Throughout the centuries philosophers and poets alike have defended an essential difference-rather than a porous transition-between the human and animal. Attempts to assign essential properties to humans (e.g., language, reason, or morality) often reflected ulterior aims to defend a privileged position for humans.. This book shifts the traditional anthropocentric focus of philosophy and literature by combining the questions "What is human?" and "What is animal?" What makes this collection unique is that it fills a lacuna in critical animal studies and the growing field of ecocriticism. It is the first collection that establishes a productive encounter between philosophical perspectives on the human-animal boundary and those that draw on fictional literature. The objective is to establish a dialogue between those disciplines with the goal of expanding the imaginative scope of human-animal relationships. The contributions thus do not only trace and deconstruct the boundaries dividing humans and nonhuman animals, they also present the reader with alternative perspectives on the porous continuum and surprising reversal of what appears as human and what as nonhuman.

Borders / Debordering: Topologies, Praxes, Hospitableness engages from interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives some of the most important issues of the present, which lay at the intersection of physical, epistemological, spiritual, and existential borders. The book addresses a variety of topics connected with the role of the body at the threshold between subjective identities and intersubjective spaces that are drawn in ontology, epistemology and ethics, as well as with borders inscribed in intersubjective, social, and political spaces (such as gender/sexuality/race, human/animal/nature/technology divisions). The book is divided in three sections, covering various phenomena of borders and their possible debordering. The first section offers insights into bordering topologies, from reflections on the U.S. border to the development of the concept of the "border" in ancient China. The second section is dedicated to practices as well as intellectual ontologies with practical implications bound up with borders in different cultural and social spheres - from Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka and Myanmar to contemporary photography with its implications for political systems and reflections on human/animal border. The third section covers reflections on hospitality that relate to migration issues, emerging material ethics, and aerial hospitableness.

Strangers to Nature challenges a reading public that has grown complacent with the standard framework of the animal ethics debate. Human influence on, and the control of, the natural world has greater consequences than ever, making the human impact on the lives of animals more evident. We cannot properly interrogate our conduct in the world without a deeper understanding of how our actions affect animals. It is crucial that the human-animal relationship become more central to ethical inquiry. This volume brings together many of the leading scholars who work to redefine and expand the discourse on animal ethics. The contributors examine the radical developments that change how we think about the status of non-human animals in our society and our moral obligations. Strangers to Nature will engage both scholars and lay-people by revealing the breadth of theorizing about current human/non-human animal relationships.

Over a career spanning nearly seven decades, Jurgen Habermas - one of the most important European philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries - has produced a prodigious and influential body of work. In this Lexicon, authored by an international team of scholars, over 200 entries define and explain the key concepts, categories, philosophemes, themes, debates, and names associated with the entire constellation of Habermas's thought. The entries explore the historical, philosophical and social-theoretic roots of these terms and concepts, as well as their intellectual and disciplinary contexts, to build a broad but detailed picture of the development and trajectory of Habermas as a thinker. The volume will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Habermas, as well as for other readers in political philosophy, political science, sociology, international relations, cultural studies, and law.

Friis and Crease capture Postphenomenology, a new field that has attracted attention among scholars engaged in technology studies. Contributors to this edited collection seek to analyze, clarify, and develop postphenomenological language and concepts, expand the work of Don Ihde, the field's founder, and scout into fields that Ihde never tackled. Many of the contributors to this collection had especially close ties to Ihde and have benefited from close work with him. This combined with the distinctive diversity of the contributors-18 people from 10 different countries-enables this volume to put on display the diversity of content and styles in this young movement.

This collection explores the various forms of narrative, semiotic, and technological mediation that shape the experience of place. From the East End of London to Navajo lands to Ground Zero, Lived Topographies examines the great effect of language, mass media, surveillance, and other incursions of the contemporary world on topographical experience and description. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi have assembled a wide array of scholars to provide an interdisciplinary approach to this subject, giving this rich, focused collection a unique perspective on the phenomenology of place.

