A wide range of philosophical essays informed by the work of Harry Frankfurt, who offers a response to each essay. The original essays in this book address Harry Frankfurt's influential writing on personal identity, love, value, moral responsibility, and the freedom and limits of the human will. Many of Frankfurt's deepest insights come from exploring the self-reflective nature of human agents and the psychic conflicts that self-reflection often produces. His work has informed discussions in metaphysics, metaethics, normative ethics, and action theory. The authors, recognized for their own contributions to the understanding of human agency, defend their original philosophical positions at the same time that they respond to Frankfurt's. Each essay is followed by a response from Frankfurt, in which he clarifies and elaborates on his views.

Hungry are the dead, unable to be sated. Still their nation grows. -Winifred Lewis Every culture has its tales of ghosts and ghoulies, dead things that stalk the night to prey upon the living. Stories of these creatures have been told around campfires from time immemorial, lending an added chill to the darkness beyond. They have been the subject of countless songs and poems. What is it that the living find so fascinating about the living dead? That is a question we'll leave you to answer. We're just happy to add to the mythology in this collection of poetry and short stories featuring "zombies, vampires, ghosts, and other dead things that want to eat you."

To treat some human beings as less worthy of concern and respect than others is to lose sight of their humanity. But what does this moral blindness amount to? What are we missing when we fail to appreciate the value of humanity? The essays in this volume offer a wide range of competing, yet overlapping, answers to these questions. Some essays examine influential views in the history of Western philosophy. In others, philosophers currently working in ethics develop and defend their own views. Some essays appeal to distinctively human capacities. Others argue that our obligations to one another are ultimately grounded in self-interest, or certain shared interests, or our natural sociability. The philosophers featured here disagree about whether the value of human beings depends on the value of anything else. They disagree about how reason and rationality relate to this value, and even about whether we can reason our way to discovering it. This rich selection of proposals encourages us to rethink some of our own deepest assumptions about the moral significance of being human.