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HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
PHILOSOPHY
2005
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NEW TITLES
NEW
Q & A with McKenzie Wark
A Hacker Manifesto
MCKENZIE WARK
A double is haunting the world—the double of abstraction, the virtual reality of information, programming or poetry, math or music, curves or colorings upon which the fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities now depend. The bold aim of this book is to make manifest the origins, purpose, and interests of the emerging class responsible for making this new world—for producing the new concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of the stuff of raw data. A Hacker Manifesto deftly defines the fraught territory between the ever more strident demands by drug and media companies for protection of their patents and copyrights and the pervasive popular culture of file sharing and pirating. This vexed ground, the realm of so-called “intellectual property,” gives rise to a whole new kind of class conflict, one that pits the creators of information—the hacker class of researchers and authors, artists and biologists, chemists and musicians, philosophers and programmers— against a possessing class who would monopolize what the hacker produces.
“Ours is once again an age of manifestos. Wark’s book challenges the new regime of property relations with all the epigrammatic vitality, conceptual innovation, and revolutionary enthusiasm of the great manifestos.” —Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire “A Hacker Manifesto is a highly original and provocative book. At a moment in history where we are starved of new political ideas and directions, the clarity with which Wark identifies a new political class is persuasive, and his ability to articulate their interests is remarkable.” —Marcus Boon, author of The Road of Excess “McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto might also be called, without too much violence to its argument, The Communist Manifesto 2.0. In essence, it’s an attempt to update the core of Marxist theory for that relatively novel set of historical circumstances known as the information age.” —Julian Dibbell, author of Play Money: Diary of a Dubious Proposition
Q: So why hackers? A: Whenever you try to describe something new you have to reach into the language and find an old word that can do a new job. I like “hacker” because it’s a good old sturdy English word. There’s nothing Latinate about it. What I want this word to do is to describe a new kind of class interest. Hackers are people who create new ideas. Hackers innovate. But they don’t own the means of realizing the value of what they create. So a hacker could be a computer programmer or a musician or a novelist or a bio-chemist. Q: Most people would think of hackers as kids who break into computers. A: It used to mean people who create new computer code, but it is interesting how it’s a term that’s been trivialized and demonized. I think that’s always the case with new kinds of political force. The word “democrat” used to be an insult. I want to do the opposite with the term: make it broader and more inclusive, not something narrow and marginal. Hackers could be working in any field, not just computing. Although it seems only appropriate to name a whole class over one of its leading new forms of creativity—the programmers. Q: So what from your own experience led you to this book? A: Signing contracts with publishers! I’m not kidding. I realized, as many people do, that you have very little control over the terms under which you sell the product of your own mind. The “intellectual property” laws, which pretend to protect the interests of the creator, really protect the interests of the owner. And since most of us don’t own the means of production, we don’t stay owners for long. But I also had a positive experience, on listservers like nettime.org, where I met a whole community of people trying to put into practice a new, global gift economy of knowledge. So that was the practice; A Hacker Manifesto is the theory. I think a lot of people could recognize themselves in this book. It tries to map the possibilities for the free creation of knowledge that we have all experienced, no matter how distorted it gets when it gets reduced to a commodity.
2004 208 pp. Cloth $21.95 / £14.95 ISBN 0-674-01543-6
Visit our online feature for this book: www.hup.harvard.edu/features/warhac/ TABLE OF CONTENTS
NEW TITLES 2 PHILOSOPHY OF MIND 3 SOCIAL & POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 7 MORAL & LEGAL PHILOSOPHY 12 PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE & SOCIETY 14 PHILOSOPHY OF AESTHETICS 15 PHILOSOPHY IN THE WORDS 18 WALTER BENJAMIN 20
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 21 PHILOSOPHY OF RATIONALITY / LOGIC 23 POSTSTRUCTURALISM / ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY 24 JEWISH MYSTICISM / GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 24 ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 24 ACADEMICALLY SPEAKING 26 INDEX 27
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PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
NEW
Mindsight
Image, Dream, Meaning
COLIN MCGINN
How to imagine the imagination is a topic that draws philosophers the way flowers draw honeybees. From Plato and Aristotle to Wittgenstein and Sartre, philosophers have talked and written about this most elusive of topics—that is, until contemporary analytic philosophy of mind developed. The guiding thread of this book is the distinction Colin McGinn draws between perception and imagination. Clearly, seeing an object is similar in certain respects to forming a mental image of it, but it is also different. McGinn shows what the differences are, arguing that imagination is a sui generis mental faculty. He goes on to discuss the nature of dreaming and madness, contending that these are primarily imaginative phenomena. In the second half of the book McGinn focuses on what he calls cognitive (as opposed to sensory) imagination, and investigates the role of imagination in logical reasoning, belief formation, the understanding of negation and possibility, and the comprehension of meaning. His overall claim is that imagination pervades our mental life, obeys its own distinctive principles, and merits much more attention.
“This book contains the most innovative and important work that Colin McGinn has done in the course of his distinguished career. It has the potential to be an extraordinarily influential book, and to create, almost single-handedly, a new area of systematic study in analytic philosophy of mind: the philosophy of the imagination. Work done in this new area could provide a foundation for work done in many other areas, including the epistemology of perception, the metaphysics of intentionality, the scientific understanding of dreaming, psychosis, and the creativity of our linguistic abilities.” —Ram Neta, Professor of Philosophy, University of North Carolina “McGinn’s book is first rate, manifesting all the qualities of incisive argument, original thought and clear, direct, lively, pithy writing for which he is celebrated.” —Malcolm Budd, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, University College London
2004 224 pp. Cloth $27.95 / £18.95 ISBN 0-674-01560-6
NEW
NEW
Finding a Replacement for the Soul
Mind and Meaning in Literature and Philosophy
BRETT BOURBON
Mind Time
The Temporal Factor in Consciousness
BENJAMIN LIBET
Bourbon asserts that our complex and variable relation with language defines a domain of meaning and being that is misconstrued and missed in philosophy, in literary studies, and in our ordinary understanding of what we are and how things make sense. Accordingly, his book seeks to demonstrate how the study of literature gives us the means to understand this relationship.
“This is an adventurous and unusual book. Bourbon moves back and forth between literary and philosophical contexts with ease, showing in multifarious ways how the one can, often in unexpected ways, illuminate the other. Throughout these wide-ranging explorations Bourbon uncovers a good deal about both the nature of literary meaning and our distinctive—if tellingly irreducible—relations to literary texts.” —Garry L. Hagberg, author of Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory
2004 290 pp. Cloth $49.95 / £32.95 ISBN 0-674-01297-6
Our subjective inner life is what really matters to us as human beings—and yet we know relatively little about how it arises. Over a long and distinguished career Benjamin Libet has conducted experiments that have helped us see, in clear and concrete ways, how the brain produces conscious awareness. For the first time, Libet gives his own account of these experiments and their importance for our understanding of consciousness.
“What makes Benjamin Libet different from all the others writing on [consciousness] ... is that he has actually spent the past 40 years experimenting on the topic. His findings have played a central role in others’ speculations. Now he has put his life’s work into a single short book.” —Steven Rose, New Scientist “Benjamin Libet’s discoveries are of extraordinary interest. His is almost the only approach yet to yield any credible evidence of how conscious awareness is produced by the brain. Mind Time endeavors to clarify these startling observations for the general public, set them in proper framework of neuroscientific knowledge, and probe their philosophical meaning. Libet’s work is unique, and speaks to questions asked by all humankind.” —Robert W. Doty, Ph.D., Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy, University of Rochester
Harvard edition World Perspectives in Cognitive Neuroscience 2004 21 line illus. 272 pp. Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-01320-4
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new in paperback
The Ethics of Memory
AVISHAI MARGALIT
2002 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award Philosophy Category Los Angeles Times Best Books of 2003— Nonfiction
Confusion
A Study in the Theory of Knowledge
JOSEPH L. CAMP, JR.
“Imagine that you think you see your car in the lot at Dodger Stadium, but your key won’t work. You think to yourself, ‘I owe $500 on this car.’ Then you see a stuffed Panda in the backseat and decide that it’s a different car. When you thought about ‘this car,’ were you thinking of the car you couldn’t unlock or the car that you owned? Camp says neither. You were thinking about something like both but you did not succeed in referring to either. Camp ... has not just produced a brain twister. His problem can be found in Descartes and Locke, who worried that we seem not to perceive actual things but to confront only ideas of them. If we can’t refer without unique objects of reference, our claims to truth may be in trouble. There are alternatives to his theory of reference, but Camp’s book ... will provoke thought.” —Leslie Armour, Library Journal
2002; 2004 256 pp. Paper $18.95 / £12.95 ISBN 0-674-01591-6 Cloth $42.50 / £27.95 ISBN 0-674-00620-8
Avishai Margalit’s work offers a philosophy for our time, when, in the wake of overwhelming atrocities, memory can seem more crippling than liberating, a force more for revenge than for reconciliation. Morally powerful, deeply learned, and elegantly written, The Ethics of Memory draws on the resources of millennia of Western philosophy and religion to provide us with healing ideas that will engage all of us who care about the nature of our relations to others.
“[A] thought-provoking book ... For Margalit ... the paradigm is Jewish memories of the Holocaust, not Muslim memories of humiliation. Still, his sensitive meditations show how these two strains of hurt might be overcome. In a marvelous chapter called ‘Forgiving and Forgetting,’ Margalit asks whether we have a duty to forgive those who have wronged us. His answer is elegant ... Margalit is an astonishingly humane thinker. His philosophy is always tied to making sense of us humans in all our complexity. And yet he is committed to making sense of us in ways that will make us better.” —Jonathan Lear, New York Times Book Review
2002; 2004 240 pp. Paper $14.95 / £9.95 ISBN 0-674-01378-6 Cloth $24.95 / £16.95 ISBN 0-674-00941-X
new in paperback
Descartes’s Concept of Mind
LILLI ALANEN
“Descartes’s Concept of Mind is a book of high quality. The main point of the project is to detail Descartes’s theory of the embodiment of the human mind. This is a neglected side of his thought, and Alanen treats it in an illuminating way. The exposition is clear and remarkably well informed. And she persuasively shows that Descartes had a complicated and interesting view of this matter.” —John Carriero, UCLA
2003 368 pp. Cloth $65.00 / £41.95 ISBN 0-674-01043-4
new in paperback
Descartes’s Dualism
MARLEEN ROZEMOND
Marleen Rozemond explicates Descartes’s aim to provide a metaphysics that would accommodate mechanistic science and supplant scholasticism. Her approach includes discussion of central differences from and similarities to the scholastics and how these discriminations affected Descartes’s defense of the incorporeity of the mind and the mechanistic conception of body.
“[Descartes’s Dualism is] a thorough and careful study of Descartes’s account of the mind/soul.” —Stephen Gaukroger, Times Literary Supplement “[Descartes’s Dualism] is a brilliant book. Rozemond provides an excellent articulation of the dualism of Descartes. Her analytic skills are very high, and her references to the medieval background of Descartes’s theory of knowledge are crisp and secure ... Rozemond’s interest in the medievals also leads to a most informative, and rare, presentation of the influence of the doctrine of transubstantiation on discussions of substance and sense qualities. Among the many books on Descartes, this one ranks with a mere handful in terms of the highest worth.” —M. A. Bertman, Choice
1998; 2002 304 pp. Paper $21.50 / £13.95 ISBN 0-674-00968-1 Cloth $55.00/£35.95 ISBN 0-674-19840-9
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Expression and the Inner
DAVID FINKELSTEIN
“This book is an important contribution to a group of problems which have a central place in philosophy of mind. Here I am taking ‘philosophy of mind’ in a broad sense; Finkelstein’s book and the problems he discusses have implications for philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology. The book is written with intelligence and verve. Very few works in philosophy have anything describable as ‘narrative tension,’ but Finkelstein’s certainly does. He draws the reader into the problems he is attempting to solve with the skill of a writer of detective stories; he leads his readers down paths that appear inviting, only then to demonstrate why the apparent solutions on offer down those paths won’t do; and his arguments for the solution he himself offers at the end have the force, and the place in the book, of the denouement of a good thriller.” —Cora Diamond, Professor of Philosophy, University of Virginia
2003 194 pp. Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-01156-2
Thinking How to Live
ALLAN GIBBARD
“In this fascinating book, Gibbard applies his development of the tools of traditional AngloAmerican metaethical theory to the questions about that most basic philosophical concern: How should one live? ... Gibbard’s arguments are clear and illustrated with helpful examples. His final result is sure to generate disagreement, but theorists in this area must contend with his arguments.” —J. H. Barker, Choice “This is a remarkable book. It takes up a central and much-discussed problem—the difference between normative thought (and discourse) and ‘descriptive’ thought (and discourse). It develops a compelling response to that problem with ramifications for much else in philosophy. But perhaps most importantly, it brings new clarity and rigor to the discussion of these tangled issues. It will take some time to come to terms with the details of Gibbard’s discussion. It is absolutely clear, however, that the book will reconfigure the debate over objectivity and ‘factuality’ in ethics.” —Gideon Rosen, Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University
2003 6 tables 320 pp. Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-01167-8
Simple Mindedness
In Defense of Naive Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind
JENNIFER HORNSBY
“Jennifer Hornsby [has written] a series of careful and insightful papers ... over the past twenty years. In Simple Mindedness, she does us the great service of collecting twelve of these papers together in a single volume ... Her overall picture of the mind is filled out in a helpful introduction, and in a series of useful postscripts ... Hornsby disagrees with both Descartes and materialists ... She denies that people are composed of a material and an immaterial substance ... [but also] denies that mental properties reduce to physical properties ... Materialists who put in the time and effort to [weigh Hornsby’s views] will be richly rewarded. There is much an orthodox materialist can learn from the heretical Hornsby.” —Michael Smith, Times Literary Supplement
1997; 2001 2 line illus. 288 pp. Paper $22.50 / £14.95 ISBN 0-674-00563-5 Cloth $42.50 / £27.95 ISBN 0-674-80818-5
Tales of the Mighty Dead
Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality
ROBERT B. BRANDOM
A work in the history of systematic philosophy that is itself animated by a systematic philosophic aspiration, this book by one of the most prominent American philosophers working today provides an entirely new way of looking at the development of Western philosophy from Descartes to the present.
“Just as Kant managed to recast a good bit of the history of philosophy as a struggle between rationalism and empiricism (thus leading to his synthesis of the two), Brandom has recast a substantial portion of modern philosophy as a struggle over the consequences of inferentialist approaches. The way he shows that there is a coherent line to be traced from Leibniz to Spinoza to Kant to Hegel to Frege to Heidegger to Wittgenstein to Sellars is brilliant; it will quite naturally also be controversial (in all the best senses). This is one of those books that will force even the people who disagree most with him to have to take his position all the more seriously. If nothing else, this shows that the usual ways of drawing the (by now tired) ‘continental/analytic’ distinctions are in serious need of rethinking. Brandom’s is an original voice. Brandom’s work, obviously analytical in orientation, also claims to take its inspirations from figures normally shunned in analytic circles. This makes him a key figure in the effort to ‘overcome’ the dichotomy.” —Terry Pinkard, Northeastern University
2002 448 pp. Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-00903-7
PHILOSOPHOY OF M IND
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Articulating Reasons
An Introduction to Inferentialism
ROBERT B. BRANDOM
2001 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award—Philosophy Category “Displaying a sovereign command of the intricate discussion in the analytic philosophy of language, Brandom manages successfully to carry out a program within the philosophy of language that has already been sketched by others, without losing sight of the vision inspiring the enterprise in the important details of his investigation … Using the tools of a complex theory of language, Brandom succeeds in describing convincingly the practices in which the reason and autonomy of subjects capable of speech and action are expressed.” —Jürgen Habermas
2000; 2001 240 pp. Paper $20.50 / £13.95 ISBN 0-674-00692-5 Cloth $43.00 / £27.95 ISBN 0-674-00158-3
Consciousness in Action
S. L. HURLEY
1998 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Award in the Category of Philosophy and Religion by the Association of American Publishers “Consciousness in Action contains ten highly original, densely argued, interrelated essays on the nature and unity of consciousness, the relationships of consciousness to underlying neurophysiological processes and environmental stimuli, and the connections among consciousness, perception and action ... [It] exhibits the astonishing breadth of knowledge, technical virtuosity and subtle analyses Hurley’s readers have come to expect in her work ... [It] is a significant work not only because of its depth, originality and impressive detail, but also because its integration of philosophy with neuropsychology and cognitive science provides new avenues of research for philosophers concerned about the nature of the mind, perception, and action ... [H]er book’s impact will continue to be felt for years to come.” —Dan Silber, Philosophy in Review
1998; 2002 32 illus., 8 tables 528 pp. Paper $26.50 / £17.95 ISBN 0-674-00796-4 Cloth $63.00 / £40.95 ISBN 0-674-16420-2
Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life
JONATHAN LEAR
2001 Gradiva Award for the Best Book in Psychoanalysis and Philosophy, Sponsored by the World Organization and the Public Education Corporation of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis “An extended meditation on Aristotle’s conception of happiness and Freud’s approach to death, the book argues that both thinkers fell prey to a similar illusion ... [the thought] that our desires can ever come to an end ... There is great depth to Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life.” —Andrew Stark, Times Literary Supplement “Not many people are equally appreciative of Plato and Freud, and fewer still are able to move back and forth between contemporary discussions among philosophers and the highly technical literature of psychoanalysis as easily as Lear does ... Daring and provocative.” —Richard Rorty, New York Times Book Review
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 2000; 2002 204 pp. Paper $16.00 / £10.95 ISBN 0-674-00674-7 Cloth $26.00 / £16.95 ISBN 0-674-00329-2
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SOCIAL & POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
x NEW
NEW
Reconstructing Public Reason
ERIC A. MACGILVRAY
A Short History of Distributive Justice
SAMUEL FLEISCHACKER
The reluctance to admit controversial beliefs as legitimate grounds for public action threatens to prevent us from responding effectively to many of the leading social and political challenges that we face. Eric MacGilvray argues that we should shift our attention away from the problem of identifying uncontroversial public ends in the present and toward the problem of evaluating potentially controversial public ends through collective inquiry over time. Rather than ask ourselves which public ends are justified, we must instead decide which public ends we should seek to justify. Reconstructing Public Reason offers a fundamental rethinking of the nature and aims of liberal toleration, and of the political implications of pragmatic philosophy. It also provides fresh interpretations of founding pragmatic thinkers such as John Dewey and William James, and of leading contemporary figures such as John Rawls and Richard Rorty.
“Imaginatively conceived and skillfully executed, Reconstructing Public Reason will appeal to those anxious about the declining (or ascending!) influence of pragmatism and those anxious about the practical significance of theorizing about political justice generally and political liberalism specifically. No small accomplishment.” —Alfonso Damico, The University of Iowa “This is an intelligent book that addresses two important and fashionable themes in political theory—pragmatism and political liberalism. And it contributes to our understanding of both.” —Jeffrey Isaac, Indiana University
2004 256 pp. Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-01542-8
Fleischacker argues that guaranteeing aid to the poor is a modern idea, developed only in the last two centuries. To attribute a longer pedigree to distributive justice is to fail to distinguish between justice and charity. By examining major writings in ancient, medieval, and modern political philosophy, Fleischacker shows how we arrived at the contemporary meaning of distributive justice.
“Fleischacker provides a fascinating account of the development of our contemporary notion of distributive justice. This is an excellent book that fills a real need.” —Stephen Darwall, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and author of Welfare and Rational Care “This is a succinct, coherent, and wide-ranging history of distributive justice that will be a boon for teachers and students. Written with a light touch, it will provoke discussion and thought, raising the possibility of seeing things differently. A fine contribution.” —Ross Harrison, author of Hobbes, Locke, and Confusion’s Masterpiece
2004 204 pp. Cloth $39.95 / £25.95 ISBN 0-674-01340-9
NEW
The Modern Self in the Labyrinth
Politics and the Entrapment Imagination
EYAL CHOWERS
“This is an erudite and original study of the great entrapment and proto-entrapment theorists of the 19th and 20th centuries, namely, Kant, Mary Shelley, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Benjamin, Kafka and Foucault. As Chowers convincingly shows, these theorists argue that moderns have come to be subject to and subjectified by historical processes that govern their conduct ... The interpretation of individual authors and the story as a whole are presented with an exemplary depth of scholarship and insight, and the cumulative effect is to throw a critical and foreboding light on the present.” —James Tully, University of Victoria “This book identifies the theme of ‘social entrapment’ in three important 20th century social theorists: Weber, Freud, and Foucault. It ably shows how the theme emerged from the problems of the Enlightenment and attempts by Marx and Nietzsche to solve them. It also points out some of the dead ends to which it has led its expositors. An impressive combination of research and argument.” —Bernard Yack, Brandeis University
2004 260 pp. Cloth $49.95 / £32.95 ISBN 0-674-01330-1
WWW.HUP.HARVARD.EDU
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NEW
Just Work
RUSSELL MUIRHEAD
This elegant essay on the justice of work focuses on the fit between who we are and the kind of work we do. Russell Muirhead shows how the common hope for work that fulfills us involves more than personal interest; it also points to larger understandings of a just society. We are defined in part by the jobs we hold, and Muirhead has something important to say about the partial satisfactions of the working life, and the increasingly urgent need to balance the claims of work against those of family and community. Muirhead weaves his argument out of sociological, economic, and philosophical analysis. He shows, among other things, how modern feminism’s effort to reform domestic work and extend the promise of careers has contributed to more democratic understandings of what it means to have work that fits. Just Work shows what it would mean for work to make good on the high promise so often invested in it and suggests what we both as a society and as individuals might do when it falls short.
“In this original and provocative book, Muirhead argues that justice in work is more than a matter of fair wages and decent working conditions; it is also a matter of fit—between the work we do and the persons we are. With a clear and distinctive voice, Muirhead revives work as a subject for political theory and illuminates the ethics of everyday life.” —Michael Sandel, author of Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy
2004 224 pp. Cloth $24.95 / £16.95 ISBN 0-674-01558-4
new in paperback
Rationality and Freedom
AMARTYA SEN
Rationality and freedom are among the most profound and contentious concepts in philosophy and the social sciences. In two volumes on rationality, freedom, and justice, the distinguished economist and philosopher Amartya Sen brings clarity and insight to these difficult issues. This volume—the first of the two—is principally concerned with rationality and freedom.
