February New Philosophy books

• Theological Ethics through a Multispecies Lens: The Evolution of Wisdom
  
  Theological Ethics through a Multispecies Lens: The Evolution of Wisdom: B105.A55 D43 2019
  Author(s): Celia E. Deane-Drummond
  Oxford ; Oxford University Press 2019.
  
  There are two driving questions informing this book. The first is where does our moral life come from? It presupposes that considering morality broadly is inadequate. Instead, different aspects need to be teased apart. It is not sufficient to assume that different virtues are bolted onto a vicious animality, red in tooth and claw. Nature and culture have interlaced histories. By weaving in evolutionary theories and debates on the evolution of compassion, justice and wisdom, it showa a richer account of who we are as moral agents. The second driving question concerns our relationships with animals. Deane-Drummond argues for a complex community-based multispecies approach. Hence, rather than extending rights, a more radical approach is a holistic multispecies framework for moral action. This need not weaken individual responsibility. She intends not to develop a manual of practice, but rather to build towards an alternative philosophically informed approach to theological ethics, including animal ethics. The theological thread weaving through this account is wisdom. Wisdom has many different levels, and in the broadest sense is connected with the flow of life understood in its interconnectedness and sociality. It is profoundly theological and practical. In naming the project the evolution of wisdom Deane-Drummond makes a statement about where wisdom may have come from and its future orientation. But justice, compassion and conscience are not far behind, especially in so far as they are relevant to both individual decision-making and institutions.
  
  
• Things: In Touch with the Past
  
  Things: In Touch with the Past: B105.A8 K67 2019
  Author(s): Carolyn Korsmeyer
  New York, NY : Oxford University Press [2019]
  
  Things: In Touch with the Past explores the value of artifacts that have survived from the past and that can be said to "embody" their histories. Such genuine or "real" things afford a particular kind of aesthetic experience-an encounter with the past-despite the fact that genuineness is not a perceptually detectable property. Although it often goes unnoticed, the sense of touch underlies such encounters, even though one is often not permitted literal touch. Carolyn Korsmeyer begins her account with the claim that wonder or marvel at old things fits within an "experiential" account of the aesthetic. She then presents her main argument regarding the role of touch-both when literal contact is made and when proximity suffices, for touch is a fundamental sense that registers bodily position and location. Correct understanding of the identity of objects is presumed when one values things just because of what they are, and with discovery that a mistake has been made, admiration is often withdrawn. Far from undermining the importance of the genuine, these errors of identification confirm it. Korsmeyer elaborates this position with a comparison between valuing artifacts and valuing persons. She also considers the ethical issues of genuineness, for artifacts can be harmed in various ways ranging from vandalism to botched restoration. She examines the differences between a real thing and a replica in detail, making it clear that genuineness comes in degrees. Her final chapter reviews the ontology that best suits an account of persistence over time of things that are valued for being the real thing.
  
  
• Announcements: On Novelty
  
  Announcements: On Novelty: B105.N4 M46 2020
  Author(s): Kristina Mendicino
  Albany : State University of New York Press [2020]
  
  A study of novelty through analyses of the language of announcement in revolutionary texts. Walter Benjamin claimed that the notion of novelty took on unprecedented importance with the growth of high capitalism in the nineteenth century. In this book, Kristina Mendicino analyzes a selection of canonical texts that reflect profound concern with novelty and its apparent contrary, the eternal return of the same, including Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Baudelaire’s lyric and prose poetry, and Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto. She also addresses Eternity by the Stars by Louis-Auguste Blanqui, who is less well known and often underestimated in considerations of his significance for revolutionary political theory. Mendicino argues that the notion of a novum cannot be understood without attentiveness to the language of announcement, not least of all because the “new” has always been associated with a particular mode of linguistic performance. Through close readings of emphatically annunciatory texts, she demonstrates how the extreme possibilities of expression that they present through specific citational and rhetorical praxes render the language of announcement overdetermined and anachronistic in ways that exceed any systematic account of historical time and experience. This excess in and through language is precisely what opens hitherto unheard of alternatives for conceiving of historical temporality and political possibility. “Impressive in scope and philosophically sophisticated, this erudite and elegantly written book is, quite simply, dazzling. Mendicino successfully tears down many of the tired clichés that too often subtend discussions about novelty and modernism and makes persuasive arguments for her own novel claims about why the appeal to novelty matters so much. In her capable hands, the question of novelty becomes a lever with which she powerfully pries open familiar texts, philosophical traditions, and concepts and transforms those recognizable topoi into resources for thinking differently about historical time, revolution, capital, wealth, theory, and practice.” — Elissa Marder, author of Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert)
  
  
• War by Agreement: A Contractarian Ethics of War
  
  War by Agreement: A Contractarian Ethics of War: B105.W3 B46 2019
  Author(s): Yitzhak Benbaji, Daniel Statman
  Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press 2019.
  
  War by Agreement presents a new theory on the ethics of war. It shows that wars can be morally justified at both the ad bellum level (the political decision to go to war) and the in bello level (its actual conduct by the military)by accepting a contractarian account of the rules governing war.According to this account, the rules of war are anchored in a mutually beneficial and fair agreement between the relevant players - the purpose of which is to promote peace and to reduce the horrors of war. The book relies on the long social contract tradition and illustrates its fruitfulness inunderstanding and developing the morality and the law of war.
  
  
• Madhyamaka and Yogacara: Allies Or Rivals?
  
  Madhyamaka and Yogacara: Allies Or Rivals?: B162 .M33 2015
  Author(s): Jay L. Garfield, Jan Westerhoff
  New York : Oxford University Press 2015.
  
