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What sets intentional actions apart from the rest has long been a central question in the philosophy of action. In this book, Markos Valaris offers a novel answer, grounded in a distinctive 'knowledge-first' conception of agential control. Rejecting decompositional accounts that analyse intentional action into separate mental and bodily components, Valaris argues that control is best understood as a capacity for knowledge of a distinctively practical kind. This framework yields a unified account of intentional action and illuminates several live debates in the field, including the ontology of actions as events, the epistemology of intentional action, and the nature of skill.
Artificial intelligence is reshaping decisions that affect people, institutions, and societies. Understanding how to design, deploy, and govern AI systems that can be trusted is now essential in many disciplines. This book offers a clear, concise introduction to trustworthy AI, treating AI not just as a technical artifact but as a socio-technical system embedded in human contexts. Developed from an internationally applicable educational framework, the book is designed for teaching and learning in computer science, data science, law, policy, business, and related fields. It equips students and professionals with the concepts and judgment needed to engage critically and responsibly with AI in practice. Combining ethics, governance, and practical insight, the book explains key concepts including transparency, fairness, accountability, human oversight, and stakeholder participation. An interdisciplinary approach makes the material accessible to both technical and non-technical audiences, with realistic scenarios and reflection questions so readers connect principles to real-world AI applications.
Plato's Sophist in Antiquity offers the first comprehensive account of how one of Plato's most challenging and influential dialogues was read, interpreted, and transformed throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. Spanning from the Early Academy to Late Neoplatonism, the volume unites leading scholars in a systematic investigation of the Sophist's complex afterlife. Combining historical depth with philosophical insight, it uncovers how ancient thinkers – Aristotle, the Stoics, Plutarch, Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, and others – engaged with the dialogue's central questions about being, non-being, truth and falsehood, identity and difference, linguistic reference, and much else. By tracing these rich trajectories of reception, the book not only fills a major gap in Platonic studies but also demonstrates the continuing vitality of the Sophist for contemporary debates in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language.
The relation of mind and body is a longstanding puzzle in philosophy. This book explores how mind-body problems show up in contemporary biomedicine and psychiatry through dualistic models and metaphors that shape clinical practice. It discusses how the resultant tensions and contradictions that plague healthcare can be resolved. This begins with disentangling the knots that constitute the mind-body problem and applying ideas from systems biology, cognitive science, and anthropology to understand mind, consciousness, and agency as processes that emerge from embodied engagements with a social world. The text takes the reader on a journey across diverse clinical situations to consider: the power of multilevel systems theory; problems of knowledge, truth, and explanation in psychiatry; the mechanisms of placebo effects and hypnotic suggestion; the role of stories in constructing the self; the power and limits of imagination; and the prospects for an integrative view of the person in health and illness.
The philosophical kinship between Kant and the Stoics is often noted in passing but has received relatively little sustained scholarly attention. This detailed, wide-ranging study shows Kant's engagement with Stoic philosophy to extend beyond ethics, tracing its impact on Kant's inquiry on rationality, moral psychology, human action, and the concept of nature as well. It reveals that Kant's most philosophically productive engagement with Stoic thought comes not in the more familiar ethical works of the critical decade (the Groundwork and the second Critique), but rather in his later practical works examining human development, moral progress and virtue, and cosmopolitan duty. This book distinctively highlights the pivotal role that the 1790 Critique of the Power of Judgment plays in Kant's appropriation and transformation of Stoic ideas, as well as his close dialogue with Seneca and Epictetus throughout the 1793 Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone.
Most people not only believe in free will but assume that if we didn't have it society would fall apart. Gregg Caruso challenges this assumption and argues that belief in free will, rather than being a good thing, actually has a dark side and we would be better off without it. His book develops an ethically defensible and practically workable account of how we can live well—indeed, live better—without belief in free will. The book discusses the moral psychology of blame and anger, the intricacies of our moral responsibility practices, and how we can preserve love, morality, creativity, friendship, and criminal and social justice without free will. He also develops an account of virtue ethics and argues not only that it is consistent with free will skepticism, but that adopting the skeptical perspective can better help us achieve the virtues most important to human flourishing and wellbeing.
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) made important contributions to ethics, social philosophy, and the philosophy of the body, and was also a prize-winning novelist. Her book The Second Sex (1949) made a huge impact as part of the second wave of feminist thought. This accessible study examines Beauvoir's philosophy across all her works, including not only The Second Sex, The Ethics of Ambiguity and her essays, but also her novels, autobiography, travel diaries and memoirs. Her key ideas are analysed, including freedom and self-creation -- with special attention to their constraints and limitations – solidarity, and the role of other people in a person's existence. Her views of women's lived experience, motherhood, the body, illness, and death are related to our own time, with examples from current affairs, literature, cinema, and social media. The result is a fresh perspective on Beauvoir's philosophy and its enduring power to illuminate existential and social realities.
The planetary boundaries framework - one of the most influential ideas of our age - is used to describe human-Earth relationships. It shapes global environmental policy and new economic thinking. This book takes a multidisciplinary approach to the planetary boundaries framework. It consists of eighteen chapters by scholars from disciplines ranging from international law to indigenous knowledge. Each chapter begins with an introduction before expanding into a critical analysis of the reach and limits of the boundary framework itself, with each of the nine frameworks the focus of two chapters. This volume comes at as a critical moment, when the unprecedented challenges of the climate crisis demand new approaches, tools and perspectives to questions of climate justice and sustainability. It is a valuable resource for researchers and graduate students in environmental politics and ethics, geography, and Earth system science. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Hope is a vital force in politics, nourishing our visions of the future when things seem irredeemably bleak. Contemporary philosophy is trapped within a view of hope as an everyday desire empty of ethical and political content. Much political theory defers to philosophy and appears unable to appreciate the value of hope as a political attitude. Through an interpretive conversation with Richard Rorty, Robert Lamb shows how Rorty uses Hegel to develop a compelling, alternative understanding of hope as the yearning for a better future amidst a contingent social world and fragile political inheritance. Commitment to political hope – an enemy of despair, optimism, and certainty – invites a reorientation of philosophical reflection and involves a demanding civic ethos to sustain communities fragmented by pathological individualism. Rorty's interpretations of John Rawls, feminism, and the redemptive potential of history show the relevance of hope for the urgent challenges facing twenty-first century liberal democracy.
