Ethology, or how animals relate to their environments, is currently enjoying increased academic attention. A prominent figure in this scholarship is Gilles Deleuze and yet, the significance of his relational metaphysics to ethology has still not been scrutinised. Jason Cullen's book is the first text to analyse Deleuze's philosophical ethology and he prioritises the theorist's examination of how beings relate to each other. For Cullen, Deleuze's Cinema books are integral to this investigation and he highlights how they expose a key Deleuzian theme: that beings are fundamentally continuous with each other. In light of this continuity then, Cullen reveals that how beings understand each other shapes them and allows them to transform their shared worlds.

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.

Aristotle's Topics is a handbook for dialectic, i.e. the exercise for philosophical debates between a questioner and a respondent. Alexander takes the Topics as a sort of handbook teaching how to defend and how attack any philosophical claim against philosophical adversaries. In book 3, Aristotle develops strategies for arguing about comparative claims, in which properties are said to belong to subjects to a greater, lesser, or equal degree. Aristotle illustrates the different argumentative patterns that can be used to establish or refute a comparative claim through one single example: whether something is more or less or equally to be chosen or to be avoided than something else. In his commentary on Topics 3, here translated for the first time into English, Alexander of Aphrodisias spells out Aristotle's text by referring to issues and examples from debates with other philosophical school (especially: the Stoics) of his time. The commentary provides new evidence for Alexander's views on the logic of comparison and is a relatively neglected source for Peripatetic ethics in late antiquity. This volume will be valuable reading for students of Aristotle and of the developments of Peripatetic logic and ethics in late antiquity.

This collection of essays presents new insights into what shaped and constituted the Renaissance and early modern views of fate and fortune. It argues that these ideas were emblematic of a more fundamental argument about the self, society, and the universe and shows that their influence was more widespread, both geographically and thematically, than hitherto assumed.

The history of the relation between religion and Enlightenment has been virtually rewritten In recent decades. The idea of a fairly unidirectional 'rise of paganism', or 'secularisation', has been replaced by a much more variegated panorama of interlocking changes-not least in the nature of both religion and rationalism. This volume explores developments in various cultural fields-from lexicology to geographical exploration, and from philosophy and history to theology, media and the arts-involved in the transformation of worldviews in the decades around 1700. The main focus is on the Dutch Republic, where discussion culture was more inclusive than in most other countries, and where people from very different walks of life joined the conversation. Contributors include: Wiep van Bunge, Frank Daudeij, Martin Gierl, Albert Gootjes, Trudelien van 't Hof, Jonathan Israel, Henri Krop, Fred van Lieburg, Jaap Nieuwstraten, Joke Spaans, Jetze Touber, and Arthur Weststeijn.

What does it mean to see time in the visual arts and how does art reveal the nature of time? Paul Atkinson investigates these questions through the work of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose theory of time as duration made him one of the most prominent thinkers of the fin de siecle. Although Bergson never enunciated an aesthetic theory and did not explicitly write on the visual arts, his philosophy gestures towards a play of sensual differences that is central to aesthetics. This book rethinks Bergson's philosophy in terms of aesthetics and provides a fascinating and original account of how Bergsonian ideas aid in understanding time and dynamism in the visual arts. From an examination of Bergson's influence on the visual arts to a reconsideration of the relationship between aesthetics and metaphysics, Henri Bergson and Visual Culture explores what it means to reconceptualise the visual arts in terms of duration. Atkinson revisits four key themes in Bergson's work - duration; time and the continuous gesture; the ramification of life and durational difference - and reveals Bergsonian aesthetics of duration through the application of these themes to a number of 19th and 20th-century artworks. This book introduces readers and art lovers to the work of Bergson and contributes to Bergsonian scholarship, as well as presenting a new of understanding the relationship between art and time.

The International Kierkegaard Commentary-For the first time in English the world community of scholars systematically assembled and presented the results of recent research in the vast literature of Soren Kierkegaard. Based on the definitive English edition of Kierkegaard's works by Princeton University Press, this series of commentaries addresses all the published texts of the influential Danish philosopher and theologian. This is volume 13 in a series of commentaries based upon the definitive translations of Kierkegaard's writings published by Princeton University Press, 1980ff.