In a bold new argument, Ulrika Carlsson grasps hold of the figure of Eros that haunts Soren Kierkegaard's The Concept of Irony, and for the first time, uses it as key to interpret that text and his second book, Either/Or. According to Carlsson, Kierkegaard adopts Plato's idea of Eros as the fundamental force that drives humans in all their pursuits. For him, every existential stance-every way of living and relating to the outside world-is at heart a way of loving. By intensely examining Kierkegaard's erotic language, she also challenges the theory that the philosopher's first two books have little common ground and reveals that they are in fact intimately connected by the central and explicit topic of love. In this text suitable for both students and the Kierkegaard specialist, Carlsson claims that despite long-held beliefs about the disparity of his early work, his first two books both relate to love and Part I of Either/Or should be treated as the sequel to The Concept of Irony.

A critique of theory through literature that celebrates the diversity of black being, The Desiring Modes of Being Black explores how literature unearths theoretical blind spots while reasserting the legitimacy of emotional turbulence in the controlled realm of reason that rationality claims to establish. This approach operates a critical shift by examining psychoanalytical texts from the literary perspective of black desiring subjectivities and experiences. This combination of psychoanalysis and the politics of literary interpretation of black texts helps determine how contemporary African American and black literature and queer texts come to defy and challenge the racial and sexual postulates of psychoanalysis or indeed any theoretical system that intends to define race, gender and sexualities. The Desiring Modes of Being Black includes essays on James Baldwin, Sigmund Freud, Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, Assotto Saint, and Rozena Maart. The metacritical reading they unfold interweaves African American Culture, Fanonian and Caribbean Thought, South African Black Consciousness, French Theory, Psychoanalysis, and Gender and Queer Studies.

Since the publication of Paul J. Olscamp's The Moral philosophy of George Berkeley (1970), research has focused on Berkeley's theory of immaterialism as the defining element of his thinking. New readings of his work gathered in this volume position immaterialism as a component of a much broader, overarching apologetic project, which is highly pragmatic in nature. Through close examinations of Berkeley's writings on key political, economic, social, moral and ethical debates, leading experts demonstrate that his writings are not simply theoretical but also bound to a practical concern with the well-being of humanity. The volume opens with nuanced analyses of Berkeley's utilitarianism, which contributors position more precisely as a theological utilitarianism, a facet of natural law and a theory with a distinctly pragmatic basis. This doctrine is reconsidered in the context of Berkeley's moral philosophy, with contributors highlighting the implications of free will for the evaluation of personal (or divine) responsibility for one's actions. Berkeley's concept of desire is reconfigured as a virtue, when channelled towards the common good of society. Contributors close by reassessing Berkeley's political and economic thought and uncover its practical dimension, where individualism is sacrificed for the greater, national interest. The George Berkeley to emerge from this book is a philosopher deeply concerned with the political, economic and social problems of his time, and whose writings proposed practical and not simply theoretical solutions to the challenges facing Britain in the eighteenth century.

In Walking, Henry David Thoreau talks about the importance of nature to mankind, and how people cannot survive without nature, physically, mentally, and spiritually, yet we seem to be spending more and more time entrenched by society. For Thoreau walking is a self-reflective spiritual act that occurs only when you are away from society, that allows you to learn about who you are, and find other aspects of yourself that have been chipped away by society. This new edition of Thoreau's classic work includes annotations and a biographical essay.

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.

Written as a personal diary for spiritual development, Marcus Aurelius's "meditations" were not meant for publication nor posterity, yet the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher has provided inspiration and guidance for more than eighteen centuries.  Now, after nearly two thousand years, Mark Forster has adapted the ideas and principles relevant to the Roman world of the second century and has made them accessible to the twenty-first-century reader.

In explicit form, Kant does not speak that much about values or goods. The reason for this is obvious: the concepts of 'values' and 'goods' are part of the eudaimonistic tradition, and he famously criticizes eudaimonism for its flawed 'material' approach to ethics. But he uses, on several occasions, the traditional teleological language of goods and values. Especially in the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant develops crucial points on this conceptual basis. Furthermore, he implicitly discusses issues of conditional and unconditional values, subjective and objective values, aesthetic or economic values etc. In recent Kant scholarship, there has been a controversy on the question how moral and nonmoral values are related in Kant's account of human dignity. This leads to the more fundamental problem if Kant should be seen as a prescriptvist (antirealist) or as subscribing to a more objective rational agency account of goods. This issue and several further questions are addressed in this volume.