NEW IN
PHILOSOPHY
- PHILOSOPHY: Aesthetics
- PHILOSOPHY: Eastern
- PHILOSOPHY: Epistemology
- PHILOSOPHY: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
- PHILOSOPHY: Free Will & Determinism
- PHILOSOPHY: General
- PHILOSOPHY: Good & Evil
- PHILOSOPHY: History & Surveys
- PHILOSOPHY: Logic
- PHILOSOPHY: Metaphysics
- PHILOSOPHY: Methodology
- PHILOSOPHY: Mind & Body
- PHILOSOPHY: Movements
- PHILOSOPHY: Political
- PHILOSOPHY: Religious
- PHILOSOPHY: Social
- Earthly Paradise
- Hardcover June 2009
- Arguing the Just War in Islam
- Jihad, with its many terrifying associations, is a term widely used today, though its meaning is poorly grasped. Kelsay's timely and important work focuses on jihad of the sword in Islamic thought, history, and culture. Making use of original sources, Kelsay delves into the tradition of shari'a--Islamic jurisprudence and reasoning--and shows how it defines jihad as the Islamic analogue of the Western "just" war.
- Paperback May 2009
- Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?
- Bauman urges us to think in new ways about a newly flexible, newly challenging modern world. In an era of routine travel, where most people circulate widely, the inherited beliefs that aid our thinking about the world have become an obstacle. He challenges members of the “knowledge class” to overcome their estrangement from the rest of society.
- Paperback May 2009
- What Is Good and Why
- What is good, how do we know, and how important is it? In this book, one of our most respected analytical philosophers reorients these questions around the notion of what causes human beings to flourish. Observing that we can sensibly address what is good for plants and animals no less than what is good for people, Kraut applies a general principle to the entire living world: what is good for complex organisms consists in the exercise of their natural powers.
- Paperback May 2009
- The Form of Practical Knowledge
- Hardcover April 2009
- Kant and the Limits of Autonomy
- Hardcover April 2009
- Looking Away
- Hardcover April 2009
- Minerva's Owl
- Hardcover April 2009
- The Physiology of Truth
- In this wide-ranging book, one of the boldest thinkers in modern neuroscience confronts an ancient philosophical problem: can we know the world as it really is? Drawing on provocative new findings about the psychophysiology of perception and judgment in both human and nonhuman primates, and also on the cultural history of science, Jean-Pierre Changeux makes a powerful case for the reality of scientific progress and argues that it forms the basis for a coherent and universal theory of human rights.
- Paperback March 2009
- Saving Persuasion
- In Saving Persuasion, Bryan Garsten uncovers the early modern origins of today's suspicious attitude toward rhetoric and seeks to loosen its grip on contemporary political theory. He argues that the artful practice of persuasion ought to be viewed as a crucial part of democratic politics. Against theorists who advocate a rationalized ideal of deliberation aimed at consensus, Garsten argues that a controversial politics of partiality and passion can produce a more engaged and more deliberative kind of democratic discourse.
- Paperback March 2009
- A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith
- Hardcover March 2009
- The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen
- Hardcover March 2009
- In Defense of Common Sense
- Hardcover March 2009
- James and Royce Reconsidered
- Paperback March 2009
- 'Yo!' and 'Lo!': The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons
- Much of twentieth-century philosophy was organized around the “linguistic turn,” in which metaphysical and epistemological issues were approached through an analysis of language. This book demonstrates that non-declarative speech acts—including vocative hails (“Yo!”) and calls to shared attention (“Lo!”)—are as fundamental to the possibility and structure of meaningful language as are declaratives.
- Hardcover January 2009
- Civilization and Enlightenment
- The idea that society progresses through stages of development, from savagery to civilization, arose in eighteenth-century Europe. Craig traces how Fukuzawa Yukichi, deeply influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment, “translated” the idea for Japanese society, both enriching and challenging the concept.
- Hardcover January 2009
- Depth
- Strevens proposes a novel theory of scientific explanation and understanding that overhauls and augments the familiar causal approach to explanation. The result is an account of explanation that has especially significant consequences for the higher-level sciences: biology, psychology, economics, and other social sciences.
- Hardcover January 2009
- The Engaged Intellect
- This book collects important essays of John McDowell. Each involves a sustained engagement with the views of an important philosopher and is characterized by a modesty that is partly temperamental and partly methodological.
- Hardcover January 2009
- Having the World in View
- McDowell builds on his much discussed Mind and World. He argues that the roots of some problems plaguing contemporary philosophy can be found in issues that were first discerned by Kant, and that the best way to get a handle on them is to follow those issues as they are reshaped in the writings of Hegel and Sellars. This new book will be a decisive further step toward healing the divisions in contemporary philosophy.
