Böcker utgivna av EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

Deleuze, Mathematics, Metaphysics provides new solutions to the central problems of the philosophy of mathematics by reconstructing Deleuze's metaphysics. It does so through direct engagement with analytic and continental philosophy, along with the formal and natural sciences. These new Deleuzian solutions reject equally other-worldly accounts of mathematics, such as Platonism, and accounts which treat mathematics as a useful fiction or an empty formalist game. Instead, Deleuze, Mathematics, Metaphysics argues that mathematical truth is grounded in the necessity of difference itself. Since difference is entirely this-worldly, the truth of mathematics does not require us to posit the reality of transcendent entities or possible worlds. Doing so not only provides a new metaphysics of mathematics; it also explains the usefulness of mathematics for science and why mathematical truth appear to have such otherworldly properties in the first place.

What in terms of Alice Munro's creative artistry and creative power allowed her to become the first and only short story writer, the first and only Canadian, and just the thirteenth woman in history to win the Nobel Prize in Literature? And exactly when during Munro's career did her artistry and power advance to ensure that she would earn such world-wide renown? The answers lie in studying the boldly innovative yet greatly under-examined group of her four mid-career breakthrough books. Our volume therefore provides a carefully orchestrated analysis of Munro's subtle yet potent handling of form, technique and style both within individual stories and across these special collections. Reading Alice Munro's Breakthrough Books: A Suite in Four Voices not only addresses a significant vacancy in Munro criticism - and, by extension, in all short story criticism - but, equally importantly, offers an exciting new model for how criticism can be collectively written.

Alfred Hitchcock was a major figure in the development and flourishing of film noir. His noir films became an inspirational foundation of the neo-noir movement beginning in the 1970s, from Brian de Palma's mash-up homages to Hitchcock originals such as Obsession (1976) and Body Double (1984) to the dark political thrillers of the era that explore the underside of American life, all of which owe a substantial debt to Hitchcock. However, the central role of Hitchcock in the long history of film noir has seldom been acknowledged in work devoted to his career and noir criticism more generally. Instead, there has been a tendency to consider Hitchcock's many dark thrillers and crime melodramas as sui generis, that is, as "Hitchcock films" that are somehow separate and distinct from industry trends. But this is to take a narrow view of the director's accomplishments that underestimates his substantial contributions to film history. Alfred Hitchcock and Film Noir will be the first book-length treatment of the impressive corpus of Hitchcock noir films considered as such, as well as of his connection more generally to the emergence and flourishing of this important cinematic trend.

In Shakespeare's Britain rivers were not only a crucial form of travel and important natural resources which sustained communities and provided employment but were also sites to which myths and memories accrued and which could be used to figure religious ideas of cleansing and the waters of life. Pageants were performed on them, legends grew up about their names and led to plays and poems being written about personified river gods and goddesses, and stories were told of historic battles which had been fought on their banks. These essays explore the cultural and literary geography of rivers in the early modern period and the ways in which they shaped the lives and identities of those who lived near them. By charting changes (both manmade and natural) to the way in which rivers ebb and flow the book also reminds us of the urgency of the climate crisis.

Finnegans Wake - Human and Nonhuman Histories opens new ground by exploring the productive tension between anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric readings of James Joyce's final modernist masterpiece. Drawing on the most up-to-date theories and methodologies (the Anthropocene, new materialism, petroculture studies, the blue humanities, animal studies, ecofeminism, ecomedia), twelve leading Joyce scholars offer valuable new insights into the interwoven historical and planetary dimensions of Finnegans Wake. The volume's focus allows the contributors to read the Wake's nonhuman imaginary in original, often surprising comparative contexts (colonialism, the Irish Revival, the Free State's energy policies, the invention of television) and to spotlight enlightening nonhuman themes in Joyce's circular history (bogs, storms, rivers, bodily fluids, skin, wolves, mourning, DNA, atoms, labour, music). As these chapters show, a century later, Finnegans Wake remains a vibrant and vital text in which to interrogate the limits, exploitations and common plight of human and nonhuman life in the 21st-century.

