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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 It roams widely but always returns to the problems inherent in reason, to question the outdated assumptions and fixed ideas that thinking cartographically entails.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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

After the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, scientists working in molecular biology embraced reductionism—the theory that all complex systems can be understood in terms of their components. Reductionism, however, has been widely resisted by both nonmolecular biologists and scientists working outside the field of biology. Many of these antireductionists, nevertheless, embrace the notion of physicalism—the idea that all biological processes are physical in nature. How, the author of this book asks, can these self-proclaimed physicalists also be antireductionists? The book navigates this difficult and seemingly intractable dualism with analysis and evidence. In the spirit of the few distinguished biologists who accept reductionism—E. O. Wilson, Francis Crick, Jacques Monod, James Watson, and Richard Dawkins—the author provides a defense of reductionism and applies it to molecular developmental biology and the theory of natural selection, ultimately proving that the physicalist must also be a reductionist.

The convergence of new technologies for the production, dissemination and analysis of scientific data and new regulatory regimes has provoked a reshuffling of priorities in research practices and outcomes, with important consequences for what is viewed as scientific knowledge and how that knowledge is obtained, legitimated and used. This book investigates how databases are set up and used to generate biological knowledge, and the practical difficulties and challenges confronted by database curators when attempting to package data for travel. These insights inform debate on four fundamental issues: what counts as knowledge at a time of significant technological and institutional changes; what counts as data, and how this relates to existing conceptions of the role and use of evidence in the life sciences and elsewhere; what does it mean to organize and interpret data to generate new knowledge of living systems; and under what conditions is such a systematization achieved.

Based upon his reading of the contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy on sense, aesthetics and ethics, in this book John Paul Ricco argues that separation is the archi-spatiality or spaciousness of existence; that aesthetics is the technique and praxis for sustaining a standing in this groundless ground; and that the ethical is the decision of this stance, and of partaking and sharing in this scene of separated spacing with other people and things. By discussing various works of modern and contemporary art, literature and philosophy including Robert Rauschenberg's Erased DeKooning Drawing to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ candy piles and paper stacks, Marguerite Duras’ The Malady of Death, and Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, Ricco theorizes various ways in which shared-separation—as the source and sense of existence—is aesthetically presented and sustained as the scene of ethical decision between us. In its three-part division, the book begins with anonymous scenes of drawing and erasing, intrusion and encounter (Part One: “Name No One”), then moves to what are theorized as “naked images” and scenes staged by outstretched and extended bodies in their shared naked exposure to the outside and non-knowledge (Part Two: “Naked”), and then to scenes of exposure to the anteriority of loss, withdrawal and retreat in photography, and amongst the offering of and partaking in, the infinite expenditure of readymade things (Part Three: “Neutral and Unbecoming”).