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An urgent comparison of what Confucianism and Charles Taylor's communitarianism have to say about the concept of the self and the contemporary challenges that it can unlock.

Plautus' Poenulus (or Little Carthaginian) is a staggering work. Performed in the years after Rome's traumatic struggle with Hannibal's Carthage, the comedy stages the restoration of a Carthaginian family divided through enslavement. This book explores the play's many themes such as slavery and war trauma, which resonate especially today, in a series of short thematic chapters followed by a continuous reading of the play.By presenting to a post-war Roman audience a tale of heartbreak and heartache among Carthaginians, and by setting the action in a Greece marked by comedic expectations and the geography of contemporary imperial conquest, Plautus' play stands as perhaps the most powerful surviving meditation on a Mediterranean world changed by Roman expansion. The play is populated by war veterans, enslaved peoples - including sex-workers, domestic slaves, and those who labour in the countryside - and an intersectional cast of Carthaginians and Greeks, a diversity that prompts audience interaction with a wide range of socio-cultural topics relevant to Plautus' Rome. By engaging weighty matters through song, slapstick, puns, and orientalising spectacle, Poenulus appears to defang charged issues, but its bite is deep. The play also includes one of the most metatheatrical prologues of all surviving Roman dramatic works, which thematizes the act of writing comedy and the constitution of the Roman theatrical audience.

This volume provides a deeper understanding of ethical issues in a selection of texts concerned with Abraham in Genesis 12-25.

Examines the principles and practice of automation in public governance.

This is a study of elite English men of English law and the methods they used to retain and justify their power and privilege, through controlling the story of the legal person. It looks at how these men of legal authority thought of themselves and their institution; how they studied and explained law; and how they put themselves in the middle of it, as the standard human in need of legal regulation and protection and in charge of that regulation and protection, and assigned to women an inferior legal role and being. The main concept employed to do all this was 'the legal person'. From the 1860s to the 1920s the courts declared that women were not 'persons' who could exercise public power - to vote, to sit in Parliament, to gain degrees, to be lawyers. Up to the end of the 20th century, and into the 21st, women's personhood remained precarious in the private sphere, for rape was excused within a marriage and female reproduction remained under state control (as it still does). It looks at the positive exclusion of women from the means of making legal meaning, especially the ability to shape law's central concept and shows the epistemological effects of this sex differential of legal power which are still felt today. Leading legal thinkers who helped to construct the concept are still revered. Law's continuing male orientation is neither seen nor acknowledged and the legal person is treated (falsely) as if he had always been and remains anyone.

A compelling new joint biography of Churchill and de Gaulle that shines new light on two of the greatest figures of the twentieth century.

This book studies relations between Muslims and non-Muslims where it matters most, diverse inner cities. Residents' insights prove relevant for both community relations and cohesion.

Could this be the moment they've both been waiting for?Eve has always loved antiques. She loves the way an item from the past can offer a glimpse of another world, of another time. It's why she painstakingly researches the stories behind every item in Rainy Day Antiques, her little Cambridge shop, to share with their new owners. It's her way of honouring the past and cherishing the present.Adam is firmly focussed on the future. He's only in town to sort his late grandfather's affairs. When he discovers that his grandfather hired Eve to manage his house clearance, he can only hope her methods don't delay his return to London. What neither of them know is that Adam's grandfather chose Eve for a reason. It's finally the right place and the right time for the two of them to meet. But what did he have planned for them?Readers love Ali McNamara...'I utterly love this author''I always enjoy reading books from this author''Wow. I love Ali McNamara books''I really do love this author's books''I want to read anything with Ali McNamara's name on it'

The first collection to provide an overview of the well-known psychoanalytic theory of the death drive in literary and cultural theory, this book features contributions from a range of prominent scholars working in the area of literature and psychanalysis. After its Freudian theorization, the death-drive has been re-interpreted by various psychoanalysts (including Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Zizek), philosophers (Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Baudrillard), political theorists (Judith Butler), queer theorists (Laurent Berlant, Lee Edelman), and posthumanist thinkers (Rosi Braidotti). This volume brings together some of the leading thinkers and theorists about the death-drive as a psychological, aesthetic, and theoretical principle in literary and cultural theory, examining texts by writers such as Plato, Henry James, and Ezra Pound.

