Philosophy

34537 books

Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience - Paperback

$90.63

by Gregg Caruso (Editor), Owen Flanagan (Editor)Existentialisms arise when the foundations of being, such as meaning, morals, and purpose come under assault. In the first-wave of existentialism, writings typified by Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche concerned the increasingly apparent inability of religion, and religious tradition, to support a foundation of being. Second-wave existentialism, personified philosophically by Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir, developed in response to similar ...

Experience Embodied: Early Modern Accounts of the Human Place in Nature - Hardcover

$213.75

by Anik Waldow (Author)Anik Waldow develops an account of embodied experience that extends from Descartes' conception of the human body as firmly integrated into the causal play of nature, to Kant's understanding of anthropology as a discipline that provides us with guidance in our lives as embodied creatures. Waldow defends the claim that during the early modern period, the debate on experience not only focused on questions arising from the subjectivity of our thinking and feeling, it also f...

The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication - Paperback

$111.15

by Kate Kenski (Editor), Kathleen Hall Jamieson (Editor)Since its development shaped by the turmoil of the World Wars and suspicion of new technologies such as film and radio, political communication has become a hybrid field largely devoted to connecting the dots among political rhetoric, politicians and leaders, voters' opinions, and media exposure to better understand how any one aspect can affect the others. In The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication, Kate Kenski and Kathleen Hall ...

$61.54

by Lisa Shapiro (Editor)For many, the word 'pleasure' conjures associations with hedonism, indulgence, and escape from the life of the mind. However little we talk about it, though, pleasure also plays an integral role in cognitive life, in both our sensory perception of the world and our intellectual understanding. This previously important but now neglected philosophical understanding of pleasure is the focus of the essays in this volume, which challenges received views that pleasure is pri...

One Child: Do We Have a Right to More? - Hardcover

$40.99

by Sarah Conly (Author)A compelling argument for the morality of limitations on procreation in lessening the harmful environmental effects of unchecked population We live in a world where a burgeoning global population has started to have a major and destructive environmental impact. The results, including climate change and the struggle for limited resources, appear to be inevitable aspects of a difficult future. Mandatory population control might be a possible last resort to combat this pro...

The Best Things in Life: A Guide to What Really Matters - Paperback

$16.98

by Thomas Hurka (Author)For centuries, philosophers, theologians, moralists, and ordinary people have asked: How should we live? What makes for a good life? In The Best Things in Life, distinguished philosopher Thomas Hurka takes a fresh look at these perennial questions as they arise for us now in the 21st century. Should we value family over career? How do we balance self-interest and serving others? What activities bring us the most joy? While religion, literature, popular psychology, and ...

$54.70

by Samuel Scheffler (Author), Niko Kolodny (Editor)Suppose you knew that, though you yourself would live your life to its natural end, the earth and all its inhabitants would be destroyed thirty days after your death. To what extent would you remain committed to your current projects and plans? Would scientists still search for a cure for cancer? Would couples still want children? In Death and the Afterlife, philosopher Samuel Scheffler poses this thought experiment in order to show that the ...

Physician-Assisted Death: What Everyone Needs to Know(r) - Paperback

$16.95

by L. W. Sumner (Author)The issue of physician-assisted death is now firmly on the American public agenda. Already legal in five states, it is the subject of intense public opinion battles across the country. Driven by an increasingly aging population, and a baby boom generation just starting to enter its senior years, the issue is not going to go away anytime soon. In Physician-Assisted Death, L.W. Sumner equips readers with everything they need to know to take a reasoned and informed posit...

Aging Thoughtfully: Conversations about Retirement, Romance, Wrinkles, and Regret - Hardcover

$27.99

by Martha C. Nussbaum (Author), Saul Levmore (Author)We all age differently, but we can learn from shared experiences and insights. The conversations, or paired essays, in Aging Thoughtfully combine a philosopher's approach with a lawyer-economist's. Here are ideas about when to retire, how to refashion social security to help the elderly poor, how to learn from King Lear -- who did not retire successfully -- and whether to enjoy or criticize anti-aging cosmetic procedures. Some of the concer...

The Ethics of Giving: Philosophers' Perspectives on Philanthropy - Hardcover

$83.77

by Paul Woodruff (Editor)In giving to charity, should we strive to do the greatest good or promote a lesser good that we care more about? On such issues, ethical theory can have momentous practical effects. This volume is a unique collection of new papers on philanthropy from a range of philosophical perspectives. The authors are among the best-regarded philosophers writing on ethics today and include a number of thinkers who have not previously published on the subject. Most recently publish...

