“The generation of 1930 in French intellectual life was unique in the gravity of the challenges they faced.” Simone Weil — the brilliant social and political theorist, activist, and spiritual writer — was one of an eminent company in the France of the 1930s who responded to these challenges. In her brief, remarkable life she wrote a host of essays and letters and filled several notebooks with reflections. Hellman’s volume sets out the single world view — with its paradoxes and its logics —...

A watershed event in the field of sociology, this text introduced "a major breakthrough in the sociology of knowledge and sociological theory generally" (George Simpson, American Sociological Review ).In this seminal book, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann examine how knowledge forms and how it is preserved and altered within a society. Unlike earlier theorists and philosophers, Berger and Luckmann go beyond intellectual history and focu...

The City of the Sun is a philosophical work by the Italian Dominican philosopher Tommaso Campanella. It is an important early utopian work. The work was written shortly after Campanella's imprisonment for heresy and sedition.The book is presented as a dialogue between "a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitaller and a Genoese Sea-Captain". Inspired by Plato's Republic and the description of Atlantis in Timaeus, it describes a theocratic society where goods, women and children are held...

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 Theory of Everybody, rather than play upon our fears, explores the positive opportunities presented by super-intelligent machines. In several genres—a play, essays, articles, and science fiction—Robert W. Fuller explores the most daunting challenge we humans will ever face: the advent of robots more intelligent than ourselves. This multifaceted collection suggests a way to retain our dignity even though we may lose our preeminence.

This book has already been published in Italy by the university press Aracne (http://www.aracneeditrice.it/aracneweb/index.php/pubblicazione.html?item=9788854857957). Its twofold purpose is to define some dimensions of individual autonomy (in particular, existential, functional and relational autonomy) and promote their dissemination within society, mainly through the introduction of some legal and economic tools.Starting from references to authors such as Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant...

A philosophical-cultural exploration, this book expands the discussion of "class" from a novel perspective. Following the current debates about wealth and class, the contributors address the social and cultural phenomena of class from a uniquely innovative philosophical approach and reconsider philosophical "givens" within the context of culture.

Liberalism is the political philosophy of equal persons - yet liberalism has refused equality to those it saw as sub-persons. Liberalism is the creed of fairness - yet liberalism has been complicit with European imperialism and African slavery. Liberalism is the classic ideology of Enlightenment and political transparency - yet liberalism has cast a dark veil over its actual racist past and present. In sum, liberalism's promise of equal rights has historically been denied to blacks and oth...

Considering the different traditions of cosmopolitan thinking and experimentation, this cutting edge volume examines the contemporary revival of cosmopolitanism as a response to the challenges of living in an interdependent world. Through a unique multidisciplinary approach, it takes the debate beyond the one-sided universalism of the Euro-American world and explores the multiverse of transformations which confront cosmopolitanism. The collection highlights central questions of cosmopolita...

Michael Jackson has spent much of his career elaborating his rich conception of lifeworlds, mining his ethnographic and personal experience for insights into how our subjective and social lives are mutually constituted.In How Lifeworlds Work, Jackson draws on years of ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa to highlight the dynamic quality of human relationships and reinvigorate the study of kinship and ritual. How, he asks, do we manage the perpetual process of accommodatio...

This book is a philosophical analysis of the ethical treatment of refugees and stateless people, a group of people who, though extremely important politically, have been greatly under theorized philosophically. The limited philosophical discussion of refugees by philosophers focuses narrowly on the question of whether or not we, as members of Western states, have moral obligations to admit refugees into our countries. This book reframes this debate and shows why it is important to think et...

In A Philosophy of Sport Steven Connor offers a new philosophical understanding of sport in its own terms, in distinction to previous writing on the philosophy of sport that has tended to see sport as a kind of testing ground for philosophical theories devised to deal with other kinds of problems – of ethics, aesthetics or logical categorization. In order to define what sport essentially is and means, Connor presents a complete grammar of sport, isolating and describing its essent...