The concept of a reason is now central to many areas of contemporary philosophy. Key theses in ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, philosophy of action, and the philosophy of the emotions, among others, have come to be framed in terms of reasons. And yet, despite their centrality, theorists seem to take inconsistent things for granted about how reasons work, what kinds of things can be reasons, what reasons favor, and more. Somehow reasons have come to be both indispensable and imp...

How to avoid the trap of taking conflicts so personallyWe’re all imperfect. Good relationships require seeing each other through these imperfections—distinguishing what is signal, and what is noise. But sometimes we mistake noise for signal—or worse, signal for noise. And even when we get things right, the other person can be getting them wrong. In When Things Get Personal, Mark Schroeder shows that the better we can learn to tell the difference between si...

According to noncognitivists, when we say that stealing is wrong, what we are doing is more like venting our feelings about stealing or encouraging one another not to steal, than like stating facts about morality. These ideas challenge the core not only of much thinking about morality and metaethics, but also of much philosophical thought about language and meaning.Noncognitivism in Ethics is an outstanding introduction to these theories, ranging from their early history through th...

In the last five decades, ethical theory has been preoccupied by a turn to reasons. The vocabulary of reasons has become a common currency not only in ethics, but in epistemology, action theory, and many related areas. It is now common, for example, to see central theses such as evidentialism in epistemology and egalitarianism in political philosophy formulated in terms of reasons. And some have even claimed that the vocabulary of reasons is so useful precisely because reasons have analyti...

Existentialist philosophy has, at times, been exceptionally popular. This is because of its promise of possibility, both in doctrine and in style: Its doctrine promises that we can break free from the shackles of cognitive or social structures we are thrown into, and we can overcome our marred personal or collective history. Its style promises that philosophy can be exciting, moving, exhilarating, and funny. Analytic Existentialism brings together ten essays in which analytic phil...

Normative ethical theories generally purport to be explanatory--to tell us not just what is good, or what conduct is right, but why. Drawing on both historical and contemporary approaches, Mark Schroeder offers a distinctive picture of how such explanations must work, and of the specific commitments that they incur. According to Schroeder, explanatory moral theories can be perfectly general only if they are reductive, offering accounts of what it is for something to be good, right, or what...

Expressivism - the sophisticated contemporary incarnation of the noncognitivist research program of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare - is no longer the province of metaethicists alone. Its comprehensive view about the nature of both normative language and normative thought has also recently been applied to many topics elsewhere in philosophy - including logic, probability, mental and linguistic content, knowledge, epistemic modals, belief, the a priori, and even quantifiers. Yet the semantic comm...

Using path-breaking discoveries of cognitive science, Mark Johnson argues that humans are fundamentally imaginative moral animals, challenging the view that morality is simply a system of universal laws dictated by reason. According to the Western moral tradition, we make ethical decisions by applying universal laws to concrete situations. But Johnson shows how research in cognitive science undermines this view and reveals that imagination has an essential role in ethical deliberation.

As an advanced introduction to the challenging topic of free will, this book is designed for upper-level undergraduates interested in a comprehensive first-stop into the field’s issues and debates. It is written by two of the leading participants in those debates—a compatibilist on the issue of free will and determinism (Michael McKenna) and an incompatibilist (Derk Pereboom). These two authors achieve an admirable objectivity and clarity while still illuminating the field’s complexity and...

The field of composition theory has emerged as part of the intellectual turmoil and set of pedagogical debates which have beset higher education for the last four decades and is now revolutionizing the theory and praxis of higher education. This volume examines three of the dominant pedagogical theories within composition theory: expressivist, cognitivist, and social-constructivist and builds its critique on the fact that much of modern composition theory has focused on epistemological con...

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of social work find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and ed...

Drawing on relevant discussions of embodiment in phenomenology, feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, queer theory and post-colonial theory, Body Images explores the role played by the body image in our everyday existence.