- Hardcover January 2009
- The Naked Gaze
- This volume focuses on tropes of visuality and gender to reflect on shifting understandings of the significance of Chineseness, modernity, and Chinese modernity. Through detailed readings of narrative works by eight authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the study identifies three distinct constellations of visual concerns corresponding to the late imperial, mid-twentieth century, and contemporary periods, respectively.
- Hardcover January 2009
- Commentaries on Plato, Volume 1, Phaedrus and Ion
- Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus, was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. This volume contains Ficino’s extended analysis and commentary on the Phaedrus.
- Hardcover November 2008
- Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist and Other Essays
- In the twenty years between his last collection of essays and his death in 2000, Quine continued his work and occasionally modified his position on central philosophical issues. This volume collects the main essays from this last, productive period of Quine’s prodigious career.
- Hardcover November 2008
- Death and Character
- Baier goes beyond her earlier work on David Hume to reflect on a topic that links his philosophy to questions of immediate relevance—in particular, questions about what character is and how it shapes our lives. Her reading radically revises the received interpretation of Hume’s epistemology and, in particular, philosophy of mind.
- Hardcover November 2008
- Quine in Dialogue
- Quine was one of the twentieth century’s great philosophers. This volume begins with a number of interviews Quine gave about his perspectives on twentieth-century logic, science and philosophy, the ideas of others, and philosophy generally. Also included are his most important articles, reviews, and comments on other philosophers, from Rudolf Carnap to P. F. Strawson.
- Hardcover November 2008
- Weaving Truth
- "What if truth were a woman?" asked Nietzsche. In ancient Greek thought, truth in language has a special relation to the female by virtue of her pre-eminent art-form--the one Freud believed was even invented by women--weaving. The essays in this book explore the implications of this nexus: language, the female, weaving, and the construction of truth.
- Paperback November 2008
- Providence Lost
- In our ever more secular times—is providence lost? Perhaps, but as Lloyd makes clear, providence still exerts a powerful influence on our thought and in our lives. This book traces a succession of transformations in the concept of providence through the history of Western philosophy.
- Hardcover November 2008
- Rescuing Justice and Equality
- In this work of political philosophy, Cohen sets out to rescue the egalitarian thesis that in a society where distributive justice prevails, people’s material prospects are roughly equal. Arguing against the Rawlsian version of a just society, Cohen demonstrates that distributive justice does not tolerate deep inequality.
- Hardcover November 2008
- Seeing Red
- Beginning with the seemingly simple act of seeing red, this brilliantly unsettling essay builds toward an explanation of why consciousness makes compelling evolutionary sense. From sensations that probably began in bodily expression to the evolutionary advantages of a conscious self, Seeing Red tracks the "hard problem" of consciousness to its source and its solution, a solution in which the very hardness of the problem may make all the difference.
- Paperback October 2008
- The Consolation of Philosophy
- Composed while its author was imprisoned, this book remains one of Western literature’s most eloquent meditations on the transitory nature of earthly belongings, and the superiority of things of the mind. Slavitt’s translation captures the energy and passion of the original. And in an introduction intended for the general reader, Seth Lerer places Boethius’s life and achievement in context.
- Hardcover September 2008
- Loneliness as a Way of Life
- “What does it mean to be lonely?” Dumm asks. His inquiry, documented in this book, takes us beyond social circumstances and into the deeper forces that shape our very existence as modern individuals. The modern individual, Dumm suggests, is fundamentally a lonely self. This book challenges us, not to overcome our loneliness, but to learn how to re-inhabit it in a better way.
- Hardcover September 2008
- Moral Dimensions
- Scanlon reframes current philosophical debates as he explores the moral permissibility of an action. Blame, he argues, is a response to the meaning of an action rather than its permissibility. This analysis leads to a novel account of the conditions of moral responsibility and to important conclusions about the ethics of blame.
- Hardcover September 2008
- Reading Tao Yuanming
- Tao Yuanming (365?–427), although dismissed as a poet following his death, is now considered one of China’s greatest writers. This study of the posthumous reputation of a central figure in Chinese literary history, the mechanisms at work in the reception of his works, and the canonization of Tao himself and of particular readings of his works sheds light on the transformation of literature and culture in premodern China.
- Hardcover September 2008
- The Affirmation of Life
- While most recent studies of Nietzsche's works have lost sight of the fundamental question of the meaning of a life characterized by inescapable suffering, Bernard Reginster's book The Affirmation of Life brings it sharply into focus. Reginster identifies overcoming nihilism as a central objective of Nietzsche's philosophical project, and shows how this concern systematically animates all of his main ideas.
