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.

Introductory Readings in Philosophy: An Historical Approach is grounded in the belief that no idea can really be understood or exist separate from the historical context in which it is born. This anthology encourages students to consider not only seminal writings by historical philosophers, but also the philosophers' values, who they were as people, and the society in which they lived. Through this approach, students form a holistic understanding of key philosophical principles and then reflect on how these principles can apply to our modern lives. The anthology is laid out topically, with each chapter referencing works from important figures from the history of philosophy. The chapters pose a series of questions to readers: What is philosophy? What is epistemology? What is the foundation for belief? What is metaphysics? What is moral philosophy? And what is meaning in, and of, human life? Within these chapters, students read a variety of philosophical works by Plato, Rene Descartes, Thomas Aquinas, Friedrich Nietzsche, Aristotle, Confucius, and Immanuel Kant. Topics addressed include moral philosophy, logical defense of our actions, creating one's own method of inquiry, the formation of belief, metaphysics as a way to explain real existence, the concept of duty, and much more. Introductory Readings in Philosophy challenges students to examine their lives and thought processes through the lens of seminal philosophical writings. It is an exceptional resource for introductory courses in philosophy.

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.

The interplay between nature, science, and art in antiquity and the early modern period differs significantly from late modern expectations. In this book scholars from ancient studies as well as early modern studies, art history, literary criticism, philosophy, and the history of science, explore that interplay in several influential ancient texts and their reception in the Renaissance. The Natural History of Pliny, De Architectura of Vitruvius, De Rerum Natura of Lucretius, Automata of Hero, and Timaios of Plato among other texts reveal how fields of inquiry now considered distinct were originally understood as closely interrelated. In our choice of texts, we focus on materialistic theories of nature, knowledge, and art that remain underappreciated in ancient and early modern studies even today.