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After Utopia was the author's first book, a harbinger of her renowned career in political philosophy. Throughout the many changes in political thought during the last half century, this important work has withstood the test of time. The book explores the decline of political philosophy, from Enlightenment optimism to modern cultural despair, and offers a critical, creative analysis of this downward trend. It looks at Romantic and Christian social thought, and shows that while the present political fatalism may be unavoidable, the prophets of despair have failed to explain the world they so dislike, leaving the possibility of a new and vigorous political philosophy. With a foreword examining the book's continued relevance, this current edition introduces a remarkable synthesis of ideas to a new generation of readers.

This is a study of the unlikely “career” of anxiety in nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy. Anxiety is an affect, something more subtle, sometimes more persistent, than an emotion or a passion. It lies at the intersection of embodiment and cognition, sensation and emotion. But anxiety also runs like a red thread through European thought, beginning from receptions of Kant’s transcendental project. Like a symptom of the quest to situate and give life to the philosophical subject, like a symptom of an interrogation that strove to take form in European intellectual culture, angst (from anxiety to anguish) passed through Schelling’s Romanticism into Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, until it was approached existentially by Kierkegaard. Nietzsche situates it in the long history of producing an animal able to promise. Its returns in the twentieth century allow us to grasp the connection between phenomenology’s exploration of passivity, followed by interpretations of the human reality in a world and open to a call that it can hardly assume. The study thus begins with Kant; it probes late idealism and Romanticism, the metaphysical vitalism that flickered with Schopenhauer, the aesthetics and religious senses of angst in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. It turns to three avatars of anxiety in the evolving psychoanalysis before exploring the return to rationalism and formalism in twentieth-century phenomenology, followed again by efforts to resituate human beings in world and body as well as, significantly, before the anxiogenic “other.”

The book contains the proceedings of the 19th Symposium Aristotelicum (Munich 2011), dedicated to Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium, which expounds a common causal explanation of animal self-motion. Besides a philosophical introduction by Christof Rapp and essays on the individual chapters of De Motu Animalium, there is a new critical edition of the Greek text and a philological introduction by Oliver Primavesi, and an English translation of the new text by Benjamin Morison. The philosophical introduction and the essays on the individual chapters aim to give a balanced representation of scholarly debate on the treatise and related issues since the publication of Martha Nussbaum’s edition and commentary in 1978. The new edition and translation of the Greek text were made necessary by the discovery, in 2011, of a second, independent branch of the manuscript tradition. The new text, which is the first to be based on a full collation of all forty-seven extant Greek manuscripts, differs in 120 significant cases from the text published by Nussbaum in 1978.

Since its original publication, this book has proven increasingly influential to those working in political philosophy, human rights, global justice, and the ethics of international relations and foreign policy, particularly in debates regarding foreign policy's role in alleviating global poverty. The book asks: Which human rights ought to be the first honored and the last sacrificed? It argues that subsistence rights, along with security rights and liberty rights, serve as the ground of all other human rights. This classic work, now available in a thoroughly updated fortieth-anniversary edition, includes a substantial new chapter examining how the accelerating transformation of our climate progressively undermines the bases of subsistence like sufficient water, affordable food, and housing safe from forest-fires and sea-level rise. Climate change threatens basic rights.

Probability concepts permeate physics. This is obvious in statistical mechanics, in which probabilities appear explicitly. But even in cases when predictions are made with near-certainty, there is are implicit probabilistic assumptions in play, as it is assumed that molecular fluctuations can be neglected. How are we to understand these probabilistic concepts? This book offers a fresh look at these familiar topics, urging readers to see them in a new light. It argues that the traditional choices between probabilities as objective chances or degrees of belief is too limiting, and introduces a new concept, called epistemic chances, that combines physical and epistemic considerations. Thinking of probabilities in this way solves some of the puzzles associated with the use of probability and statistical mechanics. The book includes some history of discussions of probability, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and introductions to conceptual issues in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. It should be of interest to philosophers interested in probability, and to physicists and philosophers of physics interested in understanding how probabilistic concepts apply to the physical world.

This engagingly written book offers an innovative account of Cicero’s treatment of key political ideas: liberty and equality, government, law, cosmopolitanism and imperialism, republican virtues, and ethical decision-making in politics. Cicero (106–43 BC) is well known as a major participant in the turbulent politics of the last three decades of the Roman Republic. But he was a political thinker, too, influential for many centuries on the Western intellectual and cultural tradition. His theoretical writings stand as the first surviving attempt to articulate a philosophical rationale for republicanism. They were not written in isolation either from the stances he took in his political oratory of the period, or from his discussions in his voluminous correspondence with friends and acquaintances of immediate political issues or questions of character or behaviour. The book situates the intimate interrelationships between Cicero’s writings in all these modes within the historical context of a fracturing traditional Roman political order, while exhibiting the continuing attractions of his conceptual landscape, as well as some of its limitations as a response to the crisis that was engulfing Rome.

