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847 results in Philosophy: general interest

Page 1 of 43

Civil Religion and the Renewal of American Politics

Truth and Reference in the Making of Fiction
  • A View on Fictionality
  • Manuel García-Carpintero
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2025
    Print publication:
    31 October 2025
  • A standard feature of our engagement with fictions is that we praise them as if they offer true insights on factual, psychological or evaluative matters, or criticize them as if they purport to do it but fail. But it is not so easy to make sense of this practice, since fictions traffick in made-up narratives concerning non-existing characters. This book offers the reader conceptual tools to reflect on such issues, providing an overarching, systematic account of philosophical issues concerning fictions and illustrating them with analysis of compelling examples. It asks whether fiction is defined – as John Searle and others have claimed – by mere pretense – the simulation of ordinary representational practices like assertions or requests - or whether it is defined by invitations or prescriptions to imagine. And it advances an original proposal on the nature of fictions, explaining why fictions can refer to the world and state facts about it.

Religious Experience
  • Implications for What Is Real
  • Phillip H. Wiebe
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • In this book, Phillip Wiebe examines religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences, assessing how these experiences appear to implicate a spiritual order. Despite the current prevalence of naturalism and atheism, he argues that experiences purporting to have a religious or spiritual significance deserve close empirical investigation. Wiebe surveys the broad scope of religious experience and considers different types of evidence that might give rise to a belief in phenomena such as spirits, paranormal events, God, and an afterlife. He demonstrates that there are different explanations and interpretations of religious experiences, both because they are typically personal accounts, and they suggest a reality that is often unobservable. Wiebe also addresses how to evaluate evidence for theories that postulate unobservables in general, and a Theory of Spirits in particular. Calling for more rigorous investigation of these phenomena, Wiebe frames the study of religious experience among other accepted social sciences that seek to understand religion.

The Neural Structure of Consciousness
  • Joseph Mendola
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Consciousness is an intriguing mystery, of which standard accounts all have well-known difficulties. This book examines the central question about consciousness: that is, the question of how phenomenal features of our experience are related to physical features of our nervous system. Using the way in which we experience color as a central case, it develops a novel account of how consciousness is constituted by our neural structure, and so presents a new physicalist and internalist solution to the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness, with respect specifically to sensory qualia. The necessary background in philosophy and sensory neurophysiology is provided for the reader throughout. The book will appeal to a range of readers interested in the problems of consciousness.

Kant and Literary Studies

A Philosopher Looks at Clothes
  • Kate Moran
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2025
    Print publication:
    05 June 2025
  • Clothes are much more than just what we put on in the morning. They express our identity; they can be an independent statement or the result of coercion; and they have deeply entrenched historical, political, and social aspects. Kate Moran explores the connections between clothes and philosophy, showing how clothes can illustrate and pose philosophical problems, and how philosophical ideas influence clothing. She discusses what it might mean for an article of clothing to be beautiful; how we communicate with clothes; how we use clothes to navigate our social existence; and how our social existence leaves its mark on our clothes. She also considers the curious relationship between philosophers and children's clothes, legal restrictions on clothing, textile waste, and labor conditions of textile workers. Her absorbing and engaging portrait of our clothes helps us to understand an important and underexplored aspect of our lives.

Rick Turner's Politics as the Art of the Impossible
  • Edited by Michael Onyebuchi Eze, Lawrence Hamilton, Laurence Piper, Gideon van Riet
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    01 July 2024
  • Rick Turner was a South African academic and activist who rebelled against apartheid at the height of its power and was assassinated in 1978 when he was 32 years old, but his life and work are testimony to the power of philosophical thinking for humans everywhere. Turner chose to live freely in an unfree time and argued for a non-racial, socialist future in a context where this seemed unimaginable.

    This book considers Rick Turner's challenge that political theorising requires thinking in a utopian way. Turner's seminal book The Eye of the Needle: Towards a Participatory Democracy in South Africa laid out potent ideas on a radically different political and economic system. His demand was that we work to escape the limiting ideas of the present, carefully design a just future based on shared human values, and act to make it a reality, both politically and in our daily lives.

    The contributors to this volume engage critically with Turner's work on race relations, his relationship with Steve Biko, his views on religion, education and gender oppression, his model of participatory democracy, and his critique of poverty and economic inequality. It's an important contribution to contemporary thinking and activism.

An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science
  • 2nd edition
  • Kent W. Staley
  • Published online:
    29 March 2025
    Print publication:
    27 March 2025
  • This thoroughly updated second edition guides readers through the central concepts and debates in the philosophy of science. Using concrete examples from the history of science, Kent W. Staley addresses questions about what science is, why it is important, and the basis for trust in scientific results. The first part of the book introduces the central concepts of philosophy of science, with updated discussions of the problem of induction, underdetermination, rationality, scientific progress, and important movements such as falsificationism, logical empiricism, and postpositivism, together with a new chapter on social constructionism. The second part offers updated chapters on probability, scientific realism, explanation, and values in science, along with new discussions of the role of models in science, science in policy-making, and feminist philosophy of science. This broad yet detailed overview will give readers a strong grounding in philosophy of science whilst also providing opportunities for further exploration.