- Paperback September 2008
- Expression and the Inner
- At least since Descartes, philosophers have been interested in the special knowledge or authority that we exhibit when we speak about our own thoughts, attitudes, and feelings. This book contends that even the best work in contemporary philosophy of mind fails to account for this sort of knowledge or authority because it does not pay the right sort of attention to the notion of expression. What's at stake is not only how to understand self-knowledge and first-person authority, but also what it is that distinguishes conscious from unconscious psychological states, what the mental life of a nonlinguistic animal has in common with our sort of mental life, and how to think about Wittgenstein's legacy to the philosophy of mind.
- Paperback September 2008
- Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy
- This last book by the late John Rawls offers readers an account of the liberal political tradition. Constantly revised and refined over three decades, Rawls's lectures on various historical figures reflect his developing and changing views on the history of liberalism and democracy. With its clear and careful analyses of the doctrine of the social contract, utilitarianism, and socialism, this volume has a critical place in the traditions it expounds.
- Paperback September 2008
- Moral Literacy
- Distinguished moral philosopher Herman draws on Kant to address timeless issues in ethical theory as well as issues arising from current moral questions, such as affirmative action and the moral costs of reparative justice. Challenging various Kantian orthodoxies, Herman offers a view of moral competency as a complex achievement, governed by rational norms and dependent on supportive social conditions.
- Paperback September 2008
- Naturalism in Question
- Today the majority of philosophers in the English-speaking world adhere to the "naturalist" credos that philosophy is continuous with science, and that the natural sciences provide a complete account of all that exists--whether human or nonhuman. However, there is a growing skepticism about the adequacy of this complacent orthodoxy. This volume presents a group of leading thinkers who criticize scientific naturalism not in the name of some form of supernaturalism, but in order to defend a more inclusive or liberal naturalism.
- Paperback September 2008
- Reasonably Vicious
- Is unethical conduct necessarily irrational? Answering this question requires giving an account of practical reason, of practical good, and of the source or point of wrongdoing. By the time most contemporary philosophers have done the first two, they have lost sight of the third, chalking up bad action to rashness, weakness of will, or ignorance. In this book, Candace Vogler does all three, taking as her guides scholars who contemplated why some people perform evil deeds. In doing so, she sets out to at once engage and redirect contemporary debates about ethics, practical reason, and normativity
- Paperback September 2008
- Truth and Predication
- Anchored in classical philosophy, Truth and Predication nonetheless makes telling use of the work of a great number of modern philosophers from Tarski and Dewey to Quine and Rorty. Representing the very best of Western thought, it reopens the most difficult and pressing of ancient philosophical problems, and reveals them to be very much of our day.
- Paperback September 2008
- The Veil of Isis
- Nearly twenty-five hundred years ago the Greek thinker Heraclitus supposedly uttered the cryptic words "Phusis kruptesthai philei." How the aphorism, usually translated as "Nature loves to hide," has haunted Western culture ever since is the subject of this engaging study by Pierre Hadot. Taking the allegorical figure of the veiled goddess Isis as a guide, and drawing on the work of both the ancients and later thinkers such as Goethe, Rilke, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger Hadot traces successive interpretations of Heraclitus' words.
- Paperback September 2008
- Benjamin's -abilities
- In this book, Weber, a leading theorist on literature and media, reveals a new and productive aspect of Benjamin’s thought by focusing the critical suffix “-ability” that Benjamin so tellingly deploys in his work. The result is an illuminating perspective on Benjamin’s thought by way of his language—and one of the most penetrating and comprehensive accounts of Benjamin’s work ever written.
- Hardcover June 2008
- Life and Action
- Any sound practical philosophy must be clear on practical concepts—concepts, in particular, of life, action, and practice. This clarity is Thompson’s aim in his ambitious work. In Thompson’s view, failure to comprehend the structures of thought and judgment expressed in these concepts has disfigured modern moral philosophy, rendering it incapable of addressing the larger questions that should be its focus.
- Hardcover June 2008
- Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?
- Bauman urges us to think in new ways about a newly flexible, newly challenging modern world. In an era of routine travel, where most people circulate widely, the inherited beliefs that aid our thinking about the world have become an obstacle. He challenges members of the “knowledge class” to overcome their estrangement from the rest of society.
- Hardcover May 2008
- The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media
- Benjamin’s famous “Work of Art” essay sets out his boldest thoughts—on media and on culture in general. This book contains the second, and most daring, of the four versions of the “Work of Art” essay—the one that addresses the utopian developments of the modern media. The collection tracks Benjamin’s observations on the media as they are revealed in essays on the production and reception of art; on film, radio, and photography; and on the modern transformations of literature and painting.
