Extending his well-known investigations into the nature and logic of art and history in the cultural world, Joseph Margolis here offers a sustained account of how selves and the cultural phenomena they generate (language, history, action, art) can be viewed as just as "real" as the physical nature from which they are emergent, while not being reducible to it. The book starts off with a review of prominent philosophies of art over the past half-century, focusing especially on Beardsley, Goodman, and Danto, so as to highlight the need for carefully distinguishing between the metaphysical and epistemological features of physical nature and human culture. The second part of the book builds on the first part's analyses of artworks to propose a theory of selves as "self-interpreting texts." Selves and Other Texts aims to develop new ways of understanding the conceptual inseparability of our analysis of physical nature and our analysis of ourselves.

For at least a century, scholarship on realist narrative, and occasional polemics against realist narrative, have assumed that realism promotes the values of sameness against those of otherness, and that it does so by use of a narrative mode that excludes certain epistemologies, ideologies, and ways of thinking. However, the truth is more complex than that, as the essays in this volume all demonstrate. Realism’s Others examines the various strategies by which realist narratives create the idea of difference, whether that difference is registered in terms of class, ethnicity, epistemology, nationality, or gender. The authors in this collection examine in detail not just the fact of otherness in some canonical realist and canonical magical-realist and postmodern novels, but the actual means by which that otherness is established by the text. These essays suggest that neither realist narrative nor narratives positioned as anti-realist take otherness for granted; rather, the texts discussed here actively create difference, and this creation of difference often occasions severe difficulties for the novels’ representational schema. How does one represent different types of knowledge, other aesthetic modes or other spaces, for example, in texts whose epistemology has long been seen as secular and empirical, whose aesthetic mode has always been approached as pure descriptive mimesis, and whose settings are largely domestic? These essays all begin with a certain collision—of nationalities, of classes, of representational matrices, of religions—and go on to chart the challenges that this collision presents to our ideas or stereotypes of realism, or to the possibilities of writing against and beyond realism. This question motivates examination of key realist or social-realist texts, in some of these essays, by Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Franz Grillparzer, Theodor Storm, Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane, Wilhelm Raabe, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Theodore Dreiser, H. T. Tsiang, Alan Sillitoe, and Richard Yates. However, it is no less central a question in certain non-realist texts which engage realist aims to a surprising degree, often to debate them openly; some of these essays discuss, in this light, fantastic, magical realist, and postmodern works by Abram Tertz, Paul Auster, Alejo Carpentier, Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, and A. S. Byatt. Realism becomes more than an aesthetic aim or narrative mode. It becomes, rather, a value evoked and discussed by all of the works analyzed here, in order to reveal its impact on fiction’s treatment of ethnicity, nationality, ideology, space, gender, and social class.

America today faces a world more complicated than ever before, but our politicians have failed to envision a foreign policy that addresses our greatest threats. Ethical Realism shows how the United States can successfully combine genuine morality with tough and practical common sense. By outlining core principles and a set of concrete proposals for tackling the terrorist threat and contend with Iran, Russia, the Middle East, and China, Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman show us how to strengthen our security, pursue our national interests, and restore American leadership in the world.

This book brings together over 25 years of Arindam Chakrabarti's original research in philosophy on issues of epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. Organized under the three basic concepts of a thing out there in the world, the self who perceives it, and other subjects or selves, his work revolves around a set of realism links. Examining connections between metaphysical stances toward the world, selves, and universals, Chakrabarti engages with classical Indian and modern Western philosophical approaches to a number of live topics including the refutation of idealism; the question of the definability of truth, and the possibility of truths existing unknown to anyone; the existence of non-conceptual perception; and our knowledge of other minds. He additionally makes forays into fundamental questions regarding death, darkness, absence, and nothingness. Along with conceptual clarification and progress towards alternative solutions to these substantial philosophical problems, Chakrabarti demonstrates the advantage of doing philosophy in a cosmopolitan fashion. Beginning with an analysis of the concept of a thing, and ending with an analysis of the concept of nothing, Realisms Interlinked offers a preview of a future metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind without borders.

The meaning of “God-talk” remains the fundamental issue facing religious thinkers today. This study concerns the analogies needed to make sense of that talk. Embracing those analogies signals the application of Austin Farrer’s cutting-edge theology. Almost fifty years after his death, Farrer remains one of the twentieth century’s last great metaphysical minds, his grasp of faith and philosophy unequalled. Having defended religious thought against both Positivist and Process reduction, he pursued his own revision of scholastic tradition, ultimately developing the vital corrective to an overweening impersonalism, one which depersonalises the divine so severs the cosmological connection. Following this course returns us to an earlier tradition, to a metaphysic of persons exemplified in the expressions of lived faith. This draws upon the logic of personal identity: what it means to be, or rather, to become, a person. Hence, journey’s end lies in a Feuerbachian anthropology of theology or ‘anthropotheism’. Like Farrer, Feuerbach used the believer’s language to relocate theology and philosophy within a framework that makes fertile use of anthropomorphic personifications to ‘think’ God. Revisiting the personalist presuppositions of metaphysics in this way throws light on the most vital questions of personal identity. To answer them is to ‘draw’ reality on a grander scale than either realism or consequentialism is capable of. Most importantly, it is locate our place within that image. Doing theology dynamically or psychologically informed – as both Farrer and Feuerbach insisted – means recognising the constitutive role such images play in self-construction. Without active participation in our ideals and aspirations, we cannot become persons at all; participation entails the enactment of our prospective selves. This returns us to the practice of piety: faith in a Godly person. Here we find the reconstruction of Feuerbach’s anthropology as applied theology and, by extension or amplification, the completion of Farrer’s personalist metaphysics.

A collection of twenty-five essays from eight countries, illustrating the many approaches to science fiction.

Forfatterens mål med denne bog er: 1) Analyse af de gældende teorier for international politik og hvad der heri er lagt størst vægt på. 2) Konstruktion af en teori for international politik som kan kan råde bod på de mangler, der er i de nu gældende. 3) Afprøvning af den rekonstruerede teori på faktiske hændelsesforløb.

This book uses insights from the cognitive sciences to illuminate Kafka’s poetics, exemplifying a paradigm for literary studies in which cognitive-scientific insights are brought to bear directly on literary texts. The volume shows that the concept of "cognitive realism" can be a critically productive framework for exploring how textual evocations of cognition correspond to or diverge from cognitive realities, and how this may affect real readers. In particular, it argues that Kafka’s evocations of visual perception (including narrative perspective) and emotion can be understood as fundamentally enactive, and that in this sense they are "cognitively realistic". These cognitively realistic qualities are likely to establish a compellingly direct connection with the reader’s imagination, but because they contradict folk-psychological assumptions about how our minds work, they may also leave the reader unsettled. This is the first time a fully interdisciplinary research paradigm has been used to explore a single author’s fictional works in depth, opening up avenues for future research in cognitive literary science.

Realism and Social Science offers an authoritative guide to critical realism and an assessment of its virtues in comparison with other leading traditions in social science. It is illustrated throughout with relevant and accessible examples.