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This book focuses on Plotinus' notion of Intellect. Intellect comes second in Plotinus' hierarchical model of reality, after the One, which is an unknowable first cause of everything. Intellect is also the sphere of being, the Platonic Ideas, which exist as its thoughts. Plotinus' doctrine of Intellect raises a host of questions that the book seeks to answer: Intellect's thought is described as an attempt to grasp the One and at the same time as self-thought. How are these two claims related? How are they compatible? What lies in Plotinus' insistence that Intellect's thought is a thought of itself? The minimal requirements thought must satisfy according to Plotinus is that it must involve a distinction between thinker and object of thought, and the object itself must be varied. How are these two claims which amount to holding that Intellect is plural in two different ways related? What is the relation between Intellect as a thinker and Intellect as an object of thought? Plotinus' position here seems to amount to a form of idealism, a claim that is explored in the book. As opposed to ordinary human discursive thinking, Intellect's thought is all-at-once, timeless, truthful, and a direct intuition into ‘the things themselves’; it is presumably not even propositional. This strong notion of non-discursive thought is discussed and explained as well as Plotinus' claim that this must be the primary form of thought. The main conclusion of the book is that though clearly dependent on the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition, Plotinus' theory of Intellect contains very significant innovations.

St Maximus the Confessor (580–662) is an influential Byzantine thinker. The book is a study of the basic features of his thought, his philosophical theology or metaphysics. The term ‘Christocentric cosmology’ describes precisely the contents of his conception. God's Logos (the Word, Christ) contains the principles (divine ideas, logoi ) according to which a well‐ordered cosmos is created, and in accordance with which the cosmos returns (converts) to its origin. In accordance with these principles the created world participates in divine activity ( energeia , power, perfections), and the return (conversion) is the way from participation in being to participation in eternal well‐being or deification. Man is created as microcosm and mediator. Through his human nature, the incarnate Logos transforms the created totality and makes human beings able to participate in the redemptive movement. Maximus develops in a precise way the tension between God's transcendence and immanence. His philosophical theology makes it possible in the modern age to develop a conception of ecological theology and even to appreciate the modern concept of human rights.

This book presents a range or perspectives on the role of state constitutions within the context of federalism. Rejecting both the old dual federalism and the newer judicial federalism models, this book understands the generation, development, interpretation, and enforcement of constitutional norms at the national and state levels to be best conceived as constituent activities of a single, collective enterprise conducted by many actors located in many sites scattered throughout the system. The chapters in this book present a conception of national and subnational constitutional law as complementary partners in a complex, collective enterprise of constitutional self-governance. The book aims to advance an understanding of state constitutions in the broader inter-institutional process of constitutional dialogue.

A demanding challenge in cross-cultural design is how to make a usable technology meaningful to local users. This book examines the disconnect of action and meaning in cross-cultural design and presents an innovative framework “Culturally Localized User Experience (CLUE)” to tackle the problem. Drawing from three strands of practice theories—activity theory, British cultural studies, and rhetorical genre theory, the CLUE approach regards local culture as the dynamic nexus of contextual interactions and integrates action and meaning through a dialogical, cyclical design process in order to design a technology that would engage local users within meaningful social practices. With five in-depth case studies of mobile text messaging use in American and Chinese contexts, this book demonstrates that a technology creating for a culturally localized user experience mediates both instrumental practices and social meanings. It calls for a change in cross-cultural design practices from simply applying cultural conventions in design to localizing for social affordances with rich understandings of use activities in context. Meanwhile, the vivid user stories at sites of technology-in-use show the power of “user localization” in connecting design and use, which the book believes essential for the success of an emerging technology like mobile messaging in an era of participatory culture. This book is divided into three parts: theoretical grounding for key concepts, case histories, and scholarly implications. It explores how to create culture-sensitive technology for local users in this increasingly globalized world with a rising participatory culture.

The virtue ethics movement in recent philosophical ethics can usefully be divided into two quite separate streams of thought. Some have turned to the texts of Plato and Aristotle for new answers to established questions in philosophical ethics, while others have sought a vantage point from which the basic questions of the field could themselves be put in question. The aim of this book is to elaborate and defend a version of the second, more radical sort of virtue ethics. The book begins with a fundamental reconsideration of the way in which thought makes itself practical in temporally extended activities and lives. This reconsideration yields an alternative picture of the self — a picture with recognizably Aristotelian and Platonic elements — and puts that picture to work in retrieving an unfamiliar conception of the proper task of philosophical ethics, one that provides a suitable home for retrieving the virtue concepts. The critical bite of the book is directed in the first instance at ideas that are prevalent among philosophers. Yet there is reason to think that these philosophical ideas express a conception of the self that shapes contemporary Western culture, and that hinders our capacity to make full sense of our activities, passions, and lives, or to attain full articulacy about the values to which we might hope to answer. The book argues that the rise of the fact/value distinction and of the characteristically modern distinction between person‐relative and impersonal goods are best understood as a story of encroaching confusion and not as the story of progressive discovery that they are often taken to be. The book culminates in an attempt to show that the ethical and epistemic virtues conduce to a single, monistic sort of goodness that fosters intimate relationships as well as healthy political community, and that overcomes the putative opposition between self‐interest and morality.

Doing and Being confronts the problem of how to understand two central concepts of Aristotle's philosophy: energeia and dunamis. While these terms seem ambiguous between actuality/potentiality and activity/capacity, Aristotle did not intend them to be so. Through a careful and detailed reading of Metaphysics Theta, the author argues that we can solve the problem by rejecting both ‘actuality’ and ‘activity’ as translations of energeia, and by working out an analogical conception of energeia. This approach enables the author to discern a hitherto unnoticed connection between Plato's Sophist and Aristotle's Metaphysics Theta, and to give satisfying interpretations of the major claims that Aristotle makes in Metaphysics Theta, the claim that energeia is prior in being to capacity (Theta 8), and the claim that any eternal principle must be perfectly good (Theta 9).

By definition, zombies would be behaviourally and physically just like us, but not conscious. If a zombie world is possible, then physicalism is false. Just as importantly, the seductive conception of phenomenal consciousness embodied by the zombie idea is fundamentally misconceived. One of this book’s two main aims is to bring out the incoherence of the zombie idea with the help of an intuitively appealing argument (the ‘sole-pictures argument’). The other is to develop a fresh approach to understanding phenomenal consciousness by exploiting two key notions: that of a ‘basic package’ of capacities which is necessary and sufficient for perception in the full sense; and that of ‘direct activity’, which, when combined with the basic package, is necessary and sufficient for perceptual consciousness. These definitions may apply to quite humble creatures, and even to suitably constructed artefacts.