In her essay collection First, Second, and Other Selves: Essays on Friendship and Personal Identity, well-known scholar of ancient philosophy Jennifer Whiting gathers her previously published essays taking Aristotle's theories on friendship as a springboard to engage with contemporary philosophical work on personal identity and moral psychology. Whiting examines three themes throughout the collection, the first being psychic contingency, or the belief that the psychological structures characteristic of human beings may in fact vary, not just from one cultural (or socio-historical) context to another, but also from one individual to another. The second theme is the belief that friendship informs an understanding of the nature of the self, an idea that springs from Whiting's uncommon reading of Aristotle's writings on friendship. Specifically, Whiting explains a scenario in which a "virtuous agent" adopts a kind of impersonal attitude both towards herself and towards her "character" friends, loving both because they are virtuous; this scenario ties in with an examination of the Aristotelian concept of the ideal friend as an "other self," or a friendship that evolves from character rather than ego, as well as Whiting's meditation on whether or not a virtuous individual should have a "special" sort of concern for her own future self, distinct in kind from the concern that she has for others. The third theme is that of rational egoism, a concept that Whiting critiques, especially in the context of Aristotle's eudaimonism. The central tenet of the collection is the message that taking "ethocentric" (or character-based) attitudes both towards ourselves and towards our friends sheds light on the nature of personal identity and helps to combat ethnocentric and other objectionable forms of bias, a message that is becoming increasingly urgent in light of the recent deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.

Body and Soul: Essays on Aristotle's Hylomorphism is one of three volumes collecting previously published essays by Jennifer Whiting. This volume contains two sets of essays, one centered on Aristotle's account of an animal's body as standing to its soul as matter (hulê) to form (morphê), the other exploring Aristotle's conception of practical reason as the proper form of human desire. In the first set Whiting presents Aristotle's conception of the soul as the form and essence of an organic (and so living) body as part of his solution to Presocratic puzzles about whether there is a real (and not simply conventional) distinction between the coming-to-be (or passing-away) of an individual substance and what is merely the alteration or rearrangement of pre-existing stuffs. The solution also involves taking each individual animal within a species to have its own numerically distinct “individual” form, which (unlike species forms traditionally conceived) exists when and only when it does. The remaining essays account for various deficiencies in the lives of rational animals by appeal to the explanatory asymmetries afforded by Aristotle's teleology, where formal and final causes dominate when things go as they should (teleologically speaking) go, and material-efficient causes dominate when things go wrong. Just as Aristotle traces the birth of females to the failure of menstrual fluid to be fully “mastered” by the formal movements in the father's semen, so too he traces akratic and other defective forms of action to the failure of desires to be fully “mastered” by the activities of reason. Whiting argues that phronêsis is on this account the proper form of the desiring part of the soul, which (when things go well) is one with the practically reasoning part.

This major collection of essays offers the first serious challenge to the traditional view that ancient and modern ethics are fundamentally opposed. In doing so, it has important implications for contemporary ethical thought, as well as providing a significant re-assessment of the work of Aristotle, Kant and the Stoics. The contributors include internationally recognised interpreters of ancient and modern ethics. Four pairs of essays compare and contrast Aristotle and Kant on deliberation and moral development (John McDowell and Barbara Herman), eudaimonism (T. H. Irwin and Stephen Engstrom), self-love and self-worth (Jennifer Whiting and Allen Wood), and practical reason and moral psychology (Julia Annas and Christine Korsgaard). The final pair of essays introduces the Stoics as an example of how the apparently antithetical views of Aristotle and the Stoics might be reconciled (John Cooper and J. B. Schneewind).

Living Together: Essays on Aristotle's Ethics is one of three volumes collecting previously published essays by Jennifer Whiting. This volume explores Aristotle's conception of eudaimonia, especially the roles played in it by the theoretical and practical activities central to human lives and by the quality of our relationships with one another. Whiting explores Aristotle's struggle to reconcile the desirability of living in accordance with justice and other distinctively human virtues with the ideal of pursuing the “divine” life of contemplation. She focuses on Aristotle's attempts to reconcile his conception of eudaimonia as the ultimate end of human action with the parallel requirements that virtuous agents choose to engage in virtuous action “for itself” and that friends love their friends “for themselves”. Drawing on her original reading of Aristotle's conception of the ideal friend as an “other self”, Whiting challenges common readings of Aristotle's eudaimonism as a form of rational egoism. She stresses appreciation of the friend's character “for itself”, and apart from any relationships in which it happens to stand to the agent's own needs and/or tastes, but calls attention to the important and often neglected role that Aristotle assigns to pleasure in this relationship. The ideal friend recognizes the value her friend's activity has for her friend and so takes pleasure in the friend's activity as such. This explains why the maximally self-sufficient (and so most godlike) agent, who needs nothing from a friend, will nevertheless choose to have at least one or two: she enjoys their company.

In Critical Suicidology, a team of international scholars, practitioners, and people directly affected by suicide argue that the field of suicidology has become too focused on the biomedical paradigm: a model that pathologizes distress and obscures the social, political, and historical contexts that contribute to human suffering. The authors take a critical look at existing research, introduce the perspectives of those who have direct personal knowledge of suicide and suicidal behaviour, and propose alternative approaches that are creative and culturally sensitive. In the right hands, this book could save lives.

Scholar Shannon Macaulay and the Dragon-Prince Ewan have been traveling together for a year when their blissful companionship is interrupted by a cryptic message from their friend Martin. "Come to Westshire. Edmond needs you." Drawn to his brother's aid, Ewan finds himself hunting an elusive monster: a winged beast kidnapping young women and stealing their memories. Its latest victim is the Princess Brighid of Westshire, the very girl Edmond has recently fallen for, to the disapproval of her temperamental father, King Riley, and stoic brother, Prince Ryan. Ewan is determined to rescue his brother's beloved, no matter what the cost. But when Ryan's eyes fall upon Shannon, the dragon realizes the cost might be greater than he is willing to pay.

Madison illuminates her mother's world. Some days, Jennifer White Gradnigo feels like Madison's the only thing in her world. She wanted a child so badly before she met her husband that she was in the process of adoption. When Madison came into their life, it truly was like Christmas. However, she didn't fully realize how all-consuming motherhood would be for her. In Motherhood: Not for the Weak, Jennifer talks candidly about what she experienced during her pregnancy and in the weeks immediately after giving birth. She never heard about most of what she experienced from anyone, including her sisters. Once she started sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly about pregnancy, it seemed to make others feel comfortable enough to do the same. Jennifer shares honest reflections about her pregnancy, birth story, and the first few weeks postpartum.

On her first assignment out of the Academy, young healer and scholar, Shannon Macaulay is summoned to the struggling kingdom of Regone to see to the wounds of a young but crippled king. When the unwanted attentions of an aggressive knight and the sudden appearance of a hated dragon turn her world upside down, she decides to take matters into her own hands even if doing so proves dangerous. Finding herself strangely drawn to the company of the dragon, Gnaw, Shannon must force herself out of her safe world of books and botany to come to the aid of her unexpected ally in a strange kingdom, cursed by a fateful encounter with a dragon and the loss of a beloved prince. Can she learn to put aside her fears, and perhaps sacrifice her deepest desires, to help a friend and restore a family?

Before his death from leukemia at the age of 36, Allon White had become known as one of the most important literary and cultural critics of his generation. This volume represents a summation of the work which transformed cultural studies in the 1980s.