In this significant contribution to aesthetic philosophy from one of the foremost writers on American poetry, Charles Altieri champions the neglected, non-cognitive, aspects of our encounters with works of art.Carefully argued with exemplary readings of poems, paintings and fiction, Imaginative Experience in the Arts outlines a new impetus for criticism and liberal education grounded in the way art stimulates our powers of imagination and enriches our experience of the world.In contrast to literary critics and philosophers who argue for the importance of aesthetic experience by subordinating it to knowledge and practical concerns, Altieri defends a view of subjective imaginative experience as important in itself, and already socially oriented. To do so, he proposes a distinction between "experience of" and "experience as," discriminating between cognitive practices and no less valuable practices involving enhanced attention; in turn, he provides a model for criticism of the kinds of description and responsiveness appropriate for aesthetic experience understood as such. Chapters test Altieri's concepts about the nature of aesthetic experience against readings of canonical poems, novels and paintings, by Langston Hughes, Giorgione, Cézanne, Silvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams and Mina Loy. Two appendices cover the limitations of AI poetry, and review other important arguments for the powers of imagination.

Grounded in the author's lived experience and research in the Sydney Anglican Diocese, the book provides a detailed study of individuals who worship and work at three parishes, covering both the stories told about Sydney Anglicans, and the lived experiences of Anglicans themselves, their identity, their faith and their communities.This study theorizes that complementarianism is not simply a set of private beliefs, but rather a specific ecclesial discourse defining orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Embedded in language and in the relationships between church leaders and parishioners, this discourse is used as an operation of power which limits Christian belief, behaviour and belonging.Rosie Clare Shorter offers a feminist, sociological account of lived Sydney Anglicanism and draws on the work of key theorists such as Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler and Joan Scott to explore the social consequences of complementarianism. Shorter provides a new frame for analyzing the specific discourse that uses gender to construct and regulate both faith and sexuality.Furthering the study of global evangelicalism, Shorter unravels the ways in which gender, sexuality, faith and evangelism are entwined and held together by complementarian discourse. In doing so, it provides new directions for safer, more equitable and inclusive Anglican churches.

An exploration of the process in which everyday narrative language can become reflective and then analytical.

Argues that lying is fundamental to the survival of the human species, through a series of philosophical, psychological and cultural examples spanning different traditions and disciplines.

From the bestselling Ukrainian cookery writer comes a profound meditation on the hopes and fears across generations amid political upheaval

Explores human vulnerability through the lens of natural law theory.

Through the use of case studies from across the Roman world, this book investigates the cultural interaction and local traditions of provincial communities under the control of imperial Rome. By drawing its theoretical approach from the anthropology of agrarian societies in South Asia, it sets out the framework for a novel cultural history cap­turing both sides of Roman imperialism: the abun­dan­ce of con­tacts bet­ween cultures and also the hierarchy in which they exis­ted. It encompasses sources from throughout the empire and across a variety of types - from Rhineland grave portraiture, to Egyptian temples, pottery finds in Britain and, lastly, inscriptions in local languages across the Mediterranean.With this focus on the influence of prestige tradition in particular Graeco-Latin societies, this book demonstrates that in spite of recent attempts to interpret the Roman world as uniquely interconnected for its time, it was in fact no exception to pre-modern conditions. The establishment of the Roman Empire produced a significant cultural interaction throughout the affected communities, and interaction with Greek and Latin traditions affected local cultures deeply, at times even transforming them. However, full participation in the culture of the ruling elite was only possible for a small segment of the provincial populations, and therefore the encounter with the Roman elite tradition did not lead to the demise of the local cultural world.

