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"This volume presents new essays on the theory and practice of recognition. In order to retain its overall plausibility as a critical social theory, contemporary recognition theory needs to be able to successfully combine theory with real-life perspectives, in both contemporary and historical contexts. Contemporary recognition theory has developed into an established and active multidisciplinary research programme. The chapters in this volume have two main purposes. First, they engage in theoretical development of the contemporary theories of recognition. The theoretical chapters explore the conceptual histories and the environments of recognition, as well as the connection between recognition and authenticity, emancipation, and social ontology. Second, they connect the theoretical insights of contemporary recognition with analyses of contemporary and historical social practices. These chapters explore themes such as populism and polarization, models of harmful invisibilization and social ignorance, the problem of evil and suffering, and social justice phenomena such as the #MeToo movement. The Theory and Practice of Recognition will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in social and political philosophy, social ontology, political theory, and sociology"--

"The book is an attempt to bring together what are often seen as incommensurable scientific and philosophical positions. Its core argument is that a main reason for the divisions about what constitutes scientific knowledge relates to disagreements on philosophical issues. The book explores what these disagreements are about, and to discuss whether they can be overcome. Taking a historical perspective, the book traces the divides in science back to three main philosophical traditions: realism, idealism, and scepticism. It maps how these have inspired three main current positions in science: logical empiricism, phenomenology, and sociology of scientific knowledge. The book is intended for a general audience concerned with today's debates on scientific knowledge and society. It will be useful for students and researchers studying philosophy of science, sociology of scientific knowledge, realism, phenomenology, positivism, logical empiricism, analytical philosophy, and sustainable scientific knowledge"--

This book offers an account of ten crucial moments in the history of ideas, which represent ten key moments of the discovery of pluralism. From the Indian emperor Ashoka to Origen and from Nicola Cusano to Las Casas, Montaigne, Lessing, giants who opened the way to the thought of tolerance, challenging the dogma of a unique truth dictated by authority, followed in this reconstruction by other glowing thinkers of the twentieth century, such as Horace Kallen, Margaret Mead, and Jacques Dupuis. These protagonists, each in their own way, battled against monism for the respect of differences and for the knowledge of otherness. This kind of hall of fame of pluralist thinkers ends with the most important figure of the pluralism of values, Isaiah Berlin, of whom an unpublished interview appears here for the first time in English. The volume is unique in this two-thousand-year-old variety of voices gathered under the denominator of cultural pluralism that they embody in the deepest and most challenging sense, often at the limits and beyond the limits of heresy. It is of great value and interest to scholars and students of theoretical, moral, political philosophy, sociology, comparative studies, comparative literature, religious diversity, religious studies, anthropology, and all those interested in the history of tolerance.

This book focuses on how we should treat philosophy's theoretical representations. It argues in favor of an instrumentalist attitude towards pivotal cases of theoretical representation in philosophy that are commonly regarded under a realist attitude. Philosophy is awash with theoretical representations, which raises the question of how we should regard them. This book argues that representations in philosophy should not be regarded under a realist attitude by default as individually disclosing the nature of what they represent. Ori Simchen introduces the reader to the general theme of representations in philosophy and our attitudes towards them via case studies: numbers, modality, and belief. He offers a framework for deciding when a realist attitude towards a theoretical representation is warranted and concludes that the representations deployed in the case studies fail the proposed test. The next part of the book illustrates the attractiveness of attitudinal instrumentalism towards representations in semantics, in the philosophy of mind, and within the problematics of rule-following. Philosophical Representation will appeal to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophical logic, and philosophical methodology.

Raimo Tuomela, late Professor Emeritus at the Centre for Philosophy of Social Sciences (TINT), University of Helsinki, is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of our time. He published extensively on various topics within social philosophy; particularly, on social action, cooperation, group belief, group responsibility, group reasoning, social practices, and institutions. To celebrate his legacy, this volume engages with and delves deeply into his philosophy of sociality. By gathering original essays from a world-class line-up of social ontologists, social action theorists, and social philosophers, this collection provides the first comprehensive and critical treatment of Tuomela's outstanding contribution to social ontology and collective intentionality. Miguel Garcia-Godinez is an IRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UCC, Philosophy. His main research areas are legal philosophy, social ontology, and metaethics. Rachael Mellin is a Law PhD student at the University of Glasgow. Her primary areas of research are in legal philosophy and social ontology.

