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1
Gorohov, Pavel. Shakespeare's Existentials. INFRA-M Academic Publishing LLC., 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.12737/1064939.
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For the first time in the Russian historical and philosophical literature, the monograph attempts to comprehensively consider the philosophical views of the great playwright and thinker. Shakespeare is presented as a philosopher who considered in his masterpieces the relation of man to the world through a series of"borderline situations". Shakespeare not only anticipated the existentialist philosophers, but also appeared in his work as the greatest philosopher-anthropologist. He reflects on the essence of nature, space and time only in close connection with thoughts about human life. 
 For a wide range of readers interested in the history of philosophy and Shakespeare studies.
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Schechter, Elizabeth. How Many Minds? Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198809654.003.0004.
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The previous chapters argued that within a split-brain subject there are two subjects of conscious experience and intentional agents, R and L. This chapter explains who these two thinking beings are and how it is possible for two thinkers to be co-embodied. The basis of the 2-thinkers claim is, naturally, that R and L think, feel, decide, and so on, independently of each other. Of course, this does not mean that they do not causally interact; since they are co-embodied, they interact all the time. What split-brain experiments show, however, is that R’s mental activities interact with L’s largely only indirectly: one of them acts or reacts in some way, and the other senses or perceives this re/action. Mental activities are causal activities whose psychological kinds are defined by their powers to interact directly. Thus the thinking things in the split-brain case are R and L, and only derivatively S.
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de Beauvoir, Simone, Véronique Zaytzeff, Frederick M. Morrison, Sonia Kruks, and Andrea Veltman. Right-Wing Thought Today. Translated by Véronique Zaytzeff and Frederick M. Morrison. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252036941.003.0009.
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Truth is one, but error is multiple. It is not just by chance that the right wing professes pluralism. Right-wing doctrines that give expression to pluralism are far too numerous for this article to seriously examine them all. Yet, bourgeois thinkers—who forbid their adversaries the use of Marxist methods if they do not accept the entire system as a whole—still have no qualms themselves about eclectically pulling together ideas borrowed from Spengler, Burnham, Jaspers, and many others....
4
Oklopcic, Zoran. Many, Other, Place, Frame. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198799092.003.0003.
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Focusing on the scenic dimension of the visual register of constituent imagination, Chapter 3 focuses on how select early modern, modern, and contemporary theorists stage the scenes in which a sovereign (people) appears either as the author or as the outcome of the act of constitution. Building on Kenneth Burke’s theory of dramatism, the chapter shows how choreographed interplay among four abstract stage ‘props’ allows constitutional thinkers to stage one of the most important attributes of sovereignty—its capacity for creatio ex nihilo. Through a series of engagements with Hobbes, Rousseau, Schmitt, Sieyès, Lefort, and others, Chapter 3 reveals how they conformed to the unwritten laws of constituent dramatism, as well as the tricks they resorted to in order to bring a sovereign people into imaginative existence.
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Atkinson, Will. Bourdieu and Schutz. Edited by Thomas Medvetz and Jeffrey J. Sallaz. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199357192.013.17.
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Chapter abstract This chapter considers the relationship between the sociologies of Pierre Bourdieu and Alfred Schutz. It begins by making plain the shared rootedness of many of their ideas in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and tracing the different directions in which they took that influence, given the dissimilar states of the intellectual fields they were positioned in. It then goes on to compare the two thinkers on philosophical anthropology and epistemology, making the case that Bourdieu’s relational worldview fills in significant gaps in Schutz’s account. However, the author subsequently argues that Schutz’s vocabulary can, in turn, help plug holes in Bourdieu’s perspective too, pushing the latter toward becoming a “relational phenomenology.” These holes are, first, the sketchy depiction of conscious activity associated with the concept of habitus and, second, the neglect of how individual lifeworlds are structured by multiple fields.
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Toye, John. The Many Faces of Socioeconomic Change. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198723349.001.0001.
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This book provides a survey of different ways in which economic sociocultural and political aspects of human progress have been studied since the time of Adam Smith. Inevitably, over such a long time span, it has been necessary to concentrate on highlighting the most significant contributions, rather than attempting an exhaustive treatment. The aim has been to bring into focus an outline of the main long-term changes in the way that socioeconomic development has been envisaged. The argument presented is that the idea of socioeconomic development emerged with the creation of grand evolutionary sequences of social progress that were the products of Enlightenment and mid-Victorian thinkers. By the middle of the twentieth century, when interest in the accelerating development gave the topic a new impetus, its scope narrowed to a set of economically based strategies. After 1960, however, faith in such strategies began to wane, in the face of indifferent results and general faltering of confidence in economists’ boasts of scientific expertise. In the twenty-first century, development research is being pursued using a research method that generates disconnected results. As a result, it seems unlikely that any grand narrative will be created in the future and that neo-liberalism will be the last of this particular kind of socioeconomic theory.
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Warman, Caroline. Pre-Romantic French Thought. Edited by Paul Hamilton. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199696383.013.1.
