As Jacques Derrida stated in Archive Fever, nothing is less reliable or less clear thanthe word “archive.” Nevertheless, it is precisely within the semantic openendedness of this notion that contemporary discursive practices of cinema and art have developed, thus reconfiguring the very idea of the archive. The single disciplines involved in this broad field – film and art history, film and art theory, aesthetics, semiotics, philology, etc. – are now beginning to question the concept of archive even in its “negative” sense: in other words, they are now starting to investigate – following Michel Foucault – what the archive is not, or does not seem to be. The archive is not the “library of libraries” or the “encyclopaedia;” it is not “memory” or a “database.” In recent years, much attention has been focused on these ideas, revealing new “impulses,” “turns” and specific forms of art (“art archive”), as well as highlighting how the notion of archive has gained importance on different interrelated levels (aesthetic, political, ethical and legal) across diverse disciplinary fields.

Foreword by Daniel A. Dombrowski. A central concern of nearly every environmental ethic is its desire to extend the scope of direct moral concern beyond human beings to plants, nonhuman animals, and the systems of which they are a part. Although nearly all environmental philosophies have long since rejected modernity's conception of individuals as isolated and independent substances, few have replaced this worldview with an alternative that is adequate to the organic, processive world in which we find ourselves. In this context, Brian G. Henning argues that the often overlooked work of Alfred North Whitehead has the potential to make a significant contribution to environmental ethics. Additionally inspired by classical American philosophers such as William James, John Dewey and Charles Sanders Pierce and environmental philosophers such as Aldo Leopold, Peter Singer, Albert Schweitzer, and Arne Naess, Henning develops an ethical theory of which the seminal insight is called "The Ethics of Creativity."By systematically examining and developing a conception of individuality that is equally at home with the microscopic world of subatomic events and the macroscopic world of ecosystems, The Ethics of Creativity correctly emphasizes the well-being of wholes, while not losing sight of the importance of the unique centers of value that constitute these wholes. In this way, The Ethics of Creativity has the potential to be a unique voice in contemporary moral philosophy.

Year after year, day after day, minute after minute, billions of non-human animals are slaughtered for several purposes and aims (food, clothing, entertainment, research). An analogous situation whose objects were humans instead of animals would obviously never be accepted. But why do we tolerate and even justify one practice while deploring the other? The answer is far from banal: this book is an attempt at finding it beyond the everyday life, through politics and philosophy.

In a historical moment when cinema is definitively abandoning analogue production, the cinematographic work of Paolo Gioli occupies an important and meaningful place in the academic and artistic debate related to the present and future position of cinema and media art in the digital era. For this reason, the Film Forum Festival decided to organize a one-day seminar in Gorizia on 17th March 2013 in order to analyze and discuss the artistic production of this Italian artist. This book records and expands topics and reflections developed by international scholars and curators during that event and contains an original text by Paolo Gioli about his cinema and his artistic production.

According to both ordinary and scientific thought, two objects can enter into relation not only simultanously, but also at different times, namely cross-temporally. For instance, we understand comparisons between entities as they are at different times, such as when we say that John is now taller than Michael was three years ago; causally related events are often not simultaneous, and objects of perceptions and perceivers usually have different temporal locations (we see ordinary things as they were a few milliseconds ago, we see the sun as it was eight minutes ago, and so on). However, many philosophers consider cross-temporality deceptive. Relations, according to the “standard view”, can hold only between things existing in the same time. In this book Torrengo defends the opposite view, according to which relations can be cross-temporally instantited and thus cross-temporal talk must be taken seriously. The theory is based on the idea that persisting in time is tantamount to possessing temporal parts at different times, and its central tenet is that persisting entities (objects and events alike) are cross-temporally related by having distinct temporal parts entering into relations.

Pretending is a puzzling activity. Why should we waste our time building up representations of an imaginary world when it would be better to acquire more information about the real one? Engaging in games of make believe, however, also means to be faced with new, possible situations, and thus to anticipate what could happen if something were the case, how we or other people could react, what decisions we should make, etc. In a word, pretense games are a kind of gym, a space where children engage in with unusual situations, in order to be ready to face whatever life could present them with. This book aims to offer an account of the architecture of the mind that is required in order to engage in, and understand, pretense paying special attention to the nature of our imaginings, their power to motivate our actions, and the kinds of metarepresentational abilities that are required in order to keep our imaginary representations distinct from the representations of reality. If pretense is a uniquely human ability, understanding it means knowing what it is that makes us so peculiar.

This book concentrates on the conversation between Socrates and Gorgias which takes place in the first part of Plato's Gorgias. Scholars have tended to concentrate on the following two conversations held by Socrates with Polus and, especially, with Callicles. This first, relatively short, conversation is usually taken to be a kind of preface coming before Plato's 'real' philosophy. The present study challenges this assumption, arguing that the conversation between Socrates and Gorgias actually anticipates the message of the whole dialogue, which concerns the essence of rhetoric and its implications.

Death, a perennial problem for philosophers and theologians, is especially crucial in the thought of Martin Heidegger. This penetrating commentary presents the concept of death as a unifying motif that illuminates many of the difficulties and obscurities of Heidegger's philosophy. Heidegger comes to see death as revealing the ultimate meaning not only of human existence, but of being itself. He thus confers upon the concept a force and sharpness, an ontological depth which is found in perhaps no other philosopher.This study corroborates the much-debated "turning" in Heidegger's philosophy. Demslce finds death to be the key not only to Heidegger's treatment of man and being, but also the key to his shift of focus from man to being. All Heidegger's various approaches to the theme of death are considered -- his existential-phenomenological analysis of Dasein, his discussions of art, poetry, history, and language, and his new phenomenological approach to the ordinary things of life.The author approaches Heidegger on his own terms, allowing the philosopher to speak for himself. The present reading of Heidegger grows smoothly out of Heidegger's own intentions. The result is a revealing study of Heidegger's philosophy in its entirety, which answers some persistently perplexing questions about this difficult modern philosopher.