“Amartya Sen occupies a unique position among modern economists. He is an outstanding economic theorist, a world authority on social choice and welfare economics. He is a leading figure in development economics, carrying out pathbreaking work on appraising the effectiveness of investment in poor countries and, more recently, on famine. At the same time, he takes a broad view of the subject and has done much to widen the perspective of economists.” —A. B. Atkinson, New York Review of Books
Belknap 2003; 2004 2 line illus. 750 pp. Paper $19.95 / £12.95 OIP ISBN 0-674-01351-4
Why Societies Need Dissent
CASS R. SUNSTEIN
“Why Societies Need Dissent ... shows that demands for lock-step conformity are wrong and uninformed thinking. Sunstein’s important new study is filled with empirical evidence of the significance of opposition, found in his compelling explanations of the need for, and benefits of, disagreement. Sunstein reveals that, in fact, the influence of dissenters is for the better, be it with courts, juries, corporate boardrooms, churches, sports teams, student organizations or faculties, not to mention ‘the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court ... during times of both war and peace.’” —John W. Dean, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures 2003 3 line illus., 5 charts 256 pp. Cloth $22.95 / £14.95 ISBN 0-674-01268-2
Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory
Actualizing Freedom
FREDERICK NEUHOUSER
Frederick Neuhouser’s task is to understand the conceptions of freedom on which Hegel’s social theory rests and to show how they ground his arguments in defense of the modern social world. In doing so, the author focuses on Hegel’s most important and least understood contribution to social philosophy, the idea of “social freedom.”
“Hegel is an obscure and difficult writer, but Neuhouser has an effortless way of making him accessible.” —Allen W. Wood, Yale University “This is a fine book, and it will be a significant contribution both to Hegel scholarship and to contemporary philosophical discussions of modern ethical life.“ —Robert B. Pippin, University of Chicago
2000; 2003 352 pp. Paper $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-01124-4 Cloth $55.00/£35.95 ISBN 0-674-00152-4
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SOCIAL & POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
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Varieties of Religion Today
William James Revisited
CHARLES TAYLOR
“Now at last we have a book about ... William James, and it has been produced by a religiously obsessed man himself. Charles Taylor has been writing philosophy for many years, and the scope of his achievement is extraordinary. He has written on ethics, epistemology, language, and politics. He has analyzed Greek, medieval, Renaissance, and modern thought in learned discourses on the history of ideas. Even more amazing, perhaps, is that a corpus of philosophy so wide should be so intellectually coherent. All of Taylor’s writings are unified by a goal, a mission, almost a calling: to understand by philosophical means who we have become and who we ought to strive to become ... [A] small but very stimulating book.” —Erin Leib, New Republic “Old-time religion had a story about these sources of despair, reinforced every Sunday morning, but James will have none of this—he cannot be so easily consoled. What he needs is a direct sensation of the presence of God. The trouble is that such experiences are rare, and fragile and isolating, not to mention questionable (even for a theist like James). Religion, if it is to survive, must be buttressed by more than fleeting sensation. The acute question raised by Charles Taylor’s interesting book is whether the modern world has room for anything else.” —Colin McGinn, Wall Street Journal
Institute for Human Sciences Vienna Lectures Series 2002; 2003 142 pp. Paper $12.00 / £7.95 ISBN 0-674-01253-4 Cloth $19.95 / £12.95 ISBN 0-674-00760-3
If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?
G. A. COHEN
2001 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award—Philosophy Category “This is an unusual book, a remarkably successful blend of autobiography, intellectual history and moral philosophy that reflects the author’s distinctive outlook and background ... [It] presents, I believe, the most important contemporary challenge to the egalitarian form of liberalism ... The questions he asks are the ones we should all be worrying about.” —Thomas Nagel, Times Literary Supplement “Cohen is much the funniest living Anglophone political philosopher of any note, as well as perhaps the cleverest.” —John Dunn, Times Higher Education Supplement
2000; 2001 3 line illus. 256 pp. Paper $19.95 / £12.95 ISBN 0-674-00693-3 Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-00218-0
Sovereign Virtue
The Theory and Practice of Equality
RONALD DWORKIN
“For the last two decades, Ronald Dworkin has been developing answers to...questions [of public policy] as part of a powerful and surprising response to the larger question of how we should reconcile liberty with equality. Unlike many partisans of equality, he thinks conservatives are right to hold individuals largely responsible for their own fates. But unlike many partisans of liberty, he nevertheless believes in substantial governmental intervention to bring about more equality. And, unlike both, he argues that, in the deepest sense, equality and liberty are never truly at odds. In Sovereign Virtue, Dworkin has brought together this surprising theory and some of its applications...If we care about having a rational public discourse about the many contests that seem to pit liberty against equality, we owe his book a careful reading.” —K. Anthony Appiah, New York Review of Books “Sovereign Virtue ... is ... extraordinarily impressive: supple, suave and enviably deft, like all his work, and in its cumulative effect quite exceptionally illuminating…[Dworkin] has been in many ways the most systematic moral, political and legal thinker of the past three decades in the Anglophone world. He may lack the personal authority or the singularity of mind of John Rawls. But on this evidence he has a substantially broader range of ambition, a set of forceful moral intuitions, a speed and boldness of intellectual manoeuvre, and a combination of energy and sheer pertinacity that are all his own.” —John Dunn, Times Higher Education Supplement
2000; 2002 528 pp. Paper $20.50 / £13.95 ISBN 0-674-00810-3 Cloth $37.50 / £24.95 ISBN 0-674-00219-9
SOCIAL & POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
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The Law of Peoples
JOHN RAWLS
“[These essays are] some of [Rawls’s] strongest published expressions of feeling ... These are the final products of a remarkably pure and concentrated career ... The writings of John Rawls, whom it is now safe to describe as the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century ... owe their influence to the fact that their depth and their insight repay the close attention that their uncompromising theoretical weight and erudition demand.” —Thomas Nagel, New Republic “This is the most engaging and accessible book Rawls has written ... For the most part Rawls lays out his argument in a straightforward way, and refers extensively to historical and contemporary episodes to illustrate it.” —David Miller, Times Literary Supplement
1999; 2001 210 pp. Paper $16.95 / £10.95 ISBN 0-674-00542-2 Cloth $25.00 / £16.95 ISBN 0-674-00079-X
A Theory of Justice
Revised Edition
JOHN RAWLS
“Rawls’s Theory of Justice is widely and justly regarded as this century’s most important work of political philosophy. Originally published in 1971, it quickly became the subject of extensive commentary and criticism, which led Rawls to revise some of the arguments he had originally put forward in this work ... This edition will certainly become the definitive one; all scholars will use it, and it will be an essential text for any academic library. It contains a new preface that helpfully outlines the major revisions, and a ‘conversion table’ that correlates the pagination of this edition with the original, which will be useful to students and scholars working with this edition and the extensive secondary literature on Rawls’s work. Highly recommended.” —J. D. Moon, Choice Review of the previous edition: “John Rawls draws on the most subtle techniques of contemporary analytic philosophy to provide the social contract tradition with what is, from a philosophical point of view at least, the most formidable defense it has yet received ... [and] makes available the powerful intellectual resources and the comprehensive approach that have so far eluded antiutilitarians. He also makes clear how wrong it was to claim, as so many were claiming only a few years back, that systematic moral and political philosophy are dead ... Whatever else may be true it is surely true that we must develop a sterner and more fastidious sense of justice. In making his peerless contribution to political theory, John Rawls has made a unique contribution to this urgent task. No higher achievement is open to a scholar.” —Marshall Cohen, New York Times Book Review
Belknap 1999 12 line illus. 560 pp. Paper $24.95 ISBN 0-674-00078-1 Cloth $52.00 ISBN 0-674-00077-3
Liberalism with Honor
SHARON R. KRAUSE
“This book makes a highly original and richly constructive contribution to contemporary democratic theory as well as to the interpretation and application of the thought of Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and the American tradition of political thought and culture, rooted in the Founding Fathers. The argument of the book establishes, for perhaps the first time in current literature, how capacious and fertile may be the moral resource for democratic theory that is to be found in a reconsidered and appropriately re-elaborated concept of honor.” —Thomas Pangle, author of Justice Among Nations: On the Moral Basis of Power and Peace
2002 288 pp. Cloth $35.00 / £22.95 ISBN 0-674-00756-5
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SOCIAL & POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Justice as Fairness
A Restatement
JOHN RAWLS EDITED BY ERIN KELLY
“There have been millions of words written about A Theory of Justice and many articles and several books by Rawls defending and expanding its doctrines. Justice as Fairness will almost certainly be the last of these, and it should take its place as the best and most comprehensive statement of Rawls’s eventual position. It is an exemplary work in every way. Rawls’s own virtues shine through. He follows the argument where it leads. He listens to his critics and acknowledges his supporters; he gives way when it is necessary, but remains firm where he can take a stand. Anybody convinced that political thought is all about disguised power, or rhetoric, or ideology in the bad sense of the word, should confront this book.” —Simon Blackburn, Times Literary Supplement
Belknap 2001; 2001 2 line illus. 240 pp. Paper $19.95 / £12.95 ISBN 0-674-00511-2 Cloth $50.00 / £32.95 ISBN 0-674-00510-4
Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy
JOHN RAWLS EDITED BY BARBARA HERMAN
“What names would we want to place next to Wittgenstein and Heidegger? No thinker, I believe, has a greater right to stand alongside them than John Rawls. Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, which appeared in 1971, changed forever the landscape of moral and political philosophy. Like Wittgenstein and Heidegger, Rawls has shown a remarkable capacity for self-criticism. Like them, he has gone on to revise in significant ways the doctrines that first established his fame ... The publication of the Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy is thus a major event, since here we find the conception of modern ethics as a whole, the understanding of its characteristic themes and problems, that has inspired Rawls’s political thought.” —Charles Larmore, New Republic
2000 4 line illus. 414 pp. Paper $20.95 / £13.95 ISBN 0-674-00442-6 Cloth $55.00 / £35.95 ISBN 0-674-00296-2
Collected Papers
JOHN RAWLS EDITED BY SAMUEL FREEMAN
“What a body of work this is, and what an accomplishment. Collected Papers affords an opportunity to step back and see [Rawls’s] work as a whole, as the elaboration of a single powerful and abiding idea ... This volume of Collected Papers stands as an inspiration to the next generation of theorists.” —Jeremy Waldron, London Review of Books “The course of Rawls’s career can be followed clearly in the Collected Papers, whose twenty-seven chapters span forty-eight years ... The writings of John Rawls, whom it is now safe to describe as the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century ... owe their influence to the fact that their depth and their insight repay the close attention that their uncompromising theoretical weight and erudition demand.” —Thomas Nagel, New Republic
1999; 2001 1 table 672 pp. Paper $27.95 / £18.95 ISBN 0-674-00569-4
Semblances of Sovereignty
The Constitution, the State, and American Citizenship
T. ALEXANDER ALEINIKOFF
SOCIAL & POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
“Aleinikoff examines sovereignty, citizenship, and the broader concept of membership (aliens as well as citizens) in the American nation-state and suggests that American constitutional law needs ‘understandings of sovereignty and membership that are supple and flexible, open to new arrangements’ ... Sure to generate heated debate over the extent to which the rules governing immigration, Indian tribes, and American territories should be altered, this book is required reading for constitutional scholars.” —R. J. Steamer, Choice
2002 320 pp. Cloth $48.00 / £30.95 ISBN 0-674-00745-X
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MORAL & LEGAL PHILOSOPHY
NEW NEW
Cities of Words
Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life
STANLEY CAVELL
Ethics without Ontology
HILARY PUTNAM
Since Socrates and his circle first tried to frame the Just City in words, discussion of a perfect communal life—a life of justice, reflection, and mutual respect—has had to come to terms with the distance between that idea and reality. Measuring this distance step by practical step is the philosophical project that Stanley Cavell has pursued on his exploratory path. Situated at the intersection of two of his longstanding interests—Emersonian philosophy and the Hollywood comedy of remarriage—Cavell’s new work marks a significant advance in this project. The book—which presents a course of lectures Cavell presented several times toward the end of his teaching career at Harvard—links masterpieces of moral philosophy and classic Hollywood comedies to fashion a new way of looking at our lives and learning to live with ourselves.
“What does it mean to live a moral life? In his typically provocative fashion, Cavell answers this question by juxtaposing various philosophical responses with particular films that illuminate those responses ... Cavell’s ‘letters’ offer a ready and heady departure from the usual conversation on moral life, and his inventive use of film helps bring the philosophers he discusses to life.” —Henry I. Carrigan Jr., Library Journal “In Cities of Words, a knotty and enlightening book, chapters about philosophers are paired with chapters about films: Emerson and The Philadelphia Story, Locke and Adam’s Rib, Nietzsche and Now, Voyager, Aristotle and The Awful Truth ... Cavell shows that the spirit of moral quest has an unusual power, even in the restricted world of these films. For all their artifice, they suggest that characters really can change themselves, that they can form ideals of justice, while keeping in mind how much failure and imperfection will be met along the way. That’s not a bad democratic vision, and it remains as potent now as it was when Katharine Hepburn rediscovered her love for Cary Grant.” —Edward Rothstein, New York Times
Belknap 2004 480 pp. Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-01336-0
In this brief book one of the most distinguished living American philosophers takes up the question of whether ethical judgments can properly be considered objective— a question that has vexed philosophers over the past century. Reviewing what he deems the disastrous consequences of ontology’s influence on analytic philosophy—in particular, the contortions it imposes upon debates about the objective of ethical judgments—Hilary Putnam proposes abandoning the very idea of ontology.
“Hilary Putnam is one of the most distinguished living American philosophers, a philosopher whose writings have done much to shape the agenda of analytic philosophy over the last forty years. Much of the interest of this book lies in the way that it illustrates, with unmistakable clarity, how severe a critic of mainstream analytic philosophy Putnam has become.” —Michael Williams, Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University
2004 1 table 176 pp. Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-01310-7
new in paperback
Ethical Formation
SABINA LOVIBOND
Sabina Lovibond invites her readers to see how the “practical reason view of ethics” can survive challenges from within philosophy and from the antirationalist postmodern critique of reason. At the heart of her argument is the Aristotelian idea of the formation of character through upbringing; these ancient ideas can be made contemporary if one understands them in a naturalized way.
“This is an intricate and stimulating book ... an argument that is impressive in its coherence and subtlety, and in the insightful way it engages with issues that are right at the centre of contemporary philosophical debate.” —John Cottingham, Times Literary Supplement
2002; 2004 224 pp. Paper $19.95 / £12.95 ISBN 0-674-01365-4 Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-00650-X
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new in paperback
NEW
The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays
HILARY PUTNAM
“Putnam’s The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy is a tour de force by a great philosopher. In an era of pseudo-scientific reductionism in what should be ‘the human sciences’, Putnam’s distinction as a philosopher of science and mathematics lends weight to his eloquent demolition of the dichotomy between judgments of fact and judgments of value that plays such a baneful role in economics, public policy, and the law, discouraging serious normative inquiry and argument. Anyone tempted by Milton Friedman’s famous claim that concerning differences of value ‘men can ultimately only fight’ should read this elegant and wonderful book.” —Martha Nussbaum, The University of Chicago “Hume’s and much 20th-century moral philosophy contrasted moral with factual judgments and led people to conclude that the former, unlike the latter, are subjective in the sense of not being rationally supportable. Putnam ... believes that the contrast is ill conceived and that the conclusion is both unwarranted and false. He acknowledges the usefulness of the fact/ value distinction but denies that anything metaphysical follows from it ... Putnam covers such matters as imperative logic, economics vis-à-vis ethics, and preference theory and such thinkers as V. Walsh, L. Robbins, and R. M. Hare. A fine philosophical workout.” —Robert Hoffman, Library Journal
2002; 2004 208 pp. Paper $16.95 / £10.95 ISBN 0-674-01380-8 Cloth $37.50 / £24.95 ISBN 0-674-00905-3
Law’s Quandary
STEVEN D. SMITH
This lively book reassesses a century of jurisprudential thought from a fresh perspective, and points to a malaise that currently afflicts not only legal theory but law in general. Steven Smith argues that our legal vocabulary and methods of reasoning presuppose classical ontological commitments that were explicitly articulated by thinkers from Aquinas to Coke to Blackstone, and even by Joseph Story. But these commitments are out of sync with the world view that prevails today in academic and professional thinking. So our law-talk thus degenerates into “just words”—or a kind of nonsense.
“Ordinary people assume that legal terms like freedom of speech have some real or true meaning. Most important legal theorists say there is no such thing. It is not unheard of for the sophisticated classes to reach conclusions at odds with common sense. But this creates a real problem for the stability of our legal system. Smith explores this quandary in a way that is wonderfully clear, honest, and funny. This is the best book I have read in several years.” —John H. Garvey, author of What Are Freedoms For? “Smith’s treatment of the issues he addresses is outstanding. His discussion is consistently probing, thoughtful, and imaginative. Smith’s range of reference is impressively broad—yet I never had the sense that he was trying to impress. His clarity—aided by his wonderfully engaging, and occasionally humorous, conversational style—is exemplary. But the enviable clarity/accessibility of Smith’s writing should not obscure just how penetrating—I am tempted to say, brilliant—his commentary is. It may sound faintly ridiculous to say this, but I thought that this book was a jurisprudential page turner.” —Michael J. Perry, author of Under God? Religious Faith and Liberal Democracy
2004 222 pp. Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-01533-9
Justice, Luck, and Knowledge
S. L. HURLEY
The recent past has seen striking advances in our understanding of both moral responsibility and distributive justice. S. L. Hurley’s ambitious work brings these two areas of lively debate into overdue contact with each other. Key contemporary discussions of distributive justice have formulated egalitarian approaches in terms of responsibility; in this view, the aim of egalitarianism is to respect differences between positions for which people are responsible while neutralizing differences that are a matter of luck. But this approach, Hurley contends, has ignored the way our understanding of responsibility constrains the roles it can actually play within distributive justice. Her book brings the new articulation of responsibility to bear in explaining these constraints.
“Luck-neutralization is a central concept in contemporary work on distributive justice, and thus moral responsibility is also a central concept (insofar as luck is what one is not morally responsible for). It is therefore fruitful and illuminating to apply important insights from responsibility theory to various theories of distributive justice. The book is written in a lively style, Susan Hurley is remarkably well-versed in the literature on free will and moral responsibility as well as distributive justice, and the ideas are vibrant and provocative ... [A] path-breaking book.” —John Martin Fischer, Professor of Philosophy, University of California Riverside “Hurley’s arguments are highly original. This is an impressive and insightful book.” —Peter Vallentyne, Professor of Philosophy, Virginia Commonwealth University
2003 6 line illus. 524 pp. Cloth $55.00 / £35.95 ISBN 0-674-01029-9
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MORAL & LEGAL PHILOSOPHY
PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE & SOCIETY
NEW new in paperback
Four Cultures of the West
JOHN W. O’MALLEY
“In this erudite work of cultural history, O’Malley extends ‘an invitation to consider and notice’ four distinctive paradigms or cultures that, taken together, handsomely help decode Western intellectual and cultural history. These four paradigms are the prophetic, the academic, the humanistic, and the culture of art and performance ... O’Malley successfully showcases the affinities between historic cultures (e.g., the Greco-Roman) and persons (e.g., Aristotle, Aquinas, and Luther) and cultural realities in our own time (e.g., the contemplative rhetoric of Lincoln at Gettysburg prefiguring the rhetorical contemplation at Ground Zero).” —Sandra Collins, Library Journal “O’Malley’s succinct analysis of the Four Cultures of the West is one of those rare books that uses history to tell us as much about the intellectual conflicts of the present as it does about those of the past. I predict his categorical analysis will be widely cited and widely debated by commentators well beyond academic specialists.” —Kenneth Woodward, contributing editor for Newsweek and author of Making Saints
Belknap 2004 272 pp. Cloth $24.95 / £16.95 ISBN 0-674-01498-7
The Emergence of Sexuality
Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts
ARNOLD I. DAVIDSON
“No one of his generation has better mastered Foucault’s archeological and genealogical work than Davidson. I do not mean in saying so that he is an expert on Foucault (which he is) but rather that he has learned how best to do his own work having seen what Foucault could do.” —Ian Hacking, Common Knowledge “In presenting his account of historical epistemology (tracing the ways concepts are modified as conditions of objectivity and forms of subjectivity change each other), Arnold Davidson takes as a pivotal task the confrontation of Foucault’s writing (to the totality of which Davidson is a world-renowned guide) with that of Freud (on whose Three Essays on Sexuality he has produced ground-breaking work), along the way showing the pertinence to his project of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. A growing body of students and specialists in philosophy, and cultural studies, and the history of science, in particular of psychiatry, have been profiting from Arnold Davidson’s clarity and his stunning erudition for a couple of decades now. This initial selection of his essays is an excellent introduction to his singular array of scholarly and critical accomplishments.” —Stanley Cavell, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University
2002; 2004 17 halftones, 12 line illus. 272 pp. Paper $19.95 / £12.95 ISBN 0-674-01370-0 Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-00459-0
Lessons of the Masters
GEORGE STEINER
“Steiner’s Lessons of the Masters sets forth the disturbing complexity of the relationship between teacher and pupil, master and disciple ... Some of the best writing in Steiner’s book is scorching characterisation—of bad teachers, of the politically correct, and the hypocrites who would deny the erotic element in the teacher-pupil relationship.” —Germaine Greer, The Times “[Steiner] brings his formidable charisma, his unrivalled range of reference and powers of rhetoric to bear on the peaks (as well as some troughs) of pedagogy, in history and literature: Socrates and Alcibiades, the parables of Christ, Faust, Virgil and Dante, Abelard and Eloise ... Like his hero Socrates, Steiner professes to have few answers, but his questions sweep you along.” —Robin Blake, Financial Times “George Steiner’s reflections on the electric relationship between teacher and student takes the reader on a high-speed rollercoaster ride to visit the greatest figures of Western civilization ... Where there is great mastery, there is likewise great jealousy, treachery, threat, and fear. Steiner passionately throws out a wide and undaunted net of inquiry into this perennially prickly and powerful subject.” —Patty Podhaisky, Bloomsbury Review
The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 2003 208 pp. Cloth $19.95 / £12.95 ISBN 0-674-01207-0
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Between Kant and Hegel
Lectures on German Idealism
DIETER HENRICH EDITED BY DAVID S. PACINI
“These are excellent lectures and make a valuable and exciting book. Henrich certainly gives a better introduction to the philosophizing that took place between Kant and Hegel than any other that I know of. He wants to show that the positions of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel each represent an option that is still open for live philosophical debate. Can there be a single-track systematic philosophy encompassing nature as well as mind? Dieter Henrich shows how this develops into a wide-ranging problem, allowing both for criticism of Kant and for constructive moves made after the criticisms are taken into account. He thus tries to show us argumentative steps by which one might proceed from a Kantian position to a Fichtean and then on to an Hegelian view. These lectures were given in 1973. Much has been done in English on Hegel since then, but relatively little on the ‘between’ period which Dieter Henrich addresses. This is not an ordinary textbook. It’s very much infused with Dieter Henrich’s own philosophical views. The topics and people Dieter Henrich discusses he really illuminates, both in terms of the historical context and in terms of the soundness or lack of it of the philosophy he is discussing. He is himself deeply inside that tradition, yet knows enough about the work of those outside it to make quite comprehensible to the outsiders what it’s like on the inside.” —J. B. Schneewind, Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University
2003 1 chart 384 pp. Cloth $55.00 / £35.95 ISBN 0-674-00773-5
PHILOSOPHY OF AESTHETICS
NEW
Ugly Feelings
SIANNE NGAI
Envy, irritation, paranoia—in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity. Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called “animatedness,” and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called “stuplimity.” She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from latetwentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening. Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of ugly feelings to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature—with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race—but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.