Karl-Otto Apel is one of the most important German philosophers of the 20th century, and is finally coming to be recognized as such. However, his work is still poorly understood and inadequately treated throughout most of the world. In The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy, critical theory scholar Eduardo Mendieta examines the philosophical origins of discourse ethics through the prism of Apel's thought. Mendieta finds that Apel fundamentally transformed German philosophy, which had become stagnant in the years before World War II, and deeply influenced later thinkers such as Jurgen Habermas. Apel's turn toward pragmatism and analytic philosophy helped him bring the concept of a linguistic paradigm shift to Germany."

Strangers to Nature challenges a reading public that has grown complacent with the standard framework of the animal ethics debate. Human influence on, and the control of, the natural world has greater consequences than ever, making the human impact on the lives of animals more evident. We cannot properly interrogate our conduct in the world without a deeper understanding of how our actions affect animals. It is crucial that the human-animal relationship become more central to ethical inquiry. This volume brings together many of the leading scholars who work to redefine and expand the discourse on animal ethics. The contributors examine the radical developments that change how we think about the status of non-human animals in our society and our moral obligations. Strangers to Nature will engage both scholars and lay-people by revealing the breadth of theorizing about current human/non-human animal relationships.

In "The Frankfurt School on Religion," Eduardo Mendieta has brought together a collection of readings and essays revealing both the deep connections that the Frankfurt School has always maintained with religion as well as the significant contribution that its work has to offer. Rather than being unanimously antagonistic towards religion as has been the received wisdom, this collection shows the great diversity of responses that individual thinkers of the school developed and the seriousness and sophistication with which they engaged the core religious issues and major religious traditions.
Through a careful selection of writings from eleven prominent theorists, including several new and previously untranslated pieces from Leo Lowenthal, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas, this volume provides much needed sources for religious leaders, philosophers, and social theorists as they grapple with the nature and functions of religion in the contemporary social, political, andeconomic landscape.
"The Frankfurt School on Religion" recovers the religious dimensions of the Frankfurt School, for too long sidelined or ignored, and offers new perspectives and insights necessary to the development of a fuller and more nuanced critical theory of society.
Selections and essays from: Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Johann Baptist Metz, Jurgen Habermas, Helmut Peukert, Edmund Arens.

Enrique Ambrosini Dussel is and has been one of the most prolific Latin American philosophers of the last 100 years. He has written over fifty books, and over three hundred articles ranging over the history of the Latin American philosophy, political philosophy, church history, theology, ethics, and occasional pieces on the state of Latin American countries. Dussel is first and foremost a moral philosopher, a philosopher of liberation. But for him, philosophy must be liberated so that it may contribute to social liberation. In one sense, 'beyond philosophy' means to go beyond contemporary, academicized, professionalized, and 'civilized' philosophy by turning to all that demystifies the autonomy of philosophy and turns our attention to its sources. 'Beyond philosophy, ' also means to go beyond philosophy in the Marxian sense of abolishing philosophy by realizing it. This is the definitive English language collection of Dussel's enormous body of work. It will allow the reader to get a good sense of the breath and depth of Dussel's opus, covering four major areas: ethics, economics, history, and liberation theology.

Full Contributors:
Linda Martin Alcoff, David Batstone, Robert N. Bellah, Judith Butler, Barbara Christian, Michael Lerner, Eduardo Mendieta, Ronald Takaki, Cornel West