This book presents a series of coordinated studies that explain and illustrate how philosophy must be developed systematically with its problems and topics bound together by links of reciprocal interconnection. The book consists of two parts: The first part consists of a series of case studies which illustrate how philosophical issues do not remain in neatly separated compartments but reach out in interrelationship with one another. The second part analyzes the principle resources of philosophical methodology and shows in detail how and why they can only be implemented in a systemically interrelated manner. Overall, the book demonstrates and illustrates the systemic and holistic nature of philosophical inquiry. Nicholas Rescher is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. In a productive research career extending over six decades, he has well over one hundred books to his credit, including Philsophical Fallacies (Palgrave, 2022), Ethics Matters (Palgrave 2021), Philosophical Clarifications (Palgrave 2019), and Value Reasoning (Palgrave 2017).

One of the main goals of this book is to determine if, in the works of some of the key authors in the history of Italian political philosophy, a notion of efficacy can be found. In legal philosophy, efficacy is the capacity a norm has to effectively influence citizens behavior. The principle of efficacy is that according to which an order or rule exists as such when it is followed effectively in practice. Here by efficacy I mean the idea that normative phenomena are self-justifying, without reference to extrinsic systems of value (such as natural law). The examinations of several texts undertaken here constitute reflections on this theme, without any claim to systematicity. They have been grouped together, roughly in historical order, by their common respect for the contexts within which they reason and reach decisions, which lends them a characteristic flavor of harsh realism that at times relies on a minimalist use of traditional normative categories. The second theme that emerges through the respective chapters (each of which constitutes the text for a lesson in a course for Ph.D. students) is that of the relationship between equality and vulnerability. Here the idea is to elaborate a concept of vulnerability that is not underpinned by what we in Italy call an anthropology, that is, a fixed notion of human nature. Instead this concept should be comprehensible and graspable solely on the basis of the recognition of decisions and actions that are merely efficacious, that function for what they are, and what they do. This recognition doesnt even need to be explicitly articulated by these authors with any specific, deliberately conscious awareness. The goal is not to identify a precise tradition of thought, one which elaborates a given line of reflection, but rather to highlight certain themes that emerge in the texts examined, even as the authors write with and for their own specific, contingent set of motives, which differ from time to time and place to place. These authors include some who are widely known, such as Dante, Machiavelli, and Beccaria. At times they are figures who typify certain key historical episodes, such as the Risorgimento (Giuseppe Mazzini) or Fascism (Cesare Lombroso and Santi Romano), while others reflect certain aspects of a contemporary debate (Pasolini and the Braibanti affair). The book is based on lectures given for a 2021 Ph.D. Course at the University of California, Berkeleys Department of Italian Studies.

This book is an abridged version of Feng Qis two major works on the history of philosophy, The Logical Development of Ancient Chinese Philosophy and The Revolutionary Course of Modern Chinese Philosophy. It is a comprehensive history of Chinese philosophy taking the reader from ancient times to the year 1949. It illuminates the characteristics of traditional Chinese philosophy from the broader vantage point of epistemology. The book revolves around important debates including those on Heaven and humankind (tian ren), names and actualities (mingshi), principle and vital force (liqi), the Way and visible things (daoqi), mind and matter/things (xinwu), and knowledge and action (zhixing). Through discussion of these debates, the course of Chinese philosophy unfolds. Modern Chinese philosophy has made landmark achievements in the development of historical and epistemological theory, namely the dynamic and revolutionary theory of reflection. However, modern Chinese philosophy is yet to construct a systematic overview of logic and methodology, as well as questions of human freedom and ideals. Amid this discussion, the question of how contemporary China is to take the baton from the thinkers of the modern philosophical revolution is addressed.