2005 37 halftones 432 pp. Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-01536-3
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NEW
The Romantic Imperative
The Concept of Early German Romanticism
FREDERICK C. BEISER
The Early Romantics met resistance from artists and academics alike in part because they defied the conventional wisdom that philosophy and the arts must be kept separate. Indeed, as the literary component of Romanticism has been studied and celebrated in recent years, its philosophical aspect has receded from view. This book, by one of the most respected scholars of the Romantic era, offers an explanation of Romanticism that not only restores but also enhances understanding of the movement’s origins, development, aims, and accomplishments—and of its continuing relevance.
“This is an excellent book. Its ten chapters are much more accessible and often clearer than the larger classic tomes on the subject. Each takes up a very significant topic and is sure to be read with profit by a wide range of readers—whether they are new to the field or already quite familiar with it. The book concerns an era, Early German Romanticism, that is properly becoming a major focus of new research. This volume could become one of the most helpful steps in making the area part of the canon for Anglophone scholars in all fields today. It is surely one of the best remedies for correcting out of date images of the work of the German romantics as regressive, obscurantist, or irrelevant. Early German Romanticism extends and modifies the project of the Enlightenment. The author shows that it deserves our attention not only because it is an era represented by some of the most interesting and creative personalities in our cultural history, but also because its main line of thought is responsible for a way of thinking central to our own time, namely a naturalism that might be expansive enough to do justice to traditional interests in the unique value of human freedom.” —Karl Ameriks, Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame
2004 272 pp. Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-01180-5
new in paperback
Embodiment of a Nation
Human Form in American Places
CECELIA TICHI
From Harriet Beecher Stowe’s image of the Mississippi’s “bosom” to Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod as “the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts,” the American environment has been represented in terms of the human body. Exploring such instances of embodiment, Cecelia Tichi exposes the historically varied and often contrary geomorphic expression of a national paradigm.
“In this fascinating analysis of American geographical and topographical imagery, Cecelia Tichi demonstrates the many ways in which our history, as well as our cultural values, are embedded in our monuments and historical sites. Using interdisciplinary perspectives from literature, history, and visual and material cultural studies, Tichi shows us how to read our national mythology in our continually shifting interpretation of our national sites and places.” —Wendy Martin, author of An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich “A brilliant analysis of how the landscape and physical environment of the United States have been transformed physically and imaginatively by creative, but often destructive, projections of national bodily identities onto the land. Tichi demonstrates how technologies combine with political motives, social impulses, and historical developments to infuse spaces and places with national meanings, even bodily geo-identity. This is bold, original research.” —Emory Elliott, General Editor of Columbia Literary History of the United States
2001; 2004 38 halftones 320 pp. Paper $19.95 / £12.95 ISBN 0-674-01361-1 Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-00494-9
new in paperback
Friends of Interpretable Objects
MIGUEL TAMEN
“In an exquisitely idiosyncratic book of enormous intellectual ambition crammed into a tiny space ... Tamen wants to redefine aesthetics ... In his scheme, the interpretable object (which might be what we recognize as an artwork, but does not need to be) exists by virtue of its ‘friends’—those people who gather round it and, so to speak, talk to it, as we might do with a statue or painting. How do objects ‘talk back’ from within a museum or a church? Suavely Wittgensteinian and insatiably curious, Tamen’s arguments are hardly devalued by the lack of any earth-shattering conclusion.” —Stephen Poole, The Guardian “Because Tamen is willing to go out on various disciplinary and logical limbs, this is a book like no other. It will appeal to students of literature and the visual arts, it will be debated by the more humanistic of philosophers, and it will perform noble cross-over activity between those disciplines and material from theories of law, science, and ecology. The book will work in this admirable way for those who are open-minded, inquisitive, and seducible by some lovely instances of intellectual wit.” —Leonard Barkan, Princeton University
2001; 2004 208 pp. Paper $16.95 / £10.95 ISBN 0-674-01368-9 Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-00646-1
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PHILOSOPHY OF AESTHETICS
1-800-405-1619 / www.hup.harvard.edu
Art Matters
PETER DE BOLLA
“Art Matters is against intimidation. De Bolla’s ambition in this book is to show us just how generous art objects are, given a chance; and just how difficult it has become to experience our experience of them in the language available. There are stories to be told about the eloquence of being mute, and de Bolla has used his own aesthetic experiences to tell them. Art Matters is writing about art at its most telling. It is a remarkable book.” —Adam Phillips, Principal Child Psychotherapist, Wolverton Gardens Child and Family Consultation Centre, London “Peter de Bolla’s Art Matters is an extraordinary description of and argument for the uniqueness of the aesthetic experience. Despite the inherent difficulty and complexity of this enterprise (in which aspects of musical performance, lyric poetry, and contemporary painting are described with great attentiveness) de Bolla has produced a grippingly refined and persuasive text, utterly free of sentimentality or cant, true, direct, original.” —Edward Said
2001; 2003 10 color illus., 1 halftone 190 pp. Paper $15.95 / £10.95 ISBN 0-674-01110-4 Cloth $36.00 / £23.95 ISBN 0-674-00649-6
Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences
PHILIP FISHER
“A short but ample book, in which Fisher ranges well beyond his home territory of literature into science, mathematics, philosophy, architecture, mythology, and modern art and where Shakespeare rubs shoulders with Frank Lloyd Wright, Nabokov with Aristotle, Newton with Cy Twombly. Fisher takes wonder where he finds it, in the Chicago skyline, Miranda’s exclamations in The Tempest or Descartes’s explanation of the rainbow. Experiences of wonder may be by definition rare, but for Fisher they are dispersed all over the map of knowledge ... This is a learned, cultivated work.” —Lorraine Daston, London Review of Books “Like Kant, Fisher wants to sketch out ‘the lively border’ between aesthetics and intelligibility, and he is to be applauded for pursuing this border in and of itself, without reducing aesthetic experience to ideology, sociology, or identity politics, as the greater part of university literary criticism has tended to do over the past decade. Unlike Kant, Fisher employs an eclectic discursive method, passing with admirable erudition from Descartes’s account of the rainbow to Plato’s geometrical problem of how to double the area of a square to an analysis of two abstract canvases by Cy Twombly.” —Adam Bresnick, Times Literary Supplement
1999; 2003 16 color illus., 1 halftone, 16 line illus. 208 pp. Paper $17.95 / £11.95 ISBN 0-674-95562-5 Cloth $40.00 / £25.95 ISBN 0-674-95561-7
The Secret Life of Puppets
VICTORIA NELSON
10th Annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies Sponsored by the Modern Language Association of America “Translating ancient thought systems into contemporary terms, finding equivalents of the old in the new, Nelson skillfully manages to thrust the sphere of academic research headlong into popular culture, making this both accessible and erudite ... In a dizzying journey that opens with a Renaissance grotto and concludes with The Truman Show and virtual reality, we are taken on a rollercoaster ride through the underside of western mysticism. As Nelson herself warns the reader, when crawling out from the ‘hole of this book,’ whatever emerges ‘will not be the same as what went in.’” —Aura Satz, Financial Times “This is New Age prophecy at its most verbally sexy and literarily savvy. It is fun, enticing, and chock full of brilliance.” —Laura Bass, Washington Times “Explores the hauntings, possessions, and other uncanny phenomena proliferating in literature and entertainment … she argues strongly, in vivid and original readings … for a new approach to the uses of fantasy and to the relationship between material and immaterial phenomena.” —Marina Warner, Times Literary Supplement “A wonderful, unlikely, necessary book which links high and low and pop culture, the sacred and the profane, into a magnificent webwork of pattern and gnosis—it is erudite, irreverent, and profound. Just read it.” —Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods and The Sandman
2002; 2003 15 halftones 368 pp. Paper $17.95 / £11.95 ISBN 0-674-01244-5 Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-00630-5
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PHILOSOPHY OF AESTHETICS
PHILOSOPHY IN THE WORDS
NEW
J. J. Rousseau: An Afterlife of Words
ELI FRIEDLANDER
Eli Friedlander reads Rousseau’s autobiography, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, as philosophy. Reading this work against Descartes’s Meditations, Friedlander shows how Rousseau’s memorable transformation of experience through writing opens up the possibility of affirming even the most dejected state of being and allows the emergence of the innocence of nature out of the ruins of all social attachments. In tracing the re-creation of a human subject in reverie, Friedlander is alive to the very form of the experience of reading the Reveries by showing the ways this work needs to—and in effect does—generate a reader, without betraying Rousseau’s utter solitude. Friedlander’s book provides an afterlife for the Reveries in modern philosophy. It constitutes an alternative to the analytic tradition’s revival of Rousseau, primarily through Rawls’s influential vision of the social contract. It also counters the fate of Rousseau’s writings in the continental tradition, determined by and large by Derrida’s deconstruction. Friedlander’s reading of the Reveries, a work that has fascinated generations of readers, is an incomparable introduction to one of the greatest thinkers in Western culture.
2004 176 pp. Cloth $39.95 / £25.95 ISBN 0-674-01514-2
NEW
The World Republic of Letters
PASCALE CASANOVA TRANSLATED BY M. B. DEBEVOISE
The “world of letters” has always seemed a matter more of metaphor than of global reality. In this book, Pascale Casanova shows us the state of world literature behind the stylistic refinements— a world of letters relatively independent from economic and political realms, and in which language systems, aesthetic orders, and genres struggle for dominance. Rejecting facile talk of globalization, with its suggestion of a happy literary “melting pot,” Casanova exposes an emerging regime of inequality in the world of letters, where minor languages and literatures are subject to the invisible but implacable violence of their dominant counterparts. Inspired by the writings of Fernand Braudel and Pierre Bourdieu, this ambitious book develops the first systematic model for understanding the production, circulation, and valuing of literature worldwide.
“This is a marvelous study of the international networks and ethnic forcefields out of which a modern world literature has emerged. In drawing a map of the literary globe, Pascale Casanova shows just how different it is from any political map ever framed. Unlike many previous comparativists, she shows just how many of the texts of literary modernism have been contributed by peoples without financial or political power. This is a brave, audacious and luminous analysis, and a bracing challenge to those who still believe in the nation as an explanatory category. This book will provoke debate for years to come.” —Declan Kiberd, author of Inventing Ireland and Irish Classics “As a researcher, Pascale Casanova specializes in the exception. Along with a literary knowledge that is exceptional in its breadth and depth, she possesses a theoretical knowledge that is truly vast and wielded with great authority. In pursuing this immense topic—the universe of relations that constitute the ‘World Republic of Letters’—she has set herself a daunting challenge: that of constructing, and empirically verifying, a theoretical model for the ‘fabric of the universal.’” —Pierre Bourdieu, author of Distinction and Language and Symbolic Power
Convergences: Inventories of the Present 2005 440 pp. Cloth $35.00 / £22.95 ISBN 0-674-01345-X
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1-800-405-1619 / www.hup.harvard.edu
Keywords and Concepts in Evolutionary Developmental Biology
EDITED BY BRIAN K. HALL AND WENDY M. OLSON
Doubling the Point
Essays and Interviews
J. M. COETZEE
2003 Recipient of the Nobel Prize
EDITED BY DAVID ATTWELL
The new field of evolutionary developmental biology is one of the most exciting areas of contemporary biology. The fundamental principle of evolutionary developmental biology (“evo-devo”) is that evolution acts through inherited changes in the development of the organism. “Evo-devo” is not merely a fusion of the fields of developmental and evolutionary biology, the grafting of a developmental perspective onto evolutionary biology, or the incorporation of an evolutionary perspective into developmental biology. Evo-devo strives for a unification of genomic, developmental, organismal, population, and natural selection approaches to evolutionary change. It draws from development, evolution, paleontology, ecology, and molecular and systematic biology, but has its own set of questions, approaches, and methods. Keywords and Concepts in Evolutionary Developmental Biology is the first comprehensive reference work for this expanding field. Covering more than fifty central terms and concepts in entries written by leading experts, Keywords offers an overview of all that is embraced by this new subdiscipline of biology, providing the core insights and ideas that show how embryonic development relates to life-history evolution, adaptation, and responses to and integration with environmental factors.
“With the recent explosion of interest in evolutionary developmental biology, fueled by advances in molecular analysis, this work arrives at an extremely important time ... Chapters are thoughtfully written by an extraordinarily wide range of scientists from nearly every perspective of evolution and development.” —K. Crawford, Choice
Harvard University Press Reference Library 2003 25 line illus., 7 tables 496 pages Cloth $59.95 / £38.95 ISBN 0-674-00904-5
These essays and interviews, documenting Coetzee’s longtime en- gagement with his own culture, and with modern culture in general, constitute a literary autobiography of striking intellectual, moral, and political force.
“The interviews are serious colloquies, and they illuminate the texts they discuss, but above all they give a strong impression of the author on his own view of what he is trying to do. One is left with an impression of a deeply informed mind. Coetzee is a writer of international stature, far above mere regional interest, and we can hardly help being interested in his being an Afrikaans-speaking South African. This is a book of distinction.” —Frank Kermode
1992 7 line illus. 448 pp. Paper $21.50 / £13.95 ISBN 0-674-21518-4
Kafka
KLAUS WAGENBACH
In Kafka’s writing, Albert Camus tells us, we travel “to the limits of human thought.” And in this book, the world’s leading Kafka authority conducts us to the deepest reaches of Kafka’s own troubled psyche, to reveal the inner workings of the man who gave his name to a central facet of modern experience, the Kafkaesque. Klaus Wagenbach, who wrote the first major critical biography of Kafka, draws upon a wealth of new and recent information to produce a concise but finely nuanced portrait of the author, an ideal introduction to this quintessential figure of modernity.
2003 16 color illus., 31 duotones, 10 line drawings, 1 map 192 pp. Cloth $21.50 / COBEEI ISBN 0-674-01138-4
NEW
A New History of German Literature
DAVID E. WELLBERY, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF JUDITH RYAN, GENERAL EDITOR HANS ULRICH GUMBRECHT, ANTON KAES, JOSEPH LEO KOERNER, DOROTHEA E. VON MÜCKE, EDITORS
“The essays making up this new history of the literary and philosophical culture of the people of the German lands (and of Germans abroad) are of an unfailingly high standard. Many are noteworthy contributions to scholarship and criticism. The ingenious plan of the book permits a variety of style and approach, while strong editing has resulted in exemplary clarity and pithiness of expression. Well conceived, eclectic, lively, and informative, this New History gives us a model overview of what German literature and thought looks like from the twenty-first century.” —J. M. Coetzee, author of Elizabeth Costello and Doubling the Point “An enticing and authoritative review of German literature from its most splendid high points to a most horrible nadir and its aftermath. This book well documents how—in a remarkable post-war process of moral regeneration—German literature struggles to come to terms with what happened.” —Amos Elon, author of The Pity of It All “Harvard’s New History of German Literature is an encyclopedic browser of incomparable quality for Germanophiles and Germanophobes alike. In a series of brief, penetrating essays, it retells thirteen centuries of German history through a broad spectrum of literature by both obscure and famous authors. For modern readers ready to tackle the riddle of modern Germany with real hope of solving it, here is the guide.” —Steven Ozment, author of A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People and The Bürgermeister’s Daughter
Belknap / Harvard University Press Reference Library 2005 12 halftones, 4 maps 1032 pp. Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-01503-7
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PHILOSOPHY IN THE WORDS
WALTER BENJAMIN
new in paperback
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926
WALTER BENJAMIN EDITED BY MARCUS BULLOCK AND MICHAEL W. JENNINGS
This first volume shows that even as a young man Benjamin possessed astonishing intellectual range and depth. His topics here include poetry and fiction, drama, philosophy, history, religion, love, violence, morality, mythology, painting, and much more. He is as compelling and insightful when musing on riddles or children’s books as he is when dealing with weightier issues such as symbolic logic or epistemology.
“To encounter Benjamin’s piece [‘The Life of Students’] is like overhearing the opening notes of one of the most intellectually compelling friendships of our century. It is greatly to the credit of Harvard University Press to have made the text finally available to English-speaking readers. In general, the editors of this volume have made an exemplary choice of what to include, and when their projected multi-volume selection is complete, it will constitute the most important compilation of Benjamin’s writings outside the mammoth German Collected Works.” —Michael André Bernstein, New Republic “Benjamin has gradually emerged as a major presence in 20th-century letters. This reputation rests on his extraordinary and highly idiosyncratic gift for original and far-reaching insights. It was his ambition to become Germany’s leading literary critic, a status that many no doubt would be inclined to award him posthumously ... Benjamin is sometimes misunderstood, since only certain parts of his overall output have come into view here. The 65 pieces collected in this excellent first volume of the new Harvard Benjamin should help clarify the larger picture as well as deepen and enliven the discussion.” —Steve Dowden, Washington Times
Belknap 1996; 2004 7 halftones 520 pp. Paper $18.95 / £12.95 ISBN 0-674-01355-7 Cloth $47.50 / £30.95 ISBN 0-674-94585-9
also available
Volume 2, 1927–1934
Belknap 22 halftones, 3 line illus. 880 pp. Cloth $46.50 / £30.95 ISBN 0-674-94586-7 The paperback version of Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2 will be available in Spring 2005; it will be broken into two parts.
The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940
THEODOR W. ADORNO AND WALTER BENJAMIN EDITED BY HENRI LONITZ TRANSLATED BY NICHOLAS WALKER
“To reconsider the relationship between Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin is to reflect on one of the most enduring philosophical friendships of the twentieth century.” —Richard Wolin, New Republic “The extensive correspondence between Adorno and Benjamin—now happily available in English—reveals the complexities of their tortured philosophical friendship.” —James Miller, New York Times Book Review
1999; 2001 400 pp. Paper $19.95 / COBE ISBN 0-674-00689-5 Cloth $47.50 / £30.95 ISBN 0-674-15427-4
Volume 3, 1935–1938
Belknap 2002 12 halftones 480 pp. Cloth $39.95 / £25.95 ISBN 0-674-00896-0
Volume 4, 1938–1940
Belknap 2003 4 halftones 512 pp. Cloth $39.95 / £25.95 ISBN 0-674-01076-0
The Arcades Project
WALTER BENJAMIN
“We will be feasting on Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project for years to come...By any standard, the appearance of this longawaited work is a towering literary event...The Arcades Project surpasses its legend. It captures the relationship between a writer and a city in a form as richly developed as those presented in the great cosmopolitan novels of Proust, Joyce, Musil and Isherwood.” —Herbert Muschamp, New York Times “Quite simply, the Passagen-Werk is one of the twentieth century’s great efforts at historical comprehension—some would say the greatest.” —T. J. Clark
Belknap 2002; 1999 42 halftones 1088 pp. Paper $23.95 / £15.95 ISBN 0-674-00802-2 Cloth $47.50 / £30.95 ISBN 0-674-04326-X
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WALTER BENJAMIN
1-800-405-1619 / www.hup.harvard.edu
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
NEW
Naturalism in Question
EDITED BY MARIO DE CARO AND DAVID MACARTHUR
“Naturalism in Question is undertaking an important task—to address the prevalence of scientific naturalism as the paradigm of serious philosophical work in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. The fact that such eminent philosophers as Davidson, Cavell, McDowell, Stroud, and Putnam are brought together around a common issue is itself an attractive feature. It provides a certain landscape of contemporary American Philosophy that is most important to bring into view. It shows that despite all their obvious differences, such philosophers can be seen as sharing a similar concern to revive a form of philosophy that does not model its rigor on problematic pictures of scientific work.” —Eli Friedlander, author of Signs of Sense: A Reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus “The book’s concern with how to position philosophy with respect to science and nature is absolutely central to contemporary philosophical discussion. The contributors are distinguished and talented philosophers, and their articles in this volume will sustain and reinforce their reputation for philosophical clarity and insight. The more expansive naturalisms they advocate are important, constructive, and often provocative responses to a growing recognition of the inadequacies of naturalist orthodoxy. The book thereby promises to be at the center of a renewed discussion of naturalism, which will likely push the entire field in new directions.” —Joseph Rouse, author of How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism
2004 350 pp. Cloth $49.95 / £32.95 ISBN 0-674-01295-X
NEW
Politics of Nature
How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy
BRUNO LATOUR TRANSLATED BY CATHERINE PORTER
This book establishes the conceptual context for political ecology—transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour proposes an end to the old dichotomy between nature and society—and the constitution, in its place, of a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually practiced.
