Iris Murdoch was a philosopher and novelist of extraordinary breadth and originality whose work defies simple categorisation. Her philosophical writing engages with an astonishingly wide range of figures, from Plato and Kant to Sartre and Heidegger, and her work increasingly inspires debate in ethics, aesthetics, religion, and literature. The Murdochian Mind is an outstanding reference source to the full span of Murdoch's philosophical work, comprising 37 specially commissioned chapters written by an international team of leading scholars. Divided into five clear parts, the volume covers the following areas: A guide to Murdoch's key philosophical texts, including The Sovereignty of Good and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. Core themes and concepts in Murdoch's philosophy, such as love, moral vision, and attention. Murdoch's engagement with the history of philosophy, including Plato, Kant, Hegel, Simone Weil, and Wittgenstein. Interdisciplinary connections with art, literature, and religion, including Judaism, Buddhism, and Christianity. Murdoch and contemporary philosophical debates, including feminism, virtue ethics, and metaethics. The application of Murdoch’s thought to applied ethics, including animal ethics, psychiatric ethics, and the environment. Although recent years have seen a blossoming of interest in Murdoch’s philosophy, The Murdochian Mind is the first volume to do justice to the incredibly rich and wide-ranging nature of her work. As such it will be of great interest to students of philosophy, especially ethics and aesthetics, as well as those in related disciplines such as literature, religion, and gender studies.

Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) was a member of the Frankfurt School, a leading figure of 1960s counterculture, and a fundamental character for the New Left. His ideas and theories, inspired by a rich fusion of Marxian and Freudian thought, exert a strong influence on contemporary thinking about activism, emancipation, and political resistance. He was also a student of Martin Heidegger in the late 1920s and engaged deeply with philosophy throughout his career. The Marcusean Mind is an outstanding survey and assessment of Marcuse's thought. Beginning with a thorough introduction to Marcuse's life and work, 39 chapters by an international and interdisciplinary team of contributors are organized into five clear parts: Intellectual Ecosystems of Marcuse Reason and Sensibilities Futures and Utopias Contemporary Movements Counterrevolutions, Neoliberalism, and Fascism These sections each contain a short introduction, after which Marcusean ideas are brought to bear on many key contemporary debates and issues across the humanities, social sciences, and science and technology. Including a Foreword by Craig Calhoun and an Afterword by Douglas Kellner, The Marcusean Mind is a superb resource for anyone interested in Marcuse's thought and its legacy. It is valuable reading for students of contemporary political theory, activism, philosophy, sociology, media and cultural studies, critical legal studies, and race and gender studies.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) is now recognised as a figure of canonical importance to the history of philosophy. Schopenhauer founded his system on a highly original interpretation of Kant’s philosophy, developing an entirely novel and controversial worldview guided centrally by his striking conception of the human will and of art and beauty. His influence extends to figures as diverse as Fredrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Iris Murdoch within philosophy, and Richard Wagner, Thomas Hardy, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges outside it. The Schopenhauerian Mind is an outstanding, wide-ranging collection that explores the rich nature of Schopenhauer's ideas, texts, influences, and legacy. Comprising 38 original chapters by an international team of contributors, the volume is organised into five clear parts: Knowledge and Reality Aesthetics and the Arts Ethics, Politics, and Salvation Before Schopenhauer After Schopenhauer The Schopenhauerian Mind covers all the key areas and concepts of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, including fields omitted in previous studies. It is essential reading for students of nineteenth-century philosophy, Continental philosophy and philosophy of art and aesthetics, and also of interest to those in related disciplines such as literature and religion.

When Marcel Proust started to work on In Search of Lost Time in 1908, he wrote this question in his notebook: ‘Should I make it a novel, a philosophical study, am I a novelist?’ Throughout his famous multi-volume work, Proust directly engages several philosophers, and few novels are as thoroughly saturated with philosophical themes and concepts as In Search of Lost Time. The Proustian Mind is an outstanding reference source to the rich philosophical range of Proust’s work and the first major volume of its kind. Including 31 chapters by an international team of contributors, the volume is divided into seven clear parts: Proust’s life and works metaphysics and epistemology mind and language aesthetics ethics gender and sexuality predecessors, contemporaries and successors. Within these sections, key Proustian themes are explored from a philosophical standpoint, including time, the self, memory, imagination, jealousy, beauty, love, subjectivity and desire. The final section considers Proust in relation to important philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, de Beauvoir and Deleuze. The Proustian Mind is essential reading for those studying aesthetics, philosophy of literature, phenomenology and ethics, and will also be of interest to those in literature studying modernism, French literature and the relationship between literature and philosophy.