- Paperback May 2008
- When Is Discrimination Wrong?
- Hellman develops a much-needed general theory of discrimination. She demonstrates that many familiar ideas about when discrimination is wrong—when it is motivated by prejudice, grounded in stereotypes, or simply departs from merit-based decision-making—won’t adequately explain our widely shared intuitions. When Is Discrimination Wrong? explores what it means to treat people as equals and thus takes up a central problem of democracy.
- Hardcover May 2008
- Persons and Things
- In Persons and Things, Johnson begins with the most elementary thing we know: deconstruction calls attention to gaps and reveals that their claims upon us are fraudulent. Johnson revolutionizes the method by showing that the inanimate thing exposed as a delusion is central to fantasy life, that fantasy life, however deluded, should be taken seriously, and that although a work of art “is formed around something missing,” this “void is its vanishing point, not its essence. The new aesthetics should restore fluidities between persons and things. In pursuing it, Johnson calls upon Ovid, Keats, Poe, Plath, and others who have inhabited this in-between space.
- Hardcover April 2008
- Quintessence
- Quintessence for the first time collects Quine's classic essays in one volume, offering a much-needed introduction to his general philosophy. The selections take up analyticity and reductionism; the indeterminacy of translation of theoretical sentences and the inscrutability of reference; ontology; naturalized epistemology; philosophy of mind; and extensionalism. Representative of Quine at his best, these readings are fundamental not only to an appreciation of the philosopher and his work, but also to an understanding of the philosophical tradition that he so materially advanced.
- Paperback April 2008
- Radical Hope
- Shortly before he died, Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation, said, "When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened." In Jonathan Lear's view, Plenty Coups' story raises a profound ethical question that transcends his time and challenges us all: how should one face the possibility that one's culture might collapse? Radical Hope is a deeply moving, philosophical inquiry into a peculiar vulnerability that goes to the heart of the human condition.
- Paperback April 2008
- The Struggle against Dogmatism
- The Struggle against Dogmatism elucidates Wittgenstein’s view that there are no theses, doctrines, or theories in philosophy. This book makes Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach comprehensible by presenting it as a response to specific problems relating to the practice of philosophy, in particular the problem of dogmatism.
- Hardcover April 2008
- Theodor W. Adorno
- This book gives us our first clear look at how the man and his moment met to create “critical theory.” An intimate picture of the quintessential twentieth-century transatlantic intellectual, the book is also a window on the cultural ferment of Adorno’s day—and its ongoing importance in our own.
- Hardcover April 2008
- German Idealism
- Paperback March 2008
- Lost Soul
- Since the mid-1980s, Taiwan and mainland China have witnessed a sustained resurgence of academic and intellectual interest in ruxue—“Confucianism”—variously conceived as a form of culture, an ideology, a system of learning, and a tradition of normative values. This study aims to show how ruxue has been conceived in order to assess the achievements of this enterprise.
- Hardcover March 2008
- Thinking How to Live
- Gibbard considers how our actions, and our realities, emerge from the thousands of questions and decisions we form for ourselves. The result is a book that investigates the very nature of the questions we ask ourselves when we ask how we should live, and that clarifies the concept of "ought" by understanding the patterns of normative concepts involved in beliefs and decisions. An original and elegant work of metaethics, this book brings a new clarity and rigor to the discussion of these tangled issues, and will significantly alter the long-standing debate over "objectivity" and "factuality" in ethics.
- Paperback March 2008
- Maimonides after 800 Years
- Moses Maimonides was the most significant Jewish thinker, jurist, and doctor of the Middle Ages, and author of a monumental code of Jewish law, and the most influential and controversial work of Jewish philosophy. The essays in this volume were written to mark the 800th anniversary of Maimonides' death in 1204. Written by the leading scholars in the field, they cover all aspects of Maimonides' work and influence.
- Hardcover February 2008
- Experiments in Ethics
- Appiah explores how the new empirical moral psychology relates to the age-old project of philosophical ethics. In this study, he urges that the relation between empirical research and morality, now so often antagonistic, should be seen in terms of dialogue, not contest. And he shows how experimental philosophy, far from being something new, is actually as old as philosophy itself.
- Hardcover January 2008
- Arguing the Just War in Islam
- Jihad, with its many terrifying associations, is a term widely used today, though its meaning is poorly grasped. Kelsay's timely and important work focuses on jihad of the sword in Islamic thought, history, and culture. Making use of original sources, Kelsay delves into the tradition of shari'a--Islamic jurisprudence and reasoning--and shows how it defines jihad as the Islamic analogue of the Western "just" war.
- Hardcover November 2007
See also: All Books in PHILOSOPHY.