“This is much more than a reworking of politics. It is a sketch of a resolution of the perennial questions of what we know and what exists ... Latour ... can be infuriating. But he is never boring. Politics of Nature must be difficult because it challenges assumptions that are built into our languages, such as the hallowed distinction between ‘facts’ and ‘values’ ... It is worth reading— twice.” —Mike Holderness, New Scientist
2004 7 line illus. 320 pp. Paper $24.95 / £16.95 ISBN 0-674-01347-6 Cloth $55.00 / £35.95 ISBN 0-674-01289-5
new in paperback
Historical Ontology
IAN HACKING
“[Hacking] focuses on the interactions between what there is (or comes to be) and our concepts thereof. The kinds of objects he considers, both of which he regards as historical, are Aristotelian universals and their instances. He emphasizes that not only do ordinary physical objects and people and their institutions begin, develop, and end, but so do concepts, e.g., those language, knowledge, a child, (psychic) trauma, and scientific reasoning ... Stimulating, incisive, and clear even in expounding theories of unclear writers.” —Robert Hoffman, Library Journal
2002; 2004 288 pp. Paper $17.95 / £11.95 ISBN 0-674-01607-6 Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-00616-X
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WWW.HUP.HARVARD.EDU
new in paperback
Making Sense of Life
Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines
EVELYN FOX KELLER
Darwin and Design
Does Evolution Have a Purpose?
MICHAEL RUSE
“This has to be the best of Ruse’s many books, and it is hard to imagine how a better one could be written on this subject. With an understanding erudition spiced with good-natured wit and occasional sly ribaldry, Ruse moves easily and assuredly among biology, philosophy, history, and theology.” —Robert T. Pennock, Science “Michael Ruse’s latest book, Darwin and Design, is an intellectual history of the design argument and its Darwinian solution ... His story is a fascinating one, enlivened especially by his accounts of various imaginative attempts before Darwin to solve the design problem without recourse to a deity.” —Daniel W. McShea, American Scientist
2003; 2004 12 halftones, 5 line illus. 384 pp. Paper $16.95 / £10.95 ISBN 0-674-01631-9 Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-01023-X
A history of the diverse and changing nature of biological explanation in a particularly charged field, Making Sense of Life draws our attention to the temporal, disciplinary, and cultural components of what biologists mean, and what they understand, when they propose to explain life.
“Making Sense of Life is about the importance of recognizing [the] tight connection between the use of language in the social domain and how it produces biological ‘understanding’ ... The central arguments of Making Sense of Life are made with grace and authority. Those who are unsettled by them, and who wish to take issue with Keller, could not ask for a more accomplished and eloquent adversary.” —Lisa Jardine, New Scientist
2002; 2003 5 halftones, 4 line illus. 400 pp. Paper $17.95 / £11.95 ISBN 0-674-01250-X Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-00746-8
Bigger than Chaos
Understanding Complexity through Probability
MICHAEL STREVENS
“This book is a model of clarity, at both the ‘macro’ and the ‘micro’ levels; the expository style is entertaining without being distracting; the presentation of technical material shows the deft touch of someone who has mastery of it without the inclination to overindulge in it.” —Ned Hall, M.I.T. “This impressive book tackles an important question: how can systems of many interacting parts, which thus display lowlevel complexity, give rise to high-level simplicity? Said another way: how can very complicated and seemingly capricious micro-behavior generate stable, predictable macrobehavior? Complex systems of the sort Strevens deals with are all around us. Thermodynamics and ecology are just the beginning. He makes real progress on a genuinely difficult topic, one that is of central interest to science and to the philosophy of science. He also has a seemingly effortless command of his materials and a sure grip on the conceptual issues. The work is technically sophisticated—he knows his mathematics, probability theory and physics—and elegantly written. This is what good philosophy is all about.” —Alan Hajek, California Institute of Technology
2003 39 line illus. 432 pp. Cloth $59.95 / £38.95 ISBN 0-674-01042-6
Time and Chance
DAVID Z ALBERT
This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures—and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense—that whatever can happen can just as naturally happen backwards.
“Albert is perfecting a style of foundational analysis that is uniquely his own ... It has a surgical precision ... and it is ruthless with pretensions. The foundations of thermodynamics is a topic that has accumulated a good deal of dead wood; this is a fire that will burn and burn.” —Simon W. Saunders, Oxford University
2001; 2003 29 line illus. 192 pp. Paper $18.95 / £12.95 OIP ISBN 0-674-01132-5
Invariances
The Structure of the Objective World
ROBERT NOZICK
“Robert Nozick’s intellectual energy is a thing of wonder. In Invariances he ranges copiously over relativity theory and quantum theory, cosmology, modal logic, topology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, decision theory, economics, and even Soviet history—not to mention his strictly philosophical forays into the nature of truth, objectivity, necessity, consciousness, and ethics.” —Colin McGinn, New York Review of Books
Belknap 2001; 2003 432 pp. Paper $19.95 / £12.95 ISBN 0-674-01245-3 Cloth $35.00 / £22.95 ISBN 0-674-00631-3
Facing Up
Science and Its Cultural Adversaries
STEVEN WEINBERG
“[Facing Up is] lucidly written as ever, with a gentle humor that does not hide [Weinberg’s] strong convictions on science, philosophy and religion. I unreservedly recommend it, not only to scientists but to all who share his beliefs in the contribution that science has made, and will continue to make, to the way we see ourselves and our world.” —Brian Pippard, Times Literary Supplement
2001; 2003 1 halftone 306 pp. Paper $16.95 / £10.95 ISBN 0-674-01120-1 Cloth $26.00 / £16.95 ISBN 0-674-00647-X
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PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
1-800-405-1619 / www.hup.harvard.edu
PHILOSOPHY OF RATIONALITY/LOGIC
NEW
Quintessence
Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W. V. Quine
W. V. QUINE EDITED BY ROGER F. GIBSON, JR.
Quintessence for the first time collects Quine’s classic essays in one volume, offering a much-needed introduction to his general philosophy. The selections take up analyticity and reductionism; the indeterminacy of translation of theoretical sentences and the inscrutability of reference; ontology; naturalized epistemology; philosophy of mind; and extensionalism. Representative of Quine at his best, these readings are fundamental not only to an appreciation of the philosopher and his work, but also to an understanding of the philosophical tradition that he so materially advanced.
“Specialists ... will be grateful for this well-modulated selection of Quine’s most important essays and articles, which reflect his thinking up to the end of his life.” —Leon H. Brody, Library Journal
Belknap 2004 448 pp. Cloth $39.95 / £25.95 ISBN 0-674-01048-5
Saving the Differences
Essays on Themes from Truth and Objectivity
CRISPIN WRIGHT
Crispin Wright’s Truth and Objectivity brought about a far-reaching reorientation of the metaphysical debates concerning realism and truth. The essays in this companion volume prefigure, elaborate, or defend the proposals put forward in that landmark work. The collection includes the Gareth Evans memorial lecture in which the program of Truth and Objectivity was first announced, as well as all of Wright’s published reactions to the extensive commentary his study provoked; it presents substantial new developments and applications of the pluralistic outlook on the realism debates proposed in Truth and Objectivity, and further pursues its distinctive minimalist conceptions of truth and of truth-aptitude.
“[A] thorough and subtle examination of [the] multiple criteria of realism.” —Paul Horwich, Times Literary Supplement “Truth and Objectivity is a strikingly resourceful and serious book, imbued with respect for the difficulty of philosophical problems and a readiness to probe them with all the conceptual instruments of contemporary analytic philosophy.” —Timothy Williamson, International Journal of Philosophical Studies “A milestone in the discussion of realism.” —Jim Edwards, Mind
2003 560 pp. Cloth $55.00 / £35.95 ISBN 0-674-01077-9
Return to Reason
STEPHEN TOULMIN
“There is now a ‘loss of confidence’ ... in our traditional ideas about rationality, according to Toulmin. Especially among those in the humanities, he argues, the claims of rationality have been progressively challenged over the last 20 or 30 years, to the point of being sidelined. This is a common complaint and not exactly news, but Toulmin does not merely bemoan and rant, as many others have done. He offers a diagnosis and a solution. Rationality has come under threat, he believes, because of the undue influence of classical mechanics and abstract mathematical methods on our idea of what intelligent problem-solving should be. Deduction in the style of Euclid’s geometry, mechanically predictable and rigorous law in the style of Galileo and Newton, indubitable certainty in the style of Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’ all exert a malign influence, insofar as they overshadow a looser, more pragmatic and less abstract concept of ‘reasonableness.’ What we need is more open-minded, informal reasonableness and less inappropriately mathematical rationality. Only then, Toulmin argues, can the idea of reason regain its rightful good name.” —Anthony Gottlieb, Los Angeles Times
2001; 2003 256 pp. Paper $16.95 / £10.95 ISBN 0-674-01235-6 Cloth $24.95 / £16.95 ISBN 0-674-00495-7
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WWW.HUP.HARVARD.EDU
POSTSTRUCTURALISM/ ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY
Feeling in Theory
Emotion after the “Death of the Subject”
REI TERADA
own, drawn from her analytical reading of post-structuralist writing and of earlier and present-day philosophies of emotion. With Feeling in Theory Terada has produced something excellent and major, both a contribution to post-structuralist theory and its interpretation, and a placing of it in a wider surround.” —Cynthia Chase, author of Decomposing Figures
2001; 2003 222 pp. Paper $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-01127-9 Cloth $47.00 / £30.95 ISBN 0-674-00493-0
This revolutionary work transforms the interdisciplinary debate on emotion by suggesting a positive relation between the “death of the subject” and the very existence of emotion. Reading the writings of Derrida and de Man, Rei Terada finds grounds for construing emotion as nonsubjective.
“What starts from a shrewd review of contemporary polemics goes on to take the shape of a theory of emotion of Terada’s
JEWISH MYSTICISM/ GERMAN PHIILOSOPHY
NEW
German Idealism
The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801
FREDERICK C. BEISER
“[A] magnificent ... book ... That Beiser manages to keep the reader afloat as he steers through such deep and turbulent waters deserves the highest praise. Expository writing of unfailing lucidity is supported by reference to an unrivalled range of sources ... I learned something from this book on almost every page ... For anyone at all seriously interested in the topic this is now the place to start.” —Michael Rosen, Times Literary Supplement
2002 752 pp. Cloth $65.00 / £41.95 ISBN 0-674-00769-7
The Sabbatean Prophets
MATT GOLDISH
The story of Shabbatai and his prophets has mainly been explored by specialists in Jewish mysticism. Matt Goldish shifts the focus of Sabbatean studies from the theology of Lurianic Kabbalah to the widespread seventeenth-century belief in latter-day prophecy. By placing Sabbateanism in a broad cultural context, Goldish integrates this Jewish messianic movement into the early modern world, making its story accessible to scholars and students alike.
2004 240 pp. Cloth $39.95 / £25.95 ISBN 0-674-01291-7
ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY
NEW
Labored in Papyrus Leaves
Perspectives on an Epigram Collection Attributed to Posidippus (P. Mil. Vogl. VIII 309)
EDITED BY BENJAMIN ACOSTA-HUGHES, ELIZABETH KOSMETATOU, AND MANUEL BAUMBACH
This colloquium volume celebrates a new Hellenistic epigram collection attributed to the third-century B.C.E. poet Posidippus, one of the most significant
literary finds in recent memory. Included in this collection are an unusual variety of voices and perspectives: papyrological, art historical, archaeological, historical, literary, and aesthetic.
Hellenic Studies #2 2004 250 pp. Paper $25.00 / £16.95 ISBN 0-674-01105-8
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POSTSTRUCTURALISM / GERMAN
1-800-405-1619 / www.hup.harvard.edu
NEW
Inventing Superstition
From the Hippocratics to the Christians
DALE B. MARTIN
Dale Martin provides the first detailed genealogy of the idea of superstition, its history over eight centuries, from classical Greece to the Christianized Roman Empire of the fourth century C.E. With illuminating reference to the writings of philosophers, historians, and medical teachers he demonstrates that the concept of superstition was invented by Greek intellectuals to condemn popular religious practices and beliefs, especially the belief that gods or other superhuman beings would harm people or cause disease. Tracing the social, political, and cultural influences that informed classical thinking about piety and superstition, nature and the divine, Inventing Superstition exposes the manipulation of the label of superstition in arguments between Greek and Roman intellectuals on the one hand and Christians on the other, and the purposeful alteration of the idea by Neoplatonic philosophers and Christian apologists in late antiquity.
“Martin calls upon the teachings of thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Galen, Hippocrates, Plotinus, and Porphyry as he defines nature and the divine, monotheism and polytheism, and earlier definitions of superstition. The book’s peak is a wonderful discussion of Celsus’s attacks on Christianity as impious and Origen’s successful Christian response in Contra Celsum. The perfect mind opener for readers desiring a better understanding of the religious climate of antiquity.” —Gary P. Gillum, Library Journal
2004 320 pp. Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-01534-7
NEW
Moralia
Volume XVI. Index
PLUTARCH
Plutarch’s “Moralia,” Moral Essays reflecting his philosophy about living a good life, is a treasury of information concerning Greco-Roman society, traditions, ideals, ethics, and religion. But access to the riches of this collection of over seventy essays has long been hindered by lack of any comprehensive index. This problem has at last been solved: the Loeb Classical Library’s edition of the Moralia is now brought to completion with an analytical Index volume. Renowned as a biographer because of his “Parallel Lives,” Plutarch (born about 50 C.E.) was also a teacher of philosophy in Rome, a priest at Delphi, and an engaging essayist with a warm, urbane, and judicious style. Whether advising about marriage and education, discussing prophecy, divine providence, and life after death, setting forth rules for politicians, or commenting on personal virtues and vices, his Moral Essays reveal not just Plutarch’s thinking but also the world in which he lived. Edward O’Neil’s thorough index provides an invaluable roadmap for tracking the wealth of information and wisdom to be found in them.
Loeb Classical Library 499 2004 640 pp. Cloth $21.50 / £14.50 ISBN 0-674-99611-9
new in paperback
What Is Ancient Philosophy?
PIERRE HADOT TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL CHASE
“Pierre Hadot deserves to be better known to English-language readers—and not just because he was a favorite of Michel Foucault’s and is the man largely responsible for introducing Wittgenstein to the French. Hadot is a historian of ancient philosophy, a professor emeritus at the prestigious Collège de France. But it is more accurate to say that he is a philosopher who makes use of the ancients for his own ideas ... In What is Ancient Philosophy? Hadot brings all his concerns together in a small volume of extraordinary erudition and surprising ... clarity of prose ... It is the summa of a distinguished career.” —Barry Gewen, New York Times Book Review
Belknap 2002; 2004 382 pp. Paper $15.95 / £10.95 ISBN 0-674-01373-5 Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-00733-6
The Inner Citadel
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
PIERRE HADOT Translated by Michael Chase
“Plato used to talk of philosopher-kings; Marcus Aurelius was something even better: He was a philosopher-emperor. The leader of the Roman Empire spent most of his life in troubling times, campaigning against the barbarians, dealing with conspiracy at home, even combatting an upstart cult that revered one of those Galilean wonder-workers. Yet the most powerful man in the world still managed to live the life of a Stoic, and to record his reflections on how we should live. Those meditations, as these inner pep talks are usually called, became one of the best-loved books of antiquity ... This study—by a leading authority on Marcus—provides background matter and analysis of the main themes in the Meditations, as well as fresh translations of many of the sayings. —Washington Post Book World
1998; 2001 1 line illus. 368 pp. Paper $20.50 / £13.95 ISBN 0-674-00707-7
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ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY
ACADEMICALLY SPEAKING
NEW new in paperback
What the Best College Teachers Do
KEN BAIN
Winner of the Virginia and Warren Stone Prize, Awarded Annually by Harvard University Press for an Outstanding Book on Education and Society “With the strong conviction that good teaching can be learned, and after 15 years of observing teachers in action, Bain undertook an exploration of the essentials of effective teaching. The result is an insightful look at what makes a great teacher, based on a study of three dozen teachers from a cross section of disciplines from medicalschool faculties to undergraduate departments.” —Vanessa Bush, Booklist “Bain, a historian and director of New York University’s Center for Teaching Excellence, studied 63 outstanding college teachers (as deemed by students and colleagues as well as by an examination of their students’ work) from diverse institutions in an attempt to identify their common traits. What he discovered is pertinent to all teachers, including those at the K-12 level.” —David Ruenzel, Teacher Magazine
Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line
The Marketing of Higher Education
DAVID L. KIRP
“Kirp has an eye for telling examples, and he captures the turmoil and transformation in higher education in readable style.” —Karen W. Arenson, New York Times “Kirp is both quite fair and a good reporter; he has a keen eye for the important ways in which bean-counting has transformed universities, making them financially responsible and also more concerned about developing lucrative specialties than preserving the liberal arts and humanities. Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line is one of the best education books of the year, and anyone interested in higher education will find it to be superior.” —Martin Morse Wooster, Washington Times
2003; 2004 336 pp. Paper $17.95 / £11.95 ISBN 0-674-01634-3 Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-01146-5
Read an excerpt of this book online: www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/BAIBES.html
2004 224 pp. Cloth $21.95 / £14.95 ISBN 0-674-01325-5
new in paperback
Making the Most of College
Students Speak Their Minds
RICHARD J. LIGHT
Winner of the Virginia and Warren Stone Prize, Awarded Annually by Harvard University Press for an Outstanding Book on Education and Society “Harvard Professor [Richard Light] reveals secrets from his 10-year study of successful students. [Making the Most of College] offers practical advice to school administrators, parents and, most importantly, to the students themselves.” —Alisha Davis, Newsweek
2001; 2004 246 pp. Paper $14.00 / £9.95 ISBN 0-674-01359-X Cloth $24.95 / £16.95 ISBN 0-674-00478-7
new in paperback
The Early Admissions Game
Joining the Elite
CHRISTOPHER AVERY, ANDREW FAIRBANKS, AND RICHARD ZECKHAUSER
“The authors present a devastating portrait of elite college admissions—and early admissions in particular—as an elaborate and complicated ‘game’ ... [where the winners] tend to be privileged students who have access to highly skilled counselors with information pipelines to elite college admissions offices.” —Peter Sacks, The Nation
2003; 2004 35 line illus., 29 tables 400 pp. Paper $16.95 / £10.95 ISBN 0-674-01620-3
The Questions of Tenure
EDITED BY RICHARD P. CHAIT
“Most books about academic tenure are based on anecdotal or subjective information, but this one attempts to analyze this contentious topic using empirical research. Chait...and several colleagues collected faculty employment policy statements from over 200 colleges and universities and then surveyed and interviewed many professors and administrators on a variety of topics related to tenure. This provided the data for the 11 chapters, which range from an overview of current policies to a study of trends in academic employment in foreign countries.” —Will Hepfer, Library Journal
2002 10 line illus., 21 tables 352 pp. Cloth $40.00 / £25.95 ISBN 0-674-00771-9
Who Owns Academic Work?
Battling for Control of Intellectual Property
CORYNNE MCSHERRY
“This book provides not a legal but a cultural analysis of the social production of academic knowledge ... [McSherry] forces us to look at the data stream of modern society that passes through a series of institutions, all of which attempt to enforce conflicting ownership claims. When a professor delivers a lecture to students, is he or she making a ‘gift’ to the world in general? Or to the community of students concerned? Or does the professor retain the ownership of everything in the lecture? ... This is a highly stimulating work.” —Anthony Smith, Times Higher Education Supplement
2001; 2003 288 pp. Paper $16.95 / £10.95 ISBN 0-674-01243-7 Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-00629-1
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INDEX INDEX
Acosta-Hughes, Labored in Papyrus..., 24 Adorno/Benjamin, Complete..., 20 Alanen, Descartes’s Concept of Mind, 4 Albert, Time and Chance, 22 Aleinikoff, Semblances of Sovereignty, 11 Avery/et al., Early Admissions Game, 26 Beiser, German Idealism, 24 Beiser, Romantic Imperative, 16 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 20 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 20 Bourbon, Finding a Replacement..., 3 Brandom, Articulating Reasons, 6 Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead, 5 Camp, Confusion, 4 Casanova, World Republic of Letters, 18 Cavell, Cities of Words, 12 Chait, Questions of Tenure, 26 Chowers, Modern Self in the Labyrinth, 7 Coetzee, Doubling the Point, 19 Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian..., 9 Davidson, Emergence of Sexuality, 14 de Bolla, Art Matters, 17 De Caro/Macarthur, Naturalism..., 21 Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, 9 Finkelstein, Expression and the Inner, 5 Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow..., 17 Fleischacker, A Short History..., 7 Friedlander, J. J. Rousseau..., 18 Gibbard, Thinking How to Live, 5 Goldish, Sabbatean Prophets, 24 Hacking, Historical Ontology, 21 Hadot, Inner Citadel, Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 25 Hall/et al., Keywords and Concepts..., 19 Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel, 15 Hornsby, Simple Mindedness, 5 Hurley, Consciousness in Action, 6 Hurley, Justice, Luck, and Knowledge, 13 Keller, Making Sense of Life, 22 Kirp, Shakespeare, Einstein..., 26 Krause, Liberalism with Honor, 10 Latour, Politics of Nature, 21 Lear, Happiness, Death..., 6 Libet, Mind Time, 3 Light, Making the Most of College, 26 Lovibond, Ethical Formation, 4 MacGilvray, Reconstructing Public Reason, 7 Margalit, Ethics of Memory, 4 Martin, Inventing Superstition, 25 McGinn, Mindsight, 3 McSherry, Who Owns Academic..., 26 Muirhead, Just Work, 8 Nelson, Secret Life of Puppets, 17 Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s..., 8 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 15 Nozick, Invariances, 22 O’Malley, Four Cultures of the West, 14 Plutarch, Moralia, 25 Putnam, Collapse of the Fact/Value..., 13 Putnam, Ethics without Ontology, 12 Quine, Quintessence, 23 Rawls, Collected Papers, 10 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 11 Rawls, Law of Peoples, 10 Rawls, Lectures on the History..., 11 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 10 Rozemond, Descartes’s Dualism, 4 Ruse, Darwin and Design, 22 Sen, Rationality and Freedom, 8 Smith, Law’s Quandary, 13 Steiner, Lessons of the Masters, 14 Strevens, Bigger than Chaos, 22 Sunstein, Why Societies Need..., 8 Tamen, Friends of Interpretable..., 16 Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today, 9 Terada, Feeling in Theory, 24 Tichi, Embodiment of a Nation, 16 Toulmin, Return to Reason, 23 Wagenbach, Kafka, 19 Wark, Hacker Manifesto, 2 Weinberg, Facing Up, 22 Wellbery, New History..., 18 Wright, Saving the Differences, 23
PHILOSOPHY
2005
Click on titles or jacket images to get more information about a title or to order online.
