For a long time, analysis of the work of Samuel Beckett has been dominated by existentialist and post-structuralist interpretations. This new volume instead raises the question of how to understand Beckett via the dialectics underpinning his work. The different chapters explore how Beckett exposes and challenges essential dialectical concepts such as objectivity, subjectivity, exteriority, interiority, immanence, transcendence, and most crucially: negativity. With contributions from prominent scholars such as Alain Badiou, Mladen Dolar, and Rebecca Comay, Beckett and Dialectics not only sheds new light on how Beckett investigates the shapes, types, and forms of negation – as in the all-pervasive figures of ‘nothing’, ‘no’, ‘null’, and ‘not’ – but also examines how several phenomena that occur throughout Beckett’s work are structured in their use of negativity. These include the relationships between voice and silence, space and void, movement and stasis, the finite and the infinite and repetition and transformation. This original analysis lends an important new perspective to Beckett studies, and even more fundamentally, to dialectics itself.

From the Greeks to the Arabs and Beyond written by Hans Daiber, is a six volume collection of Daiber's scattered writings, journal articles, essays and encyclopaedia entries on Greek-Syriac-Arabic translations, Islamic theology and Sufism, the history of science, Islam in Europe, manuscripts and the history of oriental studies. It also includes reviews and obituaries. Vol. V and VI are catalogues of newly discovered Arabic manuscript originals and films/offprints from manuscripts related to the topics of the preceding volumes.

The study of Roman society and social relations blossomed in the 1970s. By now, we possess a very large literature on the individuals and groups that constituted the Roman community, and the various ways in which members of that community interacted. There simply is, however, no overview that takes into account the multifarious progress that has been made in the past thirty-odd years. The purpose of this handbook is twofold. On the one hand, it synthesizes what has heretofore been accomplished in this field. On the other hand, it attempts to configure the examination of Roman social relations in some new ways, and thereby indicates directions in which the discipline might now proceed.
The book opens with a substantial general introduction that portrays the current state of the field, indicates some avenues for further study, and provides the background necessary for the following chapters. It lays out what is now known about the historical development of Roman society and the essential structures of that community. In a second introductory article, Clifford Ando explains the chronological parameters of the handbook. The main body of the book is divided into the following six sections: 1) Mechanisms of Socialization (primary education, rhetorical education, family, law), 2) Mechanisms of Communication and Interaction, 3) Communal Contexts for Social Interaction, 4) Modes of Interpersonal Relations (friendship, patronage, hospitality, dining, funerals, benefactions, honor), 5) Societies Within the Roman Community (collegia, cults, Judaism, Christianity, the army), and 6) Marginalized Persons (slaves, women, children, prostitutes, actors and gladiators, bandits). The result is a unique, up-to-date, and comprehensive survey of ancient Roman society.

George Berkeley's investigation of human epistemology remains one of the most respected of its time - this edition contains the treatise in full, complete with the author's preface. One of Berkeley's most important beliefs was that of immaterialism. The meaning being that nothing material exists unless it is perceived by something or someone. Distinct from solipsism - the belief that only the self exists - Berkeley's view is that material items are ideas formed by distinct conscious minds; the concept of reality being simply the summation of shared ideas rather than physical objects fascinated philosophers of the era. Much of Berkeley's philosophy is framed by then-new discoveries in the field of physics. The concepts of color and light thus have a frequent bearing on the overall thesis; disagreeing with Isaac Newton on the subject of space, it was later that Berkeley's contrarian opinions on matters such as calculus and free-thinking gained him further renown.

Drawing on a rich variety of premodern Indian texts across multiple traditions, genres, and languages, this collection explores how emotional experience is framed, evoked, and theorized in order to offer compelling insights into human subjectivity. Rather than approaching emotion through the prism of Western theory, a team of leading scholars of Indian traditions showcases the literary texture, philosophical reflections, and theoretical paradigms that classical Indian sources provide in their own right. The focus is on how the texts themselves approach those dimensions of the human condition we may intuitively think of as being about emotion, without pre-judging what that might be. The result is a collection that reveals the range and diversity of phenomena that benefit from being gathered under the formal term “emotion”, but which in fact open up what such theorisation, representation, and expression might contribute to a cross-cultural understanding of this term. In doing so, these chapters contribute to a cosmopolitan, comparative, and pluralistic conception of human experience. Adopting a broad phenomenological methodology, this handbook reframes debates on emotion within classical Indian thought and is an invaluable resource for researchers and students seeking to understand the field beyond the Western tradition.