  Madhyamaka and Yogacara are the two principal schools of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy. While Madhyamaka asserts the ultimate emptiness and conventional reality of all phenomena, Yogacara is usually considered to be idealistic. This collection of essays addresses the degree to which these philosophical approaches are consistent or complementary. Indian and Tibetan doxographies often take these two schools to be philosophical rivals. They are grounded in distinct bodies of sutra literature and adopt what appear to be very different positions regarding the analysis of emptiness and the status of mind. Madhyamaka-Yogacara polemics abound in Indian Buddhist literature, and Tibetan doxographies regard them as distinct systems. Nonetheless, scholars have tried to synthesize the two positions for centuries. This volume offers new essays by prominent experts on both these traditions, who address the question of the degree to which these philosophical approaches should be seen as rivals or as allies. In answering the question of whether Madhyamaka and Yogacara can be considered compatible, contributors engage with a broad range of canonical literature, and relate the texts to contemporary philosophical problems.
  
  
• Daoist Encounters with Phenomenology: Thinking Interculturally about Human Existence
  
  Daoist Encounters with Phenomenology: Thinking Interculturally about Human Existence: B162.7 .D36 2020
  Author(s): David Chai
  London : Bloomsbury Academic 2020.
  
  This collection is intercultural philosophy at its best. It contextualizes the global significance of the leading figures of Western phenomenology, including Husserl, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Buber and Levinas, enters them into intercultural dialogue with the Daoism of Laozi and Zhuangzi and in doing so, breaks new ground. By presenting the first sustained analysis of the Daoist worldview by way of phenomenological experience, this book not only furthers our understanding of Daoism and phenomenology, but delves deeper into the roots of human thinking, aesthetic expression, and its impact on the modern social world. The international team of philosophers approach the phenomenological tradition in the broadest sense possible, looking beyond the phenomenological language of Husserl. With chapters on art, ethics, death and the metaphor of dream and hermeneutics, this collection encourages scholars and students in both Asian and Western traditions to rethink their philosophical bearings and engage in meaningful intercultural dialogue.
  
  
• Monstrosity and Philosophy: Radical Otherness in Greek and Latin Culture
  
  Monstrosity and Philosophy: Radical Otherness in Greek and Latin Culture: B187.O84 D45 2019
  Author(s): Filippo Del Lucchese
  Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press [2019]
  
  Reveals monstrosity to be a central conceptual challenge in every ancient Greek and Roman philosophical system Amazons and giants, snakes and gorgons, centaurs and gryphons: monsters abounded in ancient culture. They raise enduring philosophical questions: about chaos and order; about divinity and perversion; about meaning and purpose; about the hierarchy of nature or its absence. Del Lucchese grapples with the concept of monstrosity, showing how ancient philosophers explored metaphysics, ontology, theology and politics to respond to the challenge of radical otherness in nature and in thought. Each chapter explores the emergence of monstrosity in a set of authors and theories. In chapter 1, monsters rise as the challenging adversaries of the new gods of the early cosmogonies. But they can also be powerful productive forces that support building the new order or ambiguous characters that catalyse the unfolding of the tragic universe. In chapter 2, the Pre-Platonic systems of Anaxagoras, Empedocle and Democritus pave the way for the recognition of the philosophical status of monstrosity. This status becomes central in Attic philosophy, first with Plato's mythological monstrosities and then with the construction of a hierarchical structure of the universe: taken up in chapter 3. Chapter 4 focuses on Aristotle's study of physical monstrosity and its role within his metaphysical and aetiological framework. Chapters 5 to 7 deal with the extraordinarily elaborate responses to Attic philosophy by the major Hellenistic systems: Epicureanism, Stoicism and Scepticism. The final chapter looks at the Middle and Neoplatonist response to Hellenism and explores the richness of late-antiquity's reflection on monstrosity up to its absorption and reworking by early Christian thought.
  
  
• The Stoics on Lekta: All There Is to Say
  
  The Stoics on Lekta: All There Is to Say: B528 .B76 2019
  Author(s): Ada Bronowski
  Oxford, United Kingdom ; Oxford University Press 2019.
  
  After Plato's Forms, and Aristotle's substances, the Stoics posited the fundamental reality of lekta - the meanings of sentences, distinct from the sentences themselves. This is the first time in the tradition of Western philosophy that what is signified is properly distinguished from signs and signifiers. The Stoics on Lekta offers a synoptic treatment of the many implications of this distinction, which grants an existential autonomy to lekta: language can only ever express meanings, but what happens to meanings which are there, ready to be said, but which are never actually expressed? It analyses the deep shift in ontological paradigm required by the presence of lekta in reality, and reveals a truly unique, complex, and consistent cosmic view in which lekta are the keystones of the structure of reality. According to this view, we cannot not speak or think in terms of lekta, and for this reason, they are in fact all there is to say. The Stoics' position ignited many fiery debates in antiquity and continues to do so in the modern era: they were the first to be concerned with questions about language and grammar, and the first to put the relation of language to reality at the heart of the enquiry into human understanding and the place of man in the cosmos. Such questions remain central to life and philosophy to this day, and by explicitly comparing and contrasting the themes and topics discussed to twentieth-century treatments of the status of the proposition, propositional structure, speech act theory, and the relation of attribution of the predicate to a subject-term, this volume seeks to demonstrate the enduring value of a direct Stoic contribution to the contemporary debate.
  
  
• Alfarabi's Book of Dialectic (Kitāb al-jadal): On the Starting Point of Islamic Philosophy
  
  Alfarabi's Book of Dialectic Kitāb al-jadall): On the Starting Point of Islamic Philosophy: B753.F33 J2313 2019
  Author(s): David M. DiPasquale
  Cambridge, United Kingdom ; Cambridge University Press 2019.
  
  Provides the first complete English translation of a central text in the Islamic philosophical tradition, with meticulously researched commentary and interpretation.
  