NEW TITLES
NEW
Q & A with McKenzie Wark
A Hacker Manifesto
MCKENZIE WARK
A double is haunting the world—the double of abstraction, the virtual reality of information, programming or poetry, math or music, curves or colorings upon which the fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities now depend. The bold aim of this book is to make manifest the origins, purpose, and interests of the emerging class responsible for making this new world—for producing the new concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of the stuff of raw data. A Hacker Manifesto deftly defines the fraught territory between the ever more strident demands by drug and media companies for protection of their patents and copyrights and the pervasive popular culture of file sharing and pirating. This vexed ground, the realm of so-called “intellectual property,” gives rise to a whole new kind of class conflict, one that pits the creators of information—the hacker class of researchers and authors, artists and biologists, chemists and musicians, philosophers and programmers— against a possessing class who would monopolize what the hacker produces.
“Ours is once again an age of manifestos. Wark’s book challenges the new regime of property relations with all the epigrammatic vitality, conceptual innovation, and revolutionary enthusiasm of the great manifestos.” —Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire “A Hacker Manifesto is a highly original and provocative book. At a moment in history where we are starved of new political ideas and directions, the clarity with which Wark identifies a new political class is persuasive, and his ability to articulate their interests is remarkable.” —Marcus Boon, author of The Road of Excess “McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto might also be called, without too much violence to its argument, The Communist Manifesto 2.0. In essence, it’s an attempt to update the core of Marxist theory for that relatively novel set of historical circumstances known as the information age.” —Julian Dibbell, author of Play Money: Diary of a Dubious Proposition
Q: So why hackers? A: Whenever you try to describe something new you have to reach into the language and find an old word that can do a new job. I like “hacker” because it’s a good old sturdy English word. There’s nothing Latinate about it. What I want this word to do is to describe a new kind of class interest. Hackers are people who create new ideas. Hackers innovate. But they don’t own the means of realizing the value of what they create. So a hacker could be a computer programmer or a musician or a novelist or a bio-chemist. Q: Most people would think of hackers as kids who break into computers. A: It used to mean people who create new computer code, but it is interesting how it’s a term that’s been trivialized and demonized. I think that’s always the case with new kinds of political force. The word “democrat” used to be an insult. I want to do the opposite with the term: make it broader and more inclusive, not something narrow and marginal. Hackers could be working in any field, not just computing. Although it seems only appropriate to name a whole class over one of its leading new forms of creativity—the programmers. Q: So what from your own experience led you to this book? A: Signing contracts with publishers! I’m not kidding. I realized, as many people do, that you have very little control over the terms under which you sell the product of your own mind. The “intellectual property” laws, which pretend to protect the interests of the creator, really protect the interests of the owner. And since most of us don’t own the means of production, we don’t stay owners for long. But I also had a positive experience, on listservers like nettime.org, where I met a whole community of people trying to put into practice a new, global gift economy of knowledge. So that was the practice; A Hacker Manifesto is the theory. I think a lot of people could recognize themselves in this book. It tries to map the possibilities for the free creation of knowledge that we have all experienced, no matter how distorted it gets when it gets reduced to a commodity.
2004 208 pp. Cloth $21.95 / £14.95 ISBN 0-674-01543-6
Visit our online feature for this book: www.hup.harvard.edu/features/warhac/ TABLE OF CONTENTS
NEW TITLES 2 PHILOSOPHY OF MIND 3 SOCIAL & POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 7 MORAL & LEGAL PHILOSOPHY 12 PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE & SOCIETY 14 PHILOSOPHY OF AESTHETICS 15 PHILOSOPHY IN THE WORDS 18 WALTER BENJAMIN 20
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 21 PHILOSOPHY OF RATIONALITY / LOGIC 23 POSTSTRUCTURALISM / ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY 24 JEWISH MYSTICISM / GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 24 ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 24 ACADEMICALLY SPEAKING 26 INDEX 27
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PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
NEW
Mindsight
Image, Dream, Meaning
COLIN MCGINN
How to imagine the imagination is a topic that draws philosophers the way flowers draw honeybees. From Plato and Aristotle to Wittgenstein and Sartre, philosophers have talked and written about this most elusive of topics—that is, until contemporary analytic philosophy of mind developed. The guiding thread of this book is the distinction Colin McGinn draws between perception and imagination. Clearly, seeing an object is similar in certain respects to forming a mental image of it, but it is also different. McGinn shows what the differences are, arguing that imagination is a sui generis mental faculty. He goes on to discuss the nature of dreaming and madness, contending that these are primarily imaginative phenomena. In the second half of the book McGinn focuses on what he calls cognitive (as opposed to sensory) imagination, and investigates the role of imagination in logical reasoning, belief formation, the understanding of negation and possibility, and the comprehension of meaning. His overall claim is that imagination pervades our mental life, obeys its own distinctive principles, and merits much more attention.
“This book contains the most innovative and important work that Colin McGinn has done in the course of his distinguished career. It has the potential to be an extraordinarily influential book, and to create, almost single-handedly, a new area of systematic study in analytic philosophy of mind: the philosophy of the imagination. Work done in this new area could provide a foundation for work done in many other areas, including the epistemology of perception, the metaphysics of intentionality, the scientific understanding of dreaming, psychosis, and the creativity of our linguistic abilities.” —Ram Neta, Professor of Philosophy, University of North Carolina “McGinn’s book is first rate, manifesting all the qualities of incisive argument, original thought and clear, direct, lively, pithy writing for which he is celebrated.” —Malcolm Budd, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, University College London
2004 224 pp. Cloth $27.95 / £18.95 ISBN 0-674-01560-6
NEW
NEW
Finding a Replacement for the Soul
Mind and Meaning in Literature and Philosophy
BRETT BOURBON
Mind Time
The Temporal Factor in Consciousness
BENJAMIN LIBET
Bourbon asserts that our complex and variable relation with language defines a domain of meaning and being that is misconstrued and missed in philosophy, in literary studies, and in our ordinary understanding of what we are and how things make sense. Accordingly, his book seeks to demonstrate how the study of literature gives us the means to understand this relationship.
“This is an adventurous and unusual book. Bourbon moves back and forth between literary and philosophical contexts with ease, showing in multifarious ways how the one can, often in unexpected ways, illuminate the other. Throughout these wide-ranging explorations Bourbon uncovers a good deal about both the nature of literary meaning and our distinctive—if tellingly irreducible—relations to literary texts.” —Garry L. Hagberg, author of Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory
2004 290 pp. Cloth $49.95 / £32.95 ISBN 0-674-01297-6
Our subjective inner life is what really matters to us as human beings—and yet we know relatively little about how it arises. Over a long and distinguished career Benjamin Libet has conducted experiments that have helped us see, in clear and concrete ways, how the brain produces conscious awareness. For the first time, Libet gives his own account of these experiments and their importance for our understanding of consciousness.
“What makes Benjamin Libet different from all the others writing on [consciousness] ... is that he has actually spent the past 40 years experimenting on the topic. His findings have played a central role in others’ speculations. Now he has put his life’s work into a single short book.” —Steven Rose, New Scientist “Benjamin Libet’s discoveries are of extraordinary interest. His is almost the only approach yet to yield any credible evidence of how conscious awareness is produced by the brain. Mind Time endeavors to clarify these startling observations for the general public, set them in proper framework of neuroscientific knowledge, and probe their philosophical meaning. Libet’s work is unique, and speaks to questions asked by all humankind.” —Robert W. Doty, Ph.D., Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy, University of Rochester
Harvard edition World Perspectives in Cognitive Neuroscience 2004 21 line illus. 272 pp. Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-01320-4
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3
new in paperback
The Ethics of Memory
AVISHAI MARGALIT
2002 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award Philosophy Category Los Angeles Times Best Books of 2003— Nonfiction
Confusion
A Study in the Theory of Knowledge
JOSEPH L. CAMP, JR.
“Imagine that you think you see your car in the lot at Dodger Stadium, but your key won’t work. You think to yourself, ‘I owe $500 on this car.’ Then you see a stuffed Panda in the backseat and decide that it’s a different car. When you thought about ‘this car,’ were you thinking of the car you couldn’t unlock or the car that you owned? Camp says neither. You were thinking about something like both but you did not succeed in referring to either. Camp ... has not just produced a brain twister. His problem can be found in Descartes and Locke, who worried that we seem not to perceive actual things but to confront only ideas of them. If we can’t refer without unique objects of reference, our claims to truth may be in trouble. There are alternatives to his theory of reference, but Camp’s book ... will provoke thought.” —Leslie Armour, Library Journal
2002; 2004 256 pp. Paper $18.95 / £12.95 ISBN 0-674-01591-6 Cloth $42.50 / £27.95 ISBN 0-674-00620-8
Avishai Margalit’s work offers a philosophy for our time, when, in the wake of overwhelming atrocities, memory can seem more crippling than liberating, a force more for revenge than for reconciliation. Morally powerful, deeply learned, and elegantly written, The Ethics of Memory draws on the resources of millennia of Western philosophy and religion to provide us with healing ideas that will engage all of us who care about the nature of our relations to others.
“[A] thought-provoking book ... For Margalit ... the paradigm is Jewish memories of the Holocaust, not Muslim memories of humiliation. Still, his sensitive meditations show how these two strains of hurt might be overcome. In a marvelous chapter called ‘Forgiving and Forgetting,’ Margalit asks whether we have a duty to forgive those who have wronged us. His answer is elegant ... Margalit is an astonishingly humane thinker. His philosophy is always tied to making sense of us humans in all our complexity. And yet he is committed to making sense of us in ways that will make us better.” —Jonathan Lear, New York Times Book Review
2002; 2004 240 pp. Paper $14.95 / £9.95 ISBN 0-674-01378-6 Cloth $24.95 / £16.95 ISBN 0-674-00941-X
new in paperback
Descartes’s Concept of Mind
LILLI ALANEN
“Descartes’s Concept of Mind is a book of high quality. The main point of the project is to detail Descartes’s theory of the embodiment of the human mind. This is a neglected side of his thought, and Alanen treats it in an illuminating way. The exposition is clear and remarkably well informed. And she persuasively shows that Descartes had a complicated and interesting view of this matter.” —John Carriero, UCLA
2003 368 pp. Cloth $65.00 / £41.95 ISBN 0-674-01043-4
new in paperback
Descartes’s Dualism
MARLEEN ROZEMOND
Marleen Rozemond explicates Descartes’s aim to provide a metaphysics that would accommodate mechanistic science and supplant scholasticism. Her approach includes discussion of central differences from and similarities to the scholastics and how these discriminations affected Descartes’s defense of the incorporeity of the mind and the mechanistic conception of body.
“[Descartes’s Dualism is] a thorough and careful study of Descartes’s account of the mind/soul.” —Stephen Gaukroger, Times Literary Supplement “[Descartes’s Dualism] is a brilliant book. Rozemond provides an excellent articulation of the dualism of Descartes. Her analytic skills are very high, and her references to the medieval background of Descartes’s theory of knowledge are crisp and secure ... Rozemond’s interest in the medievals also leads to a most informative, and rare, presentation of the influence of the doctrine of transubstantiation on discussions of substance and sense qualities. Among the many books on Descartes, this one ranks with a mere handful in terms of the highest worth.” —M. A. Bertman, Choice
1998; 2002 304 pp. Paper $21.50 / £13.95 ISBN 0-674-00968-1 Cloth $55.00/£35.95 ISBN 0-674-19840-9
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PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
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Expression and the Inner
DAVID FINKELSTEIN
“This book is an important contribution to a group of problems which have a central place in philosophy of mind. Here I am taking ‘philosophy of mind’ in a broad sense; Finkelstein’s book and the problems he discusses have implications for philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology. The book is written with intelligence and verve. Very few works in philosophy have anything describable as ‘narrative tension,’ but Finkelstein’s certainly does. He draws the reader into the problems he is attempting to solve with the skill of a writer of detective stories; he leads his readers down paths that appear inviting, only then to demonstrate why the apparent solutions on offer down those paths won’t do; and his arguments for the solution he himself offers at the end have the force, and the place in the book, of the denouement of a good thriller.” —Cora Diamond, Professor of Philosophy, University of Virginia
2003 194 pp. Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-01156-2
Thinking How to Live
ALLAN GIBBARD
“In this fascinating book, Gibbard applies his development of the tools of traditional AngloAmerican metaethical theory to the questions about that most basic philosophical concern: How should one live? ... Gibbard’s arguments are clear and illustrated with helpful examples. His final result is sure to generate disagreement, but theorists in this area must contend with his arguments.” —J. H. Barker, Choice “This is a remarkable book. It takes up a central and much-discussed problem—the difference between normative thought (and discourse) and ‘descriptive’ thought (and discourse). It develops a compelling response to that problem with ramifications for much else in philosophy. But perhaps most importantly, it brings new clarity and rigor to the discussion of these tangled issues. It will take some time to come to terms with the details of Gibbard’s discussion. It is absolutely clear, however, that the book will reconfigure the debate over objectivity and ‘factuality’ in ethics.” —Gideon Rosen, Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University
2003 6 tables 320 pp. Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-01167-8
Simple Mindedness
In Defense of Naive Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind
JENNIFER HORNSBY
“Jennifer Hornsby [has written] a series of careful and insightful papers ... over the past twenty years. In Simple Mindedness, she does us the great service of collecting twelve of these papers together in a single volume ... Her overall picture of the mind is filled out in a helpful introduction, and in a series of useful postscripts ... Hornsby disagrees with both Descartes and materialists ... She denies that people are composed of a material and an immaterial substance ... [but also] denies that mental properties reduce to physical properties ... Materialists who put in the time and effort to [weigh Hornsby’s views] will be richly rewarded. There is much an orthodox materialist can learn from the heretical Hornsby.” —Michael Smith, Times Literary Supplement
1997; 2001 2 line illus. 288 pp. Paper $22.50 / £14.95 ISBN 0-674-00563-5 Cloth $42.50 / £27.95 ISBN 0-674-80818-5
Tales of the Mighty Dead
Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality
ROBERT B. BRANDOM
A work in the history of systematic philosophy that is itself animated by a systematic philosophic aspiration, this book by one of the most prominent American philosophers working today provides an entirely new way of looking at the development of Western philosophy from Descartes to the present.
“Just as Kant managed to recast a good bit of the history of philosophy as a struggle between rationalism and empiricism (thus leading to his synthesis of the two), Brandom has recast a substantial portion of modern philosophy as a struggle over the consequences of inferentialist approaches. The way he shows that there is a coherent line to be traced from Leibniz to Spinoza to Kant to Hegel to Frege to Heidegger to Wittgenstein to Sellars is brilliant; it will quite naturally also be controversial (in all the best senses). This is one of those books that will force even the people who disagree most with him to have to take his position all the more seriously. If nothing else, this shows that the usual ways of drawing the (by now tired) ‘continental/analytic’ distinctions are in serious need of rethinking. Brandom’s is an original voice. Brandom’s work, obviously analytical in orientation, also claims to take its inspirations from figures normally shunned in analytic circles. This makes him a key figure in the effort to ‘overcome’ the dichotomy.” —Terry Pinkard, Northeastern University
2002 448 pp. Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-00903-7
PHILOSOPHOY OF M IND
5
Articulating Reasons
An Introduction to Inferentialism
ROBERT B. BRANDOM
2001 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award—Philosophy Category “Displaying a sovereign command of the intricate discussion in the analytic philosophy of language, Brandom manages successfully to carry out a program within the philosophy of language that has already been sketched by others, without losing sight of the vision inspiring the enterprise in the important details of his investigation … Using the tools of a complex theory of language, Brandom succeeds in describing convincingly the practices in which the reason and autonomy of subjects capable of speech and action are expressed.” —Jürgen Habermas
2000; 2001 240 pp. Paper $20.50 / £13.95 ISBN 0-674-00692-5 Cloth $43.00 / £27.95 ISBN 0-674-00158-3
Consciousness in Action
S. L. HURLEY
1998 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Award in the Category of Philosophy and Religion by the Association of American Publishers “Consciousness in Action contains ten highly original, densely argued, interrelated essays on the nature and unity of consciousness, the relationships of consciousness to underlying neurophysiological processes and environmental stimuli, and the connections among consciousness, perception and action ... [It] exhibits the astonishing breadth of knowledge, technical virtuosity and subtle analyses Hurley’s readers have come to expect in her work ... [It] is a significant work not only because of its depth, originality and impressive detail, but also because its integration of philosophy with neuropsychology and cognitive science provides new avenues of research for philosophers concerned about the nature of the mind, perception, and action ... [H]er book’s impact will continue to be felt for years to come.” —Dan Silber, Philosophy in Review
1998; 2002 32 illus., 8 tables 528 pp. Paper $26.50 / £17.95 ISBN 0-674-00796-4 Cloth $63.00 / £40.95 ISBN 0-674-16420-2
Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life
JONATHAN LEAR
2001 Gradiva Award for the Best Book in Psychoanalysis and Philosophy, Sponsored by the World Organization and the Public Education Corporation of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis “An extended meditation on Aristotle’s conception of happiness and Freud’s approach to death, the book argues that both thinkers fell prey to a similar illusion ... [the thought] that our desires can ever come to an end ... There is great depth to Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life.” —Andrew Stark, Times Literary Supplement “Not many people are equally appreciative of Plato and Freud, and fewer still are able to move back and forth between contemporary discussions among philosophers and the highly technical literature of psychoanalysis as easily as Lear does ... Daring and provocative.” —Richard Rorty, New York Times Book Review
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 2000; 2002 204 pp. Paper $16.00 / £10.95 ISBN 0-674-00674-7 Cloth $26.00 / £16.95 ISBN 0-674-00329-2
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PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
1-800-405-1619 / www.hup.harvard.edu
SOCIAL & POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
x NEW
NEW
Reconstructing Public Reason
ERIC A. MACGILVRAY
A Short History of Distributive Justice
SAMUEL FLEISCHACKER
The reluctance to admit controversial beliefs as legitimate grounds for public action threatens to prevent us from responding effectively to many of the leading social and political challenges that we face. Eric MacGilvray argues that we should shift our attention away from the problem of identifying uncontroversial public ends in the present and toward the problem of evaluating potentially controversial public ends through collective inquiry over time. Rather than ask ourselves which public ends are justified, we must instead decide which public ends we should seek to justify. Reconstructing Public Reason offers a fundamental rethinking of the nature and aims of liberal toleration, and of the political implications of pragmatic philosophy. It also provides fresh interpretations of founding pragmatic thinkers such as John Dewey and William James, and of leading contemporary figures such as John Rawls and Richard Rorty.
“Imaginatively conceived and skillfully executed, Reconstructing Public Reason will appeal to those anxious about the declining (or ascending!) influence of pragmatism and those anxious about the practical significance of theorizing about political justice generally and political liberalism specifically. No small accomplishment.” —Alfonso Damico, The University of Iowa “This is an intelligent book that addresses two important and fashionable themes in political theory—pragmatism and political liberalism. And it contributes to our understanding of both.” —Jeffrey Isaac, Indiana University
2004 256 pp. Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-01542-8
Fleischacker argues that guaranteeing aid to the poor is a modern idea, developed only in the last two centuries. To attribute a longer pedigree to distributive justice is to fail to distinguish between justice and charity. By examining major writings in ancient, medieval, and modern political philosophy, Fleischacker shows how we arrived at the contemporary meaning of distributive justice.
“Fleischacker provides a fascinating account of the development of our contemporary notion of distributive justice. This is an excellent book that fills a real need.” —Stephen Darwall, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and author of Welfare and Rational Care “This is a succinct, coherent, and wide-ranging history of distributive justice that will be a boon for teachers and students. Written with a light touch, it will provoke discussion and thought, raising the possibility of seeing things differently. A fine contribution.” —Ross Harrison, author of Hobbes, Locke, and Confusion’s Masterpiece
2004 204 pp. Cloth $39.95 / £25.95 ISBN 0-674-01340-9
NEW
The Modern Self in the Labyrinth
Politics and the Entrapment Imagination
EYAL CHOWERS
“This is an erudite and original study of the great entrapment and proto-entrapment theorists of the 19th and 20th centuries, namely, Kant, Mary Shelley, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Benjamin, Kafka and Foucault. As Chowers convincingly shows, these theorists argue that moderns have come to be subject to and subjectified by historical processes that govern their conduct ... The interpretation of individual authors and the story as a whole are presented with an exemplary depth of scholarship and insight, and the cumulative effect is to throw a critical and foreboding light on the present.” —James Tully, University of Victoria “This book identifies the theme of ‘social entrapment’ in three important 20th century social theorists: Weber, Freud, and Foucault. It ably shows how the theme emerged from the problems of the Enlightenment and attempts by Marx and Nietzsche to solve them. It also points out some of the dead ends to which it has led its expositors. An impressive combination of research and argument.” —Bernard Yack, Brandeis University
2004 260 pp. Cloth $49.95 / £32.95 ISBN 0-674-01330-1
WWW.HUP.HARVARD.EDU
7
NEW
Just Work
RUSSELL MUIRHEAD
This elegant essay on the justice of work focuses on the fit between who we are and the kind of work we do. Russell Muirhead shows how the common hope for work that fulfills us involves more than personal interest; it also points to larger understandings of a just society. We are defined in part by the jobs we hold, and Muirhead has something important to say about the partial satisfactions of the working life, and the increasingly urgent need to balance the claims of work against those of family and community. Muirhead weaves his argument out of sociological, economic, and philosophical analysis. He shows, among other things, how modern feminism’s effort to reform domestic work and extend the promise of careers has contributed to more democratic understandings of what it means to have work that fits. Just Work shows what it would mean for work to make good on the high promise so often invested in it and suggests what we both as a society and as individuals might do when it falls short.
“In this original and provocative book, Muirhead argues that justice in work is more than a matter of fair wages and decent working conditions; it is also a matter of fit—between the work we do and the persons we are. With a clear and distinctive voice, Muirhead revives work as a subject for political theory and illuminates the ethics of everyday life.” —Michael Sandel, author of Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy
2004 224 pp. Cloth $24.95 / £16.95 ISBN 0-674-01558-4
new in paperback
Rationality and Freedom
AMARTYA SEN
Rationality and freedom are among the most profound and contentious concepts in philosophy and the social sciences. In two volumes on rationality, freedom, and justice, the distinguished economist and philosopher Amartya Sen brings clarity and insight to these difficult issues. This volume—the first of the two—is principally concerned with rationality and freedom.
