Nicholas Rescher presents the first comprehensive chronology of philosophical anecdotes, spanning from antiquity to the current era. He introduces us to the major thinkers, texts, and historical periods of Western philosophy, recounting many of the stories philosophers have used over time to engage with issues of philosophical concern: questions of meaning, truth, knowledge, value, action, and ethics. Rescher's anecdotes touch on a wide range of themes—from logic to epistemology, ethics to metaphysics—and offer much insight into the breadth and depth of philosophical inquiry. This book illustrates the various ways philosophers throughout history have viewed the issues in their field, and how anecdotes can work to inform and encourage philosophical thought.

The Victorians are known for their commitment to materialism, evidenced by the dominance of empiricism in the sciences and realism in fiction. Yet there were other strains of thinking during the period in the physical sciences, social sciences, and literature that privileged the spaces between the material and immaterial. This book examines how the emerging language of the “imponderable” helped Victorian writers and physicists make sense of new experiences of modernity. As Sarah Alexander argues, while Victorian physicists were theorizing ether, energy and entropy, and non-Euclidean space and atom theories, writers such as Charles Dickens, William Morris, and Joseph Conrad used concepts of the imponderable to explore key issues of capitalism, imperialism, and social unrest.

Mirio Cosottini dedicates his book "Playing with silence" to everyone who loves silence and its multiple facets. In this volume, he advances a series of questions and exercises through which to set off on a path of enquiry into silence, shedding light on its multiple appearances and, at the same time, on what remains constant despite various transformations. In the first part of this work, Cosottini proposes a series of questions that invite readers to confront themselves with a silence that frightens. This silence is to be found in our bodies, enters our experience, and hides itself in the world. It can be cultivated, desired and listened to. In the second part, readers are invited to "play" with silence, turning it into a performative exercise: silence, here, is conceived as a tool for action and the fulfilment of a direct experience of silence.

This collection of essays on transnational Chinese cinema explores the corporal, psychological, and affective aspects of experiencing bodies on screen; engages with the material and discursive elements of embodiment; and highlights the dynamics between the mind and body involved in bio-cultural practices of cinematic production, distribution, exhibition, and reception.

The present book is a collection of 9 essays, emerging from a long and intense research collaboration among scholars coming from different backgrounds and traditions. As the book subtitle suggests, these essays focus on the ethical, religious, and political aspects of Wittgenstein’s thought, which are illustrated and investigated with reference to their complex interaction with Wittgenstein’s philosophical method and his conception of philosophy, on the one hand, and with his conception of language and human agency on the other.

An alternative, fallibilist model of moral reasoning rooted in the American Pragmatic tradition. Additional resources drawn from Chinese philosophy, Jain epistemology, modern philosophy of mathematics, and the Gadamerian hermeneutical tradition serve both to corroborate the argumentation and to provide examples of continuities in reasoning that cross the boundaries of disparate traditions.

This issue of Cirpit Review, inaugurating a new “time” for the journal, features a collection of essays and contributions variously inspired by the thought of Raion Panikkar. Certainly, he is one of the protagonists of the “intercultural transformation” or turn that has affected philosophy and theology. Symbol, dialogue, Christianness and ecosophy are some of the key concepts informing his inclusive and relational thought, gravitating around pluralism as its core notion. His theoretical efforts aimed at abandoning the paradigm that posits an intimate correspondence between thought and being, that is, the very premise grounding the enterprise of Western philosophy.

This issue contains the proceedings of the Symposium on Dialogical Dialogue and Raimon Panikkar, held in Baltimore in November 2013. It consisted of two separate events, held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). The first was the symposium, under the auspices of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy, on the dialogical philosophy of Raimon Panikkar (22nd November). The other was the Roundtable Panel for the Comparative Studies in Religion Section of the AAR, presided by Gerald James Larson (UC Santa Barbara), on the legacy of Panikkar's comparative study of religion (24th November). This issue is dedicated to the enduring memory of Scott Thomas Eastham.

As Jacques Derrida stated in Archive Fever, nothing is less reliable or less clear thanthe word “archive.” Nevertheless, it is precisely within the semantic openendedness of this notion that contemporary discursive practices of cinema and art have developed, thus reconfiguring the very idea of the archive. The single disciplines involved in this broad field – film and art history, film and art theory, aesthetics, semiotics, philology, etc. – are now beginning to question the concept of archive even in its “negative” sense: in other words, they are now starting to investigate – following Michel Foucault – what the archive is not, or does not seem to be. The archive is not the “library of libraries” or the “encyclopaedia;” it is not “memory” or a “database.” In recent years, much attention has been focused on these ideas, revealing new “impulses,” “turns” and specific forms of art (“art archive”), as well as highlighting how the notion of archive has gained importance on different interrelated levels (aesthetic, political, ethical and legal) across diverse disciplinary fields.