This is a volume of essays in philosophy and linguistics in tribute to Dorothy Edgington, the first woman to hold a chair in philosophy in the University of Oxford. The volume focuses on topics to which Edgington has made many important contributions including conditionals, vagueness, the paradox of knowability, and probability. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, linguists, and psychologists with an interest in philosophical logic, natural language semantics, and reasoning.

Some things are reasons for us to perform certain actions. That it will spare you great pain in the future, for example, is a reason for you to go to the dentist now, and that you are already late for work is a reason for you not to read the next article in the morning paper. Why are such considerations reasons for or against certain actions? Constructivism offers an intriguing answer to this question. Its basic idea is often encapsulated in the slogan that reasons are not discovered but made by us. This book elaborates the constructivist idea into a fully fledged account of practical reasons, makes its theoretical commitments explicit, and defends it against some well-known objections. It begins with an examination of the distinctive role that reason judgements play in the process of practical reasoning. This provides the resources for an anti-representationalist conception of the nature of those judgements, according to which they are true, if they are true, not because they accurately represent certain normative facts, but because of their role in sound reasoning. On the resulting view, a consideration owes its status as a reason to the truth of the corresponding reason judgement and thus, ultimately, to the soundness of a certain episode of reasoning. Consequently, our practical reasons exhibit a kind of mind-dependence, but this does not force us to deny their objectivity.

Duty to self has not been taken seriously by contemporary moral and political philosophers, with many even denying the coherence of the notion. Morality and politics concern treatment of others, according to common understanding, and so the very idea of a duty to oneself is thought to be mistaken. Against this, this book aims to vindicate the idea of duties owed by a person to herself, within both the moral and the political domains. Temporal divisions within a life, as well as between practical identities, enable an individual to relate to herself second-personally as she would to another, and thus to owe herself obligations. This book argues that such duties have implications for ethics, practical reasoning, and moral psychology. It also advances a new justification for paternalistic laws, which appeals to the notion of political self-duty.

Empiricisms reassesses the values of experience and experiment in European philosophy and comparatively. It traces the history of empirical philosophy from its birth in Greek medicine to its emergence as a philosophy of modern science. A richly detailed account in Part I of history’s empiricisms establishes a context in Part II for reconsidering the work of the so-called radical empiricists—William James, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, and Gilles Deleuze, each treated in a dedicated chapter. What is “radical” about their work is to return empiricism from epistemology to the ontology and natural philosophy where it began. Empiricisms also sets empirical philosophy in conversation with Chinese tradition, considering technological, scientific, medical, and alchemical sources, as well as selected Confucian, Daoist, and Mohist classics. The work shows how philosophical reflection on experience and a profound experimental practice coexist in traditional China with no interaction or even awareness of each other. Empiricism is more multi-textured than philosophers tend to assume when we explain it to ourselves and to students. One purpose of Empiricisms is to recover the neglected context. A complementary purpose is to elucidate the value of experience and arrive at some idea of what is living and dead in philosophical empiricism.

Groups are often said to bear responsibility for their actions, many of which have enormous moral, legal, and social significance. The Trump Administration, for instance, is said to be responsible for the U.S.’s inept and deceptive handling of COVID-19 and the harms that American citizens have suffered as a result. But are groups subject to normative assessment simply in virtue of their individual members being so, or are they somehow agents in their own right? Answering this question depends on understanding key concepts in the epistemology of groups, as we cannot hold the Trump Administration responsible without first determining what it believed, knew, and said. Deflationary theorists hold that group phenomena can be understood entirely in terms of individual members and their states. Inflationary theorists maintain that group phenomena are importantly over and above, or otherwise distinct from, individual members and their states. It is argued that neither approach is satisfactory. Groups are more than their members, but not because they have “minds of their own,” as the inflationists hold. Instead, this book shows how group phenomena—like belief, justification, and knowledge—depend on what the individual group members do or are capable of doing while being subject to group-level normative requirements. This framework, it is argued, allows for the correct distribution of responsibility across groups and their individual members.