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This chapter explores what is at stake for supposedly ‘pre-romantic’ thinkers in France, and try to understand what ‘pre-romanticism’ is. It argues that many of the most resonant themes associated with Romanticism, already compellingly and unflinchingly explored by Diderot, It requires us to abandon the familiar models of straightforward transmission and influence which we can fruitfully use in the case of Rousseau, because with Diderot we simply don’t have all the evidence about who said what to whom, or who read what when. Instead, we have sudden manifestations of interest, such as Goethe’s 1805 translation of theNeveu de Rameau, its first publication in any language. We also have to abandon the idea of a literary history in which Classicism dominated then faded to make way for the Enlightenment, which dominated and then faded to make way for Romanticism. This model is too simplistic, although its very convenience explains its existence.
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Adair-Toteff, Christopher, and Stephen Turner, eds. The calling of social thought. Manchester University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9781526120052.001.0001.
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Edward Shils was an important figure in twentieth century social theory, and a true transatlantic thinker who divided his time between the University of Chicago and the U.K. He was friends with many important thinkers in other fields, such as Michael Polanyi and Saul Bellow. He became known to sociologists through his brief collaboration with Talcott Parsons, but his own thinking diverged both from Parsons and conventional sociology. He developed but never finalized a comprehensive image of human society made up of personal, civic, and sacred bonds. But much of his thought was focused on conflicts: between intellectuals and their societies, between tradition and modernity, ideological conflict, and conflicts within the traditions of the modern liberal democratic state. This book explores the thought of Shils, his relations to key figures, his key themes and ideas, and his abiding interests in such topics as the academic tradition and universities. Together, the chapters provide the most comprehensive picture of Shils as a thinker, and explain his continuing relevance.
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Hutton, Eric L. Extended Knowledge and Confucian Tradition. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198769811.003.0011.
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Although studies in the history of philosophy look backward to the past, developments in contemporary philosophy can often contribute to such studies by teaching us how to analyze particular issues more carefully, and sometimes the lessons learned from reconsidering past thinkers in such a light can in turn contribute to current work in philosophy by highlighting problems or approaches that might otherwise go unnoticed. This phenomenon is not limited to the Western tradition alone: scholars of Asian thought may benefit from the conceptual tools offered by contemporary Western philosophers, and contemporary Western philosophers may find value in insights from the Asian tradition. This chapter hopes to provide support for this last claim by means of a concrete example involving contemporary theories of extended knowledge and an ancient Chinese Confucian thinker, Xunzi.
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Curd, Patricia, and Daniel W. Graham, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195146875.001.0001.
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The Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy brings together leading international scholars to study the diverse figures, movements, and approaches that constitute Presocratic philosophy. In the sixth and fifth centuries bc a new kind of thinker appeared in Greek city-states, dedicated to finding the origins of the world and everything in it, using observation and reason rather than tradition and myth. We call these thinkers Presocratic philosophers, and recognize them as the first philosophers of the Western tradition, as well as the originators of scientific thinking. New textual discoveries and new approaches make a reconsideration of the Presocratics at the beginning of the twenty-first century especially timely. More than a survey of scholarship, this study presents new interpretations and evaluations of the Presocratics' accomplishments, from Thales to the sophists, from theology to science, and from pre-philosophical background to their influence on later thinkers. Many positions presented here challenge accepted wisdom and offer alternative accounts of Presocratic theories. This book includes chapters on the Milesians (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes), Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, the Pythagoreans, the atomists, and the sophists. Special studies are devoted to the sources of Presocratic philosophy, oriental influences, Hippocratic medicine, cosmology, explanation, epistemology, theology, and the reception of Presocratic thought in Aristotle and other ancient authors.
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Rudavsky, T. M. Creation, Time, and Eternity. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199580903.003.0006.
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Of the many philosophical perplexities facing medieval Jewish thinkers, perhaps none has challenged religious belief as much as God’s creation of the world. No Jewish philosopher denied the importance of creation, that the world had a beginning (bereshit). But like their Christian and Muslim counterparts, Jewish thinkers did not always agree upon what qualifies as an acceptable model of creation. Chapter 6 is devoted to attempts of Jewish philosophers to reconcile the biblical view of creation with Greek and Islamic philosophy. By understanding the notion of creation and how an eternal, timeless creator created a temporal universe, we may begin to understand how the notions of eternity, emanation, and the infinite divisibility of time function within the context of Jewish philosophical theories of creation.
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Morris, Christopher W. Sovereignty and Executive Power. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190922542.003.0006.
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States claim sovereignty, that is, to be the ultimate source of political authority in their realm. The classical conception of sovereignty defended by early modern thinkers such as Hobbes and Rousseau would give the sovereign extraordinary powers, the authority to rule on just about any matter concerning its subjects and territory. Few today defend this classical conception of sovereignty as unconstrained authority; most everyone thinks that the powers of the state are constrained and limited. Constrained states can still be very powerful, and today many argue that the power of the executive branch of government, in particular, ought to be less constrained than it is thought to be. This chapter argues that the concept of the sovereignty of the state, whether understood in a classical way or as limited, gives little support to those who argue that the executive branch ought to be relatively unconstrained in the realm of security and foreign affairs. The doctrine of the sovereignty of the state does not single out any branch of government for distinctive powers. While there may be reasons intrinsic to sovereignty to attribute greater powers to states, these reasons don’t privilege the executive branch of government. Our executive branches are not sovereigns.
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Dagger, Richard. Republicanism. Edited by George Klosko. Oxford University Press, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199238804.003.0043.
