Philosophy

Anthropocentrism in philosophy is deeply paradoxical. Ethics investigates the human good, epistemology investigates human knowledge, and antirealist metaphysics holds that the world depends on our cognitive capacities. But humans' good and knowledge, including their language and concepts, are empirical matters, whereas philosophers do not engage in empirical research. And humans are inhabitants, not 'makers', of the world. Nevertheless, all three (ethics, epistemology, and antirealist metaphysics) can be drastically reinterpreted as making no reference to humans.

Apologizing for Socrates examines some of Plato's and Xenophon's Socratic writings, specifically those that address well-known controversies concerning the life and death of Socrates. Gabriel Danzig argues that the effort to defend Socrates from a variety of contemporary charges helps explain some of the central philosophical arguments and literary features that appear in these works.

It is more important than ever that a business must be both ethical and profitable. In this thoroughly revised and updated second edition, Norman E. Bowie shows that by applying Kant's three formulations of the categorical imperative, and by doing the right thing for the right reason, a business can achieve success in both of these fields.

Renowned in the disciplines of political theory and philosophy, Hannah Arendt's searing critiques of modernity continue to resonate in other fields of thought decades after she wrote them. In Communication Ethics in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt's Rhetoric of Warning and Hope, author Ronald C. Arnett offers a groundbreaking examination of fifteen of Arendt's major scholarly works, considering the German writer's contributions to the areas of rhetoric and communication ethics for the first time.

Drawing on John Dewey and the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, this book employs philosophy as a conceptual resource to develop new methodological and analytical tools for conducting in situ empirical investigations.

Is metaphysics possible? This book argues that the greatest threat to its viability derives from a self-destructive formalism. If what is essential to the nature of physical entities are the properties they have in common (as formalism holds), the inevitable result will be a reductionist collapse leaving only being or physical matter or some other underlying ground.

This volume collects together revised papers originally presented at the 7th Conference on Logic and the Foundations of Game and Decision Theory (LOFT 2006). LOFT is a key venue for presenting research at the intersection of logic,economics and computer science, and the present collection gives a lively and wide-ranging view of an exciting and rapidly growing area.

Philosophy of Law: An Introduction provides an ideal starting point;for students of philosophy and law as it assumes no prior knowledge of either subject. The book is structured around the key issues and themes in the philosophy of law.

Building on the best-selling tradition of previous editions, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, Seventh Edition, provides a highly original, practical, and insightful guide to morality in the health professions.

Paolo D'Angelo traces the history of concealing art--which Italian calls sprezzatura--from ancient rhetoric to our own times. Finding the precept that art must be hidden from cosmetics to interior design, politics to poetry, the English garden to shabby chic, Sprezzatura is an erudite and surprising tour of aesthetics, philosophy, and art history.

Christine Swanton offers a new, comprehensive theory of virtue ethics which addresses the major concerns of modern ethical theory from a character-based perspective. Discussion of many problems in moral theory, such as moral constraints, rightness of action, the good life, the demandingness of ethics, the role of the subjective, and the practicality of ethics, has been dominated by Kantian and Consequentialist theories, with their own distinctive conceptual apparatus. Virtue Ethics shows how a different framework can shed new light on these intractable issues.