The decades between the French Revolution and the mid-nineteenth century were a period of radical transformation in Scottish society and culture on many levels. The Scottish Enlightenment had seen a striking blossoming of the natural sciences, with the development of a distinctive and influential national scientific culture. The natural philosopher David Brewster was educated in Edinburgh amidst the intellectual ferment of the late Enlightenment but lived to end his days as a grand old man of Victorian science. This book uses the long and eventful career of Brewster as a lens through which to explore themes of rupture and continuity in Scottish scientific culture in a period of dramatic social and political change.

With an interdisciplinary agenda, Film Phenomenologies investigates the emerging field of film phenomenology, linking the fundamental significance of early thinkers and related methods of phenomenological investigation to newer emphases and diverse voices, such as Gaston Bachelard, Karen Barad, Simone de Beauvoir, bell hooks, Iris Murdoch and Hermann Schmitz. Established scholars consider various themes, including colonial duration and the politics of refusal, feeling feminist time, the exchange of play, scalar theory and scattered bodies, spectatorship and the entanglement of montage, disability, dance and speculative embodiment, AI phenomenology and breath gestures, cinematic atmospheres, the precarious intimacy of the film screen, stardom and biopics, and Black lived experience. Divided into three parts, Film Phenomenologies offers a collective combination of phenomenological approaches, braiding classic and critical methods to explore aesthetic, embodied, ethical, and political perspectives. It is the first collection to provide a substantial engagement with diverse and inclusive directions in the field of film and media studies.

Lyn Hejinian is considered one of the most important avant-garde poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beginning with five poems written from 1963 to 1965, The Proposition collects Hejinian's previously uncollected works from 1963-1983 in one unique volume. The individual early works curated in this volume broaden the existing published collections of Hejinian's works, showing Hejinian's play with form, visual language, and linguistic experiment before the poet's move to project orientated writing practices. With a new Preface by Lyn Hejinian, and five essays by prominent critics in the field, the volume offers both a new collection of Hejinian's poetry and an important scholarly resource for students, scholars, and readers of contemporary avant-garde writing more widely.

Few polities were more instrumental to the rise of the East India Company and the advent of British colonial rule in South Asia than the Mughal successor state of Awadh (c. 1722-1856). And few individuals influenced the making of the Awadh regime and its pivotal relationship with the Company more than the chief consorts (begams) of its ruling dynasty. Drawing on previously unexamined Persian sources, this book centres the begams of Awadh within a revised history of state-formation and conceptual change in pre- and early colonial India. In so doing, it posits the begams as essential, if contested, builders of both the Awadh regime and the Company state, and as ambivalent partners in forging evolving political economies and emerging conceptual languages of statehood and sovereignty in early colonial India.

Gardens were both a setting and showcase for nearly every aspect of social and daily life at the royal court during the early Islamic period in Western Asia. Safa Mahmoudian uses a wide range of primary source materials including contemporary Arabic manuscripts, together with archaeological reports, aerial photographs, and archaeologists' letters and diaries. Through close readings of this evidence, Mahmoudian creates a picture of these gardens in their historical, architectural and environmental contexts and examines various factors that influenced their design and placement. In doing so, Mahmoudian adds to our understanding of these gardens and palaces and, ultimately, early Islamic-period court culture as a whole.

Tackling digital effects such as colourisation, time-ramping, compositing and photo-realistic rendering, this monograph explores how the growing use of these post-photographic procedures shapes our relationship with the image and the world that the image represents. At stake is the ability to critically engage with the digital techniques that mediate perceptions of reality. Through a series of case-studies the book connects the dominant techniques of hybridisation with emergent ways of being in our increasingly hybrid physical-digital world. Pointing at the relationship between mainstream visual culture and the manifold imperatives of digital technology and digital culture, Hybrid Images and the Vanishing Point of Digital Visual Effects highlights how a handful of digital visual effects are coming to shape the way we live.

