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People rely on reason to think about and navigate the abstract world of human relations in much the same way they rely on maps to study and traverse the physical world. Starting from that simple observation, this book offers a critique of the way human thought and action have become deeply immersed in the rhetoric of cartography and how this cartographic reasoning allows the powerful to map out other people's lives. Comprising a reading of Western philosophy, religion, and mythology that draws on early maps and atlases; Plato, Immanuel Kant, and Ludwig Wittgenstein; and Thomas Pynchon, Gilgamesh, and Marcel Duchamp, the book is itself a minimalist guide to the terrain of Western culture. It roams widely but always returns to the problems inherent in reason, to question the outdated assumptions and fixed ideas that thinking cartographically entails.

This book develops a non-metaphysical reading of Hegel’s work, and results from a lifelong investigation on his theory of the “objective spirit”. It entails four parts. The first part demonstrates that the “abstract (i. e. private) law” plays a strategic role in the inner structure of objective spirit; it allows Hegel to overtake the alternative between natural law and history. The second part is dedicated to the "civil society", that means to the probably most inventive part of Hegel’s theory of the objective spirit. It highlights the aporias of the social space, which constitute a negative justification of the political sphere (the State); nevertheless, the State must not be conceived as a mere extension of the civil society. Starting with an analysis of the implicit discussion among Hegel and Tocqueville about the nature of political modernity, the third part investigates Hegel’s criticism of the democracy and his conception of the representation; Hegel’s “liberal constitutionalism” suggests a reappraisal of the paradigm of liberal democracy. The last part shows that Hegel’s doctrine of the objective spirit raises the issue of subjectivity in non-subjectivist terms; it provides the opportunity to reassess in a positive sense the concept of “morality”, as a normative interface between the subject and the institutionalized universe of the “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit). The book ends with a reflection on the “passion of the concept” that lights up the whole philosophy of Hegel.

It has been the author’s conviction since Kant after Duchamp (MIT Press, 1996) that Marcel Duchamp’s readymades have forced the cultural critic who takes them seriously to rethink the “concept” of art from the ground up, but in such a way that continuity with the art of the past would not be jettisoned. The crucible for this conviction is whether the appreciation of post-Duchamp art is still “aesthetic” or not. Aesthetics at Large argues that it is, that it must be, and that there is no better account of aesthetic judgment than the one given by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment. Taking it from there, the book seeks to offer a contemporary update of Kantian aesthetics and its consequences for ethics and politics. The book’s guiding thread is the thesis that Kant’s sensus communis is as relevant to the appreciation of art today as it was to the admiration of beautiful nature in 1790.

This book is about long-term romantic love and how we go about developing it—or fail to do so. It is about building the foundations for such love and dealing with the difficulties that inevitably emerge in such a challenging and critical construction project. The reader will discover the good news that there is no reason to despair: enduring love can be achieved. And time plays a leading role in this process. The book takes an optimistic perspective. Not only is enduring, profound love possible; it is also more common than most of us think. Yet the romantic road is often bumpy and long. Enticing romances encounter many blind alleys. How is the would-be lover to know when such romances are promenades for flourishing love and when they are dead-end streets? The book provides some helpful signposts along the “freeway of love.” Love is not all you need; but if you have enough of what you need, and love infuses life with joy, your life is more likely to be, as the classic song has it, a many-splendored thing. The book casts doubt on prevailing popular attempts to make love as fresh as it was at its very beginning. When freshness is foremost, we are setting ourselves up to lose the battle for long-lasting profound love before the war has begun, as there will always be fresher and tastier occasional romantic affairs than the present one.

What is the good life for a human being? Aristotle's exploration of this question in the Nicomachean Ethics has established it as a founding work of Western philosophy, though its teachings have long puzzled readers and provoked spirited discussion. Adopting a new point of view, this book deciphers some of the most perplexing conundrums of this influential treatise by approaching it as Aristotle's dialogue with the Platonic Socrates. Tracing the argument of the Ethics as it emerges through that approach, the book's reading shows how Aristotle represents ethical virtue from the perspective of those devoted to it, while standing back to examine its assumptions and implications.

“Man is a political animal,” Aristotle asserts near the beginning of the Politics. In this reading of one of the foundational texts of political philosophy, this book traces the surprising implications of Aristotle's claim and explores the treatise's relevance to ongoing political concerns. Often dismissed as overly grounded in Aristotle's specific moment in time, the Politics in fact challenges contemporary understandings of human action and allows us to better see ourselves today. Close examination of Aristotle's treatise, the book finds, reveals a significant, practical role for philosophy to play in politics. Philosophers present arguments about issues—such as the right and the good, justice and modes of governance, the relation between the good person and the good citizen, and the character of a good life—that politicians must then make appealing to their fellow citizens. This book yields new ways of thinking about ethics and politics, both ancient and modern.

