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In this imaginative and comprehensive study, Edward Casey, one of the most incisive interpreters of the Continental philosophical tradition, offers a philosophical history of the evolving conceptualizations of place and space in Western thought. Not merely a presentation of the ideas of other philosophers, The Fate of Place is acutely sensitive to silences, absences, and missed opportunities in the complex history of philosophical approaches to space and place. A central theme is the increasing neglect of place in favor of space from the seventh century A.D. onward, amounting to the virtual exclusion of place by the end of the eighteenth century. Casey begins with mythological and religious creation stories and the theories of Plato and Aristotle and then explores the heritage of Neoplatonic, medieval, and Renaissance speculations about space. He presents an impressive history of the birth of modern spatial conceptions in the writings of Newton, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant and delineates the evolution of twentieth-century phenomenological approaches in the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and Heidegger. In the book's final section, Casey explores the postmodern theories of Foucault, Derrida, Tschumi, Deleuze and Guattari, and Irigaray.

The first of its kind, A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics presents a synoptic view of the arts, which crosses traditional boundaries and explores the aesthetic experience of the ancients across a range of media—oral, aural, visual, and literary. * Investigates the many ways in which the arts were experienced and conceptualized in the ancient world * Explores the aesthetic experience of the ancients across a range of media, treating literary, oral, aural, and visual arts together in a single volume * Presents an integrated perspective on the major themes of ancient aesthetics which challenges traditional demarcations * Raises questions about the similarities and differences between ancient and modern ways of thinking about the place of art in society

Black is Beautiful identifies and explores the most significant philosophical issues that emerge from the aesthetic dimensions of black life, providing a long-overdue synthesis and the first extended philosophical treatment of this crucial subject. * The first extended philosophical treatment of an important subject that has been almost entirely neglected by philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of art * Takes an important step in assembling black aesthetics as an object of philosophical study * Unites two areas of scholarship for the first time – philosophical aesthetics and black cultural theory, dissolving the dilemma of either studying philosophy, or studying black expressive culture * Brings a wide range of fields into conversation with one another– from visual culture studies and art history to analytic philosophy to musicology – producing mutually illuminating approaches  that challenge some of the basic suppositions of each * Well-balanced, up-to-date, and beautifully written as well as inventive and insightful * Winner of The American Society of Aesthetics Outstanding Monograph Prize 2017

Use your imagination! The demand is as important as it is confusing. What is the imagination? What is its value? Where does it come from? And where is it going in a time when even the obscene seems overdone and passe? This book takes up these questions and argues for the centrality of imagination in human cognition. It traces the development of the imagination in Kant's critical philosophy (particularly the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment) and claims that the insights of Kantian aesthetic theory, especially concerning the nature of creativity, common sense, and genius, influenced the development of nineteenth-century American philosophy. The book identifies the central role of the imagination in the philosophy of Peirce, a role often overlooked in analytic treatments of his thought. The final chapters pursue the observation made by Kant and Peirce that imaginative genius is a type of natural gift (ingenium) and must in some way be continuous with the creative force of nature. It makes this final turn by way of contemporary studies of metaphor, embodied cognition, and cognitive neuroscience.

For many years essentialism was considered beyond the pale in philosophy, a relic of discredited Aristotelianism. This is no longer so. Kripke and Putnam have made belief in essential natures respectable once more. Harré and Madden have argued against Hume's theory of causation and developed an alternative theory based on the assumption that there are genuine causal powers in nature. Dretske, Tooley, Armstrong, Swoyer, and Carroll have all developed strong alternatives to Hume's theory of the laws of nature. And Shoemaker has developed a thoroughly non-Humean theory of properties. The \"new essentialism\" has evolved from these beginnings and can now reasonably claim to be a metaphysic for a modern scientific understanding of the world - one that challenges the conception of the world as comprising passive entities whose interactions are to be explained by appeal to contingent laws of nature externally imposed.

Free will remains one of the great problems in philosophy. Whether human choices and actions are causally determined or in some way free and the implications of opting for one position or the other on our moral, personal, and social lives continues to challenge philosophers. Written in a clear and uncomplicated style, this introduction to the problem of free will provides readers with a solid grasp of the central issues as well as the ability to analyse and evaluate the ideas and arguments involved. Free Will explores the determinist rejection of free will through detailed exposition of the central determinist argument and consideration of responses to each of its premises. At every stage familiar examples and case studies help frame and ground the argument. Focusing on a clear, single line of argument allows the author to demonstrate what scrupulous and persistent analytic philosophical inquiry looks and feels like in practice. The manner and approach used throughout encourage the reader to contribute to the debate as an engaged participant. Free Will will be welcomed by students looking for an engaging and clear introduction to the subject. As a rigorous exercise in philosophical argument it will serve the beginning philosophy student as an excellent spring board into the subject more generally.

In the first part of the book, Dale Jacquette explores questions of pure philosophical ontology: what is meant by the concept of being, why does something exist rather than nothing, and why there is only one logically contingent actual world. The author argues that logic provides the only possible answers to these fundamental problems of pure ontology. In the second part of the book Jacquette examines issues of applied scientific ontology and provides a critical survey of some of the most influential traditional ontologies, such as the distinction between appearance and reality and the categories of substance and transcendence. The ontology of physical entities - space, time, matter, and causation - are examined as well as the ontology of abstract entities - sets, numbers, properties, relations, and propositions. The special problems posed by the subjectivity of mind and of God are also explored. The book concludes with a chapter on the ontology of culture, language, and art.

In the section on laws of nature, Psillos considers both the regularity view of laws and laws as relations among universals as well as alternative approaches to laws. In the final section on explanation he examines in detail the issues arising from deductive-nomological explanation and statistical explanation before considering the explanation of laws and the metaphysics of explanation. Accessible to students of all levels the author provides an excellent introduction to one of the most enduring problems of philosophy.

The book includes chapters on forms of natural realism, theories of perceptual experience, representationalism, the argument from illusion, phenomenological senses, types of perceptual content, the representationalist/intentionalist thesis, and adverbialist accounts of perceptual experience. The ideas of Austin, Dretske, Heidegger, Millikan, Putnam, and Robinson are considered among others and the reader is given an invaluable philosophical framework within which to consider the issues.