The Politics of Voice in Education
  • Reforming Schools after Deleuze and Guattari
  • Eve Mayes
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2025
    Print publication:
    30 April 2023
  • Engaging with the voices of students and educators and the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Eve Mayes crafts an account of what voice can and must do in education. The book works with the textures, tremors and murmurs of voice felt over ten years of ethnographic and participatory research in Australian schools - from research encounters with students and puppets, to school governance council meetings, to school reform evaluation processes, to students' political activism. It offers a timely critique of the liberal humanist and late capitalist logics of student voice in educational reform, entwined with an affirmation of other possibilities for transversal pedagogical relations in and beyond institutional sites of education.

Theopolitical Figures
  • Scripture, Prophecy, Oath, Charisma, Hospitality
  • Montserrat Herrero
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2025
    Print publication:
    30 August 2023
  • The book addresses the question of the extent to which theological discourse has been and is relevant to the origins of the meanings, symbols, and realities of some instituted political practices. This relevance has historically manifested itself in the hybridisation of theological and political concepts, images, gestures, and rituals. Indeed, some divine traces could be seen as embedded in institutionalised political practices. Theopolitical figures, then, are other names for God - in the sense of negative theology - that we find in instituted practices within the political realm. The book considers five theopolitical figures: scripture, prophecy, oath, charisma, and hospitality. In the symbolic meaning of these figures, we discern some central questions for contemporary societies, among them: the unconditional character of justice, the unfeasibility of historical expectation, the stability of the given word, the idea of power as a gift, and openness to the coming other as an ethical-political imperative.

Hysteresis
  • The External World
  • Maurizio Ferraris
  • Edited and translated by Sarah De Sanctis
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    11 March 2025
    Print publication:
    28 February 2024
  • Since the 1780s, Western philosophy has been largely under the spell of Immanuel Kant's transcendental philosophy. In this book, Maurizio Ferraris offers a number of important criticisms of Kant in a book of two parts, written twenty-one years apart. The first part of the book, 'Observation', originally published in 2001, lays the foundations of Ferraris' New Realism, foreshadowing the realist turn that has become characteristic of 21st century philosophy. The second part, 'Speculation', written in 2021, outlines a complete metaphysical theory of realism. What ties both parts of the book together is the notion of hysteresis, the ability of effects to survive even when their causes have ceased to exist.

Affirmation and Resistance in Spinoza
  • The Strategy of the Conatus
  • Laurent Bove
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    08 March 2025
    Print publication:
    30 September 2023
  • Offers a powerful and influential interpretation of Spinoza's conatus - the essential striving that defines each of us - as fundamentally strategic.

    Spinozism must be understood as a dynamic ontology that necessarily unfolds on practical terrain. Laurent Bove analyses Spinoza's theory of affects as rooted in Habit, generating the constituent power of human beings, commonwealths, nations and multitudes. By interpreting sovereignty as a power that emerges through the active resistance of the always singular body of the multitude, Bove discovers in Spinoza a radically new approach to the State, to citizenship and to history.

Spinoza's Paradoxical Conservatism
  • François Zourabichvili
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    07 March 2025
    Print publication:
    01 May 2023
  • François Zourabichvili wrote two major contributions to Spinoza scholarship. While 'Une physique de la pensée' (PUF, 2002) concerns Spinoza's epistemology and metaphysics of ideas, Spinoza's Paradoxical Conservatism focuses on his political philosophy.

    Zourabichvili's interpretation of Spinoza's political philosophy is radically unlike the established tradition. In this book he explores Spinoza's philosophical theory of change across three different studies. First, within ethical transition, secondly within the image of the infant in Spinoza's work and third dealing with absolute monarchy which was dominant during Spinoza's time and provided his polemical writings with a concrete target.

    The book's challenging and carefully-argued claims will be of serious interest to anyone working in political theory, early modern philosophy or contemporary French thought.

An Introduction to Ethics
  • 2nd edition
  • John Deigh
  • Published online:
    06 March 2025
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
  • Now in an expanded and revised second edition, this book offers clear, penetrating examination of the central questions of ethics through study of the most important ethical theories in Western philosophy. Readers are introduced not only to the main ideas of each theory but also to contemporary developments and defenses of those ideas. Among theories the book covers are egoism, the eudaimonism of Plato and Aristotle, act and rule utilitarianism, modern natural law theory, Kant's moral theory, and existentialist ethics. Two new chapters add to this coverage expositions of Hume's ethics, Sidgwick's program for defending utilitarianism, and Rawls's hypothetical contractarianism. The discussions throughout draw the reader into philosophical inquiry through argument and criticism that illuminate the profundity of the questions under examination. Students will find this book to be a helpful guide to how philosophical inquiry is undertaken as well as to what the major theories of ethics hold.