  
• Bonaventure, the Body, and the Aesthetics of Salvation
  
  Bonaventure, the Body, and the Aesthetics of Salvation: B765.B74 D375 2020
  Author(s): Rachel Davies
  Cambridge, United Kingdom ; Cambridge University Press 2020.
  
  Examines the link between Bonaventure's aesthetics and anthropology in light of contemporary anxieties surrounding bodily diminishment.
  
  
• Power and Influence: The Metaphysics of Reductive Explanation
  
  Power and Influence: The Metaphysics of Reductive Explanation: B835.5 .C67 2019
  Author(s): Richard Corry
  Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press 2019.
  
  The world is a complex place, and this complexity is an obstacle to our attempts to explain, predict, and control it. In Power and Influence, Richard Corry investigates the assumptions that are built into the reductive method of explanation - the method whereby we study the components of acomplex system in relative isolation and use the information so gained to explain or predict the behaviour of the complex whole. He investigates the metaphysical presuppositions built into the reductive method, seeking to ascertain what the world must be like in order that the method could work.Corry argues that the method assumes the existence of causal powers that manifest causal influence- - a relatively unrecognised ontological category, of which forces are a paradigm example. The success of the reductive method, therefore, is an argument for the existence of such causal influences.The book goes on to show that adding causal influence to our ontology gives us the resources to solve some traditional problems in the metaphysics of causal powers, laws of nature, causation, emergence, and possibly even normative ethics. What results, then, is not just an understanding of thereductive method, but an integrated metaphysical worldview that is grounded in an ontology of power and influence.
  
  
• Sceptical Paths: Enquiry and Doubt from Antiquity to the Present
  
  Sceptical Paths: Enquiry and Doubt from Antiquity to the Present: B837 .S284 2019
  Author(s): Racheli Haliva, Emidio Spinelli
  Berlin ; Walter de Gruyter GmbH [2019]
  
  Sceptical Paths offers a fresh look at key junctions in the history of scepticism. Throughout this collection, key figures are reinterpreted, key arguments are reassessed, lesser-known figures are reintroduced, accepted distinctions are challenged, and new ideas are explored. The historiography of scepticism is usually based on a distinction between ancient and modern. The former is understood as a way of life which focuses on enquiry, whereas the latter is taken to be an epistemological approach which focuses on doubt. The studies in Sceptical Paths not only deepen the understanding of these approaches, but also show how ancient sceptical ideas find their way into modern thought, and modern sceptical ideas are anticipated in ancient thought. Within this state of affairs, the presence of sceptical arguments within Medieval philosophy is reflected in full force, not only enriching the historical narrative, but also introducing another layer to the sceptical discourse, namely its employment within theological settings. The various studies in this book exhibit the rich variety of expression in which scepticism manifests itself within various context and set against various philosophical and religious doctrines, schools, and approaches.
  
  
• Reconstructing the Personal Library of William James: Markings and Marginalia from the Harvard Library Collection
  
  Reconstructing the Personal Library of William James: Markings and Marginalia from the Harvard Library Collection: B945.J24 A44 2020
  Author(s): Ermine L. Algaier IV
  Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books 2020.
  
  While a reconstruction of the whole of William James’s personal library isn’t feasible, there are significant portions of it that reside within the Harvard University Library system and this book is a partial reconstruction of their story. Reconstructing the Personal Library of William James offers a new, comprehensive account of the James collection at Harvard University, bringing together all known Harvard-owned entries into one comprehensive volume. The annotated bibliography contains data on 2,554 entries (2,862 volumes) from James’s personal library, including both the 1923 “Philosophical Library” and all known additional donations by James and his family. . Each entry, when applicable, contains the following data points: Harvard Library location and call number, provenance, bookplate, accession record, autographs, inscriptions, ownership marks, indexical annotations, markings, and marginalia. To orient the reader, Ermine L. Algaier IV supplements the bibliography with essays that examine the history of the James’s library at Harvard, assess the size of the collection and how it came to reside at Harvard, and showcase patterns that emerge from looking at the collection as a whole. Additional essays are devoted to explaining the source lists and archival resources used in reconstructing James’s personal library, as well as outlining steps for continued research on the collection.
  
  
• The Concealed Influence of Custom: Hume's Treatise from the Inside Out
  
  The Concealed Influence of Custom: Hume's Treatise from the Inside Out: B1489 .G47 2019
  Author(s): Jay L. Garfield
  New York, NY : Oxford University Press [2019]
  
  Jay L. Garfield defends two exegetical theses regarding Hume's Treatise on Human Nature. The first is that Book II is the theoretical foundation of the Treatise. Second, Garfield argues that we cannot understand Hume's project without an appreciation of his own understanding of custom, and in particular, without an appreciation of the grounding of his thought about custom in the legal theory and debates of his time. Custom is the source of Hume's thoughts about normativity, not only in ethics and in political theory, but also in epistemological, linguistics, and scientific practice- and is the source of his insight that our psychological and social natures are so inextricably linked. The centrality of custom and the link between the psychological and the social are closely connected, which is why Garfield begins with Book II. There are four interpretative perspectives at work in this volume: one is a naturalistic skeptical interpretation of Hume's Treatise; a second is the foregrounding of Book II of the Treatise as foundational for Books I and III. A third is the consideration of the Treatise in relation to Hume's philosophical antecedents (particularly Sextus, Bayle, Hutcheson, Shaftesbury, and Mandeville), as well as eighteenth century debates about the status of customary law, with one eye on its sequellae in the work of Kant, the later Wittgenstein, and in contemporary cognitive science. The fourth is the Buddhist tradition in which many of the ideas Hume develops are anticipated and articulated in somewhat different ways. Garfield presents Hume as a naturalist, a skeptic and as, above all, a communitarian. In offering this interpretation, he provides an understanding of the text as a whole in the context of the literature to which it responded, and in the context of the literature it inspired.
  
