This analysis of masterpieces by Proust, Kafka, Tolstoy, and others demonstrates that reality “imitates” literary possibilities. These works should be treated not as mere fiction, but as paradigms on whose basis we grasp and understand the actual world.
Philosophy in Ireland
With contributions from leading thinkers, this volume explores philosophical developments in Ireland. It reveals a tradition defined by dialogue—with its past, with global debates, and with society—and argues that this continued engagement is vital for its future.
What happens when we remember? This book argues that autobiographical memory is not a recollection but an active, imaginative reconstruction of our past, linking historical philosophy from Bolzano and Husserl with contemporary cognitive science.
Russell Revisited
Bertrand Russell played a central role in modern philosophy. How do we account for the abiding interest in him? Accessibility. This collection of recent scholarship serves as a testament to the value of Russell’s diverse contributions to challenging philosophical issues.
Mental Representation (Volume 4
Contrary to common belief, medieval philosophers saw intentionality in physical phenomena like reflections and sounds. Mental Representation explores their intricate views on cognition and representation, shedding new light on historical and contemporary philosophy of mind.
Will explores polarities through a set of seventy mini-meditations on opposite states of moral and emotional life. He studies the operational energy at play, which is partly prayer or mantra and partly half-completed logical conundrum.
These twelve essays provide a basis for reassessing European traditions of beauty in the arts, literature, and film, as a constructive means of realising the potential of the arts for the 21st century.
This book analyzes major ethical and bioethical issues like euthanasia, suicide, organ commerce, sexual objectification, and abortion from the perspective of Kant’s moral theory. It tackles questions of autonomy, human dignity, and free choice.
Astrobiology and Humanism
This book reviews the frontiers of humanism as they interact with astrobiology. The existence of life raises deep questions meaningful to both, but disagreements in this dialogue are shown to be due to the delusion that the frontiers of science can be ignored.
Shattering the myth of an apolitical Nietzsche, this book reveals him as a 19th-century reactionary. It traces his lifelong war on modernity—from feminism to democracy—in his quest to forge a new, counter-revolutionary politics.
On Taste
This innovative collection offers fresh, never-before published approaches to the idea of taste. Scholars explore how aesthetics interpenetrates discussions of food, political conflict, art, and education, representing a key contribution to the latest research in the field.
Rethinking Kant
The Rethinking Kant series bears witness to the richness of Kantian studies. This unique collection garners papers from a whole generation of thinkers, from new PhDs to established scholars. This third volume takes the pulse of current Kantian scholarship.
Thinking is overrated. We perform best when distracted and under pressure. This book challenges the traditional picture of human action, arguing that our habits and skills allow us to be free and fully rational even when we act mindlessly.
David Swift turns to the philosopher Epicurus for a scientific explanation of the mind. Reinterpreting thinkers from Descartes to Freud, he reveals the secrets of love, hate, and behavior as the results of learned experience, not genetic predisposition.
Destroying Idols
Confusion over the meaning of ‘God’ in biblical texts is at the heart of the divorce between Judaism and Christianity. This book offers a new understanding by re-examining the “two powers in heaven” doctrine, allowing for a renewed messianic interpretation of both faiths.
Being, Goodness and Truth (Volume 16
This volume considers Aquinas’s virtue ethics, exploring the scholarly debate over inconsistencies in his account. It argues that Aquinas’s understanding of human beings as matter-form composites furnishes a robust moral accounting unavailable to reductive materialist accounts.
Our lives are a mosaic of routine practices. But what must we know to accomplish them? This book proposes six bodies of knowledge and skill—from affordances to causes—that explain the hidden architecture of our everyday actions, each introduced in its own chapter.
This publication explores phenomenological structural sociology, specifically the use of phenomenological structuralism in an effort to resolve the structure/agency problematic of the social sciences within structurationist sociological theory.
A Philosophical Approach to Creation Process
This book is about creation as conceived by the classical Greeks. Whether a plan for a form of government or a work of art, this sort of creation is used to do something that has never been done before.