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Republicanism is an ancient tradition of political thought that has enjoyed a remarkable revival in recent years. Aristotle and Polybius are the two Greek thinkers most often associated with republicanism. As with liberalism, conservatism, and other enduring political traditions, there is considerable disagreement as to exactly what republicanism is. Whether republicanism itself is an adequate or distinctive political philosophy is the subject of a broader controversy. Whether John Adams, Thomas Paine, Montesquieu, or any other modern thinker really was a classical republican, or even a republican at all, is not a settled matter. Republicans have generally opposed monarchy and favored representative government, but there is also reason to be cautious here—and reason to look more closely at the definition of republicanism before turning to its history. How does a republic differ from a democracy? If a democracy maintains its respect for the rule of law, then it is a democratic republic; if not, it may be a populist, majoritarian, or plebiscitarian form of democracy, but it cannot be a republic.
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Avilez, GerShun. The Claim of Innocence. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252040122.003.0002.
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This chapter tracks how artists inhabit the subjective space of whiteness as a closing ranks move. This idea may seem counterintuitive, but for many thinkers, exploring whiteness is useful in determining the conventional parameters of Black identity. The act of identifying and challenging these boundaries creates the opportunity for imagining a unity not plagued by restrictive conceptions of blackness. Therefore, turning inward does not appear as a mere rejection of whiteness in favor of shoring up blackness. The chapter then highlights how the rhetoric of White innocence provides the foundation for both racial and gender frameworks in the U.S. social imaginary. The desire to generate a radical Black identity includes dismantling this rhetoric, which permeates media and popular thought.
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Potter, Vincent G. Charles S. Peirce. Fordham University Press, 1996. http://dx.doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823217090.001.0001.
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In recent years, Charles Sanders Peirce has emerged as one of America's major philosophical thinkers. His work has invited philosophical reflection about those basic issues that inevitably confront us as human beings, especially in an age of science. Peirce's concern for experience, for what is actually encountered, means that his philosophy forms a reflective commentary on actual life and on the world in which it is lived. This book argues that Peirce's doctrine of the normative sciences is essential to his pragmatism. No part of Peirce's philosophy is bolder than his attempt to establish esthetics, ethics, and logic as the three normative sciences and to argue for the priority of esthetics among the trio. The book shows that Pierce took seriously the trinity of normative sciences and demonstrates that these categories apply both to the conduct of man and to the workings of the cosmos. It combines sympathetic and informed exposition with straightforward criticism and deals with the gaps and inconsistencies in Peirce's thought. It shows that Peirce was above all a cosmological and ontological thinker, one who combined science both as a method and as result with a conception of reasonable actions to form a comprehensive theory of reality. Peirce's pragmatism, is not a glorification of action but rather a theory of the dynamic nature of things in which the “ideal” dimension of reality has genuine power for directing the cosmic order, including man, toward reasonable goals.
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Wells, Stanley. Epilogue. Oxford University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780198718628.003.0009.
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Shakespeare’s plays and poems have had, and continue increasingly to have, a major impact on many areas of human life. Fellow poets from Ben Jonson onwards have written appreciatively of Shakespeare and have been inspired by him. Over the years, philosophers and thinkers of many nationalities have come under Shakespeare’s influence and written about him. The ‘Epilogue’ explains that Shakespeare can be appreciated and enjoyed in many different ways. The most obvious way to get to know him is to see his plays performed in the medium for which he wrote them, the theatre. To do so is to experience simultaneously the art of the playwright and the art of his interpreters.
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Beall, Jc. The Contradictory Christ. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198852360.001.0001.
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The claim that Jesus Christ is God (“fully divine”) and is as human as you and me (“fully human”) has appeared to many thinkers to be contradictory. But all sides have long shared a common position: namely, that the truth of God incarnate cannot be contradictory. Jc Beall disagrees: he argues that the truth of the incarnation is as it appears to be, namely, contradictory. This book lays out Beall's contradictory account of Jesus Christ.
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Kymlicka, Will. Contemporary Political Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/hepl/9780198782742.001.0001.
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Contemporary Political Philosophy has been revised to include many of the most significant developments in Anglo-American political philosophy in the last eleven years, particularly the new debates on political liberalism, deliberative democracy, civic republicanism, nationalism, and cultural pluralism. The text now includes two new chapters on citizenship theory and multiculturalism, in addition to updated chapters on utilitarianism, liberal egalitarianism, libertarianism, socialism, communitarianism, and feminism. The many thinkers discussed include G. A. Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, William Galston, Carol Gilligan, R. M. Hare, Catherine Mackinnon, David Miller, Philippe Van Parijs, Susan Okin, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, John Roemer, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer, and Iris Young.
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Barger, Lilian Calles. The Vitalism of Religion. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190695392.003.0007.
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This chapter explores how liberationists responded to the modern critique of religion as ideology by building a critical theology asserting the world-shaping role of religious faith. Rousseau, Feuerbach, and Marx set the course for subsequent social theorists to consider the possibilities and limits of religion as a revolutionary force. Diverse thinkers had brought a charge against religion as detrimental to social progress, and yet by the mid-twentieth century the criticism seemed less essential to modernity. Other social thinkers drew on religious ideas useful for multiple, and often radical, political and social projects. The ambivalent secular/religious opposition of modernity served as an opportunity for liberationists to assume a critical stance toward religion as ideology while retaining a positive utopian function for faith. Furthermore, recognizing the many ways individuals were inescapably embedded in society rendered the struggle for freedom as confronting a total system of domination, of which religion was only a part.