  
• Utility, Publicity, and Law: Essays on Bentham's Moral and Legal Philosophy
  
  Utility, Publicity, and Law: Essays on Bentham's Moral and Legal Philosophy: B1574.B34 P67 2019
  Author(s): Gerald J. Postema
  Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press 2019.
  
  A collection of essays reassessing Jeremy Bentham's strikingly original legal philosophy.
  
  
• Oneself as Another
  
  Oneself as Another: B2430.R553 S6513 1992
  Author(s): Paul Ricoeur
  Chicago : University of Chicago Press 1994.
  
  Paul Ricoeur has been hailed as one of the most important thinkers of the century. Oneself as Another, the clearest account of his "philosophical ethics," substantiates this position and lays the groundwork for a metaphysics of morals. Focusing on the concept of personal identity, Ricoeur develops a hermeneutics of the self that charts its epistemological path and ontological status.
  
  
• Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, Volume VI: Ethical and World-View Philosophy
  
  Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, Volume VI: Ethical and World-View Philosophy: B3216.D82 E5 1985
  Author(s): Wilhelm Dilthey
  Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press ©1985-©2019.
  
  This book completes a landmark six-volume translation of the major writings of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), a philosopher and historian of culture who continues to have a significant influence on philosophy, hermeneutics, and the theory of the human sciences. These volumes make available to English readers texts that represent the full range of Dilthey's work. The works in this volume present Dilthey's most deeply held views about philosophy and how it can guide human practices. System of Ethics (1890) argues that Humean sympathy motivates us only externally and must be replaced with the internally motivated fellow-feeling of solidarity that respects others as ends in themselves. The Essence of Philosophy (1907) demonstrates how philosophy has developed from its traditional metaphysical role to the epistemological and encyclopedic functions that ground and order the natural and human sciences. The work also discloses an orientational function of philosophy that is explored further in "The Types of World-View and Their Development" (1911). Philosophical world-views are important in that they address the existential needs and riddles that grow out of life experience and are not solved by any of the sciences. In addition, the book features three other significant essays. "Present Day Culture and Philosophy" (1898) concerns the challenges to philosophy posed by contemporary culture. "Dream" (1903) is about the thinkers portrayed in Raphael's School of Athens and Dilthey's worries about them breaking up into three divergent groups. Finally, "The Problem of Religion" (1911) considers how religiosity can still inform lived experience in secular times.
  
  
• Heidegger's Ontology of Events
  
  Heidegger's Ontology of Events: B3279.H49 B34 2020
  Author(s): James Bahoh
  Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press [2020]
  
  Critically reconstructs Heidegger's concept of event: the most fundamental concept in Heidegger's later philosophy James Bahoh proposes a new methodology for explaining Heidegger's philosophy: diagenic analysis. This approach solves a set of interpretive problems that have stymied previous approaches to his difficult later work and led to substantial inconsistencies in the available scholarship. Using it, Bahoh reconstructs Heidegger's concept of event in relation to his theories of history, truth, difference, ground, and time-space. In these contexts, Bahoh argues that Heidegger's logic of events entails a logic of difference that is prior to and constitutive for the logic of identity essential to traditional metaphysics. The logic of events explains the generation of ontological structures grounding individuated finite domains; that is, it explains the generation of the logic of worlds of beings.
  
  
• Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement
  
  Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement: B3279.H49 M586 2019
  Author(s): Ian Alexander Moore
  Albany : State University of New York Press [2019]
  
  Provides the first systematic interpretation of Heidegger’s relation to Eckhart, centering on the idea that we must release ourselves in order to know the truth. In the late Middle Ages the philosopher and mystic Meister Eckhart preached that to know the truth you must be the truth. But how to be the truth? Eckhart’s answer comes in the form of an imperative: release yourself, let be. Only then will you be able to understand that the deepest meaning of being is releasement and become who you truly are. This book interprets Eckhart’s Latin and Middle High German writings under the banner of an imperative of releasement, and then shows how the twentieth-century thinker Martin Heidegger creatively appropriates this idea at several stages of his career. Heidegger had a lifelong fascination with Eckhart, referring to him as “the old master of letters and life.” Drawing on archival material and Heidegger’s marginalia in his personal copies of Eckhart’s writings, Moore argues that Eckhart was one of the most important figures in Heidegger’s philosophy. This book also contains previously unpublished documents by Heidegger on Eckhart, as well as the first English translation of Nishitani Keiji’s essay “Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Meister Eckhart,” which he initially gave as a presentation in one of Heidegger’s classes in 1938. “Moore’s book is an impressive achievement. Nobody can fail to learn from it or fail to appreciate the dedication and devotion that has enabled him to produce what is unquestionably an indispensable volume for anybody interested in Eckhart, late Heidegger, or the relation of so-called mysticism to philosophy more generally.” — Robert Bernasconi, Pennsylvania State University
  
  
• Heidegger on Truth: Its Essence and Its Fate
  
  Heidegger on Truth: Its Essence and Its Fate: B3279.H49 N495 2019
  Author(s): Graeme Nicholson
  Toronto : University of Toronto Press [2019]
  
  Martin Heidegger discovered that truth is at work within all human experience, but that truth is always shadowed by untruth, as addressed in his 1949 essay "On the Essence of Truth."
  
  
• "- ein Leser, wie ich ihn verdiene": Nietzsche-Lektüren in der deutschen Philosophie und Soziologie
  
  "- ein Leser, wie ich ihn verdiene": Nietzsche-Lektüren in der deutschen Philosophie und Soziologie: B3317 .L524 2019
  Author(s): Eike Brock, Jutta Georg
  Stuttgart : JB Metzler [2019].
  