“Amartya Sen occupies a unique position among modern economists. He is an outstanding economic theorist, a world authority on social choice and welfare economics. He is a leading figure in development economics, carrying out pathbreaking work on appraising the effectiveness of investment in poor countries and, more recently, on famine. At the same time, he takes a broad view of the subject and has done much to widen the perspective of economists.” —A. B. Atkinson, New York Review of Books
Belknap 2003; 2004 2 line illus. 750 pp. Paper $19.95 / £12.95 OIP ISBN 0-674-01351-4
Why Societies Need Dissent
CASS R. SUNSTEIN
“Why Societies Need Dissent ... shows that demands for lock-step conformity are wrong and uninformed thinking. Sunstein’s important new study is filled with empirical evidence of the significance of opposition, found in his compelling explanations of the need for, and benefits of, disagreement. Sunstein reveals that, in fact, the influence of dissenters is for the better, be it with courts, juries, corporate boardrooms, churches, sports teams, student organizations or faculties, not to mention ‘the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court ... during times of both war and peace.’” —John W. Dean, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures 2003 3 line illus., 5 charts 256 pp. Cloth $22.95 / £14.95 ISBN 0-674-01268-2
Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory
Actualizing Freedom
FREDERICK NEUHOUSER
Frederick Neuhouser’s task is to understand the conceptions of freedom on which Hegel’s social theory rests and to show how they ground his arguments in defense of the modern social world. In doing so, the author focuses on Hegel’s most important and least understood contribution to social philosophy, the idea of “social freedom.”
“Hegel is an obscure and difficult writer, but Neuhouser has an effortless way of making him accessible.” —Allen W. Wood, Yale University “This is a fine book, and it will be a significant contribution both to Hegel scholarship and to contemporary philosophical discussions of modern ethical life.“ —Robert B. Pippin, University of Chicago
2000; 2003 352 pp. Paper $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-01124-4 Cloth $55.00/£35.95 ISBN 0-674-00152-4
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SOCIAL & POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
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Varieties of Religion Today
William James Revisited
CHARLES TAYLOR
“Now at last we have a book about ... William James, and it has been produced by a religiously obsessed man himself. Charles Taylor has been writing philosophy for many years, and the scope of his achievement is extraordinary. He has written on ethics, epistemology, language, and politics. He has analyzed Greek, medieval, Renaissance, and modern thought in learned discourses on the history of ideas. Even more amazing, perhaps, is that a corpus of philosophy so wide should be so intellectually coherent. All of Taylor’s writings are unified by a goal, a mission, almost a calling: to understand by philosophical means who we have become and who we ought to strive to become ... [A] small but very stimulating book.” —Erin Leib, New Republic “Old-time religion had a story about these sources of despair, reinforced every Sunday morning, but James will have none of this—he cannot be so easily consoled. What he needs is a direct sensation of the presence of God. The trouble is that such experiences are rare, and fragile and isolating, not to mention questionable (even for a theist like James). Religion, if it is to survive, must be buttressed by more than fleeting sensation. The acute question raised by Charles Taylor’s interesting book is whether the modern world has room for anything else.” —Colin McGinn, Wall Street Journal
Institute for Human Sciences Vienna Lectures Series 2002; 2003 142 pp. Paper $12.00 / £7.95 ISBN 0-674-01253-4 Cloth $19.95 / £12.95 ISBN 0-674-00760-3
If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?
G. A. COHEN
2001 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award—Philosophy Category “This is an unusual book, a remarkably successful blend of autobiography, intellectual history and moral philosophy that reflects the author’s distinctive outlook and background ... [It] presents, I believe, the most important contemporary challenge to the egalitarian form of liberalism ... The questions he asks are the ones we should all be worrying about.” —Thomas Nagel, Times Literary Supplement “Cohen is much the funniest living Anglophone political philosopher of any note, as well as perhaps the cleverest.” —John Dunn, Times Higher Education Supplement
2000; 2001 3 line illus. 256 pp. Paper $19.95 / £12.95 ISBN 0-674-00693-3 Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-00218-0
Sovereign Virtue
The Theory and Practice of Equality
RONALD DWORKIN
“For the last two decades, Ronald Dworkin has been developing answers to...questions [of public policy] as part of a powerful and surprising response to the larger question of how we should reconcile liberty with equality. Unlike many partisans of equality, he thinks conservatives are right to hold individuals largely responsible for their own fates. But unlike many partisans of liberty, he nevertheless believes in substantial governmental intervention to bring about more equality. And, unlike both, he argues that, in the deepest sense, equality and liberty are never truly at odds. In Sovereign Virtue, Dworkin has brought together this surprising theory and some of its applications...If we care about having a rational public discourse about the many contests that seem to pit liberty against equality, we owe his book a careful reading.” —K. Anthony Appiah, New York Review of Books “Sovereign Virtue ... is ... extraordinarily impressive: supple, suave and enviably deft, like all his work, and in its cumulative effect quite exceptionally illuminating…[Dworkin] has been in many ways the most systematic moral, political and legal thinker of the past three decades in the Anglophone world. He may lack the personal authority or the singularity of mind of John Rawls. But on this evidence he has a substantially broader range of ambition, a set of forceful moral intuitions, a speed and boldness of intellectual manoeuvre, and a combination of energy and sheer pertinacity that are all his own.” —John Dunn, Times Higher Education Supplement
2000; 2002 528 pp. Paper $20.50 / £13.95 ISBN 0-674-00810-3 Cloth $37.50 / £24.95 ISBN 0-674-00219-9
SOCIAL & POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
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The Law of Peoples
JOHN RAWLS
“[These essays are] some of [Rawls’s] strongest published expressions of feeling ... These are the final products of a remarkably pure and concentrated career ... The writings of John Rawls, whom it is now safe to describe as the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century ... owe their influence to the fact that their depth and their insight repay the close attention that their uncompromising theoretical weight and erudition demand.” —Thomas Nagel, New Republic “This is the most engaging and accessible book Rawls has written ... For the most part Rawls lays out his argument in a straightforward way, and refers extensively to historical and contemporary episodes to illustrate it.” —David Miller, Times Literary Supplement
1999; 2001 210 pp. Paper $16.95 / £10.95 ISBN 0-674-00542-2 Cloth $25.00 / £16.95 ISBN 0-674-00079-X
A Theory of Justice
Revised Edition
JOHN RAWLS
“Rawls’s Theory of Justice is widely and justly regarded as this century’s most important work of political philosophy. Originally published in 1971, it quickly became the subject of extensive commentary and criticism, which led Rawls to revise some of the arguments he had originally put forward in this work ... This edition will certainly become the definitive one; all scholars will use it, and it will be an essential text for any academic library. It contains a new preface that helpfully outlines the major revisions, and a ‘conversion table’ that correlates the pagination of this edition with the original, which will be useful to students and scholars working with this edition and the extensive secondary literature on Rawls’s work. Highly recommended.” —J. D. Moon, Choice Review of the previous edition: “John Rawls draws on the most subtle techniques of contemporary analytic philosophy to provide the social contract tradition with what is, from a philosophical point of view at least, the most formidable defense it has yet received ... [and] makes available the powerful intellectual resources and the comprehensive approach that have so far eluded antiutilitarians. He also makes clear how wrong it was to claim, as so many were claiming only a few years back, that systematic moral and political philosophy are dead ... Whatever else may be true it is surely true that we must develop a sterner and more fastidious sense of justice. In making his peerless contribution to political theory, John Rawls has made a unique contribution to this urgent task. No higher achievement is open to a scholar.” —Marshall Cohen, New York Times Book Review
Belknap 1999 12 line illus. 560 pp. Paper $24.95 ISBN 0-674-00078-1 Cloth $52.00 ISBN 0-674-00077-3
Liberalism with Honor
SHARON R. KRAUSE
“This book makes a highly original and richly constructive contribution to contemporary democratic theory as well as to the interpretation and application of the thought of Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and the American tradition of political thought and culture, rooted in the Founding Fathers. The argument of the book establishes, for perhaps the first time in current literature, how capacious and fertile may be the moral resource for democratic theory that is to be found in a reconsidered and appropriately re-elaborated concept of honor.” —Thomas Pangle, author of Justice Among Nations: On the Moral Basis of Power and Peace
2002 288 pp. Cloth $35.00 / £22.95 ISBN 0-674-00756-5
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SOCIAL & POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Justice as Fairness
A Restatement
JOHN RAWLS EDITED BY ERIN KELLY
“There have been millions of words written about A Theory of Justice and many articles and several books by Rawls defending and expanding its doctrines. Justice as Fairness will almost certainly be the last of these, and it should take its place as the best and most comprehensive statement of Rawls’s eventual position. It is an exemplary work in every way. Rawls’s own virtues shine through. He follows the argument where it leads. He listens to his critics and acknowledges his supporters; he gives way when it is necessary, but remains firm where he can take a stand. Anybody convinced that political thought is all about disguised power, or rhetoric, or ideology in the bad sense of the word, should confront this book.” —Simon Blackburn, Times Literary Supplement
Belknap 2001; 2001 2 line illus. 240 pp. Paper $19.95 / £12.95 ISBN 0-674-00511-2 Cloth $50.00 / £32.95 ISBN 0-674-00510-4
Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy
JOHN RAWLS EDITED BY BARBARA HERMAN
“What names would we want to place next to Wittgenstein and Heidegger? No thinker, I believe, has a greater right to stand alongside them than John Rawls. Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, which appeared in 1971, changed forever the landscape of moral and political philosophy. Like Wittgenstein and Heidegger, Rawls has shown a remarkable capacity for self-criticism. Like them, he has gone on to revise in significant ways the doctrines that first established his fame ... The publication of the Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy is thus a major event, since here we find the conception of modern ethics as a whole, the understanding of its characteristic themes and problems, that has inspired Rawls’s political thought.” —Charles Larmore, New Republic
2000 4 line illus. 414 pp. Paper $20.95 / £13.95 ISBN 0-674-00442-6 Cloth $55.00 / £35.95 ISBN 0-674-00296-2
Collected Papers
JOHN RAWLS EDITED BY SAMUEL FREEMAN
“What a body of work this is, and what an accomplishment. Collected Papers affords an opportunity to step back and see [Rawls’s] work as a whole, as the elaboration of a single powerful and abiding idea ... This volume of Collected Papers stands as an inspiration to the next generation of theorists.” —Jeremy Waldron, London Review of Books “The course of Rawls’s career can be followed clearly in the Collected Papers, whose twenty-seven chapters span forty-eight years ... The writings of John Rawls, whom it is now safe to describe as the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century ... owe their influence to the fact that their depth and their insight repay the close attention that their uncompromising theoretical weight and erudition demand.” —Thomas Nagel, New Republic
1999; 2001 1 table 672 pp. Paper $27.95 / £18.95 ISBN 0-674-00569-4
Semblances of Sovereignty
The Constitution, the State, and American Citizenship
T. ALEXANDER ALEINIKOFF
SOCIAL & POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
“Aleinikoff examines sovereignty, citizenship, and the broader concept of membership (aliens as well as citizens) in the American nation-state and suggests that American constitutional law needs ‘understandings of sovereignty and membership that are supple and flexible, open to new arrangements’ ... Sure to generate heated debate over the extent to which the rules governing immigration, Indian tribes, and American territories should be altered, this book is required reading for constitutional scholars.” —R. J. Steamer, Choice
2002 320 pp. Cloth $48.00 / £30.95 ISBN 0-674-00745-X
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MORAL & LEGAL PHILOSOPHY
NEW NEW
Cities of Words
Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life
STANLEY CAVELL
Ethics without Ontology
HILARY PUTNAM
Since Socrates and his circle first tried to frame the Just City in words, discussion of a perfect communal life—a life of justice, reflection, and mutual respect—has had to come to terms with the distance between that idea and reality. Measuring this distance step by practical step is the philosophical project that Stanley Cavell has pursued on his exploratory path. Situated at the intersection of two of his longstanding interests—Emersonian philosophy and the Hollywood comedy of remarriage—Cavell’s new work marks a significant advance in this project. The book—which presents a course of lectures Cavell presented several times toward the end of his teaching career at Harvard—links masterpieces of moral philosophy and classic Hollywood comedies to fashion a new way of looking at our lives and learning to live with ourselves.
“What does it mean to live a moral life? In his typically provocative fashion, Cavell answers this question by juxtaposing various philosophical responses with particular films that illuminate those responses ... Cavell’s ‘letters’ offer a ready and heady departure from the usual conversation on moral life, and his inventive use of film helps bring the philosophers he discusses to life.” —Henry I. Carrigan Jr., Library Journal “In Cities of Words, a knotty and enlightening book, chapters about philosophers are paired with chapters about films: Emerson and The Philadelphia Story, Locke and Adam’s Rib, Nietzsche and Now, Voyager, Aristotle and The Awful Truth ... Cavell shows that the spirit of moral quest has an unusual power, even in the restricted world of these films. For all their artifice, they suggest that characters really can change themselves, that they can form ideals of justice, while keeping in mind how much failure and imperfection will be met along the way. That’s not a bad democratic vision, and it remains as potent now as it was when Katharine Hepburn rediscovered her love for Cary Grant.” —Edward Rothstein, New York Times
Belknap 2004 480 pp. Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-01336-0
In this brief book one of the most distinguished living American philosophers takes up the question of whether ethical judgments can properly be considered objective— a question that has vexed philosophers over the past century. Reviewing what he deems the disastrous consequences of ontology’s influence on analytic philosophy—in particular, the contortions it imposes upon debates about the objective of ethical judgments—Hilary Putnam proposes abandoning the very idea of ontology.
“Hilary Putnam is one of the most distinguished living American philosophers, a philosopher whose writings have done much to shape the agenda of analytic philosophy over the last forty years. Much of the interest of this book lies in the way that it illustrates, with unmistakable clarity, how severe a critic of mainstream analytic philosophy Putnam has become.” —Michael Williams, Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University
2004 1 table 176 pp. Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-01310-7
new in paperback
Ethical Formation
SABINA LOVIBOND
Sabina Lovibond invites her readers to see how the “practical reason view of ethics” can survive challenges from within philosophy and from the antirationalist postmodern critique of reason. At the heart of her argument is the Aristotelian idea of the formation of character through upbringing; these ancient ideas can be made contemporary if one understands them in a naturalized way.
“This is an intricate and stimulating book ... an argument that is impressive in its coherence and subtlety, and in the insightful way it engages with issues that are right at the centre of contemporary philosophical debate.” —John Cottingham, Times Literary Supplement
2002; 2004 224 pp. Paper $19.95 / £12.95 ISBN 0-674-01365-4 Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-00650-X
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new in paperback
NEW
The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays
HILARY PUTNAM
“Putnam’s The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy is a tour de force by a great philosopher. In an era of pseudo-scientific reductionism in what should be ‘the human sciences’, Putnam’s distinction as a philosopher of science and mathematics lends weight to his eloquent demolition of the dichotomy between judgments of fact and judgments of value that plays such a baneful role in economics, public policy, and the law, discouraging serious normative inquiry and argument. Anyone tempted by Milton Friedman’s famous claim that concerning differences of value ‘men can ultimately only fight’ should read this elegant and wonderful book.” —Martha Nussbaum, The University of Chicago “Hume’s and much 20th-century moral philosophy contrasted moral with factual judgments and led people to conclude that the former, unlike the latter, are subjective in the sense of not being rationally supportable. Putnam ... believes that the contrast is ill conceived and that the conclusion is both unwarranted and false. He acknowledges the usefulness of the fact/ value distinction but denies that anything metaphysical follows from it ... Putnam covers such matters as imperative logic, economics vis-à-vis ethics, and preference theory and such thinkers as V. Walsh, L. Robbins, and R. M. Hare. A fine philosophical workout.” —Robert Hoffman, Library Journal
2002; 2004 208 pp. Paper $16.95 / £10.95 ISBN 0-674-01380-8 Cloth $37.50 / £24.95 ISBN 0-674-00905-3
Law’s Quandary
STEVEN D. SMITH
This lively book reassesses a century of jurisprudential thought from a fresh perspective, and points to a malaise that currently afflicts not only legal theory but law in general. Steven Smith argues that our legal vocabulary and methods of reasoning presuppose classical ontological commitments that were explicitly articulated by thinkers from Aquinas to Coke to Blackstone, and even by Joseph Story. But these commitments are out of sync with the world view that prevails today in academic and professional thinking. So our law-talk thus degenerates into “just words”—or a kind of nonsense.
“Ordinary people assume that legal terms like freedom of speech have some real or true meaning. Most important legal theorists say there is no such thing. It is not unheard of for the sophisticated classes to reach conclusions at odds with common sense. But this creates a real problem for the stability of our legal system. Smith explores this quandary in a way that is wonderfully clear, honest, and funny. This is the best book I have read in several years.” —John H. Garvey, author of What Are Freedoms For? “Smith’s treatment of the issues he addresses is outstanding. His discussion is consistently probing, thoughtful, and imaginative. Smith’s range of reference is impressively broad—yet I never had the sense that he was trying to impress. His clarity—aided by his wonderfully engaging, and occasionally humorous, conversational style—is exemplary. But the enviable clarity/accessibility of Smith’s writing should not obscure just how penetrating—I am tempted to say, brilliant—his commentary is. It may sound faintly ridiculous to say this, but I thought that this book was a jurisprudential page turner.” —Michael J. Perry, author of Under God? Religious Faith and Liberal Democracy
2004 222 pp. Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-01533-9
Justice, Luck, and Knowledge
S. L. HURLEY
The recent past has seen striking advances in our understanding of both moral responsibility and distributive justice. S. L. Hurley’s ambitious work brings these two areas of lively debate into overdue contact with each other. Key contemporary discussions of distributive justice have formulated egalitarian approaches in terms of responsibility; in this view, the aim of egalitarianism is to respect differences between positions for which people are responsible while neutralizing differences that are a matter of luck. But this approach, Hurley contends, has ignored the way our understanding of responsibility constrains the roles it can actually play within distributive justice. Her book brings the new articulation of responsibility to bear in explaining these constraints.
“Luck-neutralization is a central concept in contemporary work on distributive justice, and thus moral responsibility is also a central concept (insofar as luck is what one is not morally responsible for). It is therefore fruitful and illuminating to apply important insights from responsibility theory to various theories of distributive justice. The book is written in a lively style, Susan Hurley is remarkably well-versed in the literature on free will and moral responsibility as well as distributive justice, and the ideas are vibrant and provocative ... [A] path-breaking book.” —John Martin Fischer, Professor of Philosophy, University of California Riverside “Hurley’s arguments are highly original. This is an impressive and insightful book.” —Peter Vallentyne, Professor of Philosophy, Virginia Commonwealth University
2003 6 line illus. 524 pp. Cloth $55.00 / £35.95 ISBN 0-674-01029-9
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MORAL & LEGAL PHILOSOPHY
PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE & SOCIETY
NEW new in paperback
Four Cultures of the West
JOHN W. O’MALLEY
“In this erudite work of cultural history, O’Malley extends ‘an invitation to consider and notice’ four distinctive paradigms or cultures that, taken together, handsomely help decode Western intellectual and cultural history. These four paradigms are the prophetic, the academic, the humanistic, and the culture of art and performance ... O’Malley successfully showcases the affinities between historic cultures (e.g., the Greco-Roman) and persons (e.g., Aristotle, Aquinas, and Luther) and cultural realities in our own time (e.g., the contemplative rhetoric of Lincoln at Gettysburg prefiguring the rhetorical contemplation at Ground Zero).” —Sandra Collins, Library Journal “O’Malley’s succinct analysis of the Four Cultures of the West is one of those rare books that uses history to tell us as much about the intellectual conflicts of the present as it does about those of the past. I predict his categorical analysis will be widely cited and widely debated by commentators well beyond academic specialists.” —Kenneth Woodward, contributing editor for Newsweek and author of Making Saints
Belknap 2004 272 pp. Cloth $24.95 / £16.95 ISBN 0-674-01498-7
The Emergence of Sexuality
Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts
ARNOLD I. DAVIDSON
“No one of his generation has better mastered Foucault’s archeological and genealogical work than Davidson. I do not mean in saying so that he is an expert on Foucault (which he is) but rather that he has learned how best to do his own work having seen what Foucault could do.” —Ian Hacking, Common Knowledge “In presenting his account of historical epistemology (tracing the ways concepts are modified as conditions of objectivity and forms of subjectivity change each other), Arnold Davidson takes as a pivotal task the confrontation of Foucault’s writing (to the totality of which Davidson is a world-renowned guide) with that of Freud (on whose Three Essays on Sexuality he has produced ground-breaking work), along the way showing the pertinence to his project of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. A growing body of students and specialists in philosophy, and cultural studies, and the history of science, in particular of psychiatry, have been profiting from Arnold Davidson’s clarity and his stunning erudition for a couple of decades now. This initial selection of his essays is an excellent introduction to his singular array of scholarly and critical accomplishments.” —Stanley Cavell, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University
2002; 2004 17 halftones, 12 line illus. 272 pp. Paper $19.95 / £12.95 ISBN 0-674-01370-0 Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-00459-0
Lessons of the Masters
GEORGE STEINER
“Steiner’s Lessons of the Masters sets forth the disturbing complexity of the relationship between teacher and pupil, master and disciple ... Some of the best writing in Steiner’s book is scorching characterisation—of bad teachers, of the politically correct, and the hypocrites who would deny the erotic element in the teacher-pupil relationship.” —Germaine Greer, The Times “[Steiner] brings his formidable charisma, his unrivalled range of reference and powers of rhetoric to bear on the peaks (as well as some troughs) of pedagogy, in history and literature: Socrates and Alcibiades, the parables of Christ, Faust, Virgil and Dante, Abelard and Eloise ... Like his hero Socrates, Steiner professes to have few answers, but his questions sweep you along.” —Robin Blake, Financial Times “George Steiner’s reflections on the electric relationship between teacher and student takes the reader on a high-speed rollercoaster ride to visit the greatest figures of Western civilization ... Where there is great mastery, there is likewise great jealousy, treachery, threat, and fear. Steiner passionately throws out a wide and undaunted net of inquiry into this perennially prickly and powerful subject.” —Patty Podhaisky, Bloomsbury Review
The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 2003 208 pp. Cloth $19.95 / £12.95 ISBN 0-674-01207-0
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Between Kant and Hegel
Lectures on German Idealism
DIETER HENRICH EDITED BY DAVID S. PACINI
“These are excellent lectures and make a valuable and exciting book. Henrich certainly gives a better introduction to the philosophizing that took place between Kant and Hegel than any other that I know of. He wants to show that the positions of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel each represent an option that is still open for live philosophical debate. Can there be a single-track systematic philosophy encompassing nature as well as mind? Dieter Henrich shows how this develops into a wide-ranging problem, allowing both for criticism of Kant and for constructive moves made after the criticisms are taken into account. He thus tries to show us argumentative steps by which one might proceed from a Kantian position to a Fichtean and then on to an Hegelian view. These lectures were given in 1973. Much has been done in English on Hegel since then, but relatively little on the ‘between’ period which Dieter Henrich addresses. This is not an ordinary textbook. It’s very much infused with Dieter Henrich’s own philosophical views. The topics and people Dieter Henrich discusses he really illuminates, both in terms of the historical context and in terms of the soundness or lack of it of the philosophy he is discussing. He is himself deeply inside that tradition, yet knows enough about the work of those outside it to make quite comprehensible to the outsiders what it’s like on the inside.” —J. B. Schneewind, Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University
2003 1 chart 384 pp. Cloth $55.00 / £35.95 ISBN 0-674-00773-5
PHILOSOPHY OF AESTHETICS
NEW
Ugly Feelings
SIANNE NGAI
Envy, irritation, paranoia—in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity. Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called “animatedness,” and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called “stuplimity.” She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from latetwentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening. Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of ugly feelings to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature—with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race—but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.