Despite its foundational role in the history of philosophy, Plato's famous argument that art does not have access to truth or knowledge is now rarely examined, in part because recent philosophers have assumed that Plato’s challenge was resolved long ago. This book argues that Plato has in fact never been satisfactorily answered—and to demonstrate that, it offers a comprehensive account of Plato’s influence through nearly the whole history of Western aesthetics. The book offers a reading of the post-Platonic aesthetic tradition as a series of responses to Plato’s position, examining a diversity of thinkers and ideas. It visits Aristotle’s Poetics, the medieval Christians, Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Hegel’s phenomenology, Marxism, social realism, Heidegger, and many other works and thinkers, ending with a powerful synthesis that lands on four central aesthetic arguments that philosophers have debated.

The most difficult challenge for naturalists in philosophy is accounting for scientific understanding of nature as itself a scientifically intelligible natural phenomenon. This book advances naturalism with a novel response to this challenge, drawing upon the philosophy of scientific practice and interdisciplinary science studies, philosophical work on the normativity of conceptual understanding, and new developments in evolutionary biology. The book’s two parts develop complementary, mutually supporting revisions to familiar accounts of conceptual understanding and of Sellars’s “scientific image” of ourselves-in-the-world. The first part shows how language and scientific practices exemplify the evolutionary process of niche construction. Conceptual capacities arise from the normativity of discursive practice within an evolving developmental niche, in place of familiar naturalistic appeals to a functional teleology of cognitive or linguistic representations. The second part treats scientific understanding (“the scientific image”) as situated within the ongoing practice of scientific research rather than as an established body of scientific knowledge. Scientific work does not culminate in a single, comprehensive image within the Sellarsian “space of reasons”; the sciences instead expand and reconfigure the entire space of reasons, in ways that are prospectively directed toward further revision in research. The first part thereby situates our conceptual capacities within a scientific conception of nature, while the second part explicates a scientific conception of nature in terms of that account of conceptual understanding.

Artistic License aims at analyzing the right of copyright, given its essential underlying principles in the law, and its relation to contemporary artistic practice. As several legal theorists argue, though the role of copying in artistic practice has evolved, copyright law has failed to keep step, producing an imbalance that puts the law at odds with the domain it is meant to protect. Centrally, Hick works to reconcile growing practices of artistic appropriation and related attitudes about artistic "taking" with developed views of artists’ rights, both legal and moral. Hick examines the philosophical challenges presented by the role of intellectual property in the art world and vice versa. Using real-life examples of artists who have incorporated copyrighted works into their art, he explores issues of artistic creation and the nature of infringement through aesthetic analysis and legal and critical theory. Ultimately, Artistic License provides a critical and systematic analysis of the key philosophical issues that underlie copyright policy, rethinking the relationship between artist, artwork, and the law.

Kant’s notion of autonomy remains influential and important, not only for his immediate successors, but also well beyond them. This notion, however, is exposed to a powerful critique in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. This book specifically takes up this critique in order to insert Theodor Adorno as a forceful and urgent voice within the German Idealist tradition. It is argued that in doing so, we gain deeper insight into Adorno as much as German Idealism. For example, Adorno’s critique shows how Kant’s rational theology is essential to his Critical project, while at the same time, Adorno’s own notion of autonomy aims exactly to navigate between the Scylla of Kant’s rational theology on the one hand and the Charybdis of the dialectic of enlightenment on the other. Thereby in constant dialogue with Adorno’s two greatest interlocutors, Kant and Hegel, this book elaborates Adorno’s elusive notion of autonomy, all within the normative environment of a world ‘after Auschwitz.’ Equally important to the book’s aims, however, is a running dialogue with contemporary Anglo-American philosophy (including contemporary appropriations of German Idealism). In this way, with Adorno’s notion of autonomy, the book considers Adorno’s moral psychology, philosophy of action, and ethical theory, ultimately situating Adorno as an important voice in contemporary discussions.

Becoming Political argues that a profoundly democratic conception of judgment is at the heart of Spinoza’s thought. By recuperating in Spinoza’s writings a “vital republicanism,” the book illuminates a line of political thinking that decouples democracy from the majoritarian aspiration to rule and aligns it instead with the project of becoming free and equal judges of common affairs. On this view, judgment furnishes the communal element by which people generate power to resist domination and reconfigure the terms of their political association. Each chapter of the book offers a different perspective on the political meaning of judgment as the concept operates and evolves in Spinoza’s texts. The resulting interpretations of Spinoza’s vital republicanism analyze judgment in relation to an array of other key concepts, including freedom, affect, community, constitution, law, state, religion, and, above all, democracy. In addition to providing an interpretive key for understanding Spinoza, the book’s organizing idea of “vital republicanism” puts Spinoza’s thought in critical dialogue with various strains of contemporary political theory, from neorepublicanism to Italian biopolitics.