Historical and systematic in its treatment, this work reviews the idea of progress in Western thought as it relates to civilization, in a more comprehensive survey than is to be found in previous writings on the subject. In the author's view, the history of civilization reveals an increasing range of human capacity, both for good and for evil, depending upon men's choice between contending values.From this standpoint, the work proceeds to the exploration of such fields of social activity as the evolution of the family, the emancipation of women, economic conditions and technology, intellectual and aesthetic values, moral and religious experience. Civilization and Progress is marked by balanced and judicious treatment, very broad learning, and a lucid and forceful style. The author asks us to consider the alternatives we face and to reflect on the choices which men have made in the past, which confront us in the present world crisis, and on which our destiny hangs in the future. Seminal in scholarship and creativity, this work will interest those concerned with the Western intellectual tradition and with the condition of mankind.

British writers of the Restoration and eighteenth century initiated a critique of human knowledge unrivaled in both its scope and its enthusiasm. Author Kevin L. Cope now attempts to provide a coherent, evocative account of explanatory rhetoric in early modern Britain. Critics and historians, Cope argues, have done an admirable job of describing the details of the intellectual movements of this period but they have failed to examine the intellectual, social, and psychological implications of explanation itself. Criteria of Certainty makes up for this shortcoming by treating explanation as a composite literary and philosophical mode, as a kind of "master genre" governing the development of a variety of genres, from pithy maxims and lyric poems to lengthy treatises and epics of explanation.Cope's probing and inventive analyses of seven writers -- Rochester, Halifax, Dryden, Locke, Swift, Pope, and Smith -- shed new light on many major issues in both eighteenth-century studies and critical theory. Discussing the gradual enlargement of the claims of explanatory discourse, Cope explores the problematic psychological relation between "philosophizing" authors and their expansionist, systematizing discourse.By applying the methods of recent literary criticism to philosophical texts, Cope reexamines the possibility of a philosophical reading of literary texts, opens the possibility of "characterizing" an age, and sets a variety of genres on a common intellectual foundation. Drawing on both "canonical" and overlooked authors, he also shows how the writers of the Restoration and eighteenth century may help us to understand the immensity, vitality, and irresistibility of explanatory rhetoric in our own age.

Written by both well-established and rising scholars, Radical Future Pasts seeks to open up new possibilities for theoretical inquiries and engagements with practical political struggles. Unlike conventional "state of the discipline" collections, this volume does not summarize the history of political theory. Rather than accept traditional ideas about the political past, the contributors reinterpret canonical and current texts to demonstrate fresh interpretations and narratives. Led by editors Romand Coles, Mark Reinhardt, and George Shulman, and inspired by the work of Peter Euben, the contributors both explore and exemplify the range and importance of political theory's different genres while concentrating on such themes as time and temporality, the politics of tragedy, and political movements and subjectivities. A groundbreaking volume featuring the best new scholarship in the field, this provocative book will be useful to scholars and students interested in political theory and its relationship to political practice.

This paper explores the Israeli Haredi community’s social construction of the male body.

This issue of Cirpit Review gathers together several contributions on the theme of interculturalism, written by Italian and international scholars specialised in intercultural philosophy and inter-religious dialogue. Among them are Giacomo Marramao, Giangiorgio Pasqualotto, Franz Martin Wimmer, Joseph Prabhu, Piergiorgio Solinas, Young-chan Ro, Michiko Yusa, Ralph Weber and Marcello Ghilardi. The collection also features interventions from Pietro Barcellona, Jacob Parappally, Gabriele Piana, Gianni Vacchelli and Filippo Dellanoce. Together, they dissect current problems and perspectives related to interculturalism, pluralism and dialogue among cultures, philosophies, behaviours and values. The issue concludes with a long reflection on the topic of peace, “the truly practical question of human coexistence on this planet”.

Philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand (1905–1982) is a cultural phenomenon. Her books have sold more than 25 million copies, and countless individuals speak of her writings as having significantly influenced their lives. In spite of the popular interest in her ideas, or perhaps because of it, RandÆs work has until recently received little serious attention from academics. Though best known among philosophers for her strong support of egoism in ethics and capitalism in politics, there is an increasingly widespread awareness of both the range and the systematic character of RandÆs philosophic thought. This new series, developed in conjunction with the Ayn Rand Society, an affiliated group of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, seeks a fuller scholarly understanding of this highly original and influential thinker.The first volume starts not with the metaphysical and epistemological fundamentals of RandÆs thought, but with central aspects of her ethical theory. Though her endorsement of ethical egoism is well-known—one of her most familiar essay collections is The Virtue of Selfishness—the character of her egoism is not. The chapters in this volume address the basis of her egoism in a virtue-centered normative ethics; her account of how moral norms in general are themselves based on a fundamental choice by an agent to value his own life; and how her own approach to the foundations of ethics is to be compared and contrasted with familiar approaches in the analytic ethical tradition. Philosophers interested in the objectivity of value, in the way ethical theory is (and is not) virtue-based, and in acquiring a serious understanding of an egoistic moral theory worthy of attention will find much to consider in this volume, which includes critical responses to several of its main essays.

A collection of Syriac medical remedies, from a manuscript dated 1888; the origin is uncertain; the inscription mentions Galen.

This volume is a good quality reprint of the 1920 edition of Augustin Périer's classic text. It will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of philosophy, theology and Christian Arabic studies.