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Lewis, George E., and Benjamin Piekut. Introduction. Edited by George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195370935.013.30.
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The editors survey the history of the scholarly study of improvisation; although music scholars have led the recent push toward a consolidation of critical improvisation studies as an interdisciplinary area of inquiry, contributors to these Handbooks provide compelling evidence that improvisation has captivated thinkers across many disciplines for nearly two thousand years. The chapters collected here foreground theoretical, critical, and historical approaches (rather than profiles of creative practitioners). The editors also adumbrate the various ideological associations of the termimprovisationand how those associations have been elaborated in the scholarly literature.
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Lewis, George E., and Benjamin Piekut. Introduction. Edited by Benjamin Piekut and George E. Lewis. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199892921.013.29.
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The editors survey the history of the scholarly study of improvisation; although music scholars have led the recent push toward a consolidation of critical improvisation studies as an interdisciplinary area of inquiry, contributors to these Handbooks provide compelling evidence that improvisation has captivated thinkers across many disciplines for nearly two thousand years. The chapters collected here foreground theoretical, critical, and historical approaches (rather than profiles of creative practitioners). The editors also adumbrate the various ideological associations of the termimprovisationand how those associations have been elaborated in the scholarly literature.
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Williams, Richard O., and Jeffrey Freed. The Spectrum of Twice Exceptional and Autistic Learners and Suggestions for Their Learning Styles. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190645472.003.0014.
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This chapter compares the exceptionalities and learning disabilities found in twice exceptional (2e) learners with those of learners on the autistic spectrum who have identifiable autistic traits but not an autistic spectrum disorder diagnosis. Many autistic learners have similar exceptionalities to 2e learners, and the chapter presents genetic and neuroscience evidence to support the claim. It argues that many of the learning disabilities for each group result from unusual and exceptional sensory processing issues. In many cases hypersensitivity of the senses causes behavioral issues for the classroom and learning disabilities for the students. Both groups have very similar learning and cognitive styles and are excellent visual-spatial thinkers and learners. The chapter describes a spectrum that plots sensory traits, abilities and disabilities, exceptionalities, learning disabilities, and genetic mutations from mild to abundant. A list of teaching suggestions to accommodate the sensory and learning difficulties of the two groups is provided.
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Hutton, Sarah. Liberty of Mind. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198810261.003.0009.
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This chapter demonstrates how early modern male and female thinkers alike were concerned not only with ethical, religious, and political liberty, but also with the liberty to philosophize, or libertas philosophandi. It is argued that while men’s interests in this latter kind of liberty tended to lie with the liberty to philosophize differently from their predecessors, women were more concerned with the liberty to philosophize at all. For them, the idea that women should be free to think was foundational. This chapter shows how some women thinkers of the period, such as Damaris Cudworth Masham (1658–1708) and Mary Astell (1666–1731), followed through on the general trend of thinking about liberty in terms of freedom of the mind, to thinking about liberty for women in wider ethical and political terms. To support this point, the chapter explores their views on education, female rationality, and moral philosophy.
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Dwan, David. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198738527.003.0001.
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This chapter considers Orwell’s merits as a political thinker. It shows how his politics can only be understood by examining them in context—alongside contemporary debates about the importance of realism and the drawbacks of moralism in political life. The consistency and power of his views also need to be tested against a broader backdrop of political thought. Orwell was not a systematic thinker and he was famously hostile to intellectuals and theorists; yet the problems he encountered in politics had an irreducible conceptual element. Orwell’s contradictions express his own limitations, but they also expose the limits of justice itself. For justice, it would seem, is many-headed and services different—even incompatible—ends. Orwell’s writings express this conflict, producing a very agonized form of idealism.
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Hughes, Aaron W. Re-frame. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190684464.003.0007.
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Chapter 6 seeks to re-frame or redescribe this so-called golden age by arguing that Islam provided the intellectual and religious context for the florescence of Judaism at a formative moment in its development. In this, the context was little different from what went on in the late antique period. The chapter argues that the border separating Jew from Muslim in this period may still be more retrofitted from the present than real. It examines some key Jewish thinkers—Judah Halevi, Baḥya ibn Paqūda, Abraham ibn Ezra, Moses Maimonides—with the aim of showing how they continued to destabilize the line between Judaism and Islam. Even in the late twelfth century, “Islamic Judaism” existed subsequent to that fact that rabbinic Judaism had been historically overdetermined as normative. Indeed, so much so that rabbinic Judaism continued to absorb many elements of Islam to change not only its margins but also its center.
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Johnson, David. Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa. Edinburgh University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474430210.001.0001.