Transforming Love in China examines love, affection, and emotions in China from Maoist to contemporary China, focusing on the intersections with politics, economics, gender, class, race and technology.From the founding of the People's Republic of China to the end of the Cultural Revolution, political ideology and class struggle dominated everyday life, and love was subordinated to the communist revolution and socialism. During the Cultural Revolution, this turbulent period witnessed the paradoxical existence of self-abstinence and self-indulgence. Since China changed its political ideology in 1979 and shifted to a market-oriented economy, the country embraced the idea of romantic love. This "emotional turn" fostered opportunities for diverse intimate relationships characterized by the growth of cross-cultural love, LGBTQI+ love, and the emergence of a "sexual revolution" (Zhang 2011; Jeffreys and Yu 2015). The new dynamic was linked to contested discourses of (fantasised, eroticized, and racialized) foreign love intertwined with nationalist sentiments and ongoing tensions between sexual minorities and the government. The new millennium has witnessed love crises characterised by growing concerns about "leftover" men and women, high divorce rates, declining marriage and birth rates, and other relationship problems. The deepening of the market economy and technological advances have turned love into a "fast food" commodity for mass consumption, manifested in dating shows, digital platforms and intimacy between humans and AI/dolls.Wang draws on a wide range of texts, including government statistics on marriages and divorces, legal documents, Maoist folk songs, poems, posters, love letters, media texts, popular discourses, online dating websites, and ethnographic observations and interviews.

This volume explores late ancient and Byzantine media from an ecological view point and with a special focus on non-human agencies. How are such agencies entangled in the human elements - whether in the human media itself or the human characters of literary texts? How were these media once weathered by concrete ancient elements, and how can we re-expose them - to the weather of ecological readings? To what degree do these media imply the agency of landscapes, plants, animals, and other natural phenomena? To what degree do they comprise literary exploitations of other species?By applying an interdisciplinary approach that merges the fields of literature, history, and religious studies in the service of ecocriticism, the chapters highlight diverse ways in which premodern writers engaged with the non-human world. The integration of ecological perspectives into late ancient and Byzantine studies is a remarkably recent development. This book pioneers the interweaving of late ancient and Byzantine studies with ecocriticism. From the ancient treatises on dreams to monastic tales, from the Hexameron literature to the Byzantine romance, from the Exeter Book to a mysterious Byzantine icon, the book investigates a diverse range of media to uncover the intricacies of relationships in the natural world. It illustrates how these media are not only repositories of cultural and intellectual history but also valuable chests of ecological awareness, by overcoming the binary antinomy of culture and nature, human and non-human.

This book examines the links between experiencing immersion in antiquity and modernity. Immersive experiences are big business within today's creative economy. Forms range from immersive museum exhibitions, theatrical performances, art installations and experiences facilitated through virtual and augmented reality technologies. Yet the idea of immersion is not new; paintings, sculpture and theatre have all been theorised historically in terms of illusion, realism and immersion. From antiquity to modernity, there has been an interest in theorising the relationship between reality and virtual realities, and in contemplating whether feeling present in an alternate universe is a sought-after experience or something problematic and dangerous. The chapters in this volume explore the warnings against immersion voiced by Plato and embodied in the figure of the Homeric sirens, contrasted with the pro-immersion perspectives championed by Aristotelian mimesis and embodied in the concept of enargeia. The volume also examines the integration of the ancient world into immersive novels, games, museum exhibitions and theatrical performances. Practice-as-Research contributions explore the benefits of this synergy from practitioner perspectives. Contributors from diverse fields - including classical reception studies, art history, game studies, heritage studies and theatre studies - approach the interplay between antiquity and modernity from varied standpoints. Together, they uncover previously unforeseen connections across disciplines and lay the groundwork for future research and additional classically inflected immersive experiences.

Life lessons from living on a narrowboat, and the wonders that the waterways brings, from Adam Lind, of the popular Instagram and TikTok account, @adam.floatinghome.

Approaching Alain Badiou as a militant thinker committed to diagnosing political disorders of his time and waging theoretical battles to advance the communist hypothesis, this book focuses on the principal ambiguity of Badiou's project, which concerns the enigmatic relationship between philosophy and politics. On the one hand, his mature texts maintain a strict line of separation between the two disciplines. On the other hand, Badiou consistently links the philosophical pursuit of true life to a political revolt against injustice and inequality.Rather than treating Badiou as a builder of grand ontological systems, this book approaches the French philosopher as a combative polemicist and thinker of the contemporary moment. Not only does it take into account the development of Badiou's thinking from Sartre, Althusser, and Lacan as well as the yet unexplored relationship between Badiou's thinking and that of Foucault, but beyond that, places him in dialogue with contemporary thinkers such as Nancy Fraser and Wendy Brown.The Philosopher Militant not only diagnoses the political malady of the epoch, but also proposes a course of treatment and actively intervenes in the current situation. Seeking to foreground the actuality of Badiou's work, Gordienko provides commentary on the philosopher's canonical texts, exploring the relevance of his ideas to the latest political developments such as the election of Trump, as well as 'the dream of the lockdown' during the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, this book aspires to thinking with Badiou.