Drawing on a wealth of material from children's periodicals from the Victorian era to the early twentieth century, Kristine Moruzi examines how the concept of the charitable child has been defined through the press. Charitable ideals became increasingly prevalent at a time of burgeoning social inequities and cultural change, shaping expectations that children were capable of and responsible for charitable giving. While the child as the object of charity has received considerable attention, less focus has been paid to how and why children have been encouraged to help others. Yet the ways in which children were positioned to see themselves as people who could and should help - in whatever forms that assistance might take - are crucial to understanding how children and childhood were conceptualised in the past. This book uses children's print culture to examine the relationship between children and charitable institutions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to foreground children's active roles.

Rousseau's Politics of Taste challenges the popular but partial pictures we have of Rousseau as an inconsistent 'ancient' utopian or a 'modern' abstract philosopher with a systematising spirit. Combining intellectual history and political theory, it reinterprets his understandings of pleasure and happiness, judgment and amour-propre, inequality, the general will and, above all, taste. Rousseau's readers have long recognised the complex tensions in his thought. By reconstructing his theory of taste as a kind of modern Epicureanism, this book provides a way of articulating neglected patterns in those tensions and, a new understanding of what he was attempting to achieve with his political thought.

The twentieth century was the century of the deconstruction of all absolutes: of liberation understood as a critique of every meaningful structure. In this sense, conflict was understood as an instrument of the rupture of every form, institution and community. Niccolò Machiavelli is the first in our tradition to think about the productivity of political conflict - its capacity, on the model of ancient Rome, to construct new orders, institutions and forms of life. Francesco Marchesi offers an original reading of Machiavellian thought as well as a critique of some of the most influential contemporary theories of conflict including Foucault, Schmitt, Arendt, Lacan and Althusser. In doing so, he proposes an innovative, conflictual political ontology that, with Machiavelli, is capable of conceiving the affirmative, and not only deconstructive, power of conflict.

Many critics classify Vladimir Nabokov as a highbrow humourist, a refined wordsmith overly fond of playful puzzles and private in-jokes whose art appeals primarily to an intellectually-sophisticated readership. This study presents a more balanced portrait, placing equal emphasis on the broader, earthier humour that is such a marked feature of Nabokov's writing, which draws on the human body and all things physical for its laughs: sex and scatology, farce and slapstick. Moving between the metaphysical and the physical, the cosmic and the comic, mind and matter, it presents Nabokov as a writer at home in both high and low forms of humour, a comedian who is capable of producing as many belly laughs as brainteasers, and of appealing to a much wider readership than is commonly supposed.

For seventy years, William Gillies has been seen as a placid painter of landscape and decorative still life. Andrew McPherson explodes this view to reveal a modernist whose response to the instabilities and violence of modernity touched universals of human experience. Gillies' idiom was shaped by institutions for artistic production unique to Scotland. But it was the politics of Scotland's connections to the rest of the British Isles that produced his mythic and misleading reputation. New paintings and new meanings are uncovered placing the micro-effects of modernity on mental health, family and community in the wider contexts of war, nationalism and public patronage. McPherson also shows how this changing world led Gillies towards new applications of modernist expression. Lavishly illustrated, and referencing almost one thousand works, this major reappraisal is an indispensable source on the cultural politics of a four-nation state and the reception of modernism in Britain.

This book examines the practice of risk allocation in the offshore energy industry through the public policy lens and offers a novel perspective on the concept of gross negligence in risk allocation. This perspective is founded on the proportionality element of distributive justice in burden distribution. The assessment of how mutual indemnity clauses apply as an absolute shield against liability arising from gross negligence reveals that moral hazard can result from the practice. In the analysis, this book considers the risk allocation practice in PSC and Concession regimes and how parties' liability is determined in drilling contracts. This book considers gross negligence a sui generis risk and provides a definitional pathway for determining when gross negligence occurs and how it should apply to offshore drilling contracts. Thus, it advances an environmental sustainability approach to offshore petroleum drilling operations. This book will be useful to operators and contractors, resource-rich countries, insurance companies, practitioners, scholars, and academics interested in risk allocation in the petroleum industry.