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Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa examines for the first time the many different texts imagining the future after the end of apartheid. Focused on well-known and obscure literary texts from the 1880s to the 1970s, as well as the many manifestos and programmes setting out visions of the future, this book charts the dreams of freedom of five major traditions of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid resistance: the African National Congress (ANC), the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). The works of a number of South African literary figures are discussed, including Olive Schreiner, S. E. K. Mqhayi, Alan Paton, Karel Schoeman, Jordan Ngubane, Winnifred Holtby, Ethelreda Lewis, Dora Taylor, Livingstone Mqotsi, Peter Abrahams, Richard Rive, Lauretta Ngcobo and Bessie Head. Political thinkers analysed include Nelson Mandela, R. F. A. Hoernlé, Albert Luthuli, Clements Kadalie, A. W. G. Champion, Edward Roux, James La Guma, Alfred Nzula, I. B. Tabata, Ben Kies, Anton Lembede, A. P. Mda and Robert Sobukwe. The theoretical dimensions of the study are orientated in relation to major Marxist critics of utopianism like Marx, Friedrich Engels, Leon Trotsky and Ernst Bloch, as well as to thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Immanuel Wallerstein, James C. Scott and Jay Winter. More than an exercise in historical excavation, Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa raises challenging questions for the post-apartheid present.
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Grünnagel, Christian. Marquis de Sade. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474423632.003.0021.
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Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), appears in European literature and culture like a ghostly figure whose prolific and monstrous works haunt not only nineteenth-century French novels and the surrealist artists (Magritte, Man Ray), but also thinkers, essayists and philosophers of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century.1 After the Second World War and the devastation that it caused worldwide, some influential thinkers – such as Klossowski, de Beauvoir, Horkheimer and Adorno2 – reread the oeuvre of the divine marquis, long decried as the product of a troubled, ill and wicked mind. Lacan and Adorno and Horkheimer even proposed structural parallels between Sade’s libertinage and Kant’s philosophy.3 Keeping this history of reception in mind, it is not completely surprising that Agamben includes commentaries on Sade’s political and philosophical writing in one of his own central projects, Homo Sacer, and comes back occasionally to Sade in other works.
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Travis, Charles. Frege. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198844129.001.0001.
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This book is about Frege and his contribution to philosophy. It has three parts. Part I presents his general picture of thought, that is, the object of a capacity for thought (what may be thought). The point is to stress the value of separating the business of being true from thinkers’ engagement with such business, thus from issues specifically about language, and this as a model for philosophy in general. It also expands on Frege’s case for the intrinsic publicity (sharability) of thought. Part II concerns some particular developments of the general view made by Frege with a view to serving the needs of his central project (after logic itself): showing arithmetic to be logic. Part III applies the general picture in presenting a view of truth (and its irreducibility), logic of logic’s independence both of thinkers and of the world (its indifference to anything in how things happen to be), and of objectivity.
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Kleege, Georgina. The Tenacious Life of the Hypothetical Blind Man. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190604356.003.0002.
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The chapter provides a survey of the history of the figure of the “man born blind” or what the author calls the hypothetical blind man in the theories of such thinkers as Descartes, Locke, and Diderot. These representations rely on an over-determined, one-to-one analogy between the eyes of the sighted man and the hands of the blind man. If the sighted theorists are assumed to be “all eyes,” the hypothetical blind man is “all hands.” The chapter goes on to put representations in conversation with biographical and autobiographical accounts of actual blind people from the eighteenth century until the present, with particular attention to their treatment of their own conceptualization of visual phenomena, imagination, and dreams.
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Vervaeke, John, Leo Ferraro, and Arianne Herrera-Bennett. Flow as Spontaneous Thought. Edited by Kalina Christoff and Kieran C. R. Fox. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190464745.013.8.
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Flow is an experience encountered in many areas of human endeavor; it is reported by athletes and artists, writers and thinkers. Paradoxically, it appears to involve significant energy expenditure, and yet it is reported to feel almost effortless. It is a prototypical instance of spontaneous thought. The flow experience has been extensively documented and studied by many scholars, most prominently Csikszentmihalyi, who characterized it as “optimal experience.” This chapter builds on the work of Csikszentmihalyi and others by providing a cognitive scientific account of flow, a framework that organizes and integrates the various cognitive processes and features that serve to make flow an optimal experience. In particular, it is argued that flow is characterized by a dynamic cascade of insight, coupled with enhanced implicit learning. This model seeks to integrate the phenomenological accounts of flow with the existing body of cognitive research.
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Robertson, Simon. Nietzsche and Contemporary Ethics. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198722212.001.0001.
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Nietzsche is one of the most subversive ethical thinkers of the Western canon. This book offers a critical assessment of his ethical thought and its significance for contemporary moral philosophy. It develops a charitable but critical reading of his thought, pushing some claims and arguments as far as seems fruitful while rejecting others. But it also uses Nietzsche in dialogue with, so to contribute to, a range of long-standing issues within normative ethics, metaethics, value theory, practical reason, and moral psychology. The book is divided into three principal parts. Part I examines Nietzsche’s critique of morality, arguing that it raises well-motivated challenges to morality’s normative authority and value: his error theory about morality’s categoricity is in a better position than many contemporary versions; and his critique of moral values has bite even against undemanding moral theories, with significant implications not just for rarefied excellent types but also us. Part II turns to moral psychology, attributing to Nietzsche and defending a sentimentalist explanation of action and motivation. Part III considers his non-moral perfectionism, developing models of value and practical normativity that avoid difficulties facing many contemporary accounts and that may therefore be of wider interest. The discussion concludes by considering Nietzsche’s broader significance: as well as calling into question many of moral philosophy’s deepest assumptions, he challenges our usual views of what ethics itself is—and what it, and we, should be doing.
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Flikschuh, Katrin A. 24. Kant. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/hepl/9780198708926.003.0024.
