The present book comprises thirteen chapters written by Nordic scholars in the human and social sciences, and developed out of conference papers presented at regular winter and summer symposia held by two research groups emanating from the Nordic Summer University. Born within and informed by this specific milieu, the chapters address significant sociopolitical implications for contemporary societies emerging from the ethical reflections of leading 20th century thinkers (e.g. Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas), important procedural as well as substantive aspects of democracy, and pivotal ethico-political issues arising from the abstract logic and concrete manifestations of market economies. Though by no means devoid of their own economic, cultural and political problems, the Nordic countries are still paramount examples of humane prosperity, democratic civility, environmentally sound policy, and peaceful resolution of social and industrial conflicts. Year after year, if not decade after decade, they keep topping the international charts for socio-economic indicators about sostainable development, healthcare quality and accessibility, educational levels, crime control, preceived happiness and much else. As such, the scholarly and scientific reflections orginating within the Nordic Summer University might prove to be useful sources of insight for policy-makers, intellectuals and interested persons outside the Nordic context, and not solely inside it.

The surviving versions of the Syriac translation of Ptolemy's life of Aristotle (which contains Aristotle's will), and the Syriac commentaries on Porphyry's Isagoge; the only printed edition, with extensive introduction.

Methods in World History is the first international volume that systematically addresses a number of methodological problems specific to the field of world history. Prompted by a lack of applicable works, the authors advocate a considerable sharpening of the tools used within the field of study. Theories constructed on poor foundations run an obvious risk of reinforcing flawed assumptions, and of propping up other, more ideological, constructions. The dedicated critical approach outlined in this volume helps to mitigate such risks. Each author addresses a particular issue of method for source criticism, archaeological evidence or estimates of economies for example discussing the problems, giving practical examples, and offering solutions and ways of overcoming the difficulties involved. The perspectives are varied, the criticism focussed, and a common theme of coalescence is maintained throughout. This unique anthology will be of great use to advanced scholars of world history, and to students entering the field for the first time.

Morphology is the general theory of form and formation, which can be seen as the innovative and fruitful point of intersection of the scientific and the humanistic cultures. The three papers presented in the book by Olaf Breidbach, Pietro Corvaja and Angelo Vianello respectively illustrate different features of morphology from the epistemic viewpoints of history of science, mathematics and biology. The texts were produced in the context of the second meeting of the “Centro Interdipartimentale di Morfologia F. Moiso”, which took place in Udine on 14 December 2007.

Among the various issues debated in philosophy today, this book focuses on one which is unquestionably central: can we claim to have any regulated procedure that uses common norms to resolve human disagreements? Although this is a question with profound classical roots, it is explored in this work through the prism of a key notion in today’s thought: controversy. The aim of adopting this approach is to determine whether controversies might constitute this regulated procedure. What are controversies? Are they only a type of reasoned and ordered debate? Are they a complex process of making or fixing rational beliefs? Each chapter of this book can be seen as a way of contributing to the analysis of human rationality, but viewed not so much as something unitary and pre-established that needs to be discovered, but rather as something that is neither unitary or pre-established; something that still needs to be achieved.

Today, Henry David Thoreau's status as one of America's most influential public intellectuals remains unchallenged. Recent scholarship on Thoreau has highlighted his activism as a committed antislavery reformer and proto-environmentalist whose life became a seminal model for the image of the liberal conscience. While modern scholars have firmly established Thoreau's relevance, their focus on his public activism has undervalued the complexity and range of his contributions to American political thought and has neglected crucial facets of his philosophy regarding democratic citizenship. In The Political Thought of Henry David Thoreau, Jonathan McKenzie analyzes not only Thoreau's well-known works but also his journals and correspondence to provide a fresh portrait of the Sage of Walden as a radical individualist. This new account examines the influence that ancient philosophers, particularly the Stoics, had on Thoreau and demonstrates his importance as one of the best modern interpreters of Socrates's vision of the self. McKenzie also argues that Thoreau's own political life was shaped by a theory of privatism that encouraged both a radical simplification of one's commitments and regular engagement in experiments that plumbed life for its most essential values.Shunning grand abstractions and cosmopolitanism in favor of the wonders of daily life, Thoreau's work provides a critique of political and social life that seeks to restore the wholeness of the human subject by rescuing it from the clutches of public concerns. Indeed, McKenzie's nuanced, provocative analysis reveals Thoreau as a multifaceted philosopher who brilliantly wrestled with the complexities of ethical participation in modern democracy.

