Peter Gratton

My hypothesis is that achieving adulthood has been Russon’s aim from the beginning—in life, yes, as perhaps with the rest of us—but also in and as his philosophical development. To set up this claim, I show how philosophy has traditionally conjoined its own development with narratives of adulthood. I turn to important moments in Plato, Descartes, and Kant to set out the outlines of a given structure of maturation as found in the Western tradition, all to bring home how Russon’s writing tries to achieve something of an event beyond maturity as it’s been envisaged previously in these works.

The essays in Fanon and the Decolonization of Philosophy all trace different aspects of the mutually supporting histories of philosophical thought and colonial politics in order to suggest ways that we might decolonize our thinking. From psychology to education, to economic and legal structures, the contributors interrogate the interrelation of colonization and philosophy in order to articulate a Fanon-inspired vision of social justice. This project is endorsed by his daughter, Mireille Fanon-Mendès France, in the book's preface

The first dictionary dedicated to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy.Jean-Luc Nancy is a key figure in the contemporary intellectual landscape. This dictionary will, for the first time, consider the full scope of his writing and will provide insights into the philosophical and theoretical background to his focus on community and aesthetics.Drawing on an internationally recognised expertise of a multidisciplinary team of contributors, the 70 entries explain all of his main concepts, contextualising these within his work as a whole and relating him to his contemporaries. It will appeal to students and scholars alike.Key Features:* comprehensive definitions which are contextualised* fully cross-referenced throughout* extensive list of secondary readingKeywords: politics, democracy, freedom, morality, aesthetics.

Hannah Arendt's (1906-1975) writings, both in public magazines and in her important books, are still widely studied today. She made original contributions in political thinking that still astound readers and critics alike. The subject of several films and numerous books, colloquia, and newspaper articles, Arendt remains a touchstone in innumerable debates about the use of violence in politics, the responsibility one has under dictatorships and totalitarianism, and how to combat the repetition of the horrors of the past. The Bloomsbury Companion to Arendt offers the definitive guide to her writings and ideas, her influences and commentators, as well as the reasons for her lasting significance, with 66 original essays taking up in accessible terms the myriad ways in which one can take up her work and her continuing importance. These essays, written by an international set of her best readers and commentators, provides a comprehensive coverage of her life and the contexts in which her works were written. Special sections take up chapters on each of her key writings, the reception of her work, and key ways she interpreted those who influenced her. If one has come to Arendt from one of her essays on freedom, or from yet another bombastic account of her writings on Adolph Eichmann, or as as student or professor working in the field of Arendt studies, this book provides the ideal tool for thinking with and rediscovering one of the most important intellectuals of the past century. But just as importantly, contributors advance the study of Arendt into neglected areas, such as on science and ecology, to demonstrate her importance not just to debates in which she was well known, but those touched off only after her death. Arendt's approaches as well as her concrete claims about the political have much to offer given the current ecological and refugee crises, among others. In sum, then, the Companion provides a tool for thinking with Arendt, but also for showing just where those thinking with her can take her work today.

This paper looks at the thread throughout Nancy’s work on the notion of the decision and judgment. In a period when we must rethink not only the sovereign decision but all manner of traditional jurisprudential and ethical modes of thinking the decision, Nancy’s considerations of freedom help us reflect on thinking the decision otherwise and thus could prove revolutionary for how we think crime and punishment and calculating with the incalculable of each and every trauma we dub a crime. At a time when the geographies of the prison–industrial complex overtake the West, perhaps no other thinking is more central to undoing its practices and sovereignty.

Most shoppers like bargains. Do bargains come at the expense of workers in sweatshops around the world? The authors argue that many large multinational corporations are running the moral equivalents of sweatshops and are not properly respecting the rights of persons. They list a set of minimum standards of safety and decency that they claim all corporations should meet (and that many are not). Finally, they defend their call for improved working conditions by replying to objections that meeting improved conditions will cause greater harm than good, even to the workers themselves. They consider many specifi c corporations and name names and point the finger at various forms of disrespect for persons, along the way.

