Product Description: In A Social Theory of Freedom, Mariam Thalos argues that the theory of human freedom should be a broadly social and political theory, rather than a theory that places itself in opposition to the issue of determinism. Thalos rejects the premise that a theory of freedom is fundamentally a theory of the metaphysics of constraint and, instead, lays out a political conception of freedom that is closely aligned with questions of social identity, self-development in contexts of intimate relationships, and social solidarity...read more

Product Description: The central insight of Darwin's Origin of Species is that evolution is an ecological phenomenon, arising from the activities of organisms in the 'struggle for life'. By contrast, the Modern Synthesis theory of evolution, which rose to prominence in the twentieth century, presents evolution as a fundamentally molecular phenomenon, occurring in populations of sub-organismal entities - genes...read more

Product Description: Suicide and Agency offers an original and timely challenge to existing ways of understanding suicide. Through the use of rich and detailed case studies, the authors assembled in this volume explore how interplay of self-harm, suicide, personhood and agency varies markedly across site (Greenland, Siberia, India, Palestine and Mexico) and setting (self-run leprosy colony, suicide bomb attack, cash-crop farming, middle-class mothering)...read more

Product Description: We have come to regard nonhuman animals as beings of concern, and we even grant them some legal protections. But until we understand animals as moral agents in and of themselves, they will be nothing more than distant recipients of our largesse...read more

Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility is a series of volumes presenting outstanding new work on a set of connected themes, investigating such questions as:DT What does it mean to be an agent? DT What is the nature of moral responsibility? Of criminal responsibility? What is the relation between moral and criminal responsibility (if any)? DT What is the relation between responsibility and the metaphysical issues of determinism and free will?DT What do various psychological disorders tell us about agency and responsibility?DT How do moral agents develop? How does this developmental story bear on questions about the nature of moral judgment and responsibility?DT What do the results from neuroscience imply (if anything) for our questions about agency and responsibility?OSAR thus straddles the areas of moral philosophy and philosophy of action, but also draws from a diverse range of cross-disciplinary sources, including moral psychology, psychology proper (including experimental and developmental), philosophy of psychology, philosophy of law, legal theory, metaphysics, neuroscience, neuroethics, political philosophy, and more. It is unified by its focus on who we are as deliberators and (inter)actors, embodied practical agents negotiating (sometimes unsuccessfully) a world of moral and legal norms.

Winner of the 2015 Best Scholarly Book Award presented by the Diopian Institute for Scholarly Advancement Afrocentricity is the most intellectually dominant idea in the African world, one that is having a growing impact on social science discourse. This paradigm, philosophically rooted in African cultures and values, fundamentally challenges major epistemological traditions in Western thought, such as modernism and postmodernism, Marxism, existentialism, feminism, and postcolonialism. In The Demise of the Inhuman, Ana Monteiro-Ferreira reviews what Molefi Kete Asante has called the "infrastructures of dominance and privilege," arguing that Western concepts such as individualism, colonialism, race and ethnicity, universalism, and progress, are insufficient to overcome various forms of oppression. Afrocentricity, she argues, can help lead us beyond Western structures of thought that have held sway since the early fifteenth century, towards a new epistemological framework that will enable a more human humanity.

Product Description: What does it mean to be free? We invoke the word frequently, yet the freedom of countless Americans is compromised by social inequalities that systematically undercut what they are able to do and to become. If we are to remedy these failures of freedom, we must move beyond the common assumption, prevalent in political theory and American public life, that individual agency is best conceived as a kind of personal sovereignty, or as self-determination or control over one’s actions...read more

High school teacher Suzanne Bloomer has buried herself in her job at New Vision Christian School in Farmersburg, Ohio. But she’s none too pleased when widower Mitch Sanderson leaves his fields mid-harvest to fill a teacher/principal position at the school. She knows better than to trust a Sanderson, and she’s determined not to be tricked by one again. When Mitch’s persistent kindness starts to confuse Suzanne’s feelings for him, she remembers that she is even less interested in a hand-me-down husband than she is in wearing secondhand clothing. Neither has Mitch forgotten his late wife’s plea that he never remarry. His children certainly haven’t. Will their faith in God and trust in each other be enough to overcome the odds and build a life together?