Foreword by Daniel A. Dombrowski. A central concern of nearly every environmental ethic is its desire to extend the scope of direct moral concern beyond human beings to plants, nonhuman animals, and the systems of which they are a part. Although nearly all environmental philosophies have long since rejected modernity's conception of individuals as isolated and independent substances, few have replaced this worldview with an alternative that is adequate to the organic, processive world in which we find ourselves. In this context, Brian G. Henning argues that the often overlooked work of Alfred North Whitehead has the potential to make a significant contribution to environmental ethics. Additionally inspired by classical American philosophers such as William James, John Dewey and Charles Sanders Pierce and environmental philosophers such as Aldo Leopold, Peter Singer, Albert Schweitzer, and Arne Naess, Henning develops an ethical theory of which the seminal insight is called "The Ethics of Creativity."By systematically examining and developing a conception of individuality that is equally at home with the microscopic world of subatomic events and the macroscopic world of ecosystems, The Ethics of Creativity correctly emphasizes the well-being of wholes, while not losing sight of the importance of the unique centers of value that constitute these wholes. In this way, The Ethics of Creativity has the potential to be a unique voice in contemporary moral philosophy.

Year after year, day after day, minute after minute, billions of non-human animals are slaughtered for several purposes and aims (food, clothing, entertainment, research). An analogous situation whose objects were humans instead of animals would obviously never be accepted. But why do we tolerate and even justify one practice while deploring the other? The answer is far from banal: this book is an attempt at finding it beyond the everyday life, through politics and philosophy.

In a historical moment when cinema is definitively abandoning analogue production, the cinematographic work of Paolo Gioli occupies an important and meaningful place in the academic and artistic debate related to the present and future position of cinema and media art in the digital era. For this reason, the Film Forum Festival decided to organize a one-day seminar in Gorizia on 17th March 2013 in order to analyze and discuss the artistic production of this Italian artist. This book records and expands topics and reflections developed by international scholars and curators during that event and contains an original text by Paolo Gioli about his cinema and his artistic production.

According to both ordinary and scientific thought, two objects can enter into relation not only simultanously, but also at different times, namely cross-temporally. For instance, we understand comparisons between entities as they are at different times, such as when we say that John is now taller than Michael was three years ago; causally related events are often not simultaneous, and objects of perceptions and perceivers usually have different temporal locations (we see ordinary things as they were a few milliseconds ago, we see the sun as it was eight minutes ago, and so on). However, many philosophers consider cross-temporality deceptive. Relations, according to the “standard view”, can hold only between things existing in the same time. In this book Torrengo defends the opposite view, according to which relations can be cross-temporally instantited and thus cross-temporal talk must be taken seriously. The theory is based on the idea that persisting in time is tantamount to possessing temporal parts at different times, and its central tenet is that persisting entities (objects and events alike) are cross-temporally related by having distinct temporal parts entering into relations.

Pretending is a puzzling activity. Why should we waste our time building up representations of an imaginary world when it would be better to acquire more information about the real one? Engaging in games of make believe, however, also means to be faced with new, possible situations, and thus to anticipate what could happen if something were the case, how we or other people could react, what decisions we should make, etc. In a word, pretense games are a kind of gym, a space where children engage in with unusual situations, in order to be ready to face whatever life could present them with. This book aims to offer an account of the architecture of the mind that is required in order to engage in, and understand, pretense paying special attention to the nature of our imaginings, their power to motivate our actions, and the kinds of metarepresentational abilities that are required in order to keep our imaginary representations distinct from the representations of reality. If pretense is a uniquely human ability, understanding it means knowing what it is that makes us so peculiar.

This book concentrates on the conversation between Socrates and Gorgias which takes place in the first part of Plato's Gorgias. Scholars have tended to concentrate on the following two conversations held by Socrates with Polus and, especially, with Callicles. This first, relatively short, conversation is usually taken to be a kind of preface coming before Plato's 'real' philosophy. The present study challenges this assumption, arguing that the conversation between Socrates and Gorgias actually anticipates the message of the whole dialogue, which concerns the essence of rhetoric and its implications.

Death, a perennial problem for philosophers and theologians, is especially crucial in the thought of Martin Heidegger. This penetrating commentary presents the concept of death as a unifying motif that illuminates many of the difficulties and obscurities of Heidegger's philosophy. Heidegger comes to see death as revealing the ultimate meaning not only of human existence, but of being itself. He thus confers upon the concept a force and sharpness, an ontological depth which is found in perhaps no other philosopher.This study corroborates the much-debated "turning" in Heidegger's philosophy. Demslce finds death to be the key not only to Heidegger's treatment of man and being, but also the key to his shift of focus from man to being. All Heidegger's various approaches to the theme of death are considered -- his existential-phenomenological analysis of Dasein, his discussions of art, poetry, history, and language, and his new phenomenological approach to the ordinary things of life.The author approaches Heidegger on his own terms, allowing the philosopher to speak for himself. The present reading of Heidegger grows smoothly out of Heidegger's own intentions. The result is a revealing study of Heidegger's philosophy in its entirety, which answers some persistently perplexing questions about this difficult modern philosopher.