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This chapter examines the political ideas of Immanuel Kant. Kant is widely regarded as a precursor to current political liberalism. There are many aspects of Kant's political philosophy, including his property argument, that remain poorly understood and unjustly neglected. Many other aspects, including his cosmopolitanism, reveal Kant as perhaps one of the most systematic and consistent political thinkers. Underlying all these aspects of his political philosophy is an abiding commitment to his epistemological method of transcendental idealism. After providing a short biography of Kant, this chapter considers his epistemology as well as the relationship between virtue and justice in his practical philosophy. It also explores a number of themes in Kant's political thinking, including the idea of external freedom, the nature of political obligation, the vindication of property rights, the denial of a right to revolution, and the cosmopolitan scope of Kantian justice.
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Linnebo, Øystein. Abstraction and the Question of Symmetry. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199641314.003.0004.
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Frege and many thinkers inspired by him defend a symmetric conception of abstraction according to which the two sides of an acceptable abstraction principle provide different “recarvings” of one and the same content. Some defenses of the symmetric conception are criticized: first, a seductive argument based on a generalized notion of identity; then, an argument by Rayo based on the notion of a “just is”-statement. Instead, an asymmetric conception of abstraction is defended according to which the two sides of an acceptable abstraction principle are not on a par with respect to all worldly properties. For example, the parallelism of two lines grounds the existence of their shared direction, but not vice versa.
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Konstan, David. Hate and the State in Ancient Greece. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190465544.003.0003.
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In classical antiquity, thinkers like Aristotle regarded hatred, unlike envy, as a moral emotion, elicited by the perception of vice. Nevertheless, hatred might be taken to irrational extremes (there are occasional expressions of hatred of all women, for example), and antagonisms between ethnic groups (as in Sparta or Alexandria) or social classes (in many Greek city states) could lead to open conflict or civil war. Classical states had few resources to inhibit or control such hatreds. One significant development in this direction, however, was the amnesty decreed in Athens to heal the wounds of the civil strife that broke out after Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War.
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Beller, Steven. 4. The culture of irrationalism. Oxford University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780198724834.003.0004.
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Why has antisemitism been defined as ‘irrational’ hostility to Jews? This cultural approach was a reaction against the rationalist claim that all human experience and endeavour could be reduced to rational, calculable objects and relations. ‘The culture of irrationalism’ looks at the strong link between German cultural ‘irrationalism’, Romanticism, and antisemitism, and how influential people in the arts contributed to this. Even irrational thinkers who opposed antisemitism, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, also contributed in some way to the antisemitic thrust of German irrationalist culture. Jews, as allies of rationalist modernity, became the targets of many of those in Central and Eastern Europe who suffered from the dislocations of economic modernization.
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Adamson, Peter, ed. Health. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199916429.001.0001.
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From antiquity down to the early modern period, many philosophers have been doctors or had interests in medicine. Yet typically the histories of philosophy and medicine are pursued as separate disciplines. This book departs from that practice, bringing together contributions by both historians of philosophy and of medicine to trace the concept of health from ancient Greece and China, through the Islamic world and to modern thinkers such as Descartes and Freud. Major historical themes include the parallel between mental and physical health, the role of philosophical theories about body and soul in medical science, and the difficulty of defining health—still a challenge in today’s philosophy of medicine.
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Mangrum, Benjamin. Land of Tomorrow. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190909376.001.0001.
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This book analyzes changes in American intellectual life after the Second World War. It argues that sweeping cultural and intellectual trends undermined the legacy of social-democratic reform instituted by the New Deal. Land of Tomorrow offers a genealogy of these changes within American liberalism by looking to writers and intellectuals such as Vladimir Nabokov, Ralph Ellison, Hannah Arendt, Lionel Trilling, Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, J. D. Salinger, Ken Kesey, Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, and many others. It also considers the reception of many prominent European thinkers, including Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Franz Kafka. The major ideas and developments considered include American existentialism, theories of corporate management, aestheticism, the reception history of modernism, postwar anxieties about totalitarianism, and the history of cultural support for the welfare state in the United States
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Pennington, Kenneth. Rights. Edited by George Klosko. Oxford University Press, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199238804.003.0030.
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One of the most notable characteristics of Western societies has been the development of individual and group rights in legal, theological, and philosophical thought of the first two millennia. It has often been noted that thinkers in Non-Western societies have not had the same preoccupation with rights. The very concept of rights is laden with numerous problems. Universality is the most basic and difficult. If human rights are only a product of Western ideas of justice, they cannot have universality. In an age that is dominated by conceptions of law embracing some form of legal positivism, many scholars recognize only individual rights that have been established by the constitutional jurisprudence of individual countries or their legal systems. Historically, the emergence of rights in European jurisprudence is intimately connected with the terms ius naturale and lex naturalis in Western jurisprudence and theological thought. Human beings may never agree on universal rules of a natural law, but they might agree on universal precepts that shape the penumbra of rights surrounding natural rights.
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Meyrav, Yoav. Medieval Jewish Philosophers and the Human Body. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190490447.003.0006.
