Böcker i The Tanner Lectures on Human Values-serien

Taking up three urgent problems of social justice-those with physical and mental disabilities, all citizens of the world, and nonhuman animals-neglected by current theories and thus harder to tackle in practical terms, Martha Nussbaum seeks a theory of social justice that can guide us to a richer, more responsive approach to social cooperation.

Vanity Fair has declared the Age of Irony over. Joan Didion has lamented that Obama's United States is an "irony-free zone." Here Jonathan Lear argues that irony is one of the tools we use to live seriously, to get the hang of becoming human. It forces us to experience disruptions in our habitual ways of tuning out of life, but comes with a cost.

Separated by millennia, Aristotle and Sigmund Freud gave us disparate but compelling pictures of the human condition. But if, with Jonathan Lear, we scrutinize these thinkers' attempts to explain human behavior in terms of a higher principle-whether happiness or death-the pictures fall apart.

Wendy Brown diagnoses a late-modern nihilism that trivializes values-including truth itself-and reduces politics to narcissism and power-mongering. Rereading Max Weber, who saw a similar predicament in his own time, Brown seeks to reground political action in responsibility and reorient classrooms to the critical thinking citizens need today.