The philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand (1905-1982) is a cultural phenomenon. Her books have sold more than twenty-eight million copies, and countless individuals speak of her writings as having significantly influenced their lives. Despite her popularity, Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism has received little serious attention from academic philosophers. Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge offers scholarly analysis of key elements of Ayn Rand’s radically new approach to epistemology. The four essays, by contributors intimately familiar with this area of her work, discuss Rand’s theory of concepts - including its new account of abstraction and essence - and its central role in her epistemology; how that view leads to a distinctive conception of the justification of knowledge; her realist account of perceptual awareness and its role in the acquisition of knowledge; and finally, the implications of that theory for understanding the growth of scientific knowledge. The volume concludes with critical commentary on the essays by distinguished philosophers with differing philosophical viewpoints and the author’s responses to those commentaries. This is the second book published in Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies, which was developed in conjunction with the Ayn Rand Society to offer a fuller scholarly understanding of this highly original and influential thinker. The Ayn Rand Society, an affiliated group of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, seeks to foster scholarly study by philosophers of the philosophical thought and writings of Ayn Rand.

ANTHROPOCENE AND CRITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY. CRITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY AFTER MERLEAU-PONTY (PART II). AROUND MERLEAU-PONTY. TEXTS BYNicola Banwell, Gael Caignard, Myriam Coté, Stanislas De Courville, Gianluca De Fazio, Elena De Silvestri, Luca Fabbris, Emmanuel Falque, Giovanni Fava, Lisa Guenther, Galen A. Johnson, Rajiv Kaushik, Corinne Lajoie, Emily S. Lee, Federico Leoni, Paolo Missiroli, Cinzia Orlando, Pietro Pasquinucci, Marie-Anne Perreault, Stéphanie Perruchoud, Andrea Pitts, Joel Michael Reynolds, Camille Roelens, Tristana Martin Rubio, Davide Scarso, Alessandra Scotti, Jenny Slatman, Bryan Smyth, Ted Toadvine

The contagious joy of a party, the solemn silence in a church, the gloomy atmosphere of endless rows of identical houses in an ugly city. Through a criticism of the reification and psychologization that goes back to the very beginning of Western philosophy, Hermann Schmitz offers a fundamentally new theory of embodiment and feelings based on atmospheres, unstable but powerful phenomena that fill the “surfaceless spaces” of lived experience. This collection of essays, selected by Schmitz himself, offers a comprehensive portrait of his theory, both in its fundamental outlines and later progress.

Beyond the Bible, Beyond the West is a research in ontological hermeneutics: it is critical of “textual positivism” – which makes the univocity and clarity of a text the main goal of its task – and also of “cultural positivism” – a cultural matrix that elevates univocity and clarity as the ultimate goal of contemporary systems. This essay indirectly sketches a cultural critique and not only a theological one. Means, medium and guarantor of this ontological indelible reserve are ambivalence and paradox. We will try to follow the trace of these throughout the hermeneutic arc – and not only at its beginning.

This volume, written from a diachronic perspective, is devoted to the initatic and deeply transformative dimension of religious experience in Neoplatonic philosophy which aims at restoring the soul’s condition prior to its descent into matter. It brings together philosophers and historians of religions, specializing in the study of mithraism, theurgy, Christian mysticism and the philosophical exegesis of the Chaldean Oracles.

Bergson is rightly considered the philosopher of duration. Has this theory, however, been sufficiently elucidated? Is there a domain, aside from life itself, to which the characteristics of duration can be meaningfully ascribed? Why, in his thesis from 1907, does Bergson write of a “real” duration? His subsequent work Duration and Simultaneity: With Reference to Einstein’s Theory (1922) is the only volume written by Bergson in the period separating Creative Evolution (1907) and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). Duration and Simultaneity represents a polemical, unique, mature and relatively neglected work, one that allows us however to respond to these questions – provided that we read it as a work of philosophy and metaphysics. This book was awarded the 2020 Polydore de Paepe Prize of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium.

Our historical period is characterized by a vision of liberal heritage and a capitalist economic path. But it is far from obvious what “liberal” really means here, and what connection it has with capitalism. The current volume thus first attempts to provide a clarification of the long-term genesis of “liberal reason” in the West, following its development in the seventeenth century down to the present day. Secondly, the text aims to identify the basic logic that feeds liberal reason, a logic that nourishes capitalist processes but goes far beyond them. This analysis provides a picture in which liberal reason no longer needs to be 'represented' because it has tacitly occupied the entire conceptual space of the political. It now plays all the parts in the political comedy, both majorities and oppositions, right and left, concealing the systematic operation of distortion that has taken place. The ramifications of liberal reason have also taken root among intellectuals and movements that consider themselves to be 'neutral', or even 'anti-capitalist'. Liberalism's occupation, as pervasive as it is unnoticed, lies at the basis of the perceived impossibility of conceiving alternatives, and therefore of the continual deadlock in which contemporary consciousness struggles.

The volume contains the proceedings of an international conference exploring the concept of 'contemporaneity' from different perspectives and in reference to different disciplinary fields (philosophy, literature and art theory). In the chronological motion of historiography, contemporaneity is conceptualised as simply being the present era, one that follows modernity. Such thinking overlooks a more complex understanding of the contemporary, which is, in its original meaning, the co-presence of different times, a disconnection of temporal continuity, a rupture in the present, which becomes a meeting point where the past and the future intersect. The contemporary is untimely and, in this sense, is just in time, as it relates to time through anachronism. It is more present than the present of actuality.

