In Ugly Freedoms Elisabeth R. Anker reckons with the complex legacy of freedom offered by liberal American democracy, outlining how the emphasis of individual liberty has always been entangled with white supremacy, settler colonialism, climate destruction, economic exploitation, and patriarchy. These “ugly freedoms” legitimate the right to exploit and subjugate others. At the same time, Anker locates an unexpected second type of ugly freedom in practices and situations often dismissed as demeaning, offensive, gross, and ineffectual but that provide sources of emancipatory potential. She analyzes both types of ugly freedom at work in a number of texts and locations, from political theory, art, and film to food, toxic dumps, and multispecies interactions. Whether examining how Kara Walker’s sugar sculpture A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby reveals the importance of sugar plantations to liberal thought or how the impoverished neighborhoods in The Wire blunt neoliberalism’s violence, Anker shifts our perspective of freedom by contesting its idealized expressions and expanding the visions for what freedom can look like, who can exercise it, and how to build a world free from domination.

This volume gathers studies by prominent scholars and philosophers about the question how have major figures from the history of philosophy, and some contemporary philosophers, addressed "the ultimate why question": why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?

In his description of Ulysses in Canto XXVI of the Inferno, Dante subjected the legendary Greek hero to a thoroughgoing revision. The Homeric Ulysses, after ten years of war and a further ten of fabulous adventures throughout the Mediterranean, returns home to Ithaca and resumes his position as son, father, husband, and king of the island. In contrast, Dante’s Ulysses—and that of Tennyson, inspired by Dante and so beloved in America—is an ingenious but profoundly restless character who, in his unceasing quest for knowledge, novelty, and happiness, finds not fulfillment but death. His tragic story embodies the dilemma that human intelligence poses for our civilization today, torn between the endless pursuit of innovation and its ever more catastrophic risks. Ulysses and the Limits of Dante’s Humanism / Ulisse o dei limiti dell’umanesimo dantesco offers a bilingual English and Italian examination of that revision.

A study of religion through the lens of Peter Shaffer’s play Equus.
 
In Unbridled, William Robert uses Equus, Peter Shaffer’s enigmatic play about a boy passionately devoted to horses, to think differently about religion. For several years, Robert has used Equus to introduce students to the study of religion, provoking them to conceive of religion in unfamiliar, even uncomfortable ways. In Unbridled, he is inviting readers to do the same.
 
A play like Equus tangles together text, performance, practice, embodiment, and reception. Studying a play involves us in playing different roles, as ourselves and others, and those roles, as well as the imaginative work they require, are critical to the study of religion. By approaching Equus with the reader, turning the play around and upside-down, Unbridled transforms standard approaches to the study of religion, engaging with themes including ritual, sacrifice, worship, power, desire, violence, and sexuality, as well as thinkers including Judith Butler, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jonathan Z. Smith. As Unbridled shows, the way themes and theories play out in Equus challenges us to reimagine the study of religion through open questions, contrasting perspectives, and alternative modes of interpretation and appreciation.
 

In Uncanny Rest Alberto Moreiras offers a meditation on intellectual life under the suspension of time and conditions of isolation. Focusing on his personal day-to-day experiences of the “shelter-in-place” period during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, Moreiras engages with the limits and possibilities of critical thought in the realm of the infrapolitical—the conditions of existence that exceed average understandings of politics and philosophy. In each dated entry he works through the process of formulating a life’s worth of thought and writing while attempting to locate the nature of thought once the coordinates of everyday life have changed. Offering nothing less than a phenomenology of thinking, Moreiras shows how thought happens in and out of a life, at a certain crossroads where memories collide, where conversations with interlocutors both living and dead evolve and thinking during a suspended state becomes provisional and uncertain.

