There is agency in all we do: thinking, doing, or making. We invent a tune, play, or use it to celebrate an occasion. Or we make a conceptual leap and ask more abstract questions about the conditions for agency. They include autonomy and self-appraisal, each contested by arguments immersing us in circumstances we don’t control. But can it be true we that have no personal responsibility for all we think and do?Agency: Moral Identity and Free Will proposes that deliberation, choice, ...

Communities are vital to personal and social well-being because collaboration is required where skills and resources are scarce; their pathologies—anonymity and isolation, tribalism and murder—defeat us.Community is often invoked respectfully but without a clear referent. The word is said to be used ninety-four ways, evidence that its sense is diffuse. Community clarifies the word's principal expressions and the alternative ideological spaces-holistic and ...

The team of Diamond and Weissman have been writing movies and mentoring filmmakers for decades. In this practical guide, they take the aspiring writer by the hand and guide them through the logistics and tools of writing an attention-grabbing, audience-pleasing screenplay. Readers will learn the interests and needs of managers, agents, producers, executives, financiers, directors, and actors. Diamond and Weissman attribute their phenomenal success to a career-long focus on the motives and ...

In Dworkin’s master work, the central thesis is that all areas of value depend on one another. This is one, big thing that the hedgehog knows, in contrast to the fox, who knows many little things. Dworkin’s understanding of the relationship—between ethics, morality, and political morality—is significantly revised and also greatly elaborated. He argues that “dignity” is the essential core of living well and that a satisfactory account of dignity would, in turn, point to two principles. The ...

In Pedagogy of Freedom Paulo Freire travels ever more deeply into the territory where learning and activism are the essence of human life. This profound new book shows why an engaged way of learning and teaching is central to the creation of the individual, culture, and history.Freire finds in today's emerging global society a new context in which education cannot be indifferent to the reproduction of dominant ideologies and the interrogation of them. He argues against "pr...

Multicultural Dynamics and the Ends of History provides a strikingly original reading of key texts in the philosophy of history by Kant, Hegel, and Marx, as well as strong arguments for why these texts are still relevant to understanding history today. Réal Fillion offers a critical exposition of the theses of these three authors on the dynamics and the ends of history, in order to provide an answer to the question: "Where are we headed?" Grounding his answer in the twin observati...

The question of what living is for-of what one should care about and why-is the most important question a person can ask. Yet under the influence of the modern research ideal, our colleges and universities have expelled this question from their classrooms, judging it unfit for organized study. In this eloquent and carefully considered book, Tony Kronman explores why this has happened and calls for the restoration of life’s most important question to an honored place in higher education.

"[These essays] are rich in argument, in clear and provocative presentation of complicated issues, and are often delightfully quotable. Behind the Veil of Economics makes instructive, disturbing, and lively reading." —Elizabeth Wolgast, New York Times Book ReviewWhat lies behind the veil of economics? Power and ideology, answers Robert Heilbroner—the power of our economic involvement in society to shape the ways we think about it; the visions and ...

Free Trade Reimagined begins with a sustained criticism of the heart of the emerging world economy, the theory and practice of free trade. Roberto Mangabeira Unger does not, however, defend protectionism against free trade. Instead, he attacks and revises the terms on which the traditional debate between free traders and protectionists has been joined.Unger's intervention in this major contemporary debate serves as a point of departure for a proposal to rethink the basic i...

What kind of animals are human beings? And how do our visions of the human shape our theories of social action and institutions? In Moral, Believing Animals, Christian Smith advances a creative theory of human persons and culture that offers innovative, challenging answers to these and other fundamental questions in sociological, cultural, and religious theory. Smith suggests that human beings have a peculiar set of capacities and proclivities that distinguishes them significantly...

The books in this bite-sized new series contain no complicated techniques or tricky materials, making them ideal for the busy, the time-pressured or the merely curious. Ethics Made Easy is a short, simple and to-the-point guide. In just 96 pages, the reader will discover all the key ideas, from altruism to utilitarianism. Ideal for the busy, the time-pressured or the merely curious, Ethics Made Easy is a quick, no-effort way to break into this fascinating topic.

Since its publication in 1971, John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice has been the subject of a lively debate among philosophers, economists, and political scientists. In this book, Robert Paul Wolff provides an interpretation and critique of Rawls’ theory that both clarifies it and reveals its basic flaws.According to Professor Wolff, Rawls’ device of a bargaining game among self-interested parties is designed to solve Kant’s problem of deriving substantive moral and political p...