2005 37 halftones 432 pp. Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-01536-3
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NEW
The Romantic Imperative
The Concept of Early German Romanticism
FREDERICK C. BEISER
The Early Romantics met resistance from artists and academics alike in part because they defied the conventional wisdom that philosophy and the arts must be kept separate. Indeed, as the literary component of Romanticism has been studied and celebrated in recent years, its philosophical aspect has receded from view. This book, by one of the most respected scholars of the Romantic era, offers an explanation of Romanticism that not only restores but also enhances understanding of the movement’s origins, development, aims, and accomplishments—and of its continuing relevance.
“This is an excellent book. Its ten chapters are much more accessible and often clearer than the larger classic tomes on the subject. Each takes up a very significant topic and is sure to be read with profit by a wide range of readers—whether they are new to the field or already quite familiar with it. The book concerns an era, Early German Romanticism, that is properly becoming a major focus of new research. This volume could become one of the most helpful steps in making the area part of the canon for Anglophone scholars in all fields today. It is surely one of the best remedies for correcting out of date images of the work of the German romantics as regressive, obscurantist, or irrelevant. Early German Romanticism extends and modifies the project of the Enlightenment. The author shows that it deserves our attention not only because it is an era represented by some of the most interesting and creative personalities in our cultural history, but also because its main line of thought is responsible for a way of thinking central to our own time, namely a naturalism that might be expansive enough to do justice to traditional interests in the unique value of human freedom.” —Karl Ameriks, Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame
2004 272 pp. Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-01180-5
new in paperback
Embodiment of a Nation
Human Form in American Places
CECELIA TICHI
From Harriet Beecher Stowe’s image of the Mississippi’s “bosom” to Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod as “the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts,” the American environment has been represented in terms of the human body. Exploring such instances of embodiment, Cecelia Tichi exposes the historically varied and often contrary geomorphic expression of a national paradigm.
“In this fascinating analysis of American geographical and topographical imagery, Cecelia Tichi demonstrates the many ways in which our history, as well as our cultural values, are embedded in our monuments and historical sites. Using interdisciplinary perspectives from literature, history, and visual and material cultural studies, Tichi shows us how to read our national mythology in our continually shifting interpretation of our national sites and places.” —Wendy Martin, author of An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich “A brilliant analysis of how the landscape and physical environment of the United States have been transformed physically and imaginatively by creative, but often destructive, projections of national bodily identities onto the land. Tichi demonstrates how technologies combine with political motives, social impulses, and historical developments to infuse spaces and places with national meanings, even bodily geo-identity. This is bold, original research.” —Emory Elliott, General Editor of Columbia Literary History of the United States
2001; 2004 38 halftones 320 pp. Paper $19.95 / £12.95 ISBN 0-674-01361-1 Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-00494-9
new in paperback
Friends of Interpretable Objects
MIGUEL TAMEN
“In an exquisitely idiosyncratic book of enormous intellectual ambition crammed into a tiny space ... Tamen wants to redefine aesthetics ... In his scheme, the interpretable object (which might be what we recognize as an artwork, but does not need to be) exists by virtue of its ‘friends’—those people who gather round it and, so to speak, talk to it, as we might do with a statue or painting. How do objects ‘talk back’ from within a museum or a church? Suavely Wittgensteinian and insatiably curious, Tamen’s arguments are hardly devalued by the lack of any earth-shattering conclusion.” —Stephen Poole, The Guardian “Because Tamen is willing to go out on various disciplinary and logical limbs, this is a book like no other. It will appeal to students of literature and the visual arts, it will be debated by the more humanistic of philosophers, and it will perform noble cross-over activity between those disciplines and material from theories of law, science, and ecology. The book will work in this admirable way for those who are open-minded, inquisitive, and seducible by some lovely instances of intellectual wit.” —Leonard Barkan, Princeton University
2001; 2004 208 pp. Paper $16.95 / £10.95 ISBN 0-674-01368-9 Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-00646-1
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PHILOSOPHY OF AESTHETICS
1-800-405-1619 / www.hup.harvard.edu
Art Matters
PETER DE BOLLA
“Art Matters is against intimidation. De Bolla’s ambition in this book is to show us just how generous art objects are, given a chance; and just how difficult it has become to experience our experience of them in the language available. There are stories to be told about the eloquence of being mute, and de Bolla has used his own aesthetic experiences to tell them. Art Matters is writing about art at its most telling. It is a remarkable book.” —Adam Phillips, Principal Child Psychotherapist, Wolverton Gardens Child and Family Consultation Centre, London “Peter de Bolla’s Art Matters is an extraordinary description of and argument for the uniqueness of the aesthetic experience. Despite the inherent difficulty and complexity of this enterprise (in which aspects of musical performance, lyric poetry, and contemporary painting are described with great attentiveness) de Bolla has produced a grippingly refined and persuasive text, utterly free of sentimentality or cant, true, direct, original.” —Edward Said
2001; 2003 10 color illus., 1 halftone 190 pp. Paper $15.95 / £10.95 ISBN 0-674-01110-4 Cloth $36.00 / £23.95 ISBN 0-674-00649-6
Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences
PHILIP FISHER
“A short but ample book, in which Fisher ranges well beyond his home territory of literature into science, mathematics, philosophy, architecture, mythology, and modern art and where Shakespeare rubs shoulders with Frank Lloyd Wright, Nabokov with Aristotle, Newton with Cy Twombly. Fisher takes wonder where he finds it, in the Chicago skyline, Miranda’s exclamations in The Tempest or Descartes’s explanation of the rainbow. Experiences of wonder may be by definition rare, but for Fisher they are dispersed all over the map of knowledge ... This is a learned, cultivated work.” —Lorraine Daston, London Review of Books “Like Kant, Fisher wants to sketch out ‘the lively border’ between aesthetics and intelligibility, and he is to be applauded for pursuing this border in and of itself, without reducing aesthetic experience to ideology, sociology, or identity politics, as the greater part of university literary criticism has tended to do over the past decade. Unlike Kant, Fisher employs an eclectic discursive method, passing with admirable erudition from Descartes’s account of the rainbow to Plato’s geometrical problem of how to double the area of a square to an analysis of two abstract canvases by Cy Twombly.” —Adam Bresnick, Times Literary Supplement
1999; 2003 16 color illus., 1 halftone, 16 line illus. 208 pp. Paper $17.95 / £11.95 ISBN 0-674-95562-5 Cloth $40.00 / £25.95 ISBN 0-674-95561-7
The Secret Life of Puppets
VICTORIA NELSON
10th Annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies Sponsored by the Modern Language Association of America “Translating ancient thought systems into contemporary terms, finding equivalents of the old in the new, Nelson skillfully manages to thrust the sphere of academic research headlong into popular culture, making this both accessible and erudite ... In a dizzying journey that opens with a Renaissance grotto and concludes with The Truman Show and virtual reality, we are taken on a rollercoaster ride through the underside of western mysticism. As Nelson herself warns the reader, when crawling out from the ‘hole of this book,’ whatever emerges ‘will not be the same as what went in.’” —Aura Satz, Financial Times “This is New Age prophecy at its most verbally sexy and literarily savvy. It is fun, enticing, and chock full of brilliance.” —Laura Bass, Washington Times “Explores the hauntings, possessions, and other uncanny phenomena proliferating in literature and entertainment … she argues strongly, in vivid and original readings … for a new approach to the uses of fantasy and to the relationship between material and immaterial phenomena.” —Marina Warner, Times Literary Supplement “A wonderful, unlikely, necessary book which links high and low and pop culture, the sacred and the profane, into a magnificent webwork of pattern and gnosis—it is erudite, irreverent, and profound. Just read it.” —Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods and The Sandman
2002; 2003 15 halftones 368 pp. Paper $17.95 / £11.95 ISBN 0-674-01244-5 Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-00630-5
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PHILOSOPHY OF AESTHETICS
PHILOSOPHY IN THE WORDS
NEW
J. J. Rousseau: An Afterlife of Words
ELI FRIEDLANDER
Eli Friedlander reads Rousseau’s autobiography, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, as philosophy. Reading this work against Descartes’s Meditations, Friedlander shows how Rousseau’s memorable transformation of experience through writing opens up the possibility of affirming even the most dejected state of being and allows the emergence of the innocence of nature out of the ruins of all social attachments. In tracing the re-creation of a human subject in reverie, Friedlander is alive to the very form of the experience of reading the Reveries by showing the ways this work needs to—and in effect does—generate a reader, without betraying Rousseau’s utter solitude. Friedlander’s book provides an afterlife for the Reveries in modern philosophy. It constitutes an alternative to the analytic tradition’s revival of Rousseau, primarily through Rawls’s influential vision of the social contract. It also counters the fate of Rousseau’s writings in the continental tradition, determined by and large by Derrida’s deconstruction. Friedlander’s reading of the Reveries, a work that has fascinated generations of readers, is an incomparable introduction to one of the greatest thinkers in Western culture.
2004 176 pp. Cloth $39.95 / £25.95 ISBN 0-674-01514-2
NEW
The World Republic of Letters
PASCALE CASANOVA TRANSLATED BY M. B. DEBEVOISE
The “world of letters” has always seemed a matter more of metaphor than of global reality. In this book, Pascale Casanova shows us the state of world literature behind the stylistic refinements— a world of letters relatively independent from economic and political realms, and in which language systems, aesthetic orders, and genres struggle for dominance. Rejecting facile talk of globalization, with its suggestion of a happy literary “melting pot,” Casanova exposes an emerging regime of inequality in the world of letters, where minor languages and literatures are subject to the invisible but implacable violence of their dominant counterparts. Inspired by the writings of Fernand Braudel and Pierre Bourdieu, this ambitious book develops the first systematic model for understanding the production, circulation, and valuing of literature worldwide.
“This is a marvelous study of the international networks and ethnic forcefields out of which a modern world literature has emerged. In drawing a map of the literary globe, Pascale Casanova shows just how different it is from any political map ever framed. Unlike many previous comparativists, she shows just how many of the texts of literary modernism have been contributed by peoples without financial or political power. This is a brave, audacious and luminous analysis, and a bracing challenge to those who still believe in the nation as an explanatory category. This book will provoke debate for years to come.” —Declan Kiberd, author of Inventing Ireland and Irish Classics “As a researcher, Pascale Casanova specializes in the exception. Along with a literary knowledge that is exceptional in its breadth and depth, she possesses a theoretical knowledge that is truly vast and wielded with great authority. In pursuing this immense topic—the universe of relations that constitute the ‘World Republic of Letters’—she has set herself a daunting challenge: that of constructing, and empirically verifying, a theoretical model for the ‘fabric of the universal.’” —Pierre Bourdieu, author of Distinction and Language and Symbolic Power
Convergences: Inventories of the Present 2005 440 pp. Cloth $35.00 / £22.95 ISBN 0-674-01345-X
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Keywords and Concepts in Evolutionary Developmental Biology
EDITED BY BRIAN K. HALL AND WENDY M. OLSON
Doubling the Point
Essays and Interviews
J. M. COETZEE
2003 Recipient of the Nobel Prize
EDITED BY DAVID ATTWELL
The new field of evolutionary developmental biology is one of the most exciting areas of contemporary biology. The fundamental principle of evolutionary developmental biology (“evo-devo”) is that evolution acts through inherited changes in the development of the organism. “Evo-devo” is not merely a fusion of the fields of developmental and evolutionary biology, the grafting of a developmental perspective onto evolutionary biology, or the incorporation of an evolutionary perspective into developmental biology. Evo-devo strives for a unification of genomic, developmental, organismal, population, and natural selection approaches to evolutionary change. It draws from development, evolution, paleontology, ecology, and molecular and systematic biology, but has its own set of questions, approaches, and methods. Keywords and Concepts in Evolutionary Developmental Biology is the first comprehensive reference work for this expanding field. Covering more than fifty central terms and concepts in entries written by leading experts, Keywords offers an overview of all that is embraced by this new subdiscipline of biology, providing the core insights and ideas that show how embryonic development relates to life-history evolution, adaptation, and responses to and integration with environmental factors.
“With the recent explosion of interest in evolutionary developmental biology, fueled by advances in molecular analysis, this work arrives at an extremely important time ... Chapters are thoughtfully written by an extraordinarily wide range of scientists from nearly every perspective of evolution and development.” —K. Crawford, Choice
Harvard University Press Reference Library 2003 25 line illus., 7 tables 496 pages Cloth $59.95 / £38.95 ISBN 0-674-00904-5
These essays and interviews, documenting Coetzee’s longtime en- gagement with his own culture, and with modern culture in general, constitute a literary autobiography of striking intellectual, moral, and political force.
“The interviews are serious colloquies, and they illuminate the texts they discuss, but above all they give a strong impression of the author on his own view of what he is trying to do. One is left with an impression of a deeply informed mind. Coetzee is a writer of international stature, far above mere regional interest, and we can hardly help being interested in his being an Afrikaans-speaking South African. This is a book of distinction.” —Frank Kermode
1992 7 line illus. 448 pp. Paper $21.50 / £13.95 ISBN 0-674-21518-4
Kafka
KLAUS WAGENBACH
In Kafka’s writing, Albert Camus tells us, we travel “to the limits of human thought.” And in this book, the world’s leading Kafka authority conducts us to the deepest reaches of Kafka’s own troubled psyche, to reveal the inner workings of the man who gave his name to a central facet of modern experience, the Kafkaesque. Klaus Wagenbach, who wrote the first major critical biography of Kafka, draws upon a wealth of new and recent information to produce a concise but finely nuanced portrait of the author, an ideal introduction to this quintessential figure of modernity.
2003 16 color illus., 31 duotones, 10 line drawings, 1 map 192 pp. Cloth $21.50 / COBEEI ISBN 0-674-01138-4
NEW
A New History of German Literature
DAVID E. WELLBERY, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF JUDITH RYAN, GENERAL EDITOR HANS ULRICH GUMBRECHT, ANTON KAES, JOSEPH LEO KOERNER, DOROTHEA E. VON MÜCKE, EDITORS
“The essays making up this new history of the literary and philosophical culture of the people of the German lands (and of Germans abroad) are of an unfailingly high standard. Many are noteworthy contributions to scholarship and criticism. The ingenious plan of the book permits a variety of style and approach, while strong editing has resulted in exemplary clarity and pithiness of expression. Well conceived, eclectic, lively, and informative, this New History gives us a model overview of what German literature and thought looks like from the twenty-first century.” —J. M. Coetzee, author of Elizabeth Costello and Doubling the Point “An enticing and authoritative review of German literature from its most splendid high points to a most horrible nadir and its aftermath. This book well documents how—in a remarkable post-war process of moral regeneration—German literature struggles to come to terms with what happened.” —Amos Elon, author of The Pity of It All “Harvard’s New History of German Literature is an encyclopedic browser of incomparable quality for Germanophiles and Germanophobes alike. In a series of brief, penetrating essays, it retells thirteen centuries of German history through a broad spectrum of literature by both obscure and famous authors. For modern readers ready to tackle the riddle of modern Germany with real hope of solving it, here is the guide.” —Steven Ozment, author of A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People and The Bürgermeister’s Daughter
Belknap / Harvard University Press Reference Library 2005 12 halftones, 4 maps 1032 pp. Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-01503-7
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PHILOSOPHY IN THE WORDS
WALTER BENJAMIN
new in paperback
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926
WALTER BENJAMIN EDITED BY MARCUS BULLOCK AND MICHAEL W. JENNINGS
This first volume shows that even as a young man Benjamin possessed astonishing intellectual range and depth. His topics here include poetry and fiction, drama, philosophy, history, religion, love, violence, morality, mythology, painting, and much more. He is as compelling and insightful when musing on riddles or children’s books as he is when dealing with weightier issues such as symbolic logic or epistemology.
“To encounter Benjamin’s piece [‘The Life of Students’] is like overhearing the opening notes of one of the most intellectually compelling friendships of our century. It is greatly to the credit of Harvard University Press to have made the text finally available to English-speaking readers. In general, the editors of this volume have made an exemplary choice of what to include, and when their projected multi-volume selection is complete, it will constitute the most important compilation of Benjamin’s writings outside the mammoth German Collected Works.” —Michael André Bernstein, New Republic “Benjamin has gradually emerged as a major presence in 20th-century letters. This reputation rests on his extraordinary and highly idiosyncratic gift for original and far-reaching insights. It was his ambition to become Germany’s leading literary critic, a status that many no doubt would be inclined to award him posthumously ... Benjamin is sometimes misunderstood, since only certain parts of his overall output have come into view here. The 65 pieces collected in this excellent first volume of the new Harvard Benjamin should help clarify the larger picture as well as deepen and enliven the discussion.” —Steve Dowden, Washington Times
Belknap 1996; 2004 7 halftones 520 pp. Paper $18.95 / £12.95 ISBN 0-674-01355-7 Cloth $47.50 / £30.95 ISBN 0-674-94585-9
also available
Volume 2, 1927–1934
Belknap 22 halftones, 3 line illus. 880 pp. Cloth $46.50 / £30.95 ISBN 0-674-94586-7 The paperback version of Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2 will be available in Spring 2005; it will be broken into two parts.
The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940
THEODOR W. ADORNO AND WALTER BENJAMIN EDITED BY HENRI LONITZ TRANSLATED BY NICHOLAS WALKER
“To reconsider the relationship between Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin is to reflect on one of the most enduring philosophical friendships of the twentieth century.” —Richard Wolin, New Republic “The extensive correspondence between Adorno and Benjamin—now happily available in English—reveals the complexities of their tortured philosophical friendship.” —James Miller, New York Times Book Review
1999; 2001 400 pp. Paper $19.95 / COBE ISBN 0-674-00689-5 Cloth $47.50 / £30.95 ISBN 0-674-15427-4
Volume 3, 1935–1938
Belknap 2002 12 halftones 480 pp. Cloth $39.95 / £25.95 ISBN 0-674-00896-0
Volume 4, 1938–1940
Belknap 2003 4 halftones 512 pp. Cloth $39.95 / £25.95 ISBN 0-674-01076-0
The Arcades Project
WALTER BENJAMIN
“We will be feasting on Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project for years to come...By any standard, the appearance of this longawaited work is a towering literary event...The Arcades Project surpasses its legend. It captures the relationship between a writer and a city in a form as richly developed as those presented in the great cosmopolitan novels of Proust, Joyce, Musil and Isherwood.” —Herbert Muschamp, New York Times “Quite simply, the Passagen-Werk is one of the twentieth century’s great efforts at historical comprehension—some would say the greatest.” —T. J. Clark
Belknap 2002; 1999 42 halftones 1088 pp. Paper $23.95 / £15.95 ISBN 0-674-00802-2 Cloth $47.50 / £30.95 ISBN 0-674-04326-X
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WALTER BENJAMIN
1-800-405-1619 / www.hup.harvard.edu
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
NEW
Naturalism in Question
EDITED BY MARIO DE CARO AND DAVID MACARTHUR
“Naturalism in Question is undertaking an important task—to address the prevalence of scientific naturalism as the paradigm of serious philosophical work in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. The fact that such eminent philosophers as Davidson, Cavell, McDowell, Stroud, and Putnam are brought together around a common issue is itself an attractive feature. It provides a certain landscape of contemporary American Philosophy that is most important to bring into view. It shows that despite all their obvious differences, such philosophers can be seen as sharing a similar concern to revive a form of philosophy that does not model its rigor on problematic pictures of scientific work.” —Eli Friedlander, author of Signs of Sense: A Reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus “The book’s concern with how to position philosophy with respect to science and nature is absolutely central to contemporary philosophical discussion. The contributors are distinguished and talented philosophers, and their articles in this volume will sustain and reinforce their reputation for philosophical clarity and insight. The more expansive naturalisms they advocate are important, constructive, and often provocative responses to a growing recognition of the inadequacies of naturalist orthodoxy. The book thereby promises to be at the center of a renewed discussion of naturalism, which will likely push the entire field in new directions.” —Joseph Rouse, author of How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism
2004 350 pp. Cloth $49.95 / £32.95 ISBN 0-674-01295-X
NEW
Politics of Nature
How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy
BRUNO LATOUR TRANSLATED BY CATHERINE PORTER
This book establishes the conceptual context for political ecology—transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour proposes an end to the old dichotomy between nature and society—and the constitution, in its place, of a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually practiced.