As evidenced by the famed Book of Kells and monumental high crosses, Scotland and Ireland have long shared a distinctive artistic tradition. The story of how this tradition developed and flourished for another millennium through survival, adaptation and revival is less well known. Some works were preserved and repaired as relics, objects of devotion believed to hold magical powers. Respect for the past saw the creation of new artefacts through the assemblage of older parts, or the creation of fakes and facsimiles. Meanings and values attached to these objects, and to places with strong early Christian associations, changed over time but their 'Celtic' and/or 'Gaelic' character has remained to the forefront of Scottish and Irish national expression. Exploring themes of authenticity, imitation, heritage, conservation and nationalism, these interdisciplinary essays draw attention to a variety of understudied artworks and illustrate the enduring link that exists between Scottish and Irish cultures.

This volume interweaves Shakespeare's wisdom with ancient spiritual practices and the insights of a post-secular age in order to explore a transhistorical space of sapient knowing and living. Pursuing the delight of heart, soul and understanding in the synaesthetic experience of theatre and the meditative space of poetry, sapiential Shakespeare explores knowledge, love, beauty, nature, will and power in conversation with multiple wisdom traditions, tapping into a global sensus communis rooted in energetic knowing-with. This collection of essays begins in the Mediterranean with classical, biblical and Egyptian wisdom, moves to the East to consider Sufi and Buddhist wisdom and then turns to the West to reflect on Indigenous science and ways of knowing. Sharing a common root in oikos, meaning home, the ecumenical and the ecological converge in an embodied ethics and politics of care premised in an ecological rather than ego-logical way of being.

Action TV Reboots and Visibility Politics: Rebooting Middlebrow Culture deals with the network TV reboots of Hawaii Five-0, MacGyver, Magnum, P.I., Lethal Weapon and The Equalizer to explore the cultural politics at work in contemporary middlebrow culture. The book focusses specifically on the representational politics of contemporary middlebrow TV. The book analyses action TV reboots via the framework of middlebrow television, and the political meanings of the category. It explores the category of middlebrow TV, the role of nostalgia of middlebrow reboots. This leads into a critique of the representational norms of middlebrow TV, which includes a variety of visual representations of 'otherness' but fails to narrativize marginalisation. Instead, visual 'difference' is reduced to visual signifier of an inclusive society. What emerges is the idea of visibility politics and its dominance in American network TV.

To watch television is to watch bodies in motion: walking, dancing, cooking, fighting, running, playing, travelling, and so on. Television and the Moving Body presents the first detailed exploration of the moving body on television. It analyses different types of movement, including walking, dancing, sports, and craft, outlining how these different movement profiles are employed to construct time, tell stories, work through cultural issues, and foster empathy. Through a range of case studies across different genres and formats, including Gogglebox, The West Wing, Taskmaster, The Repair Shop, Strictly Come Dancing and Sense8, this book examines what television's moving bodies tell us both about normative ideas of movement and identity, and about television itself.

Jeffrey Bell argues that a motivating problematic for existentialist writers is the attempt to think through the implications of the problematic nature of life. He applies a Deleuzian theory of problems to an analysis of some key concepts in contemporary social and political theory. Building on the metaphysics of problems set out in his book, An Inquiry into Analytic-Continental Metaphysics, he provides a new way of integrating the concerns of existentialist writers into contemporary political and social debates.

Jeffrey Bell offers a novel approach to thinking about a number of longstanding problems in metaphysics, issues that have persisted throughout the history of philosophy. By developing a metaphysics of problems, he shows how the history of both the analytic and continental traditions of philosophy can be seen to be an ongoing response to the problem of regresses. By highlighting this shared history, Bell brings these two traditions back together to address problems that have been essential to their projects all along and central to much of the history of philosophy.

Donald Trump's love of golf adds him to a long line of presidents who have a close association with sports. Indeed, golf might just be the leading presidential pastime, ever since William Howard Taft was photographed strutting the links against the advice of his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt. And it was Roosevelt, more than any president, who set the standard for linking the nation's top job to its favourite physical pastimes. Starting with Roosevelt's significant role in linking the presidency with fandom, advocacy of, and active participation in sports, this volume traces how occupants of the White House continued to develop these connections in various guises across the following century. Though historians have certainly not ignored such associations, the variety of case studies represented here provides a wider and more multidisciplinary selection of standpoints from which to assess the interactions between sports and the presidency than ever before.