This book is concerned with the ontology of the things that we experience, especially in regard to its modal features. Ontology studies the basic categories of beings, including particulars like chairs, properties like being yellow, and relations like being on. But this book focuses specifically on the ontology of the ordinary objects that our sensory experience seems to reveal, for instance blue cars and green trees. It investigates the colors, shapes, and other concrete properties these familiar objects present in experience, their spatial relations, and whatever beyond their concrete properties and relations is required to constitute them as the specific objects that they seem to be. But there is also another aspect of this topic: modality. Modality concerns what is possible and what is necessary, what could be and what must be. The central novelty of the book is an intense focus on the modal aspect of these experienced particulars and properties, and what it can tell us about modality in general. The proper understanding of such properties and relations and such forms of particularity has many implications regarding what is and is not possible. The reality of these sorts of properties, relations, and particularity would involve in surprising ways not merely what would be hence actual but what would be merely possible. And these phenomena support a novel general conception of modality, of the possible and the necessary, according to which the actual and the possible are locally entwined and involve different types of being.

Carlo Diano’s Form and Event has long been known in Europe as a major work not only for classical studies but even more for contemporary philosophy. Already available in Italian, French, Spanish, and Greek, it appears here in English for the first time, with a substantial Introduction by Jacques Lezra that situates the book in the genealogy of modern political philosophy. Form and Event reads the two classical categories of its title phenomenologically across Aristotle, the Stoics, and especially Homer. By aligning Achilles with form and Odysseus with event, Diano links event to embodied and situated subjective experience that simultaneously finds its expression in a form that objectifies that experience. Form and event do not exist other than as abstractions for Diano but they do come together in an intermingling that Diano refers to as the “eventic form.” On Diano’s reading, eventic forms interweave subjectively situated and embodied experiences, observable in all domains of human and nonhuman life.

This book traces the historical origins of France's National Constituent Assembly of 1789, providing a vivid portrait of the ancien régime and its complex social system in the decades before the French Revolution. The book's author writes in the spirit of Alexis de Tocqueville, who described this tumultuous era with an eye toward individual and group psychology and the functioning of institutions. Whereas Tocqueville saw the old regime as a breeding ground for revolution, the author, more specifically, identifies the rural and urban conflicts that fueled the constitution-making process from 1789 to 1791. The book presents a new approach to history writing, one that supplements the historian's craft with the tools and insights of modern social science. It draws on important French and Anglo-American scholarship as well as a treasure trove of historical evidence from the period, such as the Memoirs of Saint-Simon, the letters of Madame de Sévigné, the journals of the lawyer Barbier and the bookseller Hardy, the Remonstrances of Malesherbes, and La Bruyère's maxims. The book is the first volume of a trilogy that promises to transform our understanding of constitution making in the eighteenth century.

P. F. Strawson was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his 1962 paper “Freedom and Resentment” is one of the most influential in modern moral philosophy, prompting responses across multiple disciplines, from psychology to sociology. This book closely reexamines Strawson's paper and concludes that his argument has been underestimated and misunderstood. Line by line, the book carefully untangles the complex strands of Strawson's ideas. After elucidating his conception of moral responsibility and his division between “reactive” and “objective” responses to the actions and attitudes of others, the book turns to its central argument. Strawson argues that, because determinism is an entirely general thesis, true of everyone at all times, its truth does not undermine moral responsibility. The book finds the two common interpretations of this argument, “the simple Humean interpretation” and “the broadly Wittgensteinian interpretation” both deficient. Drawing on Strawson's wider work in logic, philosophy of language, and metaphysics, the book concludes that the argument rests on an implicit, and previously overlooked, metaphysics of morals, one grounded in Strawson's “social naturalism.” The final chapter defends this naturalistic picture against objections. The book sheds new light on Strawson's thinking and has profound implications for future work on free will, moral responsibility, and metaethics. It also features the complete text of Strawson's “Freedom and Resentment.”