“This is much more than a reworking of politics. It is a sketch of a resolution of the perennial questions of what we know and what exists ... Latour ... can be infuriating. But he is never boring. Politics of Nature must be difficult because it challenges assumptions that are built into our languages, such as the hallowed distinction between ‘facts’ and ‘values’ ... It is worth reading— twice.” —Mike Holderness, New Scientist
2004 7 line illus. 320 pp. Paper $24.95 / £16.95 ISBN 0-674-01347-6 Cloth $55.00 / £35.95 ISBN 0-674-01289-5
new in paperback
Historical Ontology
IAN HACKING
“[Hacking] focuses on the interactions between what there is (or comes to be) and our concepts thereof. The kinds of objects he considers, both of which he regards as historical, are Aristotelian universals and their instances. He emphasizes that not only do ordinary physical objects and people and their institutions begin, develop, and end, but so do concepts, e.g., those language, knowledge, a child, (psychic) trauma, and scientific reasoning ... Stimulating, incisive, and clear even in expounding theories of unclear writers.” —Robert Hoffman, Library Journal
2002; 2004 288 pp. Paper $17.95 / £11.95 ISBN 0-674-01607-6 Cloth $45.00 / £29.95 ISBN 0-674-00616-X
21
WWW.HUP.HARVARD.EDU
new in paperback
Making Sense of Life
Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines
EVELYN FOX KELLER
Darwin and Design
Does Evolution Have a Purpose?
MICHAEL RUSE
“This has to be the best of Ruse’s many books, and it is hard to imagine how a better one could be written on this subject. With an understanding erudition spiced with good-natured wit and occasional sly ribaldry, Ruse moves easily and assuredly among biology, philosophy, history, and theology.” —Robert T. Pennock, Science “Michael Ruse’s latest book, Darwin and Design, is an intellectual history of the design argument and its Darwinian solution ... His story is a fascinating one, enlivened especially by his accounts of various imaginative attempts before Darwin to solve the design problem without recourse to a deity.” —Daniel W. McShea, American Scientist
2003; 2004 12 halftones, 5 line illus. 384 pp. Paper $16.95 / £10.95 ISBN 0-674-01631-9 Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-01023-X
A history of the diverse and changing nature of biological explanation in a particularly charged field, Making Sense of Life draws our attention to the temporal, disciplinary, and cultural components of what biologists mean, and what they understand, when they propose to explain life.
“Making Sense of Life is about the importance of recognizing [the] tight connection between the use of language in the social domain and how it produces biological ‘understanding’ ... The central arguments of Making Sense of Life are made with grace and authority. Those who are unsettled by them, and who wish to take issue with Keller, could not ask for a more accomplished and eloquent adversary.” —Lisa Jardine, New Scientist
2002; 2003 5 halftones, 4 line illus. 400 pp. Paper $17.95 / £11.95 ISBN 0-674-01250-X Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-00746-8
Bigger than Chaos
Understanding Complexity through Probability
MICHAEL STREVENS
“This book is a model of clarity, at both the ‘macro’ and the ‘micro’ levels; the expository style is entertaining without being distracting; the presentation of technical material shows the deft touch of someone who has mastery of it without the inclination to overindulge in it.” —Ned Hall, M.I.T. “This impressive book tackles an important question: how can systems of many interacting parts, which thus display lowlevel complexity, give rise to high-level simplicity? Said another way: how can very complicated and seemingly capricious micro-behavior generate stable, predictable macrobehavior? Complex systems of the sort Strevens deals with are all around us. Thermodynamics and ecology are just the beginning. He makes real progress on a genuinely difficult topic, one that is of central interest to science and to the philosophy of science. He also has a seemingly effortless command of his materials and a sure grip on the conceptual issues. The work is technically sophisticated—he knows his mathematics, probability theory and physics—and elegantly written. This is what good philosophy is all about.” —Alan Hajek, California Institute of Technology
2003 39 line illus. 432 pp. Cloth $59.95 / £38.95 ISBN 0-674-01042-6
Time and Chance
DAVID Z ALBERT
This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures—and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense—that whatever can happen can just as naturally happen backwards.
“Albert is perfecting a style of foundational analysis that is uniquely his own ... It has a surgical precision ... and it is ruthless with pretensions. The foundations of thermodynamics is a topic that has accumulated a good deal of dead wood; this is a fire that will burn and burn.” —Simon W. Saunders, Oxford University
2001; 2003 29 line illus. 192 pp. Paper $18.95 / £12.95 OIP ISBN 0-674-01132-5
Invariances
The Structure of the Objective World
ROBERT NOZICK
“Robert Nozick’s intellectual energy is a thing of wonder. In Invariances he ranges copiously over relativity theory and quantum theory, cosmology, modal logic, topology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, decision theory, economics, and even Soviet history—not to mention his strictly philosophical forays into the nature of truth, objectivity, necessity, consciousness, and ethics.” —Colin McGinn, New York Review of Books
Belknap 2001; 2003 432 pp. Paper $19.95 / £12.95 ISBN 0-674-01245-3 Cloth $35.00 / £22.95 ISBN 0-674-00631-3
Facing Up
Science and Its Cultural Adversaries
STEVEN WEINBERG
“[Facing Up is] lucidly written as ever, with a gentle humor that does not hide [Weinberg’s] strong convictions on science, philosophy and religion. I unreservedly recommend it, not only to scientists but to all who share his beliefs in the contribution that science has made, and will continue to make, to the way we see ourselves and our world.” —Brian Pippard, Times Literary Supplement
2001; 2003 1 halftone 306 pp. Paper $16.95 / £10.95 ISBN 0-674-01120-1 Cloth $26.00 / £16.95 ISBN 0-674-00647-X
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PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
1-800-405-1619 / www.hup.harvard.edu
PHILOSOPHY OF RATIONALITY/LOGIC
NEW
Quintessence
Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W. V. Quine
W. V. QUINE EDITED BY ROGER F. GIBSON, JR.
Quintessence for the first time collects Quine’s classic essays in one volume, offering a much-needed introduction to his general philosophy. The selections take up analyticity and reductionism; the indeterminacy of translation of theoretical sentences and the inscrutability of reference; ontology; naturalized epistemology; philosophy of mind; and extensionalism. Representative of Quine at his best, these readings are fundamental not only to an appreciation of the philosopher and his work, but also to an understanding of the philosophical tradition that he so materially advanced.
“Specialists ... will be grateful for this well-modulated selection of Quine’s most important essays and articles, which reflect his thinking up to the end of his life.” —Leon H. Brody, Library Journal
Belknap 2004 448 pp. Cloth $39.95 / £25.95 ISBN 0-674-01048-5
Saving the Differences
Essays on Themes from Truth and Objectivity
CRISPIN WRIGHT
Crispin Wright’s Truth and Objectivity brought about a far-reaching reorientation of the metaphysical debates concerning realism and truth. The essays in this companion volume prefigure, elaborate, or defend the proposals put forward in that landmark work. The collection includes the Gareth Evans memorial lecture in which the program of Truth and Objectivity was first announced, as well as all of Wright’s published reactions to the extensive commentary his study provoked; it presents substantial new developments and applications of the pluralistic outlook on the realism debates proposed in Truth and Objectivity, and further pursues its distinctive minimalist conceptions of truth and of truth-aptitude.
“[A] thorough and subtle examination of [the] multiple criteria of realism.” —Paul Horwich, Times Literary Supplement “Truth and Objectivity is a strikingly resourceful and serious book, imbued with respect for the difficulty of philosophical problems and a readiness to probe them with all the conceptual instruments of contemporary analytic philosophy.” —Timothy Williamson, International Journal of Philosophical Studies “A milestone in the discussion of realism.” —Jim Edwards, Mind
2003 560 pp. Cloth $55.00 / £35.95 ISBN 0-674-01077-9
Return to Reason
STEPHEN TOULMIN
“There is now a ‘loss of confidence’ ... in our traditional ideas about rationality, according to Toulmin. Especially among those in the humanities, he argues, the claims of rationality have been progressively challenged over the last 20 or 30 years, to the point of being sidelined. This is a common complaint and not exactly news, but Toulmin does not merely bemoan and rant, as many others have done. He offers a diagnosis and a solution. Rationality has come under threat, he believes, because of the undue influence of classical mechanics and abstract mathematical methods on our idea of what intelligent problem-solving should be. Deduction in the style of Euclid’s geometry, mechanically predictable and rigorous law in the style of Galileo and Newton, indubitable certainty in the style of Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’ all exert a malign influence, insofar as they overshadow a looser, more pragmatic and less abstract concept of ‘reasonableness.’ What we need is more open-minded, informal reasonableness and less inappropriately mathematical rationality. Only then, Toulmin argues, can the idea of reason regain its rightful good name.” —Anthony Gottlieb, Los Angeles Times
2001; 2003 256 pp. Paper $16.95 / £10.95 ISBN 0-674-01235-6 Cloth $24.95 / £16.95 ISBN 0-674-00495-7
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WWW.HUP.HARVARD.EDU
POSTSTRUCTURALISM/ ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY
Feeling in Theory
Emotion after the “Death of the Subject”
REI TERADA
own, drawn from her analytical reading of post-structuralist writing and of earlier and present-day philosophies of emotion. With Feeling in Theory Terada has produced something excellent and major, both a contribution to post-structuralist theory and its interpretation, and a placing of it in a wider surround.” —Cynthia Chase, author of Decomposing Figures
2001; 2003 222 pp. Paper $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-01127-9 Cloth $47.00 / £30.95 ISBN 0-674-00493-0
This revolutionary work transforms the interdisciplinary debate on emotion by suggesting a positive relation between the “death of the subject” and the very existence of emotion. Reading the writings of Derrida and de Man, Rei Terada finds grounds for construing emotion as nonsubjective.
“What starts from a shrewd review of contemporary polemics goes on to take the shape of a theory of emotion of Terada’s
JEWISH MYSTICISM/ GERMAN PHIILOSOPHY
NEW
German Idealism
The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801
FREDERICK C. BEISER
“[A] magnificent ... book ... That Beiser manages to keep the reader afloat as he steers through such deep and turbulent waters deserves the highest praise. Expository writing of unfailing lucidity is supported by reference to an unrivalled range of sources ... I learned something from this book on almost every page ... For anyone at all seriously interested in the topic this is now the place to start.” —Michael Rosen, Times Literary Supplement
2002 752 pp. Cloth $65.00 / £41.95 ISBN 0-674-00769-7
The Sabbatean Prophets
MATT GOLDISH
The story of Shabbatai and his prophets has mainly been explored by specialists in Jewish mysticism. Matt Goldish shifts the focus of Sabbatean studies from the theology of Lurianic Kabbalah to the widespread seventeenth-century belief in latter-day prophecy. By placing Sabbateanism in a broad cultural context, Goldish integrates this Jewish messianic movement into the early modern world, making its story accessible to scholars and students alike.
2004 240 pp. Cloth $39.95 / £25.95 ISBN 0-674-01291-7
ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY
NEW
Labored in Papyrus Leaves
Perspectives on an Epigram Collection Attributed to Posidippus (P. Mil. Vogl. VIII 309)
EDITED BY BENJAMIN ACOSTA-HUGHES, ELIZABETH KOSMETATOU, AND MANUEL BAUMBACH
This colloquium volume celebrates a new Hellenistic epigram collection attributed to the third-century B.C.E. poet Posidippus, one of the most significant
literary finds in recent memory. Included in this collection are an unusual variety of voices and perspectives: papyrological, art historical, archaeological, historical, literary, and aesthetic.
Hellenic Studies #2 2004 250 pp. Paper $25.00 / £16.95 ISBN 0-674-01105-8
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POSTSTRUCTURALISM / GERMAN
1-800-405-1619 / www.hup.harvard.edu
NEW
Inventing Superstition
From the Hippocratics to the Christians
DALE B. MARTIN
Dale Martin provides the first detailed genealogy of the idea of superstition, its history over eight centuries, from classical Greece to the Christianized Roman Empire of the fourth century C.E. With illuminating reference to the writings of philosophers, historians, and medical teachers he demonstrates that the concept of superstition was invented by Greek intellectuals to condemn popular religious practices and beliefs, especially the belief that gods or other superhuman beings would harm people or cause disease. Tracing the social, political, and cultural influences that informed classical thinking about piety and superstition, nature and the divine, Inventing Superstition exposes the manipulation of the label of superstition in arguments between Greek and Roman intellectuals on the one hand and Christians on the other, and the purposeful alteration of the idea by Neoplatonic philosophers and Christian apologists in late antiquity.
“Martin calls upon the teachings of thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Galen, Hippocrates, Plotinus, and Porphyry as he defines nature and the divine, monotheism and polytheism, and earlier definitions of superstition. The book’s peak is a wonderful discussion of Celsus’s attacks on Christianity as impious and Origen’s successful Christian response in Contra Celsum. The perfect mind opener for readers desiring a better understanding of the religious climate of antiquity.” —Gary P. Gillum, Library Journal
2004 320 pp. Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-01534-7
NEW
Moralia
Volume XVI. Index
PLUTARCH
Plutarch’s “Moralia,” Moral Essays reflecting his philosophy about living a good life, is a treasury of information concerning Greco-Roman society, traditions, ideals, ethics, and religion. But access to the riches of this collection of over seventy essays has long been hindered by lack of any comprehensive index. This problem has at last been solved: the Loeb Classical Library’s edition of the Moralia is now brought to completion with an analytical Index volume. Renowned as a biographer because of his “Parallel Lives,” Plutarch (born about 50 C.E.) was also a teacher of philosophy in Rome, a priest at Delphi, and an engaging essayist with a warm, urbane, and judicious style. Whether advising about marriage and education, discussing prophecy, divine providence, and life after death, setting forth rules for politicians, or commenting on personal virtues and vices, his Moral Essays reveal not just Plutarch’s thinking but also the world in which he lived. Edward O’Neil’s thorough index provides an invaluable roadmap for tracking the wealth of information and wisdom to be found in them.
Loeb Classical Library 499 2004 640 pp. Cloth $21.50 / £14.50 ISBN 0-674-99611-9
new in paperback
What Is Ancient Philosophy?
PIERRE HADOT TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL CHASE
“Pierre Hadot deserves to be better known to English-language readers—and not just because he was a favorite of Michel Foucault’s and is the man largely responsible for introducing Wittgenstein to the French. Hadot is a historian of ancient philosophy, a professor emeritus at the prestigious Collège de France. But it is more accurate to say that he is a philosopher who makes use of the ancients for his own ideas ... In What is Ancient Philosophy? Hadot brings all his concerns together in a small volume of extraordinary erudition and surprising ... clarity of prose ... It is the summa of a distinguished career.” —Barry Gewen, New York Times Book Review
Belknap 2002; 2004 382 pp. Paper $15.95 / £10.95 ISBN 0-674-01373-5 Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-00733-6
The Inner Citadel
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
PIERRE HADOT Translated by Michael Chase
“Plato used to talk of philosopher-kings; Marcus Aurelius was something even better: He was a philosopher-emperor. The leader of the Roman Empire spent most of his life in troubling times, campaigning against the barbarians, dealing with conspiracy at home, even combatting an upstart cult that revered one of those Galilean wonder-workers. Yet the most powerful man in the world still managed to live the life of a Stoic, and to record his reflections on how we should live. Those meditations, as these inner pep talks are usually called, became one of the best-loved books of antiquity ... This study—by a leading authority on Marcus—provides background matter and analysis of the main themes in the Meditations, as well as fresh translations of many of the sayings. —Washington Post Book World
1998; 2001 1 line illus. 368 pp. Paper $20.50 / £13.95 ISBN 0-674-00707-7
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ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY
ACADEMICALLY SPEAKING
NEW new in paperback
What the Best College Teachers Do
KEN BAIN
Winner of the Virginia and Warren Stone Prize, Awarded Annually by Harvard University Press for an Outstanding Book on Education and Society “With the strong conviction that good teaching can be learned, and after 15 years of observing teachers in action, Bain undertook an exploration of the essentials of effective teaching. The result is an insightful look at what makes a great teacher, based on a study of three dozen teachers from a cross section of disciplines from medicalschool faculties to undergraduate departments.” —Vanessa Bush, Booklist “Bain, a historian and director of New York University’s Center for Teaching Excellence, studied 63 outstanding college teachers (as deemed by students and colleagues as well as by an examination of their students’ work) from diverse institutions in an attempt to identify their common traits. What he discovered is pertinent to all teachers, including those at the K-12 level.” —David Ruenzel, Teacher Magazine
Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line
The Marketing of Higher Education
DAVID L. KIRP
“Kirp has an eye for telling examples, and he captures the turmoil and transformation in higher education in readable style.” —Karen W. Arenson, New York Times “Kirp is both quite fair and a good reporter; he has a keen eye for the important ways in which bean-counting has transformed universities, making them financially responsible and also more concerned about developing lucrative specialties than preserving the liberal arts and humanities. Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line is one of the best education books of the year, and anyone interested in higher education will find it to be superior.” —Martin Morse Wooster, Washington Times
2003; 2004 336 pp. Paper $17.95 / £11.95 ISBN 0-674-01634-3 Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-01146-5
Read an excerpt of this book online: www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/BAIBES.html
2004 224 pp. Cloth $21.95 / £14.95 ISBN 0-674-01325-5
new in paperback
Making the Most of College
Students Speak Their Minds
RICHARD J. LIGHT
Winner of the Virginia and Warren Stone Prize, Awarded Annually by Harvard University Press for an Outstanding Book on Education and Society “Harvard Professor [Richard Light] reveals secrets from his 10-year study of successful students. [Making the Most of College] offers practical advice to school administrators, parents and, most importantly, to the students themselves.” —Alisha Davis, Newsweek
2001; 2004 246 pp. Paper $14.00 / £9.95 ISBN 0-674-01359-X Cloth $24.95 / £16.95 ISBN 0-674-00478-7
new in paperback
The Early Admissions Game
Joining the Elite
CHRISTOPHER AVERY, ANDREW FAIRBANKS, AND RICHARD ZECKHAUSER
“The authors present a devastating portrait of elite college admissions—and early admissions in particular—as an elaborate and complicated ‘game’ ... [where the winners] tend to be privileged students who have access to highly skilled counselors with information pipelines to elite college admissions offices.” —Peter Sacks, The Nation
2003; 2004 35 line illus., 29 tables 400 pp. Paper $16.95 / £10.95 ISBN 0-674-01620-3
The Questions of Tenure
EDITED BY RICHARD P. CHAIT
“Most books about academic tenure are based on anecdotal or subjective information, but this one attempts to analyze this contentious topic using empirical research. Chait...and several colleagues collected faculty employment policy statements from over 200 colleges and universities and then surveyed and interviewed many professors and administrators on a variety of topics related to tenure. This provided the data for the 11 chapters, which range from an overview of current policies to a study of trends in academic employment in foreign countries.” —Will Hepfer, Library Journal
2002 10 line illus., 21 tables 352 pp. Cloth $40.00 / £25.95 ISBN 0-674-00771-9
Who Owns Academic Work?
Battling for Control of Intellectual Property
CORYNNE MCSHERRY
“This book provides not a legal but a cultural analysis of the social production of academic knowledge ... [McSherry] forces us to look at the data stream of modern society that passes through a series of institutions, all of which attempt to enforce conflicting ownership claims. When a professor delivers a lecture to students, is he or she making a ‘gift’ to the world in general? Or to the community of students concerned? Or does the professor retain the ownership of everything in the lecture? ... This is a highly stimulating work.” —Anthony Smith, Times Higher Education Supplement
2001; 2003 288 pp. Paper $16.95 / £10.95 ISBN 0-674-01243-7 Cloth $29.95 / £19.95 ISBN 0-674-00629-1
26
ACADEMICALLY SPEAKING
1-800-405-1619 / www.hup.harvard.edu
INDEX INDEX
Acosta-Hughes, Labored in Papyrus..., 24 Adorno/Benjamin, Complete..., 20 Alanen, Descartes’s Concept of Mind, 4 Albert, Time and Chance, 22 Aleinikoff, Semblances of Sovereignty, 11 Avery/et al., Early Admissions Game, 26 Beiser, German Idealism, 24 Beiser, Romantic Imperative, 16 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 20 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 20 Bourbon, Finding a Replacement..., 3 Brandom, Articulating Reasons, 6 Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead, 5 Camp, Confusion, 4 Casanova, World Republic of Letters, 18 Cavell, Cities of Words, 12 Chait, Questions of Tenure, 26 Chowers, Modern Self in the Labyrinth, 7 Coetzee, Doubling the Point, 19 Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian..., 9 Davidson, Emergence of Sexuality, 14 de Bolla, Art Matters, 17 De Caro/Macarthur, Naturalism..., 21 Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, 9 Finkelstein, Expression and the Inner, 5 Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow..., 17 Fleischacker, A Short History..., 7 Friedlander, J. J. Rousseau..., 18 Gibbard, Thinking How to Live, 5 Goldish, Sabbatean Prophets, 24 Hacking, Historical Ontology, 21 Hadot, Inner Citadel, Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 25 Hall/et al., Keywords and Concepts..., 19 Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel, 15 Hornsby, Simple Mindedness, 5 Hurley, Consciousness in Action, 6 Hurley, Justice, Luck, and Knowledge, 13 Keller, Making Sense of Life, 22 Kirp, Shakespeare, Einstein..., 26 Krause, Liberalism with Honor, 10 Latour, Politics of Nature, 21 Lear, Happiness, Death..., 6 Libet, Mind Time, 3 Light, Making the Most of College, 26 Lovibond, Ethical Formation, 4 MacGilvray, Reconstructing Public Reason, 7 Margalit, Ethics of Memory, 4 Martin, Inventing Superstition, 25 McGinn, Mindsight, 3 McSherry, Who Owns Academic..., 26 Muirhead, Just Work, 8 Nelson, Secret Life of Puppets, 17 Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s..., 8 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 15 Nozick, Invariances, 22 O’Malley, Four Cultures of the West, 14 Plutarch, Moralia, 25 Putnam, Collapse of the Fact/Value..., 13 Putnam, Ethics without Ontology, 12 Quine, Quintessence, 23 Rawls, Collected Papers, 10 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 11 Rawls, Law of Peoples, 10 Rawls, Lectures on the History..., 11 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 10 Rozemond, Descartes’s Dualism, 4 Ruse, Darwin and Design, 22 Sen, Rationality and Freedom, 8 Smith, Law’s Quandary, 13 Steiner, Lessons of the Masters, 14 Strevens, Bigger than Chaos, 22 Sunstein, Why Societies Need..., 8 Tamen, Friends of Interpretable..., 16 Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today, 9 Terada, Feeling in Theory, 24 Tichi, Embodiment of a Nation, 16 Toulmin, Return to Reason, 23 Wagenbach, Kafka, 19 Wark, Hacker Manifesto, 2 Weinberg, Facing Up, 22 Wellbery, New History..., 18 Wright, Saving the Differences, 23