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Medieval Jewish philosophers approached the human body and being in a body from various aspects: ontological, ethical, psychological, and eschatological. Thinkers from many different geographical and philosophical backgrounds nonetheless all shared a common point of reference: Judaism as an “embodied religion.” Jewish day-to-day practice (“mitzvot”) and Jewish law (“halakha”) have much to do with the regulation and moderation of the body, in this life as well as after the resurrection (if taken literally). This creates potential tension with the different philosophical and theological traditions many Jewish philosophers responded to. Passages from the writings of—among others—Saadya Gaon, Judah Halevi, Bahya ibn Paquda, Maimonides, and Abraham ibn Daud, are analyzed and assessed, exhibiting a wide scope of opinions and approaches, all of which have some affinity to the “embodiment” of the Jewish religion, which perhaps reduces the ontological distance between the realm of body and the realm of mind.
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Nikulin, Dmitri. Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190662363.001.0001.
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This book is a philosophical study of two major thinkers who span the period of late antiquity. While Plotinus stands at the beginning of its philosophical tradition, setting the themes for debate and establishing strategies of argument and interpretation, Proclus falls closer to its end, developing a grand synthesis of late ancient thought. The book discusses many central topics of philosophy and science in Plotinus and Proclus, such as the one and the many; number and being; the individuation and constitution of the soul, imagination, and cognition; the constitution of number and geometrical objects; indivisibility and continuity; intelligible and bodily matter; and evil. It shows that late ancient philosophy did not simply embrace and borrow from the major philosophical traditions of earlier antiquity—Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism—by providing marginal comments on widely known philosophical texts. Rather, Neoplatonism offered a set of highly original and innovative insights into the nature of being and thought, which can be distinguished in much subsequent philosophical thought up until modernity.
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Amin, Hussein Ahmad. The Sorrowful Muslim's Guide. Translated by Yasmin Amin and Nesrin Amin. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474437073.001.0001.
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Originally published in Arabic in 1983, this book remains a timely and important read today. Both the resurgence of Islamist politics and the political, social and intellectual upheaval which accompanied the Arab Spring challenge us to re-examine the interaction between the pre-modern Islamic tradition and modern supporters of continuity, reform and change in Muslim communities. This book does exactly that, raising questions regarding issues about which other Muslim intellectuals and thinkers have been silent. These include – among others – current religious practice vs the Islamic ideal; the many additions to the original revelation; the veracity of the Prophet’s biography and his sayings; the development of Sufism; and historical and ideological influences on Islamic thought.
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Anne, Orford, and Hoffmann Florian, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/law/9780198701958.001.0001.
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This book provides a guide to the major thinkers, concepts, approaches, and debates that have shaped contemporary international legal theory. The book explores key questions and debates in international legal theory, offers new intellectual histories for the discipline, and provides fresh interpretations of significant historical figures, texts, and theoretical approaches. It considers many issues from the field of international legal theory, and provides a guide to the main themes and debates that have driven theoretical work in international law. The text features an introductory chapter (Theorizing International Law) followed by forty-eight chapters which aim to reflect the richness and diversity of this dynamic field. The book is divided into four parts organized around four themes: histories (Part I), approaches (Part II), doctrines and regimes (Part III), and debates (Part IV). The chapters in Part I, introduce some of the key theories and thinkers that are perceived to have provided the foundations of international legal theory and aim to create a methodological awareness of the historical dimension of that theory. The chapters in Part II reflect some of the different ways of categorizing approaches to the theory field. The chapters in Part III provide an overview of theoretical discussions relating to core doctrines and areas of contemporary international law whilst those in Part IV present some of the most existential and essential questions informing the discipline’s current state and likely future.
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Smith, Jad. Beginnings. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252040634.003.0002.
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This chapter shows how Bester’s early identification with Renaissance thinkers of broad and varied learning led him to think of science fiction as a Renaissance genre especially suited to mixing and marrying various influences and branches of knowledge. It also examines several of Bester’s early stories. “Voyage to Nowhere” represented Bester’s initial foray into pastiche, while “The White Man Who Was Tabu”—a little-known South Sea adventure published under the pseudonym Alexander Blade—signaled his interest in psychology and laid the groundwork for Ben Reich and Gully Foyle, the distinctive antiheroes of his trailblazing novels The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination.
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Fine, Gail, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Plato. Oxford University Press, 2008. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195182903.001.0001.
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The Oxford Handbook of Plato provides in-depth and up-to-date discussions of a variety of topics and dialogues in twenty-one articles. The result is a useful reference to the man many consider the most important philosophical thinker in history. Plato is the best known, and continues to be the most widely studied, of all the ancient Greek philosophers. Each article serves several functions at once: they survey the lay of the land; they express and develop the authors' own views; they situate those views within a range of alternatives. This book contains articles on metaphysics, epistemology, love, language, ethics, politics, art and education. Individual articles are devoted to each of the following dialogues: the Republic, the Parmenides, the Theaetetus, the Sophist, the Timaeus, and the Philebus. There are also articles on Plato and the dialogue form; on Plato in his time and place; on the history of the Platonic corpus; on Aristotle's criticism of Plato, and on Plato and Platonism.
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Kotsko, Adam. Conclusion: Agamben as a Reader of Agamben. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474423632.003.0032.