eBook available with sample pages: HB:0415916585

Simultaneously arising out of such diverse contexts as the black community in the United States, grassroots religious communities in Latin America, and feminist circles in North Atlantic countries, theologies of liberation have emerged as a resource and inspiration for people seeking social and political freedom. Over the last three decades, liberation theology has irrevocably altered religious thinking and practice throughout the Americas.
Liberation Theologies, Postmodernity and the Americas provides a meaningful and spirited debate on vital interpretive issues in religion, philosophy, and ethics. The renowned group of scholars explore liberation theologies' uses of discourses of emancipation, revolution and utopia in contrast with postmodernism's suspicion of grand narratives, while assessing what the postmodernism/liberation debate means for strategies of social and political transformation. Guided by the experiences of those at the margins of social power, liberation theologies demystifythe eurocentric myths of secularization and modernity, and calls for a re-appraisal of religion in contemporary societies.
Contributors: Edmund Arens, David Batstone, Maria Clara Bingemer, Enrique Dussel, Gustavo Gutierrez, Jurgen Habermas, Franz Hinkelammert, Dwight Hopkins, Lois Ann Lorentzen, Eduardo Mendieta, Amos Nascimento, Elsa Tamez, Mark McLain Taylor, and Sharon Welch, Robert Allen Warrior

In "The Frankfurt School on Religion," Eduardo Mendieta has brought together a collection of readings and essays revealing both the deep connections that the Frankfurt School has always maintained with religion as well as the significant contribution that its work has to offer. Rather than being unanimously antagonistic towards religion as has been the received wisdom, this collection shows the great diversity of responses that individual thinkers of the school developed and the seriousness and sophistication with which they engaged the core religious issues and major religious traditions.
Through a careful selection of writings from eleven prominent theorists, including several new and previously untranslated pieces from Leo Lowenthal, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas, this volume provides much needed sources for religious leaders, philosophers, and social theorists as they grapple with the nature and functions of religion in the contemporary social, political, andeconomic landscape.
"The Frankfurt School on Religion" recovers the religious dimensions of the Frankfurt School, for too long sidelined or ignored, and offers new perspectives and insights necessary to the development of a fuller and more nuanced critical theory of society.
Selections and essays from: Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Johann Baptist Metz, Jurgen Habermas, Helmut Peukert, Edmund Arens.

Throughout the centuries philosophers and poets alike have defended an essential difference-rather than a porous transition-between the human and animal. Attempts to assign essential properties to humans (e.g., language, reason, or morality) often reflected ulterior aims to defend a privileged position for humans.. This book shifts the traditional anthropocentric focus of philosophy and literature by combining the questions "What is human?" and "What is animal?" What makes this collection unique is that it fills a lacuna in critical animal studies and the growing field of ecocriticism. It is the first collection that establishes a productive encounter between philosophical perspectives on the human-animal boundary and those that draw on fictional literature. The objective is to establish a dialogue between those disciplines with the goal of expanding the imaginative scope of human-animal relationships. The contributions thus do not only trace and deconstruct the boundaries dividing humans and nonhuman animals, they also present the reader with alternative perspectives on the porous continuum and surprising reversal of what appears as human and what as nonhuman.

The last book by the eminent American philosopher and public intellectual Richard Rorty, providing the definitive statement of his mature philosophical and political views. Richard Rorty's Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism is a last statement by one of America's foremost philosophers. Here Rorty offers his culminating thoughts on the influential version of pragmatism he began to articulate decades ago in his groundbreaking Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Marking a new stage in the evolution of his thought, Rorty's final masterwork identifies anti-authoritarianism as the principal impulse and virtue of pragmatism. Anti-authoritarianism, on this view, means acknowledging that our cultural inheritance is always open to revision because no authority exists to ascertain the truth, once and for all. If we cannot rely on the unshakable certainties of God or nature, then all we have left to go on-and argue with-are the opinions and ideas of our fellow humans. The test of these ideas, Rorty suggests, is relatively simple: Do they work? Do they produce the peace, freedom, and happiness we desire? To achieve this enlightened pragmatism is not easy, though. Pragmatism demands trust. Pragmatism demands that we think and care about what others think and care about, which further requires that we account for others' doubts of and objections to our own beliefs. After all, our own beliefs are as contestable as anyone else's. A supple mind who draws on theorists from John Stuart Mill to Annette Baier, Rorty nonetheless is always an apostle of the concrete. No book offers a more accessible account of Rorty's utopia of pragmatism, just as no philosopher has more eloquently challenged the hidebound traditions arrayed against the goals of social justice.