Most shoppers like bargains. Do bargains come at the expense of workers in sweatshops around the world? The authors argue that many large multinational corporations are running the moral equivalents of sweatshops and are not properly respecting the rights of persons. They list a set of minimum standards of safety and decency that they claim all corporations should meet (and that many are not). Finally, they defend their call for improved working conditions by replying to objections that meeting improved conditions will cause greater harm than good, even to the workers themselves. They consider many specifi c corporations and name names and point the finger at various forms of disrespect for persons, along the way.

At the time of his death in 1984, Foucault’s late career forays into Stoicism and other sets of ancient texts were often little understood, except as part of a larger project on the history of sexuality. Indeed, outside of France and outside of an incipient queer theory, Foucault was often taken up in terms of debates over post-structuralism and postmodernism—themes all but absent from his writings. More than thirty years later, after the publication of all of his lecture courses at the Collège de France from 1970-1984 as well as his collected writings, we have gained a better understanding of the deep continuities in his set of concerns from Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique to the third volume of his history of sexuality series, Le Souci de soi. Yet many Foucault scholars continue to see momentous shifts in his writings, e.g., from knowledge to power to ethics, and the almost bewildering range of texts he covered in the years after finishing the first volume of his history of sexuality series, La Volonté de savoir, lead to very different interpretations concerning what Foucault was attempting to do and how much his rendering of ancient texts differed from his own claims. Stuart Elden’s Foucault’s Last Decade steps into this breach, using archival work to fill in many of the details of this period, from when and on what Foucault was lecturing to listing those with him in that amusing late photo of a beaming Foucault in an ill-fitting cowboy hat. The publication of Elden’s book marks a good time to assess this often misunderstood period in Foucault’s work, and we have gathered Stuart Elden and two more of Foucault’s best interpreters, Eduardo Mendieta and Dianna Taylor, to do so.

In recent years, Richard Kearney has emerged as a leading figure in the field of continental philosophy, widely recognized for his work in the areas of philosophical and religious hermeneutics, theory and practice of the imagination, and political thought. This much-anticipated--and long overdue--study is the first to reflect the full range and impact of Kearney's extensive contributions to contemporary philosophy. The book opens with Kearney's own "prelude" in which he traces his intellectual itinerary as it traverses the three imaginaries explored in the volume: the dialogical, the political, and the narrative. The interviews that follow the first section allow readers to listen in on conversations between Kearney and some of the most interesting and respected thinkers of our time--Noam Chomsky, Charles Taylor, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricouer, and Martha Nussbaum--as they reveal new and unexpected aspects of their thought on stories and mourning, ethics and narrative, terror and religion, intellectuals and ideology. The next section, on the political imaginary, looks at Kearney's distinctive contribution to the political situation in Ireland and in Europe more generally; and in the last, on narrative, writers including David Wood, Terry Eagleton, and Mark Dooley focus on Kearney's novels as instances of narrative theory put into literary practice. Concluding with Kearney's postscript, an essay on "Traversals and Epiphanies in Joyce and Proust," the volume comes full circle, encompassing the full extent of Richard Kearney's engagement and offerings as a philosopher

The context for these interviews was a seminar [Peter Gratton] conducted on speculative realism in the Spring 2010. There has been great interest in speculative realism and one reason Gratton surmise[s] is not just the arguments offered, though [Gratton doesn't] want to take away from them; each of these scholars are vivid writers and great pedagogues, many of whom are in constant contact with their readers via their weblogs. Thus these interviews provided an opportunity to forward student questions about their respective works. Though each were conducted on different occasions, the interviews stand as a collected work, tying together the most classical questions about “realism” to ancillary movements about the non-human in politics, ecology, aesthetics, and video gaming—all to point to future movements in this philosophical area.

“What must be thought,” Jacques Derrida writes in the closing pages of Rogues, “is this inconceivable and unknowable thing, a freedom that would no longer be the power of a subject, a freedom without autonomy, a heteronomy without servitude, in short, something like a passive decision.”1 To certain readers of Derrida, this passage, coming near the end of Rogues, written some two years before he passed away, would mark the fundamental failure of his thought. “What must be thought …”: an exhortation, an ethical injunction, but seemingly also a final plea at the end of a long career that, many…