The book explores how personal hatred can foster domestic violence and emotional abuse; how hate-proneness is a main contributor to the aggressive tendencies of borderlines, narcissists, psychopaths, and hatemongers; how seemingly ordinary people embark on some of history’s worst hate crimes; and how cohesive groups can develop extremist viewpoints that motivate hate crimes, mass shootings, and genocide. The book’s first part explores hate in personal relationships, looking for an answer to the question of why our personal relationships can survive hate and resentment but not disrespect or contempt. It shows that where contempt creates an irreparable power imbalance, hate is tied to fear, which our brains may reinterpret as thrill, attraction, and arousal. But this can also make hate a dangerous emotion that convinces people to hang on to abusive relationships. When tied to vengeance and the dark triad of personality, hate is not only dangerous but also dehumanizing. Vengeance and the dark personalities are not essential to hate, however. Without them, hate can have more admirable ends. The book’s second part explores the polarizing forces that can bias cohesive groups of like-minded individuals and contribute to what is effectively a hate crisis. Drawing on history, politics, legal theory, philosophy, and psychology, it shows how cultural myths about femininity, ethnic groups, and the land of opportunity perpetuate misogyny, racism, white supremacy, and anti-Semitism. But politicians and policymakers have it in their power to address the hate crisis through legislation that preserves the original incentive behind our constitutional rights.

It has long been recognized that Hegel’s Philosophy of Right offers the only systematic alternative to the dominant social contract tradition in modern political philosophy. The difficulty has been to characterize Hegel’s view of justice as having the same kind of intuitive appeal that has made social contract theory, with its voluntary consent and assignment of rights and privileges, such an attractive model. Hegel’s Value argues that Hegelian justice depends on a proper understanding of Hegel’s theory of value and on the model of life through which the overall conception of value, the Good, is operationalized. Through an examination of key episodes in Phenomenology of Spirit and a detailed reading of the entire Philosophy of Right, Hegel’s Value shows how Hegel develops his account of justice through an inferentialist method whereby the content of right unfolds into increasingly thick normative structures. The theory of value that Hegel develops in tandem with the account of right relies on a productive unity of self-consciousness and life, of pure thinking and the natural drives. The book argues that Hegel’s expressive account of the free will enables him to theorize rights not simply as abstract claims, but rather as realizations of value in social contexts of mutual recognition. Hegel’s account of justice is a living system of institutions centered on a close relation of the economic and political spheres and on an understanding of the law as developing through practices of public reason.

Mathematical and philosophical thought about continuity has changed considerably over the ages. Aristotle insisted that continuous substances are not composed of points, and that they can only be divided into parts potentially; a continuum is a unified whole. The most dominant account today, traced to Cantor and Dedekind, is in stark contrast with this, taking a continuum to be composed of infinitely many points. The opening chapters cover the ancient and medieval worlds: the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander, and a recently discovered manuscript by Bradwardine. In the early modern period, mathematicians developed the calculus the rise of infinitesimal techniques, thus transforming the notion of continuity. The main figures treated here include Galileo, Cavalieri, Leibniz, and Kant. In the early party of the nineteenth century, Bolzano was one of the first important mathematicians and philosophers to insist that continua are composed of points, and he made a heroic attempt to come to grips with the underlying issues concerning the infinite. The two figures most responsible for the contemporary hegemony concerning continuity are Cantor and Dedekind. Each is treated, along with precursors and influences in both mathematics and philosophy. The next chapters provide analyses of figures like du Bois-Reymond, Weyl, Brouwer, Peirce, and Whitehead. The final four chapters each focus on a more or less contemporary take on continuity that is outside the Dedekind–Cantor hegemony: a predicative approach, accounts that do not take continua to be composed of points, constructive approaches, and non-Archimedean accounts that make essential use of infinitesimals.

This book collects the central writings by Hans Blumenberg and covers topics such as on the philosophy of language, metaphor theory, non-conceptuality, aesthetics, politics, and literary studies. The book demonstrates Blumenberg's intellectual breadth and gives an overview of his thematic and stylistic range over four decades. Blumenberg's early philosophy of technology becomes tangible, as does his critique of linguistic perfectibility and conceptual thought, his theory of history as successive concepts of reality, his anthropology, or his studies of literature. The book allows readers to discover a master thinker whose role in the German intellectual post-war scene can hardly be overestimated.

Kant’s arguments for the reality of human freedom and the normativity of the moral law continue to inspire work in contemporary moral philosophy. Many prominent ethicists invoke Kant, directly or indirectly, in their efforts to derive the authority of moral requirements from a more basic conception of action, agency, or rationality. But many commentators have detected a deep rift between the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason, leaving Kant’s project of justification exposed to conflicting assessments and interpretations. In this major re-reading of Kant, Owen Ware defends the controversial view that Kant’s mature writings on ethics share a unified commitment to the moral law’s primacy. Using both close analysis and historical contextualization, Owen Ware overturns a paradigmatic way of reading Kant’s arguments for morality and freedom, situating them within Kant’s critical methodology at large. The result is a novel understanding of Kant that challenges much of what goes under the banner of Kantian arguments for moral normativity today.