Over a career spanning nearly seven decades, Jurgen Habermas - one of the most important European philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries - has produced a prodigious and influential body of work. In this Lexicon, authored by an international team of scholars, over 200 entries define and explain the key concepts, categories, philosophemes, themes, debates, and names associated with the entire constellation of Habermas's thought. The entries explore the historical, philosophical and social-theoretic roots of these terms and concepts, as well as their intellectual and disciplinary contexts, to build a broad but detailed picture of the development and trajectory of Habermas as a thinker. The volume will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Habermas, as well as for other readers in political philosophy, political science, sociology, international relations, cultural studies, and law.

Top scholars provide a critical analysis of the current ethical challenges facing police officers, police departments, and the criminal justice system From George Floyd to Breonna Taylor, the brutal deaths of Black citizens at the hands of law enforcement have brought race and policing to the forefront of national debate in the United States. In The Ethics of Policing, Ben Jones and Eduardo Mendieta bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars across the social sciences and humanities to reevaluate the role of the police and the ethical principles that guide their work. With contributors such as Tracey Meares, Michael Walzer, and Franklin Zimring, this volume covers timely topics including race and policing, the use of aggressive tactics and deadly force, police abolitionism, and the use of new technologies like drones, body cameras, and predictive analytics, providing different perspectives on the past, present, and future of policing, with particular attention to discriminatory practices that have historically targeted Black and Brown communities. This volume offers cutting-edge insight into the ethical challenges facing the police and the institutions that oversee them. As high-profile cases of police brutality spark protests around the country, The Ethics of Policing raises questions about the proper role of law enforcement in a democratic society.

There is no place on earth that does not echo with the near or distant sounds of human activity. More than half of humanity lives in cities, meaning the daily soundtrack of our lives is filled with sound-whether it be sonorous, harmonious, melodic, syncopated, discordant, cacophonous, or even screeching. This new anthology aims to explore how humans are placed in certain affective attitudes and dispositions by the music, sounds, and noises that envelop us. Sound and Affect maps a new territory for inquiry at the intersection of music, philosophy, affect theory, and sound studies. The essays in this volume consider objects and experiences marked by the correlation of sound and affect, in music and beyond: the voice, as it speaks, stutters, cries, or sings; music, whether vocal, instrumental, or machine-made; and our sonic environments, whether natural or artificial, and how they provoke responses in us. Far from being stable, correlations of sound and affect are influenced and even determined by factors as diverse as race, class, gender, and social and political experience. Examining these factors is key to the project, which gathers contributions from a cross-disciplinary roster of scholars, including both established and new voices. This agenda-setting collection will prove indispensable to anyone interested in innovative approaches to the study of sound and its many intersections with affect and the emotions.

Enrique Ambrosini Dussel is and has been one of the most prolific Latin American philosophers of the last 100 years. He has written over fifty books, and over three hundred articles ranging over the history of the Latin American philosophy, political philosophy, church history, theology, ethics, and occasional pieces on the state of Latin American countries. Dussel is first and foremost a moral philosopher, a philosopher of liberation. But for him, philosophy must be liberated so that it may contribute to social liberation. In one sense, "beyond philosophy" means to go beyond contemporary, academicized, professionalized, and "civilized" philosophy by turning to all that demystifies the autonomy of philosophy and turns our attention to its sources. "Beyond philosophy," also means to go beyond philosophy in the Marxian sense of abolishing philosophy by realizing it. This is the definitive English language collection of Dussel's enormous body of work. It will allow the reader to get a good sense of the breath and depth of Dussel's opus, covering four major areas: ethics, economics, history, and liberation theology.