  Dieses Buch trägt die Nietzsche-Rezeption im deutschsprachigen Raum anhand der bedeutendsten Autorinnen und Autoren zusammen, wobei neben der philosophischen auch die soziologische Rezeption berücksichtigt wird. Es dokumentiert die spannenden Veränderungen des Nietzsche-Verständnisses im Wandel der Zeiten und eröffnet im selben Atemzug neue Perspektiven für die Interpretation von Nietzsches Philosophie. Nicht zuletzt ist der Band eine exklusive Informationsquelle und Orientierungshilfe für Nietzsche-Forscherinnen und -Forscher und – ganz nebenbei – eine etwas andere Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts.
  
  
• Nietzsche's Metaphilosophy: The Nature, Method, and Aims of Philosophy
  
  Nietzsche's Metaphilosophy: The Nature, Method, and Aims of Philosophy: B3317 .N4977 2019
  Author(s): Paul S. Loeb, Matthew Meyer
  Cambridge, United Kingdom ; Cambridge University Press 2019.
  
  Renowned scholars explore and discuss Nietzsche's desire to challenge the very conception of philosophy, and his methods of doing so.
  
  
• Wittgenstein and Hegel: Reevaluation of Difference
  
  Wittgenstein and Hegel: Reevaluation of Difference: B3376.W564 W57 2019
  Author(s): Jakub Mácha, Alexander Berg
  Berlin : De Gruyter [2019]
  
  This book brings together for the first time two philosophers from different traditions and different centuries. While Wittgenstein was a focal point of 20th century analytic philosophy, it was Hegel’s philosophy that brought the essential discourses of the 19th century together and developed into the continental tradition in 20th century. This now-outdated conflict took for granted Hegel’s and Wittgenstein’s opposing positions and is being replaced by a continuous progression and differentiation of several authors, schools, and philosophical traditions. The development is already evident in the tendency to identify a progression from a ‘Kantian’ to a ‘Hegelian phase’ of analytical philosophy as well as in the extension of right and left Hegelian approaches by modern and postmodern concepts. Assessing the difference between Wittgenstein and Hegel can outline intersections of contemporary thinking.
  
  
• Spinoza's Ethics
  
  Spinoza's Ethics: B3973.E5 E38 2020
  Author(s): Benedictus de Spinoza
  Princeton : Princeton University Press 2020.
  
  An authoritative edition of George Eliot's elegant translation of Spinoza's greatest philosophical work In 1856, Marian Evans completed her translation of Benedict de Spinoza's Ethics while living in Berlin with the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes. This would have become the first edition of Spinoza's controversial masterpiece in English, but the translation remained unpublished because of a disagreement between Lewes and the publisher. Later that year, Evans turned to fiction writing, and by 1859 she had published her first novel under the pseudonym George Eliot. This splendid edition makes Eliot's translation of the Ethics available to today's readers while also tracing Eliot's deep engagement with Spinoza both before and after she wrote the novels that established her as one of English literature's greatest writers. Clare Carlisle's introduction places the Ethics in its seventeenth-century context and explains its key philosophical claims. She discusses George Eliot's intellectual formation, her interest in Spinoza, the circumstances of her translation of the Ethics, and the influence of Spinoza's ideas on her literary work. Carlisle shows how Eliot drew on Spinoza's radical insights on religion, ethics, and human emotions, and brings to light surprising affinities between Spinoza's austere philosophy and the rich fictional worlds of Eliot's novels. This authoritative edition demonstrates why George Eliot's translation remains one of the most compelling and philosophically astute renderings of Spinoza's Latin text. It includes notes that indicate Eliot's amendments to her manuscript and that discuss her translation decisions alongside more recent English editions.
  
  
• Kierkegaard and the Question Concerning Technology
  
  Kierkegaard and the Question Concerning Technology: B4377 .B365 2019
  Author(s): Christopher B. Barnett
  New York : Bloomsbury Academic 2019.
  
  Over the last several decades, technology has emerged as an important area of interest for both philosophers and theologians. Yet, despite his status as one of modernity's seminal thinkers, Søren Kierkegaard is not often seen as one who contributed to the field. Kierkegaard and the Question Concerning Technology argues otherwise. Christopher B. Barnett shows that many of Kierkegaard's criticisms of "the present age" relate to the increasing dominance of technology in the West, and he puts Kierkegaard's thought in conversation with subsequent thinkers who grappled with technological issues, from Martin Heidegger to Thomas Merton. Barnett shows that Kierkegaard's writing, with its marked emphases on personal "upbuilding," stands as a place where deeper, non-technical modes of thinking are both commended and nurtured. In doing so, Barnett presents a Kierkegaard who remains relevant--perhaps all too relevant--in today's digital age.
  
  
• The Kierkegaard-Girard Option
  
  The Kierkegaard-Girard Option: B4378.V56 B45 2019
  Author(s): Charles K. Bellinger
  Macon, Georgia : Mercer University Press [2019]
  
  
  
  
• Indian Philosophy: A Reader
  
  Indian Philosophy: A Reader: B5131 .I535 2020
  Author(s): Jonardon Ganeri
  London : Routledge 2020.
  
  The selection of essays in this volume aims to present Indian philosophy as an autonomous intellectual tradition, with its own internal dynamics, rhythms, techniques, problematics and approaches, and to show how the richness of this tradition has a vital role in a newly emerging global and international discipline of philosophy, one in which a diversity of traditions exchange ideas and grow through their interaction with one another. This new volume is an abridgement of the four-volume set, Indian Philosophy, published by Routledge in 2016. The selection of chapters was made in collaboration with the editors at Routledge. The purpose of this volume is to reintroduce the heritage of 'Indian Philosophy' to a contemporary readership by acquainting the reader with some of the core themes of Indian philosophy, such as the concept of philosophy, philosophy as a search for the self, Buddhist philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, language and logic.
  