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Thus far, the contributors to this volume have considered the many and varied bodies of work that have left their mark on Agamben’s project. In this concluding chapter, I would like to take up one final body of work that Agamben must somehow account for, if only implicitly – namely, his own. The task is more difficult than it may sound, because Agamben is not nearly as self-referential as some major twentieth-century thinkers. Unless his habits change drastically, he will not leave behind a voluminous legacy of interviews on the stakes and intentions of his work, as Foucault did. His explicit cross-references between his own works are few and far between. Heidegger spent his entire career attempting to unpack the significance and shortcomings of Being and Time, while the later Derrida provided exhaustive footnotes demonstrating that the themes of his so-called ‘ethical turn’ were always already present in his earliest work. By contrast, Agamben rarely reflects directly on the relationship between any given text and the texts that preceded it. And within individual texts, the reader rarely finds the kinds of ‘signposts’ that explain why each book is structured in the way that it is.
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Oberreuter, Heinrich, ed. Praeceptor Germaniae. Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5771/9783845238500.
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Understanding acumen and politics plus German culture and Western civilisation as diametrically opposed is a German disease which Thomas Mann also succumbed to. Initially, Mann did not regard democracy as an appropriate form of government for Germans as they were not able to love politics: he was therefore just one apolitical individual among many. Eventually, Thomas Mann liberated himself from this prejudiced approach to politics and the apolitical, and came to terms with democracy. From then on, he countered radicalism’s propensity to use violence with republican reason, which led to him being treated with hostility, persecuted and forced into exile. Politics, which was originally alien to him, swept its way into his life and forced him to adopt a standpoint on it, without him ever having become a political person or even a political thinker at heart. His comments on politics did not leave West and East Germans unaffected, especially as the idea of a cultural nation, through which acumen suddenly legitimised politics, was one of the few things which held the seemingly irreconcilably divided nations together. In post-war Germany, Thomas Mann increasingly became a ‘Praeceptor Germaniae’ (one of the country’s most eminent teachers). In this book, prominent experts clearly depict his gravitation towards the republic, his road into exile, his fight against Hitler and his influence on a divided Germany. With contributions by Manfred Görtemaker, Philipp Gut, Helmut Koopmann, Horst Möller, Heinrich Oberreuter, Julia Schöll, Hans-Rudolf Vaget, Georg Wenzel, Ruprecht Wimmer and Hans Wisskirchen.
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Deguchi, Yasuo, Jay L. Garfield, Graham Priest, and Robert H. Sharf. What Can't be Said. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197526187.001.0001.
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Paradox drives a good deal of philosophy in every tradition. In the Indian and Western traditions, there is a tendency among many (but not all) philosophers to run from contradiction and paradox. If and when a contradiction appears in a theory, it is regarded as a sure sign that something has gone amiss. This aversion to paradox commits them, knowingly or not, to the view that reality must be consistent. In East Asia, however, philosophers have reacted to paradox differently. Many East Asian philosophers—both in the Daoist and the Buddhist traditions—have openly embraced paradox. They have taken compelling arguments for contradictory positions to suggest that the world is—at least in some respects, and often in very deep respects—inconsistent, and that our best theories of the world will therefore be inconsistent. This book is an initial survey of the writings of some influential East Asian thinkers who were committed to paradox, and for good reason. Their acceptance of contradiction allowed them to develop important insights that evaded those who consider paradox out of bounds.
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Cork, Steven, ed. Resilience and Transformation. CSIRO Publishing, 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1071/9780643098138.
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Resilience and Transformation explores what factors contribute to Australia’s resilience, what trends are apparent, and what actions are required to better prepare us for the immediate and longer term future.
 Resilience is a word used more and more across societies worldwide as decision makers realise that predicting and controlling the future does not work and that preparing for uncertainty and surprise is vital. Many viewpoints have emerged on how to assess and achieve resilience of individuals, organisations, communities and ecosystems, but rarely has the resilience of a nation been considered. As Australia moves into a millennium that promises major economic, social, technological and environmental change, Australia21 has assembled some of Australia’s leading thinkers to give their perspectives on the extent and direction of resilience across our nation’s social, economic, ecological and disaster management systems.
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Joshi, Mahesh K., and J. R. Klein. Inclusive Capitalism and the Return of Social Purpose. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198827481.003.0003.
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Inclusive capitalism is a hot topic and for the right reasons. It has been the focus of discussions both in academic and development circles around the world. “The role that business plays in society, and the expectations about the role it should play, has shifted dramatically in recent years. Called to a higher purpose, or sensing that externalities can only be ignored at their peril, many businesses are increasingly open to the notion that they have a responsibility for creating more inclusive economic systems” (Tufano et al. 2016). This statement is an indicator of rigorous research being carried out on the capital and social impact of global business. This chapter highlights the work of the best thinkers and primary players in the world of global business and economics.
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Barton, Gregory A. The Cultural Soil of Organic Farming. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199642533.003.0002.
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The movement to maintain the influence of the countryside and of farmers in particular dominated political thought in England and the United States throughout most of the nineteenth century, and still influenced millions into the mid-twentieth century. Aspects of agrarianism, romantic farm literature, and its many variants on the continent of Europe—including biodynamics and German biological farming—all can be seen as building blocks that merged with the organic farming protocols pioneered by Albert Howard (discussed further in later chapters). The reaction against industrialism must be understood as both a cultural and a political movement. This explains why—though socialist and leftist thinkers of all stripes also shared agrarian ideals—the main arguments against the effects of industrialism were from those on the right of the political spectrum.