The Kyoto School was the most important philosophical current in Japan during the 20th century. In the context of a growing interest in Japanese philosophy, as well as in non-European philosophy in general, this essay represents the first attempt to set the political thought of Kiyoshi Miki (1897-1945) and Jun Tosaka (1900-1945) in dialogue with contemporary thought. Miki and Tosaka were both leftist thinkers interested in thinking through political action “from below. ” This book introduces their concepts of “basic experience” and “everydayness” through conversation with contemporary theories of speculative realism, especially that of Mark Fisher. According to Miki and Tosaka, social myths are not just fictions but political “objects” with a life of their own, capable of generating political subjects and subverting the dominant ideology.

Offering an overview of the relationship between smell and atmospheres as proposed within the humanities, this volume aims at interpreting the “olfactive” as a cross-sensorial and ecological modality of perception. It investigates osmospheres - i.e. , the olfactory irradiances which provide persons, commodities, situations and places with an aura, a vague but unique flavour—from the perspective of relational and social aesthetics. For reasons that are addressed extensively, the central case study is of food, which exemplifies the porous boundaries between subject and environment, identity and alterity, knowing and feeling. In the light of contemporary artistic and marketing practices, in which food osmospheres are staged in order to convey emotions and drive consumer behavior, this work speculates on the socio-political aesthetic implications of osmospheric foodification attempting to capture the essence of today’s urban and domestic dwelling.

This book aims to reflect on mental illness through considering the influence that criticism and German idealism exerted on directions of philosophical, scientific and psychoanalytical thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and which can still be perceived today. It aims, therefore, not only to offer today's cultural and scientific debate an analysis of otherwise undetected aspects of classical German philosophy but also to shed light on subjects and issues present within current philosophical, psychiatric and scientific investigation.

Written by four hands, the current volume moves on two planes that fruitfully intersect and sometimes conflict in their interpretations. On the one hand, Petar Bojanič proposes that gestures are not parasitic of social acts but instead constitute a supporting element. From this interpretative angle, gestures contribute to the constitution of a group or institution. On the other hand, Virgilio Cesarone first presents a phenomenology of gesture, showing that non-instrumental gestural expression, which refers to the constitution of another's body as alter ego, is truly human. Furthermore, gesture shows its essentiality precisely at the moment when it serves no purpose. He thus proposes a hermeneutics of gesture, aiming to show that gesture cannot be considered an accessory and expressive element of a thought that is inwardly closed, but part of a thought that moves with the hand itself.

The book offers a study of ancient rhetoric within a philosophical reflection that aims to reconstruct its history. Through the various definitions of rhetoric and all its practical, ethical, social and political implications, the author leads us to the rhetorical languages of today, developed within the democracies and the so-called populisms that characterize the West – or rather, what remains of it.

The twelfth volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall contains 326 letters and covers the fifteen months of Tyndall’s life from March 1871 through May 1872, a time when he was a central figure in the field and had a substantial reputation in both the UK and the US. It begins just before the publication of Fragments of Science in April and Hours of Exercise in May. It includes a number of small but public disputes about science. Tyndall had a number of visits from friends and dignitaries, and he traveled to Switzerland, Ireland, and the countryside for scrambles. He was dealing with family issues out of Ireland, which were troublesome for him. He was busy administering the Royal Institution and the Royal Society; he was also working as the scientific consultant to Trinity House, which was involved in overseeing lighthouses in the United Kingdom, of which Ireland was a part at this time. Unlike other volumes, this one is not defined as much by one or two major projects or events for Tyndall, but instead includes a number of smaller projects and issues for him personally and professionally. As a leading man of science, and preoccupied with the work required for Trinity House, he had little time for socializing or research and began to refuse both social and professional invitations. Although well established, he remained concerned with his image, which manifests in a number of ways throughout this period.

Aristotle was the first philosopher to divide the imagination—what he called phantasia—from other parts of the psyche, placing it between perception and intellect. A mathematician and philosopher of mathematical sciences, Aristotle was puzzled by the problem of geometrical cognition—which depends on the ability to “produce” and “see” a multitude of immaterial objects—and so he introduced the category of internal appearances produced by a new part of the psyche, the imagination. As Justin Humphreys argues, Aristotle developed his theory of imagination in part to explain certain functions of reason with a psychological rather than metaphysical framework. Investigating the background of this conceptual development, The Invention of Imagination reveals how imagery was introduced into systematic psychology in fifth-century Athens and ultimately made mathematical science possible. It offers new insights about major philosophers in the Greek tradition and significant events in the emergence of ancient mathematics while offering space for a critical reflection on how we understand ourselves as thinking beings.

Public education plays a crucial role in crafting a nation's future. In the United States, education reform policy, particularly the reliance on large-scale, standardized testing, is a growing topic of national conversation and concern. An Illusion of Equity: The Legacy of Eugenics in Today's Education demonstrates how centuries of propaganda have led us to accept the idea that test scores indicate something so valuable about human beings that they should be used to organize society. Drawing on decades of experience as an educator, author Wendy Zagray Warren unpacks the origins of this practice, inviting us to probe the ideologies underlying testing procedures and score interpretation and to evaluate the rationale for using test scores as the sole markers for academic achievement. From the beginning, large-scale tests have produced scores divided by race and class. Initially, these results aligned with the eugenic ideology of its creators. Warren shows that while the rhetoric used to justify test-based policy has changed, the model used to produce test scores remains much the same. Therefore, so do the outcomes of test-based policies, which continue to reproduce and reinforce the existing social hierarchy of the United States. The hope of equity lies in educators charting new paths and scholars around the world who are dreaming new educational paradigms into being. Ultimately, Warren invites policymakers, educators, and parents to explore the richness of possibility when education is designed around the belief that every child is worthy of the opportunity to thrive.