phenomenological inquiry, and illustrates phenomenology's contemporary relevance. The main topics include consciousness, intentionality, perception, meaning, and knowledge. The book also contains critical assessments of Edmund Husserl's phenomenological method. It argues that knowledge is the most fundamental mode of consciousness, and that the central theses constitutive of Husserl's "transcendental idealism" are compatible with metaphysical realism regarding the objects of thought, perception, and knowledge. Helpful tools include introductions that help the reader segue from the previous chapter to the new one, chapter conclusions, and suggested reading lists of primary and some key secondary sources. Key Features: Elucidates and engages with contemporary work in analytic epistemology and philosophy of mind Provides clear prose explanations of the necessary distinctions and arguments required for understanding the subject Places knowledge at the center of phenomenological inquiry

Writings on History brings together a selection of texts by Louis Althusser dating from 1963 to 1986, including essays, a lecture, notes to his collaborators, and the transcript of an informal 1963 discussion of literary history. The centrepiece of this collection is Althusser's previously unpublished Book on Imperialism, a theorization of globalized capitalism that remained unfinished. All these writings are concerned with the place of history in Marxist theory and, in particular, on what Althusser considered to be the mortal danger of historicism haunting the revolutionary reading of the present. They testify to his continuing dialogue with the historiography of his day, several of whose representatives were engaged in discussion and debate with him. Deeply interested in history but intent on avoiding the kind of interpretation that would transform it into a deterministic force, Althusser never ceased to reflect on the equilibrium between the historical and the concept in Marxist historiography, an equilibrium that he sought to reinvent for his time. The traces of that undertaking, which continues to generate debate throughout the world today, are brought together in this volume.

Christos Yannaras is one of the most significant Orthodox theologians of recent times. The work of Yannaras is virtually synonymous with a turn or renaissance of Orthodox philosophy and theology, initially within Greece, but as the present volume confirms, well beyond it. His work engages not only with issues of philosophy and theology, but also takes in wider questions of culture and politics. With contributions from established and new scholars, the book is divided into three sections, which correspond to the main directions that Christos Yannaras has followed - philosophy, theology, and culture - and reflects on the ways in which Yannaras has engaged and influenced thought across these fields, in addition to themes including ecclesiology, tradition, identity, and ethics. This volume facilitates the dialogue between the thought of Yannaras, which is expressed locally yet is relevant globally, and Western Christian thinkers. It will be of great interest to scholars of Orthodox and Eastern Christian theology and philosophy, as well as theology more widely.

In his late work Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Immanuel Kant struggles to answer a straightforward, yet surprisingly difficult, question: how is radical conversion-a complete reorientation of a person's most deeply held values-possible? In this book, Ryan S. Kemp and Christopher Iacovetti examine how this question gets taken up by Kant's philosophical heirs: Schelling, Fichte, Hegel and Kierkegaard. More than simply developing a novel account of each thinker's position, Kemp and Iacovetti trace how each philosopher formulates his theory in response to tensions in preceding views, culminating in Kierkegaard's claim that radical conversion lies outside a person's control. Kemp and Iacovetti close by examining some of the moral-psychological implications of Kierkegaard's account, particularly the question of how someone might responsibly relate to values that have, by their own admission, been acquired in contingent and accidental fashion.