In this original study Khai Wager explores cosmopsychism - an approach that argues that the cosmos as a whole is conscious and that human consciousness is derived from it - and its relation to cognate views such as panpsychism, panqualityism and perennialism.The problem of phenomenal consciousness surfaces when we try to understand how it can be that our human consciousness arises from entirely non-conscious matter. Reflecting the growing interest in panpsychism, which argues consciousness does not emerge from entirely non-conscious matter, but rather that all matter is in some sense already conscious, Wager draws our attention to the combination problem: how do these small instances of consciousness combine to form larger instances? He demonstrates that cosmopsychism turns panpsychism on its head, reasoning to macro-level consciousness from a more fundamental form at the cosmic level. However, it faces its own challenge in the derivation problem: how is macro-level consciousness derived from the cosmic consciousness? This volume brings a cosmopsychism approach into critical engagement with panpsychism and investigates their respective handling of these problems, together with looking beyond these views to panqualityism and perennialism. Setting out an overall defence of cosmopsychism and attuning to enduring currents of human thought, it will be of interest to students and scholars of philosophy of mind and metaphysics as well as philosophy of religion, philosophy of psychology and cognitive science.

James Hyde, a practicing painter, boldly revises the concept of space in the European history of art. He presents it as a concept bound to historical circumstance, developing -sometimes contentiously-in philosophy, mathematics and science, and finally emerging in 20th century theorizations of art. Using primary documents, Hyde exposes what many will find surprising-that space only becomes part of the descriptive and analytic apparatus of art and architecture at the turn of the 20th century, not earlier. Hyde examines narratives that have shaped our understanding of the history of art and their explanatory efficacy in the context of the transformations of 13th and 15th century Italian art. He offers insights into the relationship between painting, architecture, icons and narrative pictures, the effects of St. Francis's miracles on painting and the essential diagrammatical nature of Renaissance perspective. The arrival of space into discussions about art introduces Kant, Leibniz, Apollonaire and Adolf von Hildebrand into the story. Hyde considers how and why artists and historians appropriated space at the end of the 19th century, as well as how space moved from the discourse of Neoclassical sculpture and Cubism to its prominence in discussions of art today. Hyde's original reading of the definition of space and the cultural forces that shaped it provides a re-envisioning of the foundations of art history and the philosophy of art.

THE TIMES BEST SCIENCE BOOK OF 2024GUARDIAN BEST IDEAS BOOKS OF 2024ECONOMIST BEST BOOKS OF 2024FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOKS OF 2024From one of the world's great science writers, a book that explores the deepest principles of evolutionary history.In this groundbreaking new approach to the evolution of all life, Richard Dawkins shows how the body, behaviour, and genes of every living creature can be read as a book - an archive of the worlds of its ancestors. A perfectly camouflaged desert lizard has a desiccated landscape of sand and stones 'painted' on its back. Its skin can be read as a description of ancient deserts in which its ancestors survived - and, before that, of the worlds of its more remote ancestors: a genetic book of the dead.But such descriptions are more than skin-deep. The fine chisels of Darwinian natural selection carve their way through the very warp and woof of the body, into every biochemical nook and corner, into every cell of every living creature. A zoologist of the future, presented with a hitherto-unknown animal, will be able to reconstruct the worlds that shaped its ancestors, to read its unique 'book of the dead'.The book is filled with fascinating examples of the power of Darwinian natural selection to build exquisite perfection, paradoxically accompanied by what look like gross blunders. Along the way, Dawkins dismantles influential criticisms of the 'gene's-eye-view' of life. And, to end with a provocative sting in the tail, the author asks there is a sense in which all our 'own' genes can be seen as a gigantic colony of cooperating viruses?From the author of The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale comes a revolutionary book that unlocks the door to an ancient past, seen through wholly new eyes.

A reconceptualization of the concept of humanism that places dialectical humanism as the core philosophical and political project capable of resisting and overcoming capitalism.