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Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society: Moral Science in the Scottish Enlightenment

Craig Smith

Adam Ferguson was a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a leading member of the Scottish Enlightenment. A friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, Ferguson was among the ... More

Adam Ferguson was a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a leading member of the Scottish Enlightenment. A friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, Ferguson was among the leading exponents of the Scottish Enlightenment’s attempts to develop a science of man and was among the first in the English speaking world to make use of the terms civilization, civil society, and political science. This book challenges many of the prevailing assumptions about Ferguson’s thinking. It explores how Ferguson sought to create a methodology for moral science that combined empirically based social theory with normative moralising with a view to supporting the virtuous education of the British elite. The Ferguson that emerges is far from the stereotyped image of a nostalgic republican sceptical about modernity, and instead is one much closer to the mainstream Scottish Enlightenment’s defence of eighteenth century British commercial society.Less

Adam Smith and Rousseau: Ethics, Politics, Economics

Maria Pia Paganelli, Dennis C. Rasmussen, and Craig Smith (eds)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith are two of the foremost thinkers of the European Enlightenment, thinkers who made seminal contributions to moral and political philosophy and who shaped some of ... More

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith are two of the foremost thinkers of the European Enlightenment, thinkers who made seminal contributions to moral and political philosophy and who shaped some of the key concepts of modern political economy. Among Smith’s first published works was a letter to the Edinburgh Review where he discusses Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Smith continued to engage with Rousseau’s work and to explore many shared themes such as sympathy, political economy, sentiment, and inequality. This collection brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of Adam Smith and Rousseau scholars to provide an exploration of the key shared concerns of these two great thinkers in politics, philosophy, economics, history, and literature.Less

Affects, Actions and Passions in Spinoza: The Unity of Body and Mind

Chantal Jaquet

Nowadays there is a great enthusiasm for the Spinozan conception of the union of mind and body among modern researchers, such as Damasio. The fact that the Spinozan model has become very relevant is ... More

Nowadays there is a great enthusiasm for the Spinozan conception of the union of mind and body among modern researchers, such as Damasio. The fact that the Spinozan model has become very relevant is an opportunity to reflect on the impact and value of these references to Spinoza, which historians of philosophy eye with caution because they are all too often based on second-hand knowledge, and frequently distort the philosopher's thought. That is why it is crucial to reexamine the question of the mind-body relationship and its affective modalities in Spinoza from a philosophical angle and identify a model for interpreting it that is capable of informing contemporary debates.Less

The Afterlives of Georges Perec

Rowan Wilken and Justin Clemens (eds)

Georges Perec is widely acknowledged as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His far-reaching influence has inspired many fields of creativity, extending far beyond literature ... More

Georges Perec is widely acknowledged as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His far-reaching influence has inspired many fields of creativity, extending far beyond literature itself.The Afterlives of Georges Perec examines the impact of Perec’s ideas, writing and analytical experimentation in architecture, art and design, media, electronic communications and computing, and studies of the everyday. It asks: what are the lessons that architects, artists, game-designers and writers can draw from Perec’s fascination with creative constraints? What do his descriptions of the minutiae of everyday life reveal about use of information and communications technologies? What happens if we readLife A User’s Manual as a toolbox of ideas for games studies? How might his fascination with the ‘infra-ordinary’ shed light on the uses of contemporary social media? What insights might Perec’s use of algorithmic writing generate for the digital humanities? Through an examination of such questions, this collection takes Perec scholarship beyond its existing limits to offer new ways of rethinking our present.Less

Agamben and Radical Politics

Daniel McLoughlin (ed.)

Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty was profoundly influential for critical theory as it grappled with issues of security and state violence in the wake of September 11 2001. Yet his work was ... More

Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty was profoundly influential for critical theory as it grappled with issues of security and state violence in the wake of September 11 2001. Yet his work was criticised for its lack of attention to capitalism and liberal governmentality, and it was argued that he ignored the problem of political action. Issues of economy and political praxis have become even more urgent for critical theory over the past decade as it has confronted the crisis of neoliberal capitalism and an increasingly turbulent and populist politics. Agamben and Radical Politics suggests that Agamben’s work retains its urgency for understanding the issues that underpin the politics of our time. It does so by focusing on his recent work on the theological history of economy, his account of a non-sovereign politics, and his longstanding engagement with the revolutionary tradition. The book includes a newly translated essay by Agamben, entitled ‘Capitalism as Religion,’ and ten chapters that critically engage with him on issues including the genealogy of economy, the practices of monasticism and use, temporality and historical method, and his relationship to Marxism and anarchism. The volume sheds new light on Agamben’s work by focusing on his treatment of economy and poitical action and, through this, opens up new ways of thinking about politics and critical theory in an age of financial crisis and political revolts.Less