  
• The Sorites Paradox
  
  The Sorites Paradox: BC199.V34 S67 2019
  Author(s): Sergi Oms, Elia Zardini
  Cambridge, United Kingdom ; Cambridge University Press 2019.
  
  For centuries, the Sorites Paradox has spurred philosophers to think and argue about the problem of vagueness. This volume offers a guide to the paradox which is both an accessible survey and an exposition of the state of the art, with a chapter-by-chapter presentation of all of the main solutions to the paradox and of all its main areas of influence. Each chapter offers a gentle introduction to its topic, gradually building up to a final discussion of some open problems. Students will find a comprehensive guide to the fundamentals of the paradox, together with lucid explanations of the challenges it continues to raise. Researchers will find exciting new ideas and debates on the paradox.
  
  
• Szenische Metaphysik
  
  Szenische Metaphysik: BD113 .H63 2019
  Author(s): Wolfram Hogrebe
  Frankfurt am Main : Vittorio Klostermann [2019]
  
  The question of 20th century philosophy was: how are we humans situated in our world? In forms of consciousness, as Husserl insistently analyzed, in language games, as Wittgenstein thought, or in a prior understanding of being, as Heidegger recommended? Wolfram Hogrebe summarizes these answers in what he calls scenic existence. This is grounded in certainties in which we experience ourselves sensitively 'tinted'. In this respect, forms of consciousness, language games and understanding of being are only built up from an anonymous sonority. Wolfram Hogrebe has been following these circumstances for several years. In this new book, he delineates the project in historically informed, multi-faceted differentiations, terminating in a plea for a new enlightenment that may be understood as a program for our time.
  
  
• Morality and Epistemic Judgment: The Argument from Analogy
  
  Morality and Epistemic Judgment: The Argument from Analogy: BD161 .C659 2019
  Author(s): Christopher Cowie
  Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press 2019.
  
  Moral judgments attempt to describe a reality that does not exist, so they are all false. This is the moral error theory, a deeply troubling yet plausible view that is now one of the canonical positions in moral philosophy. The most compelling argument against it is the argument from analogy. According to this, the moral error theory should be rejected because it would seriously compromise our practice of making epistemic judgments-judgments about how we ought to form and revise our beliefs in light of our evidence-and could undermine systematic thought and reason themselves. Christopher Cowie provides a novel assessment of the recent attention paid to this topic in moral philosophy and epistemology. He reasons that the argument from analogy fails because moral judgments are unlike judgments about how we ought to form and revise our beliefs in light of our evidence. On that basis, a moral error theory does not compromise the practice of making epistemic judgments. The moral error theory may be true after all, Cowie concludes, and if it is then we will simply have to live with its concerning consequences.
  
  
• Everything, More Or Less: A Defence of Generality Relativism
  
  Everything, More Or Less: A Defence of Generality Relativism: BD221 .S79 2019
  Author(s): J. P. Studd
  Oxford : Oxford University Press 2019.
  
  Almost no systematic theorizing is generality-free, but how general can we be? Do we ever succeed in theorizing about ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING in some interestingly final, all-caps-worthy sense of 'absolutely everything'? Not according to generality relativism. This book is concerned with the absolute generality debate, which involves and impacts on diverse issues in logic, metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics (especially the philosophy of set theory), andphilosophy of language. It offers a sustained defence of generality relativism that seeks to address the numerous challenges such as: What are we to make of seemingly absolutely general theories? What preventsour achieving absolute generality simply by using 'everything' unrestrictedly? How are we to characterize relativism without making use of exactly the kind of generality this view foreswears? Written for professional philosophers and graduate students, the text is accessible to readers who are unfamiliar with the absolute generality literature or the relevant parts of mathematics, but also includes a series of technical appendices which cater for specialist readers.
  
  
• The Voice of Misery: A Continental Philosophy of Testimony
  
  The Voice of Misery: A Continental Philosophy of Testimony: BD238.T47 H45 2019
  Author(s): Gert-Jan van der Heiden
  Albany : State University of New York [2019]
  
  A systematic study of testimony rooted in contemporary continental philosophy and drawing on literary case studies. From analytic epistemology to gender theory, testimony is a major topic in philosophy today. Yet, one distinctive approach to testimony has not been fully appreciated: the recent history of contemporary continental philosophy offers a rich source for another approach to testimony. In this book, Gert-Jan van der Heiden argues that a continental philosophy of testimony can be developed that is guided by those forms of bearing witness that attest to limit experiences of human existence, in which the human is rendered mute, speechless, or robbed of a common understanding. In the first part, Van der Heiden explores this sense of testimony in a reading of several literary texts, ranging from Plato’s literary inventions to those of Kierkegaard, Melville, Soucy, and Mortier. In the second part, based on the orientation offered by the literary experiments, Van der Heiden offers a more systematic account of testimony in which he distinguishes and analyzes four basic elements of testimony. In the third part, he shows what this analysis implies for the question of the truth and the truthfulness of testimony. In his discussion with philosophers such as Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, Agamben, Foucault, Ricoeur, and Badiou, Van der Heiden also provides an overview of how the problem of testimony emerges in a number of thinkers pivotal to twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought. “The Voice of Misery is a special book. Van der Heiden has presented an argument that is poised to challenge discourse in analytic philosophy, reshape approaches in continental philosophy, and give new orientation to interdisciplinary research in continental philosophy and literary theory. The book will find a large readership across the discipline of philosophy and in several areas of the humanities.” — Theodore George, author of Tragedies of Spirit: Tracing Finitude in Hegel’s Phenomenology
  
  
• Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-person Perspective
  
  Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-person Perspective: BD438.5 .Z34 2008
  Author(s): Dan Zahavi
  Cambridge, Mass. ; MIT Press 2008, ©2005.
  
