Since the Brexit referendum of 2016, extraordinary uncertainty has hung over the future of the Union between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, creating a crisis for the unionist community. A referendum that began on the question of sovereignty quickly degenerated into cries of betrayal over a redrawn border in the Irish Sea, and has led to unionists becoming more insular again, resurrecting ethnic and nationalist notions of what constitutes the Union. In A People Under Siege, historian Aaron Edwards, a native of Belfast, explores the profound challenges facing the community and, in the process, articulates what is really meant by unionism. He explains key developments within unionism over the past turbulent century and examines how a people who believe themselves to be once again under siege are viewed by others beyond their community. In doing so he confronts the narrow, sectional beliefs and prejudices of unionists and loyalists, as well as outlining their more positive and forward-thinking aspects. By embracing these, Edwards explains how divisions could be healed and a position reached of mutual acceptance, tolerance and understanding that will benefit the entire population.

A work dealing with the bases of morality and virtue, both public and private. Hutcheson argues that the natural inclination of the human being is to be virtuous, since the pleasures of being virtuous are the greatest we can experience. Individual human beings have a common inbuilt morality because of the human constitution. In addition to the five senses, he believed there was a moral sense, both equal and complementary to these five. The picture he paints is of a human mentality positively geared to harmonious society, which stumbles and fails only when selfish interest gets in the way. Selfish interest though, was for him only a secondary phenomenon, a failure of the system, which can be corrected if only people could be brought to realize their own nature and the nature of their senses.

An ambitious new history of philosophy in English that broadens the canon to include many lesser-known figures Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote that “philosophy should be written like poetry.” But philosophy has often been presented more prosaically as a long trudge through canonical authors and great works. But what, Jonathan Rée asks, if we instead saw the history of philosophy as a haphazard series of unmapped forest paths, a mass of individual stories showing endurance, inventiveness, bewilderment, anxiety, impatience, and good humor? Here, Jonathan Rée brilliantly retells this history, covering such figures as Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Mill, James, Frege, Wittgenstein, and Sartre. But he also includes authors not usually associated with philosophy, such as William Hazlitt, George Eliot, Darwin, and W. H. Auden. Above all, he uncovers dozens of unremembered figures—puritans, revolutionaries, pantheists, feminists, nihilists, socialists, and scientists—who were passionate and active readers of philosophy, and often authors themselves. Breaking away from high-altitude narratives, he shows how philosophy finds its way into ordinary lives, enriching and transforming them in unexpected ways.

William King (1650–1729) was perhaps the dominant Irish intellect of the period from 1688 until his death in 1729. An Anglican (Church of Ireland) by conversion, King was a strident critic of John Toland and the clerical superior of Jonathan Swift.