Agamben's Philosophical Lineage

Adam Kotsko and Carlo Salzani (eds)

One of the greatest challenges Agamben presents to his readers is the vast and often bewildering range of sources he draws upon in his work. This volume is a one-stop reference for clarifying ... More

One of the greatest challenges Agamben presents to his readers is the vast and often bewildering range of sources he draws upon in his work. This volume is a one-stop reference for clarifying Agamben’s relationship to the many figures he engages with, providing a wide range of articles by scholars with special expertise in Agamben and the figure in question. It covers his primary interlocutors, his more occasional and secondary points of reference as well as figures who are often lurking in the background of his arguments but are seldom directly mentioned. The result is a thorough overview of Agamben’s philosophy, as illuminated by his practices of reading.Less

Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Women in Black

Athena Athanasiou

Drawing on a wide range of contemporary social and political thought, the book engages with a feminist dissident movement: namely, former Yugoslavia’s “Women in Black” (Žene u Crnom orŽuC) and its ... More

Drawing on a wide range of contemporary social and political thought, the book engages with a feminist dissident movement: namely, former Yugoslavia’s “Women in Black” (Žene u Crnom orŽuC) and its practices of performative mourning for the abjected other. This agonistic mourning involves standing still in public, wearing black, and holding vigils to acknowledge the victims of the “other side.” In performatively occupying the position of the internal enemy, these political actors respond to those estranged as external enemies. By re-positioning their political bodies at the centre of the polis as a means of embodying their own and others’ ambivalent and precarious belonging vis-à-vis its demarcation lines, the activists bring intolerable memories into public view. Hence, they actualize the multilayered modalities of stasis as standing still but also taking the stand as embodied traces of those who had been stripped of their capacity to testify within the nationalist and militarist banality that led to ethno-nationalist violence in what has become the former Yugoslavia. In commemorating those socially instituted as impossible to commemorate, and in upsetting the grounds of mourning as a founding scene of maternal properness in nationalism, these dissident political subjects contest the idealized mourning inscribed in the genealogies of biopolitical normalization and ethno-national militarism. The book addresses agonistic mourning as a critical practice of contesting the power assemblage of sovereignty, biopolitics and nationalism.Less

Badiou and Cinema

Alex Ling

This book offers an in-depth examination of cinema and its philosophical significance. It employs the philosophy of Alain Badiou to answer the question central to all serious film scholarship – ... More

This book offers an in-depth examination of cinema and its philosophical significance. It employs the philosophy of Alain Badiou to answer the question central to all serious film scholarship – namely, ‘can cinema be thought?’ Treating this question on three levels, the author first asks if we can really think what cinema is, at an ontological level. Second, he investigates whether cinema can actually think for itself; that is, whether or not it is truly ‘artistic’. Finally, the author explores in what ways we can rethink the consequences of the fact that cinema thinks. In answering these questions, he uses well-known films ranging from Hiroshima mon amour to Vertigo to The Matrix to illustrate Badiou's philosophy, as well as to consider the ways in which his work can be extended, critiqued and reframed with respect to the medium of cinema.Less

Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature

Jean-Jacques Lecercle

Why do philosophers read literature? How do they read it? And to what extent does their philosophy derive from their reading of literature? Anyone who has read contemporary European philosophers has ... More

Why do philosophers read literature? How do they read it? And to what extent does their philosophy derive from their reading of literature? Anyone who has read contemporary European philosophers has had to ask such questions. This book is an attempt to answer them, by considering the ‘strong readings’ Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze impose on the texts they read. The author demonstrates that philosophers need literature as much as literary critics need philosophy: it is an exercise not in the philosophy of literature (where literature is a mere object of analysis), but in philosophy and literature, a heady and unusual mix.Less

Badiou and Plato: An Education by Truths

A J Bartlett

This book is an interrogation of Plato's entire work using the concepts and categories of Alain Badiou. It critically addresses and draw consequences from Badiou's claim that his work is a ‘Platonism ... More

This book is an interrogation of Plato's entire work using the concepts and categories of Alain Badiou. It critically addresses and draw consequences from Badiou's claim that his work is a ‘Platonism of the multiple’ and that philosophy today requires a ‘platonic gesture’. Examining the relationship between Badiou and Plato, the book transforms our perception of Plato's philosophy and rethinks the central philosophical question: ‘what is education?’ The book corrects many errors in the existing commentary on Badiou's work and extracts a key Platonic theme crucial at every level of culture today: education.Less

The Becoming of the Body: Contemporary Women's Writing in French

Amaleena Damlé

Following a long tradition of objectification, twentieth-century French feminism has often sought to liberate the female body from the confines of patriarchal logos and to inscribe its rhythms in ... More

