This book analyzes the implication of secular/liberal values in Western and human rights law and its impact on Muslim women. It offers an innovative reading of the tension between the religious and secular spheres. The author does not view the two as binary opposites. Rather, she believes they are twin categories that define specific forms of lives as well as a specific notion of womanhood. This divergence from the usual dichotomy opens the doors for a reinterpretation of secularism in contemporary Europe. This method also helps readers to view the study of religion vs. secularism in a new light. It allows for a better understanding of the challenges that contemporary Europe now faces regarding the accommodation of different religious identities. For instance, one entire section of the book concerns the practice of veiling and explores the contentious headscarf debate. It features case studies from Germany, France, and the UK. In addition, the analysis combines a wide range of disciplines and employs an integrated, comparative, and inter-disciplinary approach. The author successfully brings together arguments from different fields with a comparative legal and political analysis of Western and Islamic law and politics. This innovative study appeals to students and researchers while offering an important contribution to the debate over the role of religion in contemporary secular Europe and its impact on women's rights and gender equality.

What is the point of living? If we are all going to die anyway, if nothing will remain of whatever we achieve in this life, why should we bother trying to achieve anything in the first place? Can we be mortal and still live a meaningful life? Questions such as these have been asked for a long time, but nobody has found a conclusive answer yet. The connection between death and meaning, however, has taken centre stage in the philosophical and literary work of some of the world's greatest writers: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Soren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, Herman Melville, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Marcel Proust, and Albert Camus. This book explores their ideas, weaving a rich tapestry of concepts, voices and images, helping the reader to understand the concerns at the heart of those writers' work and uncovering common themes and stark contrasts in their understanding of what kind of world we live in and what really matters in life.

With entries written by leading scholars in the field of Modern Philosophy, this is a complete one-volume reference guide to Leibniz's life, thought and work. G.W.F. Leibniz (1646-1716) was one of the great polymaths of the modern world. As well as being among the greatest Rationalist metaphysicians of the post-medieval age, he built the first mechanical calculator capable of multiplication and division, and developed the binary, base-two system. As a physicist, he made advances in mechanics, coining the term 'kinetic energy'. As a mathematician, Leibniz invented calculus independently of Newton, and it is his notation, not Newton's, which is used to this day. Perhaps best known for the atomic concept of the monad, Leibniz also made outstanding contributions to symbolic logic, aesthetics, history, linguistics, and political theory. With entries written by leading scholars in the field of Modern Philosophy, this Companion is an accessible and authoritative reference guide to Leibniz's life, work and. The book includes extended biographical sketches, a time line and an up-to-date annotated bibliography. Gathering all these resources, this book will be an extremely valuable tool for those interested in Leibniz and the era in which he wrote. "The Continuum Companions" series is a major series of single volume companions to key research fields in the humanities aimed at postgraduate students, scholars and libraries. Each companion offers a comprehensive reference resource giving an overview of key topics, research areas, new directions and a manageable guide to beginning or developing research in the field. A distinctive feature of the series is that each companion provides practical guidance on advanced study and research in the field, including research methods and subject-specific resources.

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.

This book reflects the most recent research devoted to a systematized perspective and a critical (re)construction of previous theoretical attempts of explaining, justifying and continuing Kuhn's ingenious hypothesis in arts. Hofstadter, Clignet and Habermas revealed to be the most engaged scholars in solving this aesthetic "puzzled-problem". In this context, the structural similarities between science and arts are attentively evaluated, thus satisfying an older concern attributed to the historical Kuhn-Kubler dispute, extensively commented along the pages of this book. How can we track the matter of rationality and truth in art and aesthetics, inspired by scientific perspectives? Are artistic styles similar to scientific paradigms? Are we entitled to pursue paradigms and masterpieces as rational models in science, respectively in arts? On what possible grounds can we borrow from science notions such as progress and predictability, in the study of the evolution of art and its aesthetic backgrounds? Are the historical dynamics of science and art affected by political factors in the same manner? This book will be of interest to philosophers, but also to historians of science and historians of art alike in the reassessment it provides of recent debates on reshaping the art world using Kuhn's "paradigm shift".

Overcoming Uncertainty in Ancient Greek Political Philosophy makes an historical and theoretical contribution by explaining the role of opinion in ancient Greek political philosophy, showing its importance for Aristotle's theory of deliberation, and indicating a new model for a deliberative republic. Currently, there are no studies of opinion in ancient Greek political theory and so the book breaks new historical ground. The book establishes that opinion is key for the political theories of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics because each sees uncertainty as a problem that needs to be overcome if one is to establish a virtuous polity. Since they have different notions of the nature of the uncertainty of opinion, they develop very different political strategies to overcome it. The book explains that Plato's and the Stoics' analyses of uncertainty support oligarchy and monarchy, respectively, and that theoretical support for deliberate politics requires a more nuanced understanding of uncertainty that only Aristotle provides.

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘Where you arrive does not matter so much as what sort of person you are when you arrive there.’ Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4BC–AD 65) is one of the most eminent Roman philosophers. Instrumental in guiding the Roman Empire under Emperor Nero, Seneca influenced him from a young age with his Stoic principles. Later in life, Seneca wrote Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, or Letters from a Stoic, detailing these principles in full, sharing the many traditional themes of Stoic philosophy, such as the contempt of death, the value of friendship and virtue as the supreme good. Using Gummere’s translation from the early twentieth century, this selection of Seneca’s letters shows his belief in the ethical ideas of Stoicism and continues to provide practical, personal counsel for readers seeking guidance in the turbulent twenty-first century.

The book explores Peirce's non standard thoughts on a synthetic continuum, topological logics, existential graphs, and relational semiotics, offering full mathematical developments on these areas. More precisely, the following new advances are offered: (1) two extensions of Peirce's existential graphs, to intuitionistic logics (a new symbol for implication), and other non-classical logics (new actions on nonplanar surfaces); (2) a complete formalization of Peirce's continuum, capturing all Peirce's original demands (genericity, supermultitudeness, reflexivity, modality), thanks to an inverse ordinally iterated sheaf of real lines; (3) an array of subformalizations and proofs of Peirce's pragmaticist maxim, through methods in category theory, HoTT techniques, and modal logics. The book will be relevant to Peirce scholars, mathematicians, and philosophers alike, thanks to thorough assessments of Peirce's mathematical heritage, compact surveys of the literature, and new perspectives offered through formal and modern mathematizations of the topics studied.