The itineraries suggested in this book interrogate the ontological and metaphysical sense of aesthetic experience, understood as the primary experience, in which our complexity as human beings is invested by the world and manifests itself. Readers will find two different yet convergent intentions. The first, exquisitely ontologico-aesthetic, develops Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh-element towards an ontology of virtuality, with the aim of understanding a new entity, neither properly living nor properly artificial, appearing on the background of being. The second, predominantly aesthetico-metaphysical, takes the entity’s force of being in the aesthetico-linguistic experience of deixis, and tries to show the work of the aesthetic logos as a condition of possibility for meta-empirical inference.working title

This volume of original essays critically examines the intriguing interplay among major actors and venues of creative practices in contemporary East Asian cities. Its chapters closely investigate manifestations of the political and aesthetic decisions made, or not made, in the construction and representation of creative cities. The contributors give Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Shanghai special consideration.

The author offers a paradigm-shifting view of the structure of material and verbal communication, based on the mother-child experience and confirmed by recent research in infant psychology. This view justifies a relational epistemology that informs the material gift economy, as well as the structure of language itself. Provisioning economies give value to the receivers, and the circulation of gifts consolidates community. Understanding language as verbal gifting unites other orientations with reason to liberate us from biopathic, patriarchal conceptions of humanity. Sketched against this background, Vaughan introduces a conception of monetized exchange as a gift-denying and expropriating psychological mechanism, which is an unintended collective by-product of verbal communication.

Nicholas Rescher presents the first comprehensive chronology of philosophical anecdotes, spanning from antiquity to the current era. He introduces us to the major thinkers, texts, and historical periods of Western philosophy, recounting many of the stories philosophers have used over time to engage with issues of philosophical concern: questions of meaning, truth, knowledge, value, action, and ethics. Rescher's anecdotes touch on a wide range of themes—from logic to epistemology, ethics to metaphysics—and offer much insight into the breadth and depth of philosophical inquiry. This book illustrates the various ways philosophers throughout history have viewed the issues in their field, and how anecdotes can work to inform and encourage philosophical thought.

The Victorians are known for their commitment to materialism, evidenced by the dominance of empiricism in the sciences and realism in fiction. Yet there were other strains of thinking during the period in the physical sciences, social sciences, and literature that privileged the spaces between the material and immaterial. This book examines how the emerging language of the “imponderable” helped Victorian writers and physicists make sense of new experiences of modernity. As Sarah Alexander argues, while Victorian physicists were theorizing ether, energy and entropy, and non-Euclidean space and atom theories, writers such as Charles Dickens, William Morris, and Joseph Conrad used concepts of the imponderable to explore key issues of capitalism, imperialism, and social unrest.

Mirio Cosottini dedicates his book "Playing with silence" to everyone who loves silence and its multiple facets. In this volume, he advances a series of questions and exercises through which to set off on a path of enquiry into silence, shedding light on its multiple appearances and, at the same time, on what remains constant despite various transformations. In the first part of this work, Cosottini proposes a series of questions that invite readers to confront themselves with a silence that frightens. This silence is to be found in our bodies, enters our experience, and hides itself in the world. It can be cultivated, desired and listened to. In the second part, readers are invited to "play" with silence, turning it into a performative exercise: silence, here, is conceived as a tool for action and the fulfilment of a direct experience of silence.

This collection of essays on transnational Chinese cinema explores the corporal, psychological, and affective aspects of experiencing bodies on screen; engages with the material and discursive elements of embodiment; and highlights the dynamics between the mind and body involved in bio-cultural practices of cinematic production, distribution, exhibition, and reception.

The present book is a collection of 9 essays, emerging from a long and intense research collaboration among scholars coming from different backgrounds and traditions. As the book subtitle suggests, these essays focus on the ethical, religious, and political aspects of Wittgenstein’s thought, which are illustrated and investigated with reference to their complex interaction with Wittgenstein’s philosophical method and his conception of philosophy, on the one hand, and with his conception of language and human agency on the other.

An alternative, fallibilist model of moral reasoning rooted in the American Pragmatic tradition. Additional resources drawn from Chinese philosophy, Jain epistemology, modern philosophy of mathematics, and the Gadamerian hermeneutical tradition serve both to corroborate the argumentation and to provide examples of continuities in reasoning that cross the boundaries of disparate traditions.

This issue of Cirpit Review, inaugurating a new “time” for the journal, features a collection of essays and contributions variously inspired by the thought of Raion Panikkar. Certainly, he is one of the protagonists of the “intercultural transformation” or turn that has affected philosophy and theology. Symbol, dialogue, Christianness and ecosophy are some of the key concepts informing his inclusive and relational thought, gravitating around pluralism as its core notion. His theoretical efforts aimed at abandoning the paradigm that posits an intimate correspondence between thought and being, that is, the very premise grounding the enterprise of Western philosophy.