In a hospital waiting room two acquaintances, Director and Woman, await the results of surgery on friends. They lend comfort to one another through a wide-ranging conversation. They speak of fear, laughter, spirit, belief, and many other topics. Their dialogue makes clear that we can do far more than simply wait, passively, in fear of results. With the right partner, you can, together, drink in life--and drink deeply indeed. Woman is a professional violinist; Director is a consultant. But Director is also a philosopher. What does a philosopher love to do? Woman believes they love to talk. But Director indicates this isn't quite true. Philosophers love to philosophize. What does that mean? The answer to this comes through a reading of the book as a whole. The dialogue in this book is philosophy. It does not rely on a structure of concepts arranged to articulate a whole, so it may not seem familiar to many as philosophy. Philosophy, as we need it today, is conversational. After all, what is more persuasive? An all-but-perfectly-tight series of arguments meant to compel a certain conclusion, or a looser discussion of the topic in question with someone you like and admire? This does not mean Director's philosophizing is tame. He asks, 'If we feel fear, what do we seek?' Woman replies, 'I seek comfort. And you?' 'I seek to destroy the source of the fear.' This produces a laugh from Woman. As Director says in response, 'Laughter is better than fear.' But as we read on, we may wonder: Was he serious? What does it mean to destroy the source of the fear? And why does this question arise in a book about comfort? Woman declares that, 'People comfort themselves [...] by refusing to think.' Director and she question whether that is true comfort. This book is about that question.

"Spanning a wide range of texts, figures, and traditions from the ancient Mediterranean world, this volume gathers far-reaching, interdisciplinary papers on Greek philosophy from an international group of scholars. The book's sixteen chapters address an array of topics and themes, extending from the formation of philosophy from its first stirrings in archaic Greek as well as Egyptian, Persian, Mesopotamian, and Indian sources, through central concepts in ancient Greek philosophy and literatures of the classical period and into the Hellenistic age. Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy offers both in-depth, rigorous, attentive investigations of canonical texts in western philosophy, such as Plato's Phaedo, Gorgias, Republic, Phaedrus, Protagoras and the Metaphysics, De Caelo, Nichomachean Ethics, Generation and Corruption of Aristotle's corpus, as well as inquiries that reach back into the rich archives of the Mediterranean Basin and forward into the traditions of classical philosophy beyond the ancient world. Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy is of interest to students and scholars working on different aspects of ancient Greek philosophy, as well as ancient philosophy more broadly"--

This volume discusses the definitional problems and conceptual strategies involved in defining the human. By crossing the boundaries of disciplines and themes, it offers a transdisciplinary platform for exploring the new ideas of the human and adjusting to the dynamic in which we are plunged. The emerging cyborgs and transhumans call for an urgent reconsideration of humans as individuals and collectives. The identity of the human in the 21st century eludes definitions underpinned by simplifying and simplified dichotomies. Affecting all the spheres of life, the discoveries and achievements of recent decades have challenged the bipolar categorizations of human/nonhuman and human/machine, real/virtual and thus opened the door to transdisciplinary considerations. Ours is a new world where the boundaries of normality and abnormality, a legacy of the long history of philosophy, medicine, and science need dismantling. We are now on our way to re-examine, re-understand, and re-describe what normal-abnormal, human-nonhuman, and I-we-they mean. We find ourselves facing what resembles the liminal stage of a global ritual, a stage of being in-betweenbetween the old anthropocentric order and a new position of blurred boundaries. The volume addresses philosophical, bioethical, sociological, and cognitive approaches developed to transcend the binaries of human-nonhuman, natural-artificial, individual-collective, and real-virtual.

Mainstream philosophy of religion has persistently failed to engage seriously or critically with animist beliefs and practices. The field that is now called "philosophy of religion" could quite easily be renamed "philosophy of theism" with few lecturers on the subject having to change their lecture notes. It is the aim of this volume to rectify that failure and to present animism as a live option among the plethora of religious worldviews. The volume addresses four major questions: 1. What is this thing called "animism"? 2. Are there any arguments for or against animist belief and practice? 3. What is the relationship between animism, naturalism, and the sciences? And 4. Should we take animism seriously? Animism and Philosophy of Religion is intended to be the first authoritative scholarly volume on the issue of animism and its place in the philosophy of religion. Ambitiously, it aims to act as the cornerstone volume for future work on the subject and as a key text for courses engaging with the subject. Tiddy Smith is a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Massey University. He is the author of The Methods of Science and Religion (Rowman and Littlefield) and has published various articles in journals such as the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Erkenntnis, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, and Philosophia.