Following a long tradition of objectification, twentieth-century French feminism has often sought to liberate the female body from the confines of patriarchal logos and to inscribe its rhythms in writing. But how has the promotion of ‘women’s writing’ in such thought and literature evolved in the years preceding and following the turn of the millennium? What sorts of bodily questions and problems do contemporary female writers evoke? How are traditional conceptions of the boundaries of the female body contested, exceeded or transformed? And how do contemporary philosophical discourses correspond to the ways that literary authors conceptualize, and write, the female body? This book addresses such questions by exploring the intersections between a range of contemporary texts, including the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, recent feminist and queer thought, and contemporary writers Amélie Nothomb, Ananda Devi, Marie Darrieussecq and Nina Bouraoui. Revealing an emphasis on the becoming of the body in recent culture, it illuminates the implications of such a concept for a feminist politics, for women’s writing and for the cultural signification of contemporary female corporeality.Less

Bergson and the Art of Immanence: Painting, Photography, Film

Charlotte de Mille

John Mullarkey (ed.)

Bergson and The Art of Immanence is the first book to bring Henri Bergson’s philosophy of immanence together with the latest ideas in art-theory and the practice of immanent art as found in painting, ... More

Bergson and The Art of Immanence is the first book to bring Henri Bergson’s philosophy of immanence together with the latest ideas in art-theory and the practice of immanent art as found in painting, photography, and film. This new collection of essays from world-renowned art theorists, philosophers, and Bergson-scholars will provide both a wide historical context and a rigorous conceptual framework for contemporary art-theory and practice involving the concepts of rhythmic duration, perception, affectivity, the body, memory, and intuition – all of which were given their first systematic theorization in the twentieth-century as immanent objects through the work of Bergson.Less

Between Desire and Pleasure: A Deleuzian Theory of Sexuality

Frida Beckman

Mapping both historical and contemporary configurations of the sexual body along with its functions and sensations, this book identifies disabling conceptions and constructions of pleasure while also ... More

Mapping both historical and contemporary configurations of the sexual body along with its functions and sensations, this book identifies disabling conceptions and constructions of pleasure while also searching for the possibility of claiming sexual pleasure as a constructive and politically enabling notion today. In the face of the way in which Deleuze’s theory of desire builds on a rejection of the usefulness of pleasure, this book works to construct a Deleuzian theory of sexuality that is inclusive of pleasure. Intervening into contemporary fields of research including posthumanist-, disability-, animal-, and feminist studies as well as into current critiques of capitalism and consumerism, Between Desire and Pleasure works to contribute to cultural, conceptual, and political debates about sexuality.Less

Butler and Ethics

Moya Lloyd (ed.)

This edited volume explores Judith Butler’s work on ethics. It focuses on questions such as whether there has been an ‘ethical turn’ in her work or whether Butler’s increasing emphasis on ethics is ... More

This edited volume explores Judith Butler’s work on ethics. It focuses on questions such as whether there has been an ‘ethical turn’ in her work or whether Butler’s increasing emphasis on ethics is merely the culmination of ideas inherent in her earlier writing. Precisely what kind of debt does Butler owe Levinas? What role does affect play in her most recent writings? How do ethics, politics, and affect connect to her increasing concern with violence, war, and conflict? What relation does Butler envisage between grievability and sensate democracy? How do her discussions of ethico-politics relate to her earlier understanding of politics as subversion? What is the nature of the relation between ethics and politics in her recent thinking?Less

Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics

John Beck and Ryan Bishop (eds)

What are the legacies of the Cold War? This interdisciplinary collection explores how, in a number of fundamental ways, contemporary life and thought continue to be shaped by theories, technologies ... More

What are the legacies of the Cold War? This interdisciplinary collection explores how, in a number of fundamental ways, contemporary life and thought continue to be shaped by theories, technologies and attitudes that were forged during World War II and developed into organisational structures during the long Cold War. From futures research, pattern recognition algorithms, nuclear waste disposal and surveillance technologies, to smart weapons systems, contemporary fiction and art, this book shows that we live in a world imagined and engineered during the Cold War.Less

Conditions of Thought: Deleuze and Transcendental Ideas

Daniela Voss

From his early work in ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy’ to ‘Difference and Repetition’, Deleuze develops a unique notion of transcendental philosophy. It comprises a radical critique of the illusions of ... More

From his early work in ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy’ to ‘Difference and Repetition’, Deleuze develops a unique notion of transcendental philosophy. It comprises a radical critique of the illusions of representation and a genetic model of thought. Engaging with questions of representation, Ideas and the transcendental, this book offers a sophisticated treatment of the Kantian aspects of Deleuze’s thought, taking account of Leibniz, Maimon, Lautman and Nietzsche along the way.Less

Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics

Abraham Jacob Greenstine and Ryan J. Johnson (eds)

This volume is the world’s first exploration of a series of encounters between ancient philosophical texts and contemporary continental metaphysics. The ancient texts under consideration originated ... More

This volume is the world’s first exploration of a series of encounters between ancient philosophical texts and contemporary continental metaphysics. The ancient texts under consideration originated in the greater Mediterranean, and in particular the Greek and Roman worlds, from the 6th-century B.C.E. to the end of antiquity, around the 4th-century C.E. More specifically, our volume is organized by three sites of engagement with the ancient world: (1) Plato and the Academy, (2) Aristotle and the Lyceum, and (3) and the schools of the Epicureans, Skeptics, Stoics, and Neo-Platonists. On the other side of the engagement, the tradition of contemporary continental metaphysics stretches from Deleuze’s self-nomination as a “pur métaphysicien,” through the renewed attention to ontology in thinkers such as Agamben and Badiou, up to the various New Materialisms and Speculative Realisms that populate the 21st-century continental landscape.   Through this collection of resonating voices and interlocking ideas, this volume expresses the profusion of new continental approaches to classic problems of metaphysics. These essays do not merely rehearse overlooked contemporary interpretations of the ancients, but do something entirely original: to reconsider what it means to think, with the ancients, about the nature of things. At their most ambitious, these essays even “do metaphysics,” using ancient philosophers as collaborators to make new contributions to contemporary problems. The questions of metaphysics persist through changing cultural tastes, and they remain because they constantly demand our response. This volume confronts this demand and responds with a new collection of classically-informed yet progressive-minded philosophical encounters.Less

Contemporary Political Movements and the Thought of Jacques Rancière: Equality in Action

Todd May

This book shows how democratic progressive politics can happen and how it is happening in very different arenas. The author takes an intensive look at a range of contemporary political movements and ... More

This book shows how democratic progressive politics can happen and how it is happening in very different arenas. The author takes an intensive look at a range of contemporary political movements and shows how, to one degree or another, they exemplify the political thought of Jacques Rancière. Following an overview of Rancière's thought, the author considers the following groups: the Algerian refugee movement in Montreal for citizenship, the first Palestinian intifada, the politics of equality and identity politics in relation to the Zapatista movement, a local food co-op in South Carolina and an anarchist press in Oakland. Essentially, the book shows how political theory and practice can enlighten one another, and in an age of cynicism, fear and despair, the author suggests that there is hope for the possibility of progressive democratic action.Less

Continental Realism and Its Discontents

Marie-Eve Morin (ed.)

A new realist movement in continental philosophy has emerged to challenge philosophical approaches and traditions ranging from transcendental and speculative idealism to phenomenology and ... More

A new realist movement in continental philosophy has emerged to challenge philosophical approaches and traditions ranging from transcendental and speculative idealism to phenomenology and deconstruction for failing to do justice to the real world as it is ‘in itself’, that is, as independent of the structures of human consciousness, experience, and language. This volume presents a collection of essays that take up the challenge of realism from a variety of historical and contemporary philosophical perspectives. This volume includes essays that engage the fundamental presuppositions and conclusions of this new realism by turning to the writings of seminal figures in the history of philosophy, including Kant, Schelling, and others. Also included are essays that challenge anti-realist readings of Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and Nancy. Finally, several essays in this volume propose alternative ways of understanding realism through careful readings of key figures in German idealism, pessimism, phenomenology, existentialism, feminism, and deconstruction.Less

The Contingency of Necessity: Reason and God as Matters of Fact

Tyler Tritten

This book shows how all necessity – logical, mathematical, physical, transcendental or metaphysical - is consequent. It argues that reason and God, although necessary with respect to essence, are, ... More

This book shows how all necessity – logical, mathematical, physical, transcendental or metaphysical - is consequent. It argues that reason and God, although necessary with respect to essence, are, with respect to existence, eternal contingencies. The first chapter critically reverses Meillasssoux’s claim for the necessity of contingency. The second chapter positively outlines the possibility of contingent necessity by means of Boutroux’s neglected book The Contingency of the Laws of Nature. The third chapter further grounds this possibility by means of the early Schelling’s reading of Plato’s Timaeus. Chapters four and five turn to Schelling’s late philosophy, detailing an ontology that treats reason and God as matters of fact rather than as truths of reason. Chapter six draws parallels and differences between Schelling’s approach and the “passing by” of the last God in Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy. The book’s final chapter argues for a new typology for philosophical theology, theomonism, and how this conception can provide a contemporary response to the Euthyphro Dilemma. While some authors, e.g. Meillassoux and Kearney, have recently argued for a possible God who does not exist now but may in the future, this book addresses an unexplored alternative, a contingent God that eternally exists but could have eternally never existed.Less