It has long been a cornerstone of Catholic belief that Christians can be intelligent and creative thinkers—inquisitive seekers after truth—as well as men and women of ardent faith. Catholics are entirely committed, then, to the claim that human rationality and religious faith are complementary realities since they are equally gifts of God. But understanding precisely how faith and reason cohere has not always been a smooth path. At times, theology has allowed philosophy to become the leading (and baleful) partner in the faith-reason relationship, thereby lapsing into rationalism or relativism. At other times, theology has been tempted by fideism, with philosophy now regarded as little more than a pernicious intruder corrupting Christian faith, life and thought. The essays in this volume display how Catholicism understands the proper confluence between philosophy and theology, between human rationality and Christian faith, between the natural order and supernatural grace. To illustrate these points, the book draws on a long line of Christian thinkers: Origen, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas and, in our own day, Fides et Ratio of John Paul II and the Regensburg Address of Benedict XVI. How is theology always a “Jewgreek” enterprise—to borrow a term from Jacques Derrida—always a combination of the biblical (Hebraic) and philosophical (Hellenic) traditions? Why is one particular element of philosophy, metaphysics, essential for the intelligibility and clarity of Catholic theology? Why is this so much the case that John Paul II could state emphatically: “a philosophy which shuns metaphysics would be radically unsuited to the task of mediation in the understanding of Revelation”? But theology cannot simply be about dialogue with philosophers of yesteryear. Theology must constantly incorporate fresh thinking and remain in lively conversation with an extensive variety of contemporary perspectives. This book displays how reciprocity and absorption has been characteristic of theology’s past and must represent its future as well.

Ranging from math to literature to philosophy, Uncountable explains how numbers triumphed as the basis of knowledge—and compromise our sense of humanity.

Our knowledge of mathematics has structured much of what we think we know about ourselves as individuals and communities, shaping our psychologies, sociologies, and economies. In pursuit of a more predictable and more controllable cosmos, we have extended mathematical insights and methods to more and more aspects of the world. Today those powers are greater than ever, as computation is applied to virtually every aspect of human activity. Yet, in the process, are we losing sight of the human? When we apply mathematics so broadly, what do we gain and what do we lose, and at what risk to humanity?

These are the questions that David and Ricardo L. Nirenberg ask in Uncountable, a provocative account of how numerical relations became the cornerstone of human claims to knowledge, truth, and certainty. There is a limit to these number-based claims, they argue, which they set out to explore. The Nirenbergs, father and son, bring together their backgrounds in math, history, literature, religion, and philosophy, interweaving scientific experiments with readings of poems, setting crises in mathematics alongside world wars, and putting medieval Muslim and Buddhist philosophers in conversation with Einstein, Schrödinger, and other giants of modern physics. The result is a powerful lesson in what counts as knowledge and its deepest implications for how we live our lives.
 

In almost thirty interviews, Donatien Grau probes some of the world’s most prominent thinkers and preeminent arts leaders on the past, present, and future of the encyclopedic museum.

Over the last two decades, the encyclopedic museum has been criticized and praised, constantly discussed, and often in the news. Encyclopedic museums are a phenomenon of Europe and the United States, and their locations and mostly Eurocentric collections have in more recent years drawn attention to what many see as bias. Debates on provenance in general, cultural origins, and restitutions of African heritage have exerted pressure on encyclopedic museums, and indeed on all manner of museums. Is there still a place for an institution dedicated to gathering, preserving, and showcasing all the world’s cultures?

Donatien Grau’s conversations with international arts officials, museum leaders, artists, architects, and journalists go beyond the history of the encyclopedic format and the last decades’ issues that have burdened existing institutions. Are encyclopedic museums still relevant? What can they contribute when the Internet now seems to offer the greater encyclopedia? How important is it for us to have in-person access to objects from all over the world that can directly articulate something to us about humanity? The fresh ideas and nuances of new voices on the core principles important to museums in Dakar, Abu Dhabi, and Mumbai complement some of the world’s arts leaders from European and American institutions—resulting in some revealing and unexpected answers. Every interviewee offers differing views, making for exciting, stimulating reading.

Includes interviews with George Abungu, National Museums of Kenya; Kwame Anthony Appiah, New York University; Homi K. Bhabha, Harvard University; Hamady Bocoum, Musée des Civilisationes Noires, Dakar; Irina Bokova, UNESCO; Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University; Thomas Campbell, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco; James Cuno, J. Paul Getty Trust; Philippe de Montebello, New York University; Bachir Souleymane Diagne, Columbia University; Kaywin Feldman, National Gallery of Art; Marc Fumaroli, Collège de France; Massimiliano Gioni, New Museum; Michael Govan, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Camille Henrot, artist; Max Hollein, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Henri Loyrette, Musée du Louvre; Jean Nouvel, architect; Zaki Nusseibeh, United Arab Emirates; Mikhail Piotrovsky, State Hermitage Museum; Grayson Perry, artist; Krzysