Philosophy

The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics looks at a fascinating theme in philosophy and the arts. Leading figures in the field contribute forty-eight articles which detail the theory, application, history, and future of philosophy and all branches of the arts. The first article of the book gives a general overview of the field of philosophical aesthetics in two parts: the first is a quick sketch of the lay of the land, and the second an account of five central problems over the past fifty years. The second article gives an extensive survey of recent work in the history of modern aesthetics, or aesthetic thought from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. There are three main parts to the book. The first part comprises sections dealing with problems in aesthetics, such as expression, fiction or aesthetic experience, considered apart from any particular artform. The second part contains articles on problems in aesthetics as they arise in connection with particular artforms, such as music, film, or dance. The third part addresses relations between aesthetics and other fields of enquiry, and explores viewpoints or concerns complimentary to those prominent in mainstream analytical aesthetics.

The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy presents the first collective study of the development of philosophy in North America, from the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. Twenty-six leading experts examine distinctive features of American philosophy, trace notable themes, and consider the legacy and influence of notable figures, such as Emerson, James and Dewey.

Humans encounter and use animals in a stunning number of ways. The nature of these animals and the justifiability or unjustifiabilitly of human uses of them are the subject matter of this volume. Philosophers have long been intrigued by animal minds and vegetarianism, but only around the last quarter of the twentieth century did a significant philosophical literature begin to be developed on both the scientific study of animals and the ethics of human uses of animals. This literature had a primary focus on the discussion of animal psychology, the moral status of animals, the nature and significance of species, and a number of practical problems. The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics is designed to capture the nature of the questions as they stand today and to propose solutions to many of the major problems. Several articles in this volume explore matters that have never previously been examined by philosophers. The articles explore many theoretical issues about animal minds and an array of practical concerns about animal products, farm animals, hunting, circuses, zoos, the entertainment industry, safety-testing on animals, the status and moral significance of species, environmental ethics, the nature and significance of the minds of animals, and so on. They also investigate what the future may be expected to bring in the way of new scientific developments and new moral problems.

Thomas Aquinas (1224/6–1274) lived an active, demanding academic and ecclesiastical life that ended while he was still comparatively young. He nonetheless produced many works, varying in length from a few pages to a few volumes. The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas is an introduction to this influential author and a guide to his thought on almost all the major topics on which he wrote. The book begins with an account of Aquinas's life and works. The next section contains a series of articles that set Aquinas in his intellectual context. They focus on the philosophical sources that are likely to have influenced his thinking, the most prominent of which were certain Greek philosophers (chiefly Aristotle), Latin Christian writers (such as Augustine), and Jewish and Islamic authors (such as Maimonides and Avicenna). The subsequent parts of the book address topics that Aquinas himself discussed. These include metaphysics, the existence and nature of God, ethics and action theory, epistemology, philosophy of mind and human nature, the nature of language, and an array of theological topics, including Trinity, Incarnation, sacraments, resurrection, and the problem of evil, among others. These articles include more than thirty contributions on topics central to Aquinas's own worldview. The final articles of the volume address the development of Aquinas's thought and its historical influence.

This book reflects the lively international character of Aristotelian studies, drawing contributors from across the globe, and including a preponderance of authors from the University of Oxford, which has been a center of Aristotelian studies for many centuries. It explores the broad range of activity Aristotelian studies comprise today, including the primarily textual and philological to the application of broadly Aristotelian themes to contemporary problems irrespective of their narrow textual fidelity. In between these extremes one finds the core of Aristotelian scholarship as it is practiced today, and as it is primarily represented in this volume: textual exegesis and criticism. Even within this more limited core activity, one witnesses a rich range of pursuits, with some scholars seeking primarily to understand Aristotle in his own philosophical milieu and others seeking rather to place him into direct conversation with contemporary philosophers and their present-day concerns. The book, prefaced with an introduction to Aristotle's life and works by the editor, covers the main areas of Aristotelian philosophy and intellectual enquiry: ethics, metaphysics, politics, logic, language, psychology, rhetoric, poetics, theology, physical and biological investigation, and philosophical method. It also looks both backwards and forwards: two articles recount Aristotle's treatment of earlier philosophers, who proved formative to his own orientations and methods, and another three chart the long afterlife of Aristotle's philosophy: in Late Antiquity, in the Islamic World, and in the Latin West.

Assertions belong to the family of speech acts that make claims regarding how things are. They include statements, avowals, reports, expressed judgments, and testimonies—acts which are relevant across a host of issues not only in philosophy of language and linguistics but also in subdisciplines such as epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, and social and political philosophy. Over the past two decades, the amount of scholarship investigating the speech act of assertion has increased dramatically, and the scope of such research has also grown. The Oxford Handbook of Assertion explores various dimensions of the act of assertion: its nature; its place in a theory of speech acts, and in semantics and meta-semantics; its role in epistemology; and the various social, political, and ethical dimensions of the act. Essays from leading theorists situate assertion in relation to other types of speech acts, exploring the connection between assertions and other phenomena of interest not only to philosophers but also to linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, lawyers, computer scientists, and theorists from communication studies.

The Oxford Handbook of Berkeley is a compendious examination of a large number of topics in the philosophy of George Berkeley (1685–1753), Anglican bishop of Cloyne, the famous idealist and most illustrious Irish philosopher. Berkeley is best known for his denial of the existence of material substance and his insistence that the only things that exist in the universe are minds (including God) and their ideas. But Berkeley was a polymath who contributed to a variety of different disciplines, not well distinguished from philosophy in the eighteenth century, including the theory and psychology of vision, the nature and functioning of language, the debate over infinitesimals in mathematics, political philosophy, economics, chemistry (including his favored panacea, tar water), and theology. This volume includes contributions from thirty-four expert commentators on Berkeley’s philosophy, some of whom provide a state-of-the-art account of his philosophical achievements and some of whom place his philosophy in historical context by comparing and contrasting it with the views of his contemporaries (including Mandeville, Collier, and Edwards), as well as with philosophers who preceded him (such as Descartes, Locke, Malebranche, and Leibniz) and others who succeeded him (such as Hume, Reid, Kant, and Shepherd).

The Oxford Handbook of Bioethics is an authoritative, state-of-the-art guide to current issues in bioethics. Thirty-four contributors reflect the interdisciplinary nature that is characteristic of bioethics, and its increasingly international character. Thirty topics are covered in articles written by some of the world's leading figures in the field, as well as by some newer ‘up-and-comers’. The articles address both perennial issues, such as the methodology of bioethics, autonomy, justice, death, and moral status, and newer issues, such as bio-banking, stem cell research, cloning, pharmacogenomics, and bioterrorism. Other topics concern mental illness and moral agency, the rule of double effect, justice and the elderly, the definition of death, organ transplantation, feminist approaches to commodification of the body, life extension, advance directives, physician-assisted death, abortion, genetic research, population screening, enhancement, research ethics, and the implications of public and global health for bioethics.

This book examines British philosophy in an eighteenth-century context. It looks at the theories of John Locke that mattered most to philosophers of the period, along with Isaac Newton's complex and contested legacy. It also discusses a number of different interpretations of what a ‘scientific approach’ to human nature might look like and shows that the idea of a science of man goes beyond Lockeanism and Newtonianism. Moreover, the book explores important contributions to the theory of perception and addresses the question of how sensory experience served to stock the mind with ideas, focusing on George Berkeley and Thomas Reid and their arguments against the simple representationalism apparently expounded by Locke. There is also a discussion on the relation between the passions and other important faculties of the mind, such as the faculties of reason, will, and taste. The book shows that the philosophy of eighteenth-century politics was a very wide-ranging business, encompassing topics such as the origins of civil society, the British constitution, political economy, and religion and the rationality of belief in revelation.

This volume contains thirty new essays by leading experts on British philosophy in the nineteenth century, and provides a comprehensive and unrivalled resource for advanced students and scholars. As well as the most celebrated figures, such as Mill, Spencer, Sidgwick, and Bradley, the Handbook discusses many other less well-known names and debates from the period, such as Whewell, Shadworth Hodgson, and Martineau. The Handbook contains six parts: Part I examines logic and scientific method from Whately through to the advent of modern formal logic; Part II discusses some of the century’s most famous metaphysical systems such as those of the Scottish Common Sense school, J. F. Ferrier and F. H. Bradley; Part III covers science and philosophy, paying particular attention to positivism and the impact of Darwin’s evolutionary theory; Part IV explores ethical, social, and political thought, including the lesser known themes of feminism and British Socialism; Part V concerns religious philosophy; and Part VI examines the changes which took place in the practice of philosophy itself during the nineteenth-century. Prefaced by an introductory article which contextualises and relates the various themes and controversies of the century, each chapter provides an overview of the topic under consideration and surveys of the state of current research, while at the same time offering new ideas and suggestions for future interpretation.

The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy of the 17th Century provides an advanced comprehensive overview of the issues that are informing research on the subject of British philosophy in the seventeenth century, while at the same time offering new directions for research to take. It covers the whole of the seventeenth century, ranging from Francis Bacon to John Locke and Isaac Newton. The book contains five parts: the introductory Part I examines the state of the discipline and the nature of its practitioners as the century unfolded; Part II discusses the leading natural philosophers and the philosophy of nature, including Bacon, Boyle, and Newton; Part III covers knowledge and the human faculty of the understanding; Part IV explores the leading topics in British moral philosophy from the period; and Part V concerns political philosophy. In addition to dealing with canonical authors and celebrated texts, such as Thomas Hobbes and his Leviathan, it discusses many less-well-known figures and debates from the period whose importance is only now being appreciated.

The Oxford Handbook of Business Ethics provides a comprehensive treatment of the field of business ethics as seen from a philosophical approach. Business ethics raises many important philosophical issues. A first set of issues concerns the methodology of business ethics. What is the role of ethical theory in business ethics? To what extent, if at all, can thinking in business ethics be enhanced by philosophy, so as to provide real moral guidance? Another set of issues involves questions regarding markets, capitalism, and economic justice. There are related concerns about the nature of business organizations and the responsibilities they have to their members, owners, and society. This Handbook consists of twenty-four articles that survey the field of business ethics, covering all major topics about the relationship between ethical theory and business ethics. The articles are written by philosophers who offer a systematic interpretation of their topics and discuss various moral controversies and dilemmas that plague business relationships and government-business relationships.

The Oxford Handbook of Causation provides an overview of topics related to causation, as well as the history of the causation debate from the ancient Greeks to the logical empiricists. Causation is a central topic in many areas of philosophy. In metaphysics, philosophers want to know what causation is, and how it is related to laws of nature, probability, action, and freedom of will. In epistemology, philosophers investigate how causal claims can be inferred from statistical data, and how causation is related to perception, knowledge, and explanation. In the philosophy of mind, philosophers want to know whether and how the mind can be said to have causal efficacy, and in ethics, whether there is a moral distinction between acts and omissions and whether the moral value of an act can be judged according to its consequences. In addition, causation is a contested concept in other fields of enquiry, such as biology, physics, and the law. The articles, which are all written by leading experts in the field of causation, provide surveys of contemporary debates, while often also advancing novel and controversial claims.

This handbook contains thirty-two previously unpublished contributions to consequentialist ethics by leading scholars, covering what’s happening in the field today as well as pointing to new directions for future research. Consequentialism is a rival to such moral theories as deontology, contractualism, and virtue ethics. But it’s more than just one rival among many, for every plausible moral theory must concede that the goodness of an act’s consequences is something that matters even if it’s not the only thing that matters. Thus, all plausible moral theories will accept both that the fact that an act would produce good consequences constitutes a moral reason to perform it and that the better that act’s consequences the greater the moral reason there is to perform it. Now, if this is correct, then much of the research concerning consequentialist ethics is important for ethics in general. For instance, one thing that consequentialist researchers have investigated is what sorts of consequences matter: the consequences that some act would have or the consequences that it could have—if, say, the agent were to follow up by performing some subsequent act. And it’s reasonable to suppose that the answer to such questions will be relevant for normative ethics regardless of whether the goodness of consequences is the only thing that matters (as consequentialists presume) or just one of many things that matter (as nonconsequentialists presume).

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology presents twenty-eight chapters on the field of contemporary phenomenology, and gives an overview of the type of work and range of topics found and discussed in contemporary phenomenology. The chapters aim to articulate and develop original theoretical perspectives. Some of them are concerned with issues and questions typical and distinctive of phenomenological philosophy, while others address questions familiar to analytic philosophers, but do so with arguments and ideas taken from phenomenology. Some offer detailed analyses of concrete phenomena; others take a more comprehensive perspective and seek to outline and motivate the future direction of phenomenology. The book aims to provide a definitive guide to what is currently going on in phenomenology. It includes discussions of such diverse topics as intentionality, embodiment, perception, naturalism, temporality, self-consciousness, language, knowledge, ethics, politics, art and religion, and will make it clear that phenomenology, far from being a tradition of the past, is alive and in a position to make valuable contributions to contemporary thought.

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy is the definitive guide to what is happening in the lively and fascinating subject of contemporary philosophy. More than thirty distinguished scholars contribute incisive and up-to-date critical surveys of the principal areas of research into this subject. The coverage is broad, with sections devoted to moral philosophy, social and political philosophy, philosophy of mind and action, philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of the sciences.

The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy is a guide to the major themes of the continental European tradition in philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors, who are all leading figures in the field, provide a thematic treatment of continental philosophy, treating its subject matter philosophically and not simply as a series of museum pieces from the history of ideas. The scope of the volume is broad, with discussions covering a wide range of philosophical movements including German Idealism, existentialism, phenomenology, Marxism, postmodernism, and critical theory, as well as thinkers like Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and Foucault.

A collection of fifty essays on Descartes and his influence in the seventeenth century. The first section is devoted to various aspects of Descartes’s philosophy (biography, epistemology, metaphysics, natural philosophy (science), mathematics, philosophical theology, etc.). The second section is devoted to Descartes’s influence, especially Cartesians and the Cartesian movement, in France, the Netherlands, Italy, England and elsewhere. The third section is devoted to the critics and opponents of Descartes and Cartesianism.

John Dewey was the foremost figure and public intellectual in early to mid-twentieth-century American philosophy. He is the most academically cited Anglophone philosopher of the past century, and he is among the most cited Americans of any century. In this comprehensive volume spanning thirty-five chapters, leading scholars help researchers access particular aspects of Dewey’s thought, navigate the enormous and rapidly developing literature, and participate in current scholarship in light of prospects in key topical areas. Beginning with a framing essay by Philip Kitcher calling for a transformation of philosophical research, contributors interpret, appraise, and critique Dewey’s philosophy under the following headings: Metaphysics; Epistemology, Science, Language, and Mind; Ethics, Law, and the Starting Point; Social and Political Philosophy, Race, and Feminist Philosophy; Philosophy of Education; Aesthetics; Instrumental Logic, Philosophy of Technology, and the Unfinished Project of Modernity; Dewey in Cross-Cultural Dialogue; The American Philosophical Tradition, the Social Sciences, and Religion; and Public Philosophy and Practical Ethics.

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please read the site FAQs.

This volume collects previously unpublished work on distributive justice written by leading political philosophers. Its aim is to provide a wide-ranging overview of the central contemporary debates—some more familiar than others—concerning distributive justice. The volume opens with an introduction and its thirty-two chapters are divided into four parts. The chapters of Part I introduce readers to the main contemporary approaches to distributive justice; those of Part II discuss the relation between distributive justice and some other social virtues; and those of Part III address some central foundational issues that affect our thinking about justice. Finally, the chapters of Part IV examine the implications of distributive justice for some key aspects of social life.

Environmental ethics is an academic subfield of philosophy concerned with normative and evaluative propositions about the world of nature and, perhaps more generally, the moral fabric of relations between human beings and the world we occupy. This Handbook contains forty-five newly commissioned essays written by leading experts and emerging voices. The essays range over a broad variety of issues, concepts, and perspectives that are both central to and characteristic of the field, thus providing an authoritative but accessible account of the history, analysis, and prospect of ideas that are essential to contemporary environmental ethics. The Handbook includes sections on the broad social contexts in which we find ourselves (e.g., chapters on history, science, economics, governance, and the Anthropocene), on what ought to count morally and why (e.g., chapters on humanity, animals, living individuals, ecological collectives, and wild nature), on the nature and meaning of environmental values (e.g., truth and goodness, practical reasons, hermeneutics, phenomenology, and aesthetics), on theoretical understandings of how we should act (e.g., on consequentialism, duty and obligation, character, caring relationships, and the sacred), on key concepts (e.g., responsibility, justice, gender, rights, ecological space, risk and precaution, citizenship, future generations, and sustainability), on specific areas of environmental concern (e.g., pollution, population, energy, food, water, mass extinction, technology and ecosystem management), on climate change considered as the defining environmental problem of our time (e.g., chapters on mitigation, adaptation, diplomacy, and geoengineering), and on social change (e.g., pragmatism, conflict, sacrifice, and action).

The Oxford Handbook of Epistemology contains work by today's leading figures in the field of epistemology. The articles function not only as a survey of key areas, but as original scholarship on a range of vital topics. In the concept-sensitive hands of philosophers, epistemology focuses on the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge. It examines the defining ingredients, the sources, and the limits of knowledge. Given the central role of epistemology in the history of philosophy as well as in contemporary philosophy, epistemologists will always have work to do. Debates over the analysis of knowledge, the sources of knowledge and the status of skepticism will alone keep the discipline of epistemology active and productive. The book explains the main ideas and problems of contemporary epistemology while avoiding overly technical detail.

The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory is a reference work in ethical theory, consisting of articles by leading moral philosophers. Ethical theories have always been of central importance to philosophy, and remain so—ethical theory is one of the most active areas of philosophical research and teaching today. Courses in ethics are taught in colleges and universities at all levels, and ethical theory is the organizing principle for all of them. The book is divided into two parts, mirroring the field. The first part treats meta-ethical theory, which deals with theoretical questions about morality and moral judgment, including questions about moral language, the epistemology of moral belief, the truth aptness of moral claims, and so forth. The second part addresses normative theory, which deals with general moral issues, including the plausibility of various ethical theories and abstract principles of behavior. Examples of such theories are consequentialism and virtue theory. The twenty-five contributors cover the field in a comprehensive and highly accessible way, while achieving three goals: exposition of central ideas, criticism of other approaches, and putting forth a distinct viewpoint.

This handbook explores the topic of death and dying from the late twentieth to the early twenty-first centuries, with particular emphasis on the United States. In this period, technology has radically changed medical practices and the way we die as structures of power have been reshaped by the rights claims of African Americans, women, gays, students, and, most relevant here, patients. Respecting patients’ values has been recognized as the essential moral component of clinical decision making. Technology’s promise has been seen to have a dark side: it prolongs the dying process. For the first time in history, human beings have the ability to control the timing of death. With this ability comes a responsibility that is awesome and inescapable. How we understand and manage this responsibility is the theme of this volume. The book has six sections. Section I examines how the law has helped shape clinical practice, emphasizing the roles of rights and patient autonomy. Section II focuses on specific clinical issues, including death and dying in children, continuous sedation as a way to relieve suffering at the end of life, and the problem of prognostication in patients who are thought to be dying. Section III considers psychosocial and cultural issues. Section IV discusses death and dying among various vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and persons with disabilities. Section V deals with physician-assisted suicide and active euthanasia (lethal injection). Finally, Section VI looks at hospice and palliative care as ways to address the psychosocial and ethical problems of death and dying.

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook; however, the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please read the site FAQs.

This exciting new Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the contemporary state of the field. The editors’ introduction and forty-five essays cover feminist critical engagements with philosophy and adjacent scholarly fields, as well as feminist approaches to current debates and crises across the world. Authors cover topics ranging from the ways in which feminist philosophy attends to other systems of oppression, and the gendered, racialized, and classed assumptions embedded in philosophical concepts, to feminist perspectives on prominent subfields of philosophy. The first section contains chapters that explore feminist philosophical engagement with mainstream and marginalized histories and traditions, while the second section parses feminist philosophy’s contributions to with numerous philosophical subfields, for example metaphysics and bioethics. A third section explores what feminist philosophy can illuminate about crucial moral and political issues of identity, gender, the body, autonomy, prisons, among numerous others. The Handbook concludes with the field’s engagement with other theories and movements, including trans studies, queer theory, critical race, theory, postcolonial theory, and decolonial theory. The volume provides a rigorous but accessible resource for students and scholars who are interested in feminist philosophy, and how feminist philosophers situate their work in relation to the philosophical mainstream and other disciplines. Above all it aims to showcase the rich diversity of subject matter, approach, and method among feminist philosophers.

Food ethics, as an academic pursuit, is vast, incorporating work from philosophy as well as anthropology, economics, environmental sciences and other natural sciences, geography, law, and sociology. This Handbook provides a sample of recent philosophical work in food ethics. This philosophical work addresses ethical issues with agricultural production, the structure of the global food system, the ethics of personal food consumption, the ethics of food policy, and cultural understandings of food and eating, among other issues. The work in this Handbook draws on multiple literatures within philosophy, including practical ethics, normative ethics, and political philosophy, as well as drawing on non-philosophical work. Part I considers ethical issues concerning the industrial model of farming that dominates in developed countries, looking most closely at industrial crop farming and its environmental effects. Part II concerns the ethics of animal agriculture. Part III concerns the ethics of consumption: is it morally permissible to consume various products? Part IV concerns justice—including racial, social, and economic justice—in the food system. Part V discusses some ethical and legal issues with specific kinds of food policies, including healthy eating policies, food labeling, and agricultural guest worker programs. Part VI includes four essays taking a critical eye to our public discourse about, and personal experiences of, dieting, healthy eating, and obesity prevention. Lastly, the essays in Part VII concern the personal, social, and moral significance of food.

This second edition of the Oxford Handbook of Free Will is a sourcebook and guide to current work on free will and related subjects. Its focus is on writings of the past forty years, in which there has been a resurgence of interest in traditional issues about the freedom of the will in the light of new developments in the sciences, philosophy, and humanistic studies. Special attention is given to research on free will of the first decade of the twenty-first century since the publication of the first edition of the text. This edition contains new articles surveying topics that have become prominent in debates about free will recently, including new work on the relation of free will to physics, the neurosciences, cognitive science, psychology, and empirical philosophy, new versions of traditional views (compatibilist, incompatibilist, libertarian, etc.) and new views (e.g., revisionism) that have emerged. The twenty-eight articles cover a host of free-will related issues, such as moral agency and responsibility, accountability and blameworthiness in ethics, autonomy, coercion and control in social theory, criminal liability, responsibility and punishment in legal theory, issues about the relation of mind to body, consciousness and the nature of action in philosophy of mind and the cognitive and neurosciences, questions about divine foreknowledge, providence and human freedom in philosophy of religion, and general metaphysical questions about necessity and possibility, determinism, time and chance, quantum reality, and causation and explanation.

Debates about freedom traditionally focus on a few central themes. The chapters of this volume update those debates and launch new ones. Whether the freedom worth pursuing is one or many, whether it conflicts with equality, whether it can be secured by the institutions of the modern state, and whether it is compatible with a deterministic understanding of the universe are some of the central questions that animate the chapters in this volume. Our contributors show both that we have made real progress in our understanding of the many faces of freedom and its enabling conditions, and that threats to our freedoms remain various, serious, and real.

This Handbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of nineteenth-century Germany that will be helpful to readers of very different sorts, all the way from laymen to undergraduates to experts. The volume is divided into four parts. The first part explores individual philosophers, including Fichte, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, amongst other great thinkers of the period. The second addresses key philosophical movements: Idealism, Romanticism, Neo-Kantianism, and Existentialism. The chapters in the third part engage with different areas of philosophy that received particular attention at this time, including philosophy of nature and of science, philosophy of mind and language, philosophy of education, and the relationship between philosophy and science, or Wissenschaft (a German term that is famously less narrowly restricted to natural science and disciplines modeled on it than its English counterpart). Finally, the contributors turn to discuss central philosophical topics, from skepticism to materialism, from dialectics to ideas of historical and cultural Otherness, and from the reception of antiquity to atheism. Nineteenth-century German philosophy made important contributions to virtually all areas of philosophy that are still distinguished in academic philosophy departments today. Written by a team of leading experts, The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century is the first collective critical study of this great period in intellectual history. It will be an essential resource for anyone working in the area, and will lead the direction of future research.

The Oxford Handbook of Hegel is a comprehensive guide to the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, the last major thinker in the philosophical movement known as German Idealism. Beginning with chapters on his first published writings, the authors draw out Hegel’s debts to his predecessors and highlight the themes and arguments that have proven the most influential over the past two centuries. There are six chapters each on the Phenomenology of Spirit and The Science of Logic, and in-depth analyses of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. Five chapters cover Hegel’s philosophy of law, action, and the ethical and political philosophy presented in his Philosophy of Right. Several chapters cover the many recently edited lecture series from the 1820s, bringing new clarity to Hegel’s conception of aesthetics, the philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy. The concluding part focuses on Hegel’s legacy, from his role in the formation of Marx’s philosophy to his importance for contemporary liberal political philosophy. The Handbook includes many essays from younger scholars who have brought new perspectives and rigor to the study of Hegel’s thought. The essays are marked by close engagement with Hegel’s difficult texts and by a concern with highlighting the ongoing systematic importance of Hegel’s philosophy.

The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes consists of twenty-six original chapters by a group of distinguished philosophers, political theorists, historians, and literary scholars from North America and Europe. All the contributors have made substantial contributions to Hobbes scholarship, some over the course of decades. The book is divided into five parts: Logic and Natural Philosophy; Human Nature and Moral Philosophy; Political Philosophy; Religion; and History, Poetry, and Paradox. The goal of each chapter is to advance the understanding of Hobbes’s thought. The discussion in many of the chapters overlaps with discussions in others, and these overlapping discussions provide multiple perspectives on the topic. Because the authors come from several different traditions and have divergent interpretations of Hobbes, the varied perspectives help to illuminate Hobbes’s thought even when they are at odds. Several of the articles interrogate Hobbes’s texts with completely new questions, and others bring to the fore topics that have not been known or appropriately appreciated.

David Hume (1711–1776) is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential of the English-speaking philosophers. The range of his contributions is considerable: covering issues of metaphysics and epistemology, mind and emotion, morality and politics, history, economics, and religion. Although there is little debate about the importance and significance of Hume’s philosophical contributions, there is, nevertheless, considerable debate about the interpretation of his overall philosophical achievement as well as his particular aims and intentions with respect to the specific topics he addresses. Beyond this, there is also considerable disagreement about the critical assessment or plausibility of the various arguments and positions that Hume advances. This collection aims to provide a comprehensive set of analyses and assessments of the key components and aspects of Hume’s philosophical work. The contributions are drawn from among the leading figures of contemporary philosophy and Hume scholarship with a view to providing readers not only with an understanding of the core themes and features of Hume’s philosophy but also with a clear view of the central debates concerning the interpretation and assessment of Hume’s philosophy at the present time. This volume constitutes the most substantial and ambitious collection devoted exclusively to Hume’s philosophy.

The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy tells the story of philosophy in India through a series of exceptional individual acts of philosophical virtuosity. It brings together forty leading international scholars to record the diverse figures, movements, and approaches that constitute philosophy in the geographical region of the Indian subcontinent, a region sometimes nowadays designated South Asia. The chapters provide a synopsis of the liveliest areas of contemporary research and set new agendas for nascent directions of exploration. Each of the chapters provides compelling evidence that in the global exercise of human intellectual skills India, throughout its history, has been a hugely sophisticated and important presence, host to an astonishing range of exceptionally creative minds engaged in an extraordinary diversity of the most astute philosophical exploration conceivable. It spans philosophy of law, logic, politics, environment, and society, but is most strongly associated with wide-ranging discussions in the philosophy of mind and language, epistemology and metaphysics (how we know and what is there to be known), ethics, meta-ethics, and aesthetics, and meta-philosophy. The reach of Indian ideas has been vast, both historically and geographically, and it has been and continues to be a major influence in world philosophy. In the breadth as well as the depth of its philosophical investigation, in the sheer bulk of surviving texts and in the diffusion of its ideas, the philosophical heritage of India easily stands comparison with that of China, Greece, the Latin West, or the Islamic world.

The second edition of The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity constitutes an update and revision of a topic of growing academic and societal importance. Interdisciplinarity continues to be prominent both within and outside academia. Academics, policy makers, and members of public and private sectors seek approaches to help organize and integrate the vast amounts of knowledge being produced today, both within research and at all levels of education. This compendium is distinguished by its breadth of coverage, with chapters written by experts from multiple networks and organizations, on topics ranging across science and technology; social sciences, humanities, and arts; and professions. The volume is edited by respected interdisciplinary scholars and supported by an international advisory board to ensure the highest quality and breadth of coverage. The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity provides a synoptic overview of the current state of interdisciplinary research, education, administration and management, and problem solving—knowledge that spans the disciplines and interdisciplinary fields while also crossing the boundary between the academic community and society at large. Offering the most broad-based account of inter- and transdisciplinarity to date, its essays bring together many of the globe’s leading thinkers on interdisciplinary research, education, and institutional parameters as well as reflections on how knowledge can be better integrated with societal needs.

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please read the site FAQs.

The study of Islamic philosophy has recently entered a new and exciting phase. Both the received canon of Islamic philosophers and the grand narrative of the course of Islamic philosophy are in the process of being radically questioned and revised. The bulk of twentieth-century Western scholarship on Arabic or Islamic philosophy focused on the period from the ninth century to the twelfth. It is a measure of the transformation that is currently underway in the field that the present Handbook gives roughly equal weight to every century from the ninth to the twentieth. The Handbook differs from previous overviews in another significant way: It is work-centered rather than person- or theme-centered. This format is intended to give readers a better sense of what a work in Islamic philosophy looks like, and of the issues, concepts, and arguments that are at play in works belonging to various periods and subfields within Islamic philosophy.

Japanese philosophy is now a flourishing field with thriving societies, journals, and conferences dedicated to it around the world, made possible by an ever-increasing library of translations, books, and articles. The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy is a foundation-laying reference work that covers, in detail and depth, the entire span of this philosophical tradition, from ancient times to the present. It introduces and examines the most important topics, figures, schools, and texts from the history of philosophical thinking in premodern and modern Japan. Each chapter, written by a leading scholar in the field, clearly elucidates and critically engages with its topic in a manner that demonstrates its contemporary philosophical relevance. The Handbook opens with an extensive introductory chapter that addresses the multifaceted question, “What Is Japanese Philosophy?” The first fourteen chapters cover the premodern history of Japanese philosophy, with sections dedicated to Shintō and the Synthetic Nature of Japanese Philosophical Thought, Philosophies of Japanese Buddhism, and Philosophies of Japanese Confucianism and Bushidō. Next, seventeen chapters are devoted to Modern Japanese Philosophies. After a chapter on the initial encounter with and appropriation of Western philosophy in the late nineteenth-century, this large section is divided into one subsection on the most well-known group of twentieth-century Japanese philosophers, The Kyoto School, and a second subsection on the no less significant array of Other Modern Japanese Philosophies. Rounding out the volume is a section on Pervasive Topics in Japanese Philosophical Thought, which covers areas such as philosophy of language, philosophy of nature, ethics, and aesthetics, spanning a range of schools and time periods. This volume will be an invaluable resource specifically to students and scholars of Japanese philosophy, as well as more generally to those interested in Asian and comparative philosophy and East Asian studies.

The extraordinary breadth and depth of Leibniz’s intellectual vision commands ever increasing attention. As more texts gradually emerge from seemingly bottomless archives, new facets of his contribution to an astonishing variety of fields come to light. This volume provides a uniquely comprehensive, systematic, and up-to-date appraisal of Leibniz’s thought thematically organized around its diverse but interrelated aspects. Discussion of his philosophical system naturally takes place of pride. A cluster of original essays revisit his logic, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of nature, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. The scope of the volume, however, goes beyond that of a philosophical collection to embrace all the main features of Leibniz’s thought and activity. Contributions are offered on Leibniz as a mathematician (including not only his calculus but also determinant theory, symmetric functions, the dyadic, the analysis situs, probability and statistics); on Leibniz as a scientist (physics and also optics, cosmology, geology, physiology, medicine, and chemistry); on his technical innovations (the calculating machine and the technology of mining, as well as other discoveries); on his work as an ‘intelligencer’ and cultural networker, as jurist, historian, editor of sources and librarian; on his views on Europe’s political future, religious toleration, and ecclesiastical reunification; on his proposals for political, administrative, economic, and social reform. In so doing, the volume serves as a unique cross-disciplinary point of contact for the many domains to which Leibniz contributed. By assembling leading specialists on all these topics, it offers the most rounded picture of Leibniz’s endeavors currently available.

Emmanuel Levinas (1906—1995) emerged as an influential philosophical voice in the final decades of the twentieth century, and his reputation has continued to flourish and increase in our own day. His central themes—the primacy of the ethical and the core of ethics as our responsibility to and for others—speak to readers from a host of disciplines and perspectives. However, his writings and thought are challenging and difficult. The Oxford Handbook of Levinas contains essays that aim to clarify and engage Levinas and his writings in a number of ways. Some focus on central themes of his work, others on the ways in which he read and was influenced by figures from Plato, Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant to Blanchot, Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida. Other essays focus on how his thinking has been appropriated in moral and political thought, psychology, film criticism, and more, and on the relation between his thinking and religious themes and traditions. Finally, several essays deal primarily with how readers have criticized Levinas and found him wanting. This volume exposes and explores both the depth of Levinas’s philosophical work and the range of applications to which it has been put, with special attention to clarifying how his interests in the human condition, the crisis of civilization, the centrality and character of ethics and morality, and the very meaning of human experience should be of interest to the widest range of readers.

This volume presents thirty-two essays on a wide array of topics in modern philosophical meaning in life research. The essays are organized into six parts. Part I, Understanding Meaning in Life, focuses on various ways of conceptualizing meaning in life. Among other issues, it discusses whether meaning in life should be understood objectively or subjectively, the relation between importance and meaningfulness, and whether meaningful lives should be understood narratively. Part II, Meaning in Life, Science, and Metaphysics, presents opposing views on whether neuroscience sheds light on life’s meaning, inquires whether hard determinists must see life as meaningless, and explores the relation between time, personal identity, and meaning. Part III, Meaning in Life and Religion, examines the relation between meaningfulness, mysticism, and transcendence, and considers life’s meaning from both atheist and theist perspectives. Part IV, Ethics and Meaning in Life, examines (among other issues) whether meaningful lives must be moral, how important forgiveness is for meaning, the relation between life’s meaningfulness (or meaninglessness) and procreation ethics, and whether animals have meaningful lives. Part V, Philosophical Psychology and Meaning in Life, compares philosophical and psychological research on life’s meaning, explores the experience of meaningfulness, and discusses the relation between meaningfulness and desire, love, and gratitude. Part VI, Living Meaningfully: Challenges and Prospects, elaborates on topics such as suicide, suffering, education, optimism and pessimism, and their relation to life’s meaning.

This publication is intended to show the links between the philosophy written in the Middle Ages and that of today. Essays by over twenty medieval specialists, who are also familiar with contemporary discussions, explore areas in logic and philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, moral psychology ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. Each topic has been chosen because it is of present philosophical interest, but a more-or-less-similar set of questions was also discussed in the Middle Ages. No party-line has been set about the extent of the similarity. Some writers (e.g. Panaccio on Universals and Cesalli on States of Affairs) argue that there are close continuities. Others (e.g. Thom on Logical Form and Pink on Freedom of the Will) stress the differences. All, however, share the aim of providing new analyses of medieval texts, and of writing in a manner that is clear and comprehensible to philosophers who are not medieval specialists. The volume, which begins with eleven articles looking at the history of medieval philosophy period by period, and region by region, constitutes a wide-ranging and up-to-date chronological survey of medieval philosophy. All four traditions—Greek, Latin, Islamic, and Jewish (in Arabic, and in Hebrew)—are considered, and the Latin tradition is traced from late antiquity through to the seventeenth century and beyond.