What can theology offer in the context of neoliberalism, globalization, growing inequality, and an ever more ecologically precarious planet that disproportionately affects the poor? This book, by one of the country's best-known Latino theologians, explores possibilities for liberation from the forces that would impose certain forms of knowledge on our social world to manipulate our experience of identity, power, and justice.
Beautifully written in a refreshingly direct and accessible prose, Maduro's book is nevertheless built upon subtly articulated critiques and insights. But to write a conventional academic tractatus would have run counter to Maduro's project, which is built on his argument that ignorance is masked in the language of expertise, while true knowledge is dismissed because it is sometimes articulated in pedestrian language by those who produce it through the praxis of solidarity and struggle for social justice.
With a generosity and receptivity to his readers reminiscent of letters between old friends, and with the pointed but questioning wisdom of a teller of parables, Maduro has woven together a twenty-first-century reply to Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach." Neither conventional monograph nor memoir, neither a theological nor a political tract, but with elements of all of these, Maps for a Fiesta arrives as Maduro's philosophical and theological testament one that celebrates the knowledge-work and justice-making of the poor.
What Maduro offers here is a profound meditation on the relationship between knowledge and justice that could be read as a manifesto against the putatively unknowable world that capitalist chaos has made, in favor of a world that is known by the measure of its collective justice. His fiesta grants us the joy that nourishes us in our struggles, just as knowledge gives us the tools to build a more just society. What Maduro offers is nothing less than an epistemology of liberation.

Critique of Latin American Reason is one of the most important philosophical texts to have come out of South America in recent decades. First published in 1996, it offers a sweeping critique of the foundational schools of thought in Latin American philosophy and critical theory. Santiago Castro-Gomez argues that "Latin America" is not so much a geographical entity, a culture, or a place, but rather an object of knowledge produced by a family of discourses in the humanities that are inseparably linked to colonial power relationships. Using the archaeological and genealogical methods of Michel Foucault, he analyzes the political, literary, and philosophical discourses and modes of power that have contributed to the making of "Latin America." Castro-Gomez examines the views of a wide range of Latin American thinkers on modernity, postmodernity, identity, colonial history, and literature, also considering how these questions have intersected with popular culture. His critique spans Central and South America, and it also implicates broader and protracted global processes. This book presents this groundbreaking work of contemporary critical theory in English translation for the first time. It features a foreword by Linda Martin Alcoff, a new preface by the author, and an introduction by Eduardo Mendieta situating Castro-Gomez's thought in the context of critical theory in Latin America and the Global South. Two appendixes feature an interview with Castro-Gomez that sheds light on the book's composition and short provocations responding to each chapter from a multidisciplinary forum of contemporary scholars who resituate the work within a range of perspectives including feminist, Francophone African, and decolonial Black political thought.

What can theology offer in the context of neoliberalism, globalization, growing inequality, and an ever more ecologically precarious planet that disproportionately affects the poor? This book, by one of the country's best-known Latino theologians, explores possibilities for liberation from the forces that would impose certain forms of knowledge on our social world to manipulate our experience of identity, power, and justice.
Beautifully written in a refreshingly direct and accessible prose, Maduro's book is nevertheless built upon subtly articulated critiques and insights. But to write a conventional academic tractatus would have run counter to Maduro's project, which is built on his argument that ignorance is masked in the language of expertise, while true knowledge is dismissed because it is sometimes articulated in pedestrian language by those who produce it through the praxis of solidarity and struggle for social justice.
With a generosity and receptivity to his readers reminiscent of letters between old friends, and with the pointed but questioning wisdom of a teller of parables, Maduro has woven together a twenty-first-century reply to Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach." Neither conventional monograph nor memoir, neither a theological nor a political tract, but with elements of all of these, Maps for a Fiesta arrives as Maduro's philosophical and theological testament one that celebrates the knowledge-work and justice-making of the poor.
What Maduro offers here is a profound meditation on the relationship between knowledge and justice that could be read as a manifesto against the putatively unknowable world that capitalist chaos has made, in favor of a world that is known by the measure of its collective justice. His fiesta grants us the joy that nourishes us in our struggles, just as knowledge gives us the tools to build a more just society. What Maduro offers is nothing less than an epistemology of liberation.