Categories We Live by: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories - Paperback

$87.21

by Ásta (Author)We are women, we are men. We are refugees, single mothers, people with disabilities, and queers. We belong to social categories and they frame our actions, self-understanding, and opportunities. But what are social categories? How are they created and sustained? How does one come to belong to them? Ásta approaches these questions through analytic feminist metaphysics. Her theory of social categories centers on an answer to the question: what is it for a feature of an individua...

Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic - Paperback

$87.21

by Serene J. Khader (Author)Decolonizing Universalism argues that feminism can respect cultural and religious differences and acknowledge the legacy of imperialism without surrendering its core ethical commitments. Transcending relativism/ universalism debates that reduce feminism to a Western notion, Serene J. Khader proposes a feminist vision that is sensitive to postcolonial and antiracist concerns. Khader criticizes the false universalism of what she calls 'Enlightenment liberalism, ' a w...

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death - Paperback

$99.18

by Ben Bradley (Editor), Fred Feldman (Editor), Jens Johansson (Editor)Death has long been a pre-occupation of philosophers, and this is especially so today. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death collects 21 newly commissioned essays that cover current philosophical thinking of death-related topics across the entire range of the discipline. These include metaphysical topics--such as the nature of death, the possibility of an afterlife, the nature of persons, and how our thinking about ti...

$82.06

by Antonia Lolordo (Editor)What is a person? Why do we count certain beings as persons and others not? How is the concept of a person distinct from the concept of a human being, or from the concept of the self? When and why did the concept of a person come into existence? What is the relationship between moral personhood and metaphysical personhood? How has their relationship changed over the last two millennia? This volume presents a genealogy of the concept of a person. It demonstrates how ...

Thomas Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles: A Guide and Commentary - Paperback

$123.12

by Brian Davies (Author)The Summa Contra Gentiles, one of Aquinas's best known works after the Summa Theologiae, is a philosophical and theological synthesis that examines what can be known of God both by reason and by divine revelation. A detailed expository account of and commentary on this famous work, Davies's book aims to help readers think about the value of the Summa Contra Gentiles (SCG) for themselves, relating the contents and teachings found in the SCG to those of other works and o...

On Romantic Love: Simple Truths about a Complex Emotion - Paperback

$23.99

by Berit Brogaard (Author)Romantic love presents some of life's most challenging questions. Can we choose who to love? Is romantic love rational? Can we love more than one person at a time? And can we make ourselves fall out of love? Berit Brogaard here attempts to get to the bottom of love's many contradictions. This short book, informed by both historical and cutting edge philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, combines a new theory of romantic love with entertaining anecdotes from real l...

Hegel's Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic - Hardcover

$205.20

by Karen Ng (Author)Karen Ng sheds new light on Hegel's famously impenetrable philosophy. She does so by offering a new interpretation of Hegel's idealism and by foregrounding Hegel's Science of Logic, revealing that Hegel's theory of reason revolves around the concept of organic life. Beginning with the influence of Kant's Critique of Judgment on Hegel, Ng argues that Hegel's key philosophical contributions concerning self-consciousness, freedom, and logic all develop around the idea of inte...

Locke: A Very Short Introduction - Paperback

$12.99

by John Dunn (Author)John Locke (1632-1704) one of the greatest English philosophers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, argued in his masterpiece, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, that our knowledge is founded in experience and reaches us principally through our senses; but its message has been curiously misunderstood. In this book John Dunn shows how Locke arrived at his theory of knowledge, and how his exposition of the liberal values of toleration and responsible...

Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction - Paperback

$12.99

by David Miller (Author)This Very Short Introduction introduces readers to the key concepts of political philosophy: authority, democracy, freedom and its limits, justice, feminism, multiculturalism, and nationality. Accessibly written and assuming no previous knowledge of the subject, it encourages the reader to think clearly and critically about the leading political questions of our time. Miller first investigates how political philosophy tackles basic ethical questions such as 'how should...

Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction - Paperback

$12.99

by Thomas Flynn (Author)One of the leading philosophical movements of the twentieth century, existentialism has had more impact on literature and the arts than any other school of thought. Focusing on the leading figures of existentialism, including Sartre, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and Camus, Thomas Flynn offers a concise account of existentialism, explaining the key themes of individuality, free will, and personal responsibility, which marked the movemen...

$12.95

by Plato (Author), Robin Waterfield (Translator), Andrew Gregory (Author)'The god wanted everything to be good, marred by as little imperfection as possible.' Timaeus, one of Plato's acknowledged masterpieces, is an attempt to construct the universe and explain its contents by means of as few axioms as possible. The result is a brilliant, bizarre, and surreal cosmos - the product of the rational thinking of a creator god and his astral assistants, and of purely mechanistic causes based on th...