As Anglo-American legal systems face unsustainable levels of imprisonment, this book provides an ethical rationale for moving in a direction that pragmatic considerations already press us toward: reducing punitiveness. Every mainstream moral justification for criminal sanctions is subject to formidable objections, creating “moral uncertainty” about whether any single justification can adequately guide policymakers. Instead, this book defends 'The Convergence Approach' -- basing penal policy on areas of agreement between theories. This provides an ethical “safety net” so that even if one's preferred theory is flawed, another theory could still justify the policy. The book also proposes a presumption against imposing sanctions of a severity that a reasonable theory would deem excessive, and emulating less punitive Nordic systems. It discusses moral/legal principles applicable across many jurisdictions, providing accessible, up-to-date, interdisciplinary, and topical discussions of the prisons crisis, penal theories, moral psychology, crime prevention, and victims' and offenders' rights.
Who has a legitimate claim to wisdom? Emily Hulme argues that Plato's response to this question was shaped by the concept of technē (art, craft, expertise, profession) and that he developed the notion of philosophy as a genuine profession in the dialogues against the rival claims of practices like sophistry The first part of the book concerns technē in general, drawing on literary, epigraphic, and art historical evidence to discuss this concept in Greek thought and culture and explaining the position of this term in Plato's epistemological vocabulary. The second part offers close readings of a handful of key dialogues: philosophy defined against sophistry in Euthydemus, Hippias Minor, Protagoras, and Gorgias; the profession of philosopher-rulers in the Republic; and philosophy versus politics in the Sophist and Statesman
This volume explores the interrelations between emotions, embodiment, and vulnerability through a phenomenological perspective. Scholars of philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry investigate how the fragilities of embodied existence shape emotions, how these vulnerabilities become visible in psychopathological conditions, and how they figure in therapeutic contexts. A central theme is that emotions can be understood as experiences lived through and enacted – not merely endured – showing them as fundamental to human selfhood and agency. Integrating phenomenological analyses with clinical insights, the text illuminates fluid boundaries between ordinary and pathological emotional experience. Across twenty-one chapters contributed by established researchers, this book builds a framework for understanding how emotions reveal and modulate human vulnerability.
The seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, commonly known as Leviathan, has fascinated, alarmed, and challenged readers ever since its publication in 1651. Both a modernization of natural law theory and an early and influential contribution to social contract theory, Leviathan offers a powerful, systematic theory of the rights and duties of sovereigns and subjects, governors and citizens. This Critical Guide provides scholars, students, and anyone curious about Hobbes's political theory access to the latest research into Hobbes's views of philosophical method, human psychology, morality, law, liberty, governance, power relations, obligation, agency and responsibility, the requisites of social stability, pride, honor, theism, and organized religion. In fourteen original essays by many of today's leading Hobbes scholars, the volume provides overviews and in-depth investigations into those aspects of Hobbes's thinking in Leviathan that are of greatest interest today.
Many think that there is nothing to be done now to address past wrongs. The intergenerational harm argument connects ongoing harms with past wrongs, but this argument faces problems: it relies on empirical claims connecting wrongs of the past with harms in the present, claims with which not everyone agrees, and since the wrongdoers existed in the past, it is difficult to say who owes reparations today. In this book, Susan Stark discusses cases of wrongs and injustices - focusing on genocides, the transatlantic slave trade, and social discrimination and oppression of various kinds -- and explores the complex ethical problem of how past wrongs and historic injustices can be partially repaired in the present, and of who is morally required to repair them. She argues for a new way of thinking about reparations, and shows that it is possible to make some repair in the present for wrongs done by others in the past.
During the first four centuries of the common era, scholars and theologians laid the ground work for Christian doctrines that have shaped the faith and practice of believers for two millenia. This was the formative period of Christianity when the major theological tenets of the faith were articulated. The writings of the earliest Christians continue to serve as a vital source of inspiration and guidance for Christians around the world. This Companion offers an overview of Christianity's foundational beliefs and practices. Providing an historiographical overview of the topic, it includes essays on the key thinkers and texts, as well as doctrines and practices that emerged during early Christian era. The volume covers the range of texts produced over four centuries and written by theologians hailing from throughout the Mediterranean world, including the Latin West, North Africa, and the Greek east. Written by an international team of scholars, this Companion serves an accessible introduction to the topic for students and scholars alike.
Montesquieu is among the most important figures in the history of political thought, yet his published writings reveal next to nothing regarding his personal life. This volume provides the first English translations of letters revealing the character, lifestyle, and ambitions of this titled aristocrat, landowner, feudal lord, wine producer, and influential author. The letters chosen include intimate details regarding his marriage, family life, dalliances, and literary ambitions alongside frank assessments of French and European politics, warfare, and religion that would have aroused government censors if made public. We learn how eagerly Montesquieu sought entry into Parisian social circles after publishing his Persian Letters (1721), and we see how greatly he valued friendships with Parisian women whose influence at court could protect writers criticizing the existing order. In sum, the letters translated for this volume provide crucial context for his published work, illuminating how his life experiences shaped his worldview.