Many people today hold up empathy as crucial to caring about all humanity and bridging divides between hostile groups. Others accuse it of reinforcing xenophobic tribalism, and of directing people to help only individuals they see or whose stories they know. Who is right? Is empathy essential to cosmopolitanism, and a valuable moral instrument, or does it blur the differences among people, reinforce ethnocentrism, and distract us from fair and effective moral action? Being Me Being You argues that the answer to that question depends on the conception of empathy one is working with. It recommends the “projective” conception of empathy, introduced by the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith, as against the “contagious” conception of empathy to be found in the writings of his contemporary and friend David Hume. (Both men are among the first theorists of empathy, but they called it “sympathy.”) Smith developed a conception of empathy by which it is not merely an instrument for moral action, but a key component of what it is to be human. For Smith, however, empathy is also crucial to our having distinctive perspectives—to what we call “difference” today; empathy enables our common humanity and our distinctiveness to come together. Relatedly, Smith showed how it could help us combine our cosmopolitan aspirations with our local loyalties, and how it could make for public policies that are sensitive to each person’s different needs and aspirations. In all these ways, Smith’s empathy-centered humanism remains invaluable today.

What happens to scientific knowledge when researchers outside the natural sciences bring elements of the latest trend across disciplinary boundaries for their own purposes? Researchers in fields from anthropology to family therapy and traffic planning employ the concepts, methods, and results of chaos theory to harness the disciplinary prestige of the natural sciences, to motivate methodological change or conceptual reorganization within their home discipline, and to justify public policies and aesthetic judgments. Using the recent explosion in the use (and abuse) of chaos theory, this book examines the relationship between science and other disciplines as well as the place of scientific knowledge within our broader culture. The book's detailed investigation of the myriad uses of chaos theory reveals serious problems that can arise in the interchange between science and other knowledge-making pursuits, as well as opportunities for constructive interchange. By engaging with recent debates about interdisciplinary research, the book contributes a theoretical vocabulary and a set of critical frameworks for the rigorous examination of borrowing.

Friedrich Nietzsche has been one of the most widely read authors in the world from the time of his death to the present day, as well as one of the most controversial. He has been celebrated as a liberating theorist of individual creativity and self-care, but also condemned as the inhumane advocate of anti-modern politics and hierarchical communalism. This book contends that Nietzsche’s complex legacy is the consequence of a self-conscious and artful tension within his work. That tension is reflected by the two major character-types that he established in his writings, the Free Spirit and Zarathustra, who represent different approaches to the conduct and understanding of life: one that strives to be as independent and critical of the world as possible, and one that engages with, cares for, and aims to change the world. Nietzsche developed these characters at different moments of his life, in order to confront from contrasting perspectives such elemental experiences as the drive to independence, the feeling of love, and the assessment of one’s overall health (or well-being). Understanding the tension between the Free Spirit and Zarathustra takes readers to the heart of what Nietzsche identified as the tensions central to his life, and to all of human life. The book highlights the fact that Nietzsche equipped his writings with retrospective self-commentaries and an autobiographical apparatus that clarify how he understood his development as an author, thinker, and human being, as well as the challenges that he left for readers to confront on their own.

Evolutionary biology since Darwin has seen a dramatic entrenchment and elaboration of the role of chance in evolution. It is nearly impossible to discuss contemporary evolutionary theory in any depth at all without making reference to at least some concept of “chance” or “randomness.” Many processes are described as chancy, outcomes are characterized as random, and many evolutionary phenomena are thought to be best described by stochastic or probabilistic models. Chance is taken by various authors to be central to the understanding of fitness, genetic drift, macroevolution, mutation, foraging theory, and environmental variation, to take but a few examples. And for each of these notions, there are yet more stories to tell. Each weaves itself into the various branches of evolutionary theory in myriad different ways, with a wide variety of effects on the history and current state of life on Earth. Each is grounded in a particular trajectory in the history of philosophy and the history of biology, and has inspired a variety of responses throughout science and culture. This book endeavors to offer a cross-section of biological, historical, philosophical, and theological approaches to understanding chance in evolutionary theory.

