This title was first published in 2000: The author is a legal and moral philosopher who has applied the insight and methods of Wittgenstein to a range of topics in constitutional law, criminal law and theories of justice. This collection offers his most important and influential essays, together with an introductory essay which reviews and develops his contribution to legal and moral philosophy.

This title was first published in 2000: This volume includes essays on the theory and practice of criminal law. Many of the essays are interdisciplinary, reflecting the influence of developments in philosophy, sociology and psychology on the concept of criminality. Cross-cultural issues are also raised and considered.

This book uses philosophy, psychology, and autobiography in an innovative exploration of self and self-knowledge. It argues that our sense of who we are is an ever-changing response to the world of interpersonal experience, an essential project that is always subject to revision and change. It explores self-knowledge through linked topics. What characteristics make an individual identifiable and unique, and how are they experienced introspectively? What insight can be gained through the me...

Wearing a mask—putting on another face—embodies a fundamental human fantasy of inhabiting other bodies and experiencing other lives. In this extensively illustrated book, Thomas Morawetz explores how the creation of transformational makeup for theatre, movies, and television fulfills this fantasy of self-transformation and satisfies the human desire to become "the other."Morawetz begins by discussing the cultural role of fantasies of transformation and what these fantasies reveal a...

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 ...

John Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition—justice as fairness—and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. “Each person,” writes Rawls, “possesses an inviolability founded on justice that ...

“A milestone in political and moral philosophy, as groundbreaking as the theories of Bentham and Kant and arguably the most important and influential piece of contemporary philosophy of the last century.” —The GuardianThe principles of justice that Rawls set forth in this book are those that free and rational people would accept in an “original position” of equality. In this hypothetical situation, which corresponds to the state of nature in social contract...

‘When we claim to have been injured by language, what kind of claim do we make?’ - Judith Butler, Excitable SpeechExcitable Speech is widely hailed as a tour de force and one of Judith Butler’s most important books. Examining in turn debates about hate speech, pornography and gayness within the US military, Butler argues that words can wound and linguistic violence is its own kind of violence. Yet she also argues that speech is ‘excitable’ and flu...

Contemporary democracies have granted an expansive amount of power to unelected judges that sit in constitutional or supreme courts. This power shift has never been easily squared with the institutional backbones through which democracy is popularly supposed to be structured. The best institutional translation of a 'government of the people, by the people and for the people' is usually expressed through elections and electoral representation in parliaments. Judicial review of legislation h...

Exploring Law's Empire is a collection of essays examining the work of Ronald Dworkin in the philosophy of law and constitutionalism. A group of leading legal theorists develop, defend and critique the major areas of Dworkin's work, including his criticism of legal positivism, his theory of law as integrity, and his work on constitutional theory. The volume concludes with a lengthy response to the essays by Dworkin himself, which develops and clarifies many of his positions on the...

In this book Joseph Raz develops his views on some of the central questions in practical philosophy: legal, political, and moral. The book provides an overview of Raz's work on jurisprudence and the nature of law in the context of broader questions in the philosophy of practical reason. The book opens with a discussion of methodological issues, focusing on understanding the nature of jurisprudence. It asks how the nature of law can be explained, and how the success of a legal theory can be...

Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics**, originally published in 1993, has been called a founding text of agonism, which treats political contestation not as a regrettably necessary way to correct political imperfections but as a necessary, sometimes joyful feature of democratic life.** As Bonnie Honig writes in the preface to this thirtieth anniversary edition, "the agonism that informs this book is democratic: it is committed to shared spaces and rel...