$12.99

by Catherine Osborne (Author)Generations of philosophers, both ancient and modern, have traced their inspiration back to the Presocratics. Part of the fascination stems from the fact that little of what they wrote survives. Here Osborne invites her readers to dip their toes into the fragmentary remains of thinkers from Thales to Pythagoras, Heraclitus to Protagoras, and to try to reconstruct the moves that they were making, to support stories that Western philosophers and historians of philos...

$71.80

by Thomas Nagel (Author)Human beings have the unique ability to view the world in a detached way: We can think about the world in terms that transcend our own experience or interest, and consider the world from a vantage point that is, in Nagel's words, "nowhere in particular." At the same time, each of us is a particular person in a particular place, each with his own "personal" view of the world, a view that we can recognize as just one aspect of the whole. How do we reconcile these two sta...

The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of Their Thought - Paperback

$42.73

by Ben-Ami Scharfstein (Author)This highly readable volume offers a broad introduction to modern philosophy and philosophers. Ben-Ami Scharfstein contends that personal experience, especially that of childhood, affects philosophers' sense of reality and hence the content of their philosophies. He bases his argumenton biographical studies of twenty great philosophers, beginning with Descartes and ending with Wittgenstein and Sartre. Taken together, these studies provide the beginnings of a psy...

The Garden of Leaders: Revolutionizing Higher Education - Hardcover

$73.51

by Paul Woodruff (Author)The Garden of Leaders explores two related questions: What is leadership? And what sort of education could prepare young people to be leaders? Paul Woodruff argues that higher education--particularly but not exclusively in the liberal arts--should set its main focus on cultivating leadership in students. Woodruff advances a new view of liberal arts education that places leadership at the root of everything it does, so that students will be prepared to lead in their li...

But is It Art?: An Introduction to Art Theory - Paperback

$17.98

by Cynthia Freeland (Author)From Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes to provocative dung-splattered madonnas, in today's art world many strange, even shocking, things are put on display. This often leads exasperated viewers to exclaim--is this really art? In this invaluable primer on aesthetics, Freeland explains why innovation and controversy are so highly valued in art, weaving together philosophy and art theory with many engrossing examples. Writing clearly and perceptively, she explores the cultur...

The Retrieval of Liberalism in Policing - Hardcover

$188.10

by Luke William Hunt (Author)There is a growing sense that many liberal states are in the midst of a shift in legal and political norms - a shift that is happening slowly and for a variety of security-related reasons. The internet and tech booms that are paving the way for new forms of electronic surveillance predated the 9/11 attacks by several years, while the police's vast use of secret informants and deceptive operations began well before that. On the other hand, the recent uptick in reac...

Kant and the Science of Logic: A Historical and Philosophical Reconstruction - Hardcover

$188.10

by Huaping Lu-Adler (Author)Immanuel Kant's enduring influence on philosophy is indisputable. In particular, Kant transformed debates on the fundamental questions in logic, and it is the significance and complexity of this accomplishment that Huaping Lu-Adler here explores. Kant's theory of logic represents a turning point in a history of philosophical debates over the following questions: Is logic a science, instrument, standard of assessment, or mixture of these? Kant's official answer to t...

$83.77

by Thomas Nail (Author)More than at any other time in human history, we live in an age defined by movement and mobility; and yet, we lack a unifying theory which takes this seriously as a starting point for philosophy. The history of philosophy has systematically explained movement as derived from something else that does not move: space, eternity, force, and time. Why, when movement has always been central to human societies, did a philosophy based on movement never take hold? This book fina...

Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature - Paperback

$126.54

by Martha C. Nussbaum (Author)This volume brings together Nussbaum's published papers on the relationship between literature and philosophy, especially moral philosophy. The papers, many of them previously inaccessible to non-specialist readers, deal with such fundamental issues as the relationship between style and content in the exploration of ethical issues; the nature of ethical attention and ethical knowledge and their relationship to written forms and styles; and the role of the emotion...

The Philosophical Parent: Asking the Hard Questions about Having and Raising Children - Paperback

$70.09

by Jean Kazez (Author)Becoming parents draws us into philosophical quandaries before our children have even been born. Why do most of us want to have children? Should we make new people, despite life's travails and our crowded world? Is adoptive parenthood just the same as biological parenthood? Once children arrive, the questions start to be a mix of the profound and the practical. Should we share our lifestyle with our children, no matter how unusual? Should we vaccinate and may we circumci...

The Ambivalent State: Police-Criminal Collusion at the Urban Margins - Paperback

$64.96

by Javier Auyero (Author), Katherine Sobering (Author)Over the last few decades, debates about policing in poor urban areas have turned from analyzing the state's neglect and abandonment into documenting its harsh interventions and punishing presence. Yet, we know very little about the covert world of state action that is hidden from public view. In The Ambivalent State, Javier Auyero and Katherine Sobering offer an unprecedented look into the clandestine relationships between police agents a...