Product Description: WINNER OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION BOOK PRIZE (2015). Building Better Beings presents a new theory of moral responsibility. Beginning with a discussion of ordinary convictions about responsibility and free will and their implications for a philosophical theory, Manuel Vargas argues that no theory can do justice to all the things we want from a theory of free will and moral responsibility...read more

In this brilliant study, Thomas Pfau argues that the loss of foundational concepts in classical and medieval Aristotelian philosophy caused a fateful separation between reason and will in European thought. Pfau traces the evolution and eventual deterioration of key concepts of human agency—will, person, judgment, action—from antiquity through Scholasticism and on to eighteenth-century moral theory and its critical revision in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Featuring extended critical discussions of Aristotle, Gnosticism, Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith, and Coleridge, this study contends that humanistic concepts they seek to elucidate acquire meaning and significance only inasmuch as we are prepared positively to engage (rather than historicize) their previous usages. Beginning with the rise of theological (and, eventually, secular) voluntarism, modern thought appears increasingly reluctant and, in time unable to engage the deep history of its own underlying conceptions, thus leaving our understanding of the nature and function of humanistic inquiry increasingly frayed and incoherent. One consequence of this shift is to leave the moral self-expression of intellectual elites and ordinary citizens alike stunted, which in turn has fueled the widespread notion that moral and ethical concerns are but a special branch of inquiry largely determined by opinion rather than dialogical reasoning, judgment, and practice.   A clear sign of this regression is the present crisis in the study of the humanities, whose role is overwhelmingly conceived (and negatively appraised) in terms of scientific theories, methods, and objectives. The ultimate casualty of this reductionism has been the very idea of personhood and the disappearance of an adequate ethical language. Minding the Modern is not merely a chapter in the history of ideas; it is a thorough phenomenological and metaphysical study of the roots of today's predicaments.   “[A] learned, deeply important, and accomplished study . . . that calls upon a set of interpretive and communal traditions that, far from being fossilized, contain radical and renovating power, but whose power can be called on, extended, elaborated, and applied to the present and future only if one knows that those traditions can and do remain alive and available, and that we ignore or pronounce them 'past' at our peril. The sweep and comprehensiveness of the work are remarkable. This is not a history of philosophy at all. It is a call for us to rededicate ourselves to a serious, demanding practice of humanistic studies.” —James Engell, Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University "Minding the Modern is comparable to Alasdair MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. With extraordinary erudition, Pfau locates the philosophical developments that contributed to the agony of the modern mind. Moreover, he helps us see why many who exemplify that intellectual stance do not recognize their own despair. Suffice it to say, this is an immensely important book that hopefully will be read widely and across the disciplines." —Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics, Duke Divinity School

This book explores and critically reflects on the theory and practice of political agency in contemporary global politics. In light of the changing relationship between the state, the market and the society, it seeks to map both theoretically and empirically contemporary forms of global political agency. This book reflects on the theory and practice of political agency in contemporary global politics. More specifically, it empirically analyses a range of different forms of political agency and explores their significance for understanding and enacting global politics. Reflecting the efforts of scholars from a variety of disciplines from political theory and Sociology to Geography and International Relations, it brings into conversation a wide spectrum of theoretical approaches including Marxism, feminism, post-structuralism and historical institutionalism. The contributors compare a range of forms of political agency; exploring their significance for the theory and practice of global politics; and reflect on the tensions and synergies generated by recent efforts to conceptualise them. Demonstrating an innovative and interdisciplinary approach Contemporary Political Agency will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, sociology, political economy and political theory.

Product Description: Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility is a series of volumes presenting outstanding new work on a set of connected themes in moral philosophy and philosophy of action. This special volume in the series presents ten new papers marking the fiftieth anniversary of P...read more

Product Description: The notion of imputation occupies a central place in Kant s practical philosophy. It links the concept of freedom, the notion of person, and deontological ethics. This is the first study to comprehensively analyze Kant s theory of imputation...read more

Product Description: A Metaphysics for Freedom argues that agency itself-and not merely the special, distinctively human variety of it-is incompatible with determinism. For determinism is threatened just as surely by the existence of powers which can be unproblematically accorded to many sorts of animals, as by the distinctively human powers on which the free will debate has tended to focus...read more

Product Description: In exploring whether our neuroscientific discoveries are consistent with the idea we are voluntary agents, Human Agency and Neural Causes presents a neuroscientifically-informed emergentist account of human agency.In contrast with the assumptions that currently shape neuropsychological research on voluntary agency, J...read more