Moderate Liberalism and the Scottish Enlightenment
  • Montesquieu, Hume, Smith and Ferguson
  • Constantine Christos Vassiliou
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    06 March 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2023
  • Moderate Liberalism and the Scottish Enlightenment responds to a perennial problem in political theory: how to balance commercial considerations with the public good. It investigates this dilemma through the lenses of Enlightenment thinkers whose liberal theories responded to the hazards of commercial innovation during capitalism's nascent stages. Vassiliou argues that Montesquieu, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson represent a moderate perspective in foundational liberal thought, which emphasizes the critical importance of honour. He compares how their liberal theories uniquely channel human beings' desire for honour to nourish a sense of interpersonal magnanimity within an inward-looking, liberal commercial world. In an age of polarized extremes, we have witnessed restive democracies flirting with populist, illiberal responses for managing the hazards of capitalist innovation. Montesquieu and his Scottish counterparts' foundational liberal theories offer us more viable, middle-ground prescriptions which are sensitive to the emotional constitution of a liberal society.

Violence, Image and Victim in Bataille, Agamben and Girard
  • John Lechte
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    05 March 2025
    Print publication:
    31 May 2023
  • What is violence - what is an image? How does violence relate to the image, and how do violence and the image implicate and define the victim? These questions underpin the thinking of Bataille, Agamben and Girard - thinkers of the moment in as much as they each aim to explain the basis of society and culture in the context of power and the sacred. To study power and the sacred, the book shows, is to reveal the connection between violence and the image, a connection that shows what it means to be a victim.

    Separate chapters are devoted to the study of violence and the image as these appear in the work of Bataille, Agamben and Girard.

    The book concludes that no study of violence and the image can avoid engaging with the issue of the injustice of being a victim.

Marx with Spinoza
  • Production, Alienation, History
  • Franck Fischbach
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    01 March 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2023
  • Spinoza and Marx would seem to be two very opposed philosophers. Spinoza was interested in contemplating eternal truths of nature while Marx was interested in the history of capital.

    Franck Fischbach suggests that by reading the two together we may better understand both history and nature, as well as ourselves, making possible a new understanding of human nature. Rather than see history and nature as opposed, history is nothing but the constant transformation of nature.

    Central to this transformation is a new understanding of alienation not as loss of the self in a world of objects, but as loss of objects in a world that disconnects us from nature and social relations, leaving us isolated as a subject. The isolated individual, the kingdom within a kingdom, as Spinoza put it, is not the condition of our liberation but the basis of our subjection.

Modern Philosopher Kings
  • Wisdom and Power in Politics
  • Haig Patapan
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    01 March 2025
    Print publication:
    31 March 2023
  • Can wisdom and power, philosophy and politics be combined to secure justice? Or are there formidable tensions, even antagonism between them? Socrates presented the philosopher king as an aspiration, a remedy for the ills of the world. He also called it a paradox, a challenging and perplexing innovation. Ever since, the philosopher king has been an enduring and fascinating question as well as a political aspiration. Modern Philosopher Kings examines the philosopher king as a paradox and an ambitious modern project. Through a series of diverse studies ranging from the prophet, intellectual, artist, advisor, scientist and 'the people' it examines modern attempts to unite wisdom and power. In doing so it reveals the different ways and the extent to which wisdom can be empowered and power ennobled.

An Introduction to Classical and Modal Logics
  • The Outlines of Knowledge
  • Adam Bjorndahl
  • Published online:
    08 February 2025
    Print publication:
    21 November 2024
  • Classical logic – which studies the structural features of purported claims of fact – and modal logic – which studies relations of necessity and possibility – are different but complementary areas of logical thought. In this lively and accessible textbook, Adam Bjorndahl provides a comprehensive and unified introduction to the two subjects, treating them with the same level of rigour and detail and showing how they fit together. The core material appears in the main text, with hundreds of supplemental examples, comments, clarifications, and connections presented throughout in easy-to-read sidenotes, giving the book a distinct conversational feel. A detailed, multi-part appendix covers important background mathematical material that some students may lack, such as induction or the concept of countable infinity. A fully self-contained learning resource, this book will be ideal for a semester-long upper-level university course on either or both of the topics.

The Philosophy of Worship
  • Divine and Human Aspects
  • Edited by Aaron Segal, Samuel Lebens
  • Published online:
    09 January 2025
    Print publication:
    23 January 2025
  • Worship is central to the lives of billions of people worldwide. Yet, despite the recent flourishing of analytical philosophy of religion, there has been very little attention paid to the philosophical questions raised by worship. This book is the first volume to explore the philosophy of worship. Written in a clear style that eschews unnecessary technical jargon, it considers the metaphysical, ethical, and psychological issues associated with worship, among them: What, if anything, is the point of worship? What, if anything, makes a being worthy of worship? Can worship hold value for atheists? What, if anything, might be wrong with idolatry? These questions, and more, sit at the heart of this book. With contributions from world renowned philosophers and important early career voices, this volume sets the agenda for future work in the philosophy of worship.

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