This volume is the third volume in Palgrave' Macmillan's new Iris Murdoch Today scholarly series. Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination is the first major collection of literary essays since her centenary in 2019. It brings together leading Murdoch scholars from across the world who expand the boundaries of recent criticism offering work not only on the novels, but on her unpublished poetry and archival materials. This collection discusses her interest in, and use of, Japanese literature; her relationship with, and reader-response to her, in Australia; Murdoch in the post #metoo era; her lifelong interest in the supernatural, same-sex relationships and friendships; as well as the use and abuse of biographical material. The collection widens the field of Murdoch studies and marks a new waypoint in the development of her critical reception.

Samantha Matherne defends a systematic interpretation of the philosopher Immanuel Kant's theory of imagination. To this end, she offers an account of what kind of mental capacity Kant takes imagination to be in general, as well as an account of the way in which we use this capacity in theoretical, aesthetic, and practical contexts. In contrast with more traditional theories of imagination, as a kind of fantasy that we exercise only in relation to objects that are not real or not present, Matherne argues that Kant theorizes imagination as something that we exercise just as much in relation to objects that are real and present. Thus she attributes to Kant a view of imagining as something that pervades our lives. In order to bring out this pervasiveness, Matherne explores Kant's account of how we exercise our imagination in perception, ordinary experience, the appreciation of beauty and sublimity, the production of art, the pursuit of happiness, and the pursuit of morality. However, she also argues that Kant's analysis of this wide range of phenomena is underwritten by a unified theory of what imagination is, as a remarkably flexible cognitive capacity that we can exercise in constrained and creative, playful and serious ways.

The thought of Immanuel Kant is fundamental to understanding Western philosophy. Spanning epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and religion, the sheer scope and originality of Kant’s ideas have decisively shaped the history of modern philosophy. The Kantian Mind is an outstanding guide and reference source to Kant's thought and a major new publication in Kant scholarship. Comprising forty-five chapters by a stellar team of contributors, the collection is divided into four clear parts: Background to the Critical Philosophy Transcendental Philosophy (Critique and Doctrine) Posthumous Writings and Lectures Kant and Contemporary Kantians. In addition to coverage of Kant's main works, the volume contains chapters on a broad range of topics including Kant's views on logic, mathematics, the natural sciences, anthropology, religion, politics, and education. The concluding chapters cover the influence of Kant's thought on contemporary analytic and continental philosophy. Including suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter, The Kantian Mind is essential reading for all students and scholars of Kant and contemporary Kantian thought. It will also be extremely helpful to those in related humanities and social sciences disciplines such as religion, history, politics, and literature.

We are self-conscious creatures thrown into a world which is not of our making. What is the connection between being self-conscious and being related to an objective world? Descartes and Kant, in different ways and with different emphases, argued that self-conscious subjects such as us must be related to an objective world. Philosophers in the twentieth century were less ambitious: self-conscious subjects must only think or experience the world as objective. The Practical Self argues that the answer to our question lies in a set of enigmatic remarks by the eighteenth-century philosopher, physicist, and aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. 'One should say it is thinking, just as one says, it is lightning', Lichtenberg writes. 'To say cogito is already too much To assume the I, to postulate it, is a practical requirement.' Lichtenberg is raising a puzzle here about our grounds for recognising ourselves as the agents of our thinking. Its solution is to understand that we have practical grounds to think of ourselves as the intellectual agents. We are thus practical selves: intellectual agents who have distinctively practical grounds to recognise ourselves as such. And our faith in ourselves as practical selves is sustained through interaction with others. The argument of this book is that self-consciousness requires faith in ourselves as the agents of our thinking and that this faith is sustained by a practices which relate us to other thinkers. Self-consciousness connects us to a world of others.