  The relationship of self, and self-awareness, and experience: exploring classical phenomenological analyses and their relevance to contemporary discussions in consciousness research.
  
  
• Merleau-Ponty and Nishida: Artistic Expression as Motor-Perceptual Faith
  
  Merleau-Ponty and Nishida: Artistic Expression as Motor-Perceptual Faith: BH39 .L68 2019
  Author(s): Adam Loughnane
  Albany : State University of New York Press [2019]
  
  Places the phenomenologies of Merleau-Ponty and Nishida in dialogue and uncovers a demand for a motor-perceptual form of faith in both philosophers’ meditations on artistic expression. In Merleau-Ponty and Nishida, Adam Loughnane initiates a fascinating new dialogue between two of the twentieth century’s most important phenomenologists of the Eastern and Western philosophical worlds. Throughout the book, the reader is guided among the intricacies and innovations of Merleau-Ponty’s and Nishida’s ontological approaches to artistic expression with a focused look at a rarely explored connection between faith and negation in their philosophies. Exploring the intertwining of these concepts in their broader ontologies invokes a reappraisal of the ambiguous status of religion and art in the writings of both thinkers. Measuring these ambiguities, the ontologies of Flesh and Basho are read in-depth alongside great artworks and the motor-perceptual practices of seminal landscape artists such as Cézanne, Sesshū, Taiga, and Hasegawa, as well as other major figures of European, Chinese, and Japanese art history. Loughnane studies these artists’ bodily practices, focusing on the intimate relations realized with the landscapes they paint, and illuminating a valence of their expressive disciplines as a motor-perceptual form of faith. Merleau-Ponty and Nishida is an exciting intercultural reading, expanding two philosophers’ projects toward new horizons of research, revealing incitements in their writings that challenge unambiguous distinctions between art, philosophy, faith, and ultimately philosophy East and West. “Loughnane illuminates the ambiguous, chiasmatic, and dynamic relationality between the body and the world, providing concrete examples from art history East and West. He not only skillfully explains Nishida’s and Merleau-Ponty’s ontological notions, but also puts their philosophy to the test of art works, proving that their thinking reveals an important truth of art.” — Takeshi Kimoto, Chukyo University
  
  
• The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Ethics
  
  The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Ethics: BJ1012 .C28 2019
  Author(s): Tom Angier
  Cambridge, United Kingdom ; Cambridge University Press 2019.
  
  Natural law ethics centres on the idea that ethical norms derive from human nature. The field has seen a remarkable revival since the millennium, with new work in Aristotelian metaphysics complementing innovative applied work in bioethics, economics and political theory. Starting with three chapters on the history of natural law ethics, this volume moves on to various twentieth-century theoretical innovations in the tradition, and then to natural law as embedded in the three Abrahamic faiths. It closes with sections on applied natural law ethics and the challenges and prospects for natural law ethics in the twenty-first century. Uniquely interdisciplinary and written without technical jargon, the book will be of great interest to students and researchers in philosophy, theology, political theory and economics. They will find this the go-to resource for cutting-edge thinking in natural law ethics.
  
  
• An Ethical Guidebook to the Zombie Apocalypse: How to Keep Your Brain without Losing Your Heart
  
  An Ethical Guidebook to the Zombie Apocalypse: How to Keep Your Brain without Losing Your Heart: BJ1012 .H35 2020
  Author(s): Bryan Hall
  London : Bloomsbury Academic 2020.
  
  When your base camp is overrun by zombies, whom do you save if you cannot save everyone? Is it permissible to sacrifice one survivor to an undead horde in order to save a greater number of the living? Do you have obligations to loved ones who have turned? These are some of the troubling ethical questions you might face in a zombie apocalypse. Bryan Hall uses situations like these to creatively introduce the foundational theories of moral philosophy. Covering major thinkers such as Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill, this is an introduction to Ethics like no other: a practical guidebook for surviving a zombie outbreak with your humanity intact. It shows you why moral reasoning matters as long as you still walk among the living. The book is written entirely from the perspective of someone struggling to survive in a world overrun by the undead. Each chapter begins with graphic art and a “field exercise” that uses a story from this world to illustrate an ethical problem. By considering moral controversies through the unfamiliar context of a zombie apocalypse, the morally irrelevant factors that get in the way of resolving these controversies are removed and you can better answer questions such as: · Do we have a moral obligation to help those less fortunate than ourselves? · Is it ever morally permissible to intentionally kill an innocent person? · Are non-rational but sentient beings morally considerable? Equipped with further reading sections and overviews of the theories that you would usually cover in an introductory Ethics course, this one-of-a-kind primer critically evaluates different procedures for moral action that you can use not only to survive but flourish in an undead world.
  
  
• Global Corruption and Ethics Management: Translating Theory Into Action
  
  Global Corruption and Ethics Management: Translating Theory Into Action: BJ1012 .J87 2020
  Author(s): Carole L. Jurkiewicz
  Lanham, Maryland : Rowman & Littlefield [2020]
  
  Global Corruption and Ethics Management: Translating Theory into Action advances the study and practice of ethics management through seminal analyses of the who/how/why/when/and where of corruption. In accessible and direct language, thirty foremost scholars and experts from across the globe translate robust theory into actionable programs and policies. This book disrupts formulaic thinking and replaces it with dynamic research, vanguard approaches, and proven solutions.
  