This book offers the first comparative study of the foundations, consolidation and contestation of regime guardianship in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of Turkey. For decades, the military in Turkey and the clergy in Iran acted as the guardians of Atatürk and Khomeini's ideological legacies. At the turn of the 21st century rising popular actors in both countries started challenging the tutelary control of the state and society. While in Turkey the clash between the Kemalist guardians and their Islamist-led rivals resulted in a victory for the latter, although not for democracy, in Iran, traditionalist guardians were able to thwart popular challenges to their authority at the expense of the regime's democratic legitimacy. How was guardianship established, consolidated and contested in these republics with seemingly inimical founding ideologies? Why did it unravel in Turkey but survive in the Islamic Republic in the early 2010s? And what do these power struggles and their outcomes tell us about political contestation in tutelary hybrid regimes?

This book provides the first assessment of the performance of three leading European polities in providing estimative intelligence during an era of surprise. It develops a new framework for conducting postmortems guided by a normative model of anticipatory foreign policy. The comparative analysis focuses on how the UK, the EU and Germany handled three cases of major surprises: the Arab uprisings, the rise to power of the Islamic State (ISIS), and the Russian annexation of Crimea. It considers not just government intelligence assessments, but also diplomatic reporting and expert open sources and how these assessments were received by organisational leaders. The book tests and develops new theories about the causes of strategic surprises, going beyond a common focus on intelligence versus policy failures to identify challenges and factors that cut across both communities. With the help of former senior officials, the book identifies lessons yet to be learnt by European polities to better anticipate and prepare for future surprises.

Three early modern philosophers - Spinoza, Leibniz and Hume - understood that minds necessarily involve ideas and patterns of thinking that are not conscious. Morejon shows that in this way they sharply distinguish themselves from other major early modern thinkers whose conceptions of the mind tended to identify thinking with consciousness, such as Descartes, Malebranche and Locke. This conception of the thinking mind as conscious remains popular even today. By contrast, Leibniz, Spinoza and Hume argue instead that thought is not, as such, a matter of consciousness. Morejon explores the significance of this insight for their conceptions of freedom and ethics. By systematically analyzing the major writings of these three thinkers and placing them in the context of the history of Western philosophy, he shows that together they provide us with a metaphysics of ideas that is uniquely helpful for thinking through important problems in contemporary political theory. In particular, it allows us to understand how it is possible for people to act against their own interests and in spite of their consciously knowing better. Readers will gain a sophisticated understanding of what Leibniz, Spinoza and Hume thought about the metaphysics of ideas, the nature of the human mind and the limits of individual freedom.

Adrian Little demonstrates how different conceptions of past, present and future contribute to the nature of political conflict in the world today. Reacting against narratives of political disillusionment and apathy, he focuses on how a new understanding of political temporality can inform our approach to political problems. He forms his argument around three major cases in which the nature of past, present and future is contested: Indigenous politics in settler colonies; the politics of bordering and migration; and debates over the future of democracy.

This study takes up Woolf's challenge to probe the relationship between education and work, specifically her education and her work as an essayist. It expands her education beyond her father's library to include not only a broader examination of her homeschooling but also her teaching at Morley College and her early book reviewing. It places Virginia Stephen's learning in the historical and cultural contexts of education for women, the working classes and writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Weaving together Virginia Stephen's homeschooling, her teaching and her writing for the newspapers, Beth Rigel Daugherty demonstrates how these three strands shape Virginia Woolf's essay persona, her essays and her relationship with her readers. She also shows why Virginia Stephen's apprenticeship compels Virginia Woolf to become a pedagogical essayist. The volume publishes two holograph draft lectures by Virginia Stephen for the first time and mines rarely used archival materials. It also includes five appendices, one detailing Virginia Stephen's library and another her apprenticeship essays. This is the first in a two-volume study of Virginia Woolf's essays that analyses Virginia Stephen's development and Virginia Woolf's achievements as an essay writer.