The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics offers an authoritative and compelling guide to this diverse and fertile field of philosophy. Twenty-four of the world's most distinguished specialists provide broad articles about what kinds of things there are, in what ways they exist, and how they relate to each other. They give the latest word on such topics as identity, modality, time, causation, persons and minds, freedom, and vagueness. This book's breadth and depth are unrivalled across the philosophical spectrum.

Moral psychology is the study of how human minds make and are made by human morality. This state of the art volume covers contemporary philosophical and psychological work on moral psychology, as well as notable historical theories and figures in the field of moral psychology, such as Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, and the Buddha. The volume’s 50 chapters, authored by leading figures in the field, cover foundational topics, such as character, virtue, emotion, moral responsibility, the neuroscience of morality, weakness of will, and the nature of moral judgments and reasons. The volume also canvases emerging work in applied moral psychology, including adaptive preferences, animals, mental illness, poverty, marriage, race, bias, and victim blaming.

The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility is a collection of 33 articles by leading international scholars on the topic of moral responsibility and its main forms, praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. The articles in the volume provide a comprehensive survey on scholarship on this topic since 1960, with a focus on the past three decades. Chapters address the nature of moral responsibility—whether it is fundamentally a matter of deserved blame and praise; or whether it is grounded anticipated good consequences, such as moral education and formation; or whether there are different kinds of moral responsibility. They examine responsibility for both actions and omissions, whether responsibility comes in degrees, and whether groups such as corporations can be responsible. The traditional debates about this issue focus on threats to moral responsibility from causal determinism, and from the absence of the ability to do otherwise that may result; and chapters in the volume appraise the most recent developments in these debates. They also discuss how physics, neuroscience, and psychological research on topics such as addiction and implicit bias illuminate the ways and degrees to which we might be responsible. Philosophical reflection on personal relationships and moral responsibility has been especially intense over the past two decades, and a number of chapters reflect this development. Blameworthiness is often linked to attitudes such as moral resentment and indignation, and the role of these attitudes in relationships is explored. Forgiveness and reconciliation also have an important role in personal relationships, and chapters in the volume explore these responsibility-related notions.

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please read the site FAQs.

This Handbook offers several papers on Nietzsche’s main philosophical topics supplemented with sets of papers dealing with biography, relations with other philosophers, and his individual works. Topics covered by the papers include Nietzsche’s biography, family, attitude towards women, his sickness and madness, his interest in the views of other philosophers, his principal works, values, epistemology and metaphysics, and his idea of will to power.

For about one century the catalogue of books in phenomenological psychopathology has been tremendously rich in essays, but remarkably poor in handbooks. Even the cornerstone of our canon, Jaspers’ General Psychopathology, originally written as a textbook, can hardly be given to a student as a basic reading. This makes extremely difficult teaching the fundamentals of our discipline. Students ask for manualized knowledge expecting teachers to explain them what-exactly-must-be-done-in-a-given-circumstance. This Handbook is meant to fill these gaps. It includes a detailed, thorough and reader-friendly description of philosophical and clinical key-concepts and constructs, and of the contributions of leading figures of phenomenological psychopathology. It establishes clear connections between psychopathological knowledge and clinical practice. It liaise phenomenological psychopathology to contemporary debates in nosography, clinical epistemology, research and the neurosciences. It’s stronger benefit is that it brings together evidence-based with person-based knowledge. All learning is based on process of recognition. ‘Recognition’ means identification of someone or something from previous encounters or knowledge. In standard clinical training this process is called ‘diagnosis’ and evidence-based diagnostic skills are deemed fundamental. Students are spot-on when soliciting this kind of knowledge to be regimented and normalized. Yet ‘recognition’ has a second meaning: acknowledging the absolute singularity of what is out there. To recognize someone or something means to be able to tolerate its otherness. This kind of recognition is a practice in which epistemology is in touch with ethics. Whereas recognition qua identification or diagnosis is an act of recollection based on previously acquired knowledge, recognition qua acknowledgement is an ethical act of acceptance of the unique being-so of the other person or state of affairs. The Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology engages in bringing together these two kinds of ‘recognition’ and establish a solid as well as flexible framework for the clinic of mental disorders.

This book examines the nature of philosophical methodology, defined as the study of philosophical method: how to do philosophy well. It considers a number of hypotheses that explain the nature of philosophical methodology, including eliminativism, epistemologism, theory selectionism, necessary preconditionalism, and hierarchicalism. It also tackles a range of topics such as ‘ordinary language philosophy’, the role of logic in philosophical methodology, phenomenology, philosophical heuristics, and methods in the philosophy of literature and film. Other chapters discuss the method of reflective equilibrium, the notions of conceivability and possibility, naturalistic approaches to philosophical methodology, the methodology of legal philosophy, aesthetics and the philosophy of art as branches of analytic philosophy, issues and methods in the philosophy of mathematics, how and whether faith conflicts with reason, and critical philosophy of race.