  
• The Problem of Evil
  
  The Problem of Evil: BJ1401 .T66 2019
  Author(s): Michael Tooley
  Cambridge : Cambridge University Press 2019.
  
  Chapter 1 addresses some preliminary issues that it is important to think about in formulating arguments from evil. Chapter 2 is then concerned with the question of how an incompatibility argument from evil is best formulated, and with possible responses to such arguments. Chapter 3 then focuses on skeptical theism, and on the work that skeptical theists need to do if they are to defend their claim of having defeated incompatibility versions of the argument from evil. Finally, Chapter 4 discusses evidential arguments from evil, and four different kinds of evidential argument are set out and critically examined.
  
  
• Deadly Biocultures: The Ethics of Life-making
  
  Deadly Biocultures: The Ethics of Life-making: BJ1409.5 .E44 2019
  Author(s): Nadine Ehlers, Shiloh Krupar
  Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press [2019]
  
  A trenchant analysis of the dark side of regulatory life-making today In their seemingly relentless pursuit of life, do contemporary U.S. “biocultures”—where biomedicine extends beyond the formal institutions of the clinic, hospital, and lab to everyday cultural practices—also engage in a deadly endeavor? Challenging us to question their implications, Deadly Biocultures shows that efforts to “make live” are accompanied by the twin operation of “let die”: they validate and enhance lives seen as economically viable, self-sustaining, productive, and oriented toward the future and optimism while reinforcing inequitable distributions of life based on race, class, gender, and dis/ability. Affirming life can obscure death, create deadly conditions, and even kill. Deadly Biocultures examines the affirmation to hope, target, thrive, secure, and green in the respective biocultures of cancer, race-based health, fatness, aging, and the afterlife. Its chapters focus on specific practices, technologies, or techniques that ostensibly affirm life and suggest life’s inextricable links to capital but that also engender a politics of death and erasure. The authors ultimately ask: what alternative social forms and individual practices might be mapped onto or intersect with biomedicine for more equitable biofutures?
  
  
• The Oxford Handbook of Gossip and Reputation
  
  The Oxford Handbook of Gossip and Reputation: BJ1535.G6 O94 2019
  Author(s): Francesca Giardini, Rafael Wittek
  New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press [2019]
  
  Gossip and reputation are core processes in societies and have substantial consequences for individuals, groups, communities, organizations, and markets.. Academic studies have found that gossip and reputation have the power to enforce social norms, facilitate cooperation, and act as a means of social control. The key mechanism for the creation, maintenance, and destruction of reputations in everyday life is gossip - evaluative talk about absent third parties. Reputation and gossip are inseparably intertwined, but up until now have been mostly studied in isolation. The Oxford Handbook of Gossip and Reputation fills this intellectual gap, providing an integrated understanding of the foundations of gossip and reputation, as well as outlining a potential framework for future research. Volume editors Francesca Giardini and Rafael Wittek bring together a diverse group of researchers to analyze gossip and reputation from different disciplines, social domains, and levels of analysis. Being the first integrated and comprehensive collection of studies on both phenomena, each of the 25 chapters explores the current research on the antecedents, processes, and outcomes of the gossip-reputation link in contexts as diverse as online markets, non-industrial societies, organizations, social networks, or schools. International in scope, the volume is organized into seven sections devoted to the exploration of a different facet of gossip and reputation. Contributions from eminent experts on gossip and reputation not only help us better understand the complex interplay between two delicate social mechanisms, but also sketch the contours of a long term research agenda by pointing to new problems and newly emerging cross-disciplinary solutions.
  
  
• Opting for the Best: Oughts and Options
  
  Opting for the Best: Oughts and Options: BJ1595 .P835 2019
  Author(s): Douglas W. Portmore
  New York, NY : Oxford University Press [2019]
  
  We ought to opt for the best-that is, we ought to choose the option that is best in terms of whatever ultimately matters. So, if maximizing happiness is what ultimately matters, then we ought to perform the option that results in the most happiness. And if, instead, abiding by the Golden Rule is what ultimately matters, then we ought to perform the option that best abides by this rule. However, even if we know what ultimately matters, this is not always sufficient for determining which option we ought to perform. There are other questions that we need to consider as well. Which events are options for us? How do we rank our options-in terms of their own goodness or in terms of the goodness of the best options that entail them? How exactly does that which ultimately matters determine which options we ought to perform? In Opting for the Best, Douglas W. Portmore focuses on these three questions, which he argues can best be answered by putting aside any specific determination of what ultimately matters. He argues that tackling these three questions is crucial to solving many of the puzzles concerning what we ought to do, including those involving supererogation, indeterminate outcomes, overdetermined outcomes, predictable future misbehavior, and good acts that entail bad acts, among others. Engaging with arguments in areas as wide-ranging as action theory and deontic logic, the solutions that Portmore offers systematize our thinking about some of the most complex issues in practical philosophy.
  
  

Other new Philosophy books

• Die Ideengeschichte von Kant bis Hegel / Baumanns, Peter author.: B105.I28 B38 2019
• Wissen im Aufbruch : die Philosophie der deutschen Klassik am Beginn der Moderne / Asmuth, Christoph author.: B2741 .A86 2018
• Fichte im Streit : Festschrift für Wolfgang Janke / : B2848 .F529 2018
• Subjekt und Person : Beiträge zu einem Schlüsselproblem der klassischen deutschen Philosophie / : B2900 .H43 Suppl. v.68
• Hegels Philosophie / Jaeschke, Walter.: B2948 .J346 2020
• Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie / Habermas, Jürgen author.: B3258.H323 A934 2019
• Tod, wo ist dein Stachel? : über einen Zusammenhang von Endlichkeit und personaler Lebensform des Menschen / Quante, Michael author.: BD444 .Q36 2019