If collective remembrance is as old as human communal existence and the age-old practices that forge its cohesion, theoretical preoccupation with the phenomenon of collective memory is relatively recent. The present book accounts for this paradox through interpretation of the novel function accorded to collective memory which, in a modern context of discontinuity and dislocation, reoccupies the space that has been left vacant by the decline of traditional assumptions concerning human socio-political identity. In this situation, where memory is widely called upon as a source of collective cohesion, this book aims to elaborate a philosophical basis for the concept of collective memory and to delimit its scope in relation to the historical past. Extensive analysis is devoted to the complex modes of symbolic configuration of collective memory in the public sphere. These modes of symbolic configuration have undergone radical transformation over the past century that is both reflected and engendered by the new technologies of mass communication by virtue of their capacity to simulate direct experience and remembrance through the image. Such transformations make increasingly palpable the limited scope of collective memory, rooted in a rapidly changing context, in the face of an historical past beyond its pale. The growing awareness of these limits, however, and of the opacity of the historical past, need not fuel historical skepticism: as the novels of Walter Scott, Marcel Proust and W. J. Sebald serve to illustrate, it may place in evidence subtle nuances of temporal context that are emblematic of historical reality.

Contrary to popular rumor, brain science has not shown that souls are an illusion – not if by soul we mean what it is about a person that acts and thinks, often creatively, what makes choices and takes responsibility. The human self, as theories of emergence and complexity are teaching us, is among those complex realities not reducible to the sum of their humbler parts and predecessors. Neuropsychology and cognitive science make a powerful case for the soul, not as a wisp of smoke but as a dynamic reality emergent from our bodily capabilities. Examining perception, consciousness, memory, agency, and creativity Goodman and Caramenico argue for a new humanism rooted in the philosophical and intellectual traditions of the West – and the East – but anchored in the latest scientific findings. Coming to Mind does not pit soul against body or body against soul, as though the work of understanding were a zero-sum game. They argue not for a separable soul, spiritual in name yet mysteriously able to pass through walls. Rather, they lay out a groundwork for understanding the intimate relation between the body (above all, the brain) and an integrated self capable of language and thought, discovery, caring, and love.

What is the good life? Posing this question today would likely elicit very different answers. Some might say that the good life means doing good—improving one's community and the lives of others. Others might respond that it means doing well—cultivating one's own abilities in a meaningful way. But for Aristotle, these two distinct ideas—doing good and doing well—were one and the same, and could be realized in a single life. This book examines how we can draw this conclusion from Aristotle's works, while also studying how this conception of the good life relates to contemporary ideas of morality. The key to Aristotle's views on ethics, the author argues, lies in the Metaphysics or, more specifically, in his thoughts on activities, actions, and capacities. He shows that, for Aristotle, it is only possible to be truly active when acting for the common good, and it is only possible to be truly happy when active to the extent of one's own powers. But does this mean we should aspire to Aristotle's impossibly demanding vision of the good life? In a word, no. The author stresses the enormous gap between life in Aristotle's time and ours.

This work offers a rethinking of Friedrich Nietzsche’s crucial notion of the agon. Analyzing an array of primary and secondary sources and synthesizing decades of Nietzsche scholarship, it shows how the agon, or contest, organized core areas of Nietzsche’s philosophy, providing an appreciation of the subtleties of his notorious views about power. By focusing so intensely on this particular guiding interest, the book offers a vantage point from which to view this iconic thinker. Though existence—viewed through the lens of Nietzsche’s agon—is fraught with struggle, the book illuminates what Nietzsche recognized as the agon’s generative benefits. It imbues the human experience with significance, meaning, and value. Analyzing Nietzsche’s elaborations of agonism—his remarks on types of contests, qualities of contestants, and the conditions in which either may thrive or deteriorate—the book demonstrates how much the agon shaped his philosophical projects and critical assessments of others. The agon led Nietzsche from one set of concerns to the next, from aesthetics to metaphysics to ethics to psychology, via Homer, Socrates, Saint Paul, and Wagner. In showing how one obsession catalyzed so many diverse interests, the book sheds light on some of this philosopher’s most difficult and paradoxical ideas.

Creatively Undecided offers a new way to look at how scientific understandings change. Thomas Kuhn has shown us how scientific practice and thinking depends on the normative framework in which it is conducted, but he and his followers have failed to show how such frameworks can be deemed the possible outcomes of the kind of critical assessment that Popper viewed as central to all rational deliberation. How can a scientist subject her standards to rational appraisal if that very act requires the use of those standards? The novel way out argued for in the book is to realize that exposure to external normative criticism is capable of destabializing normative commitment to a far greater extent than mere self-critique. Therefore, while science can only be transformed from within, by people who have standing in the field, criticism from the outside is essential. We may not be able to be sufficiently self-critical on our own, but trusted criticism from outside, even if resisted, can begin to change our perspective—at which point transformative self-criticism becomes a real option. The book’s novel thesis, argued for philosophically in the first four chapters comprising Parts I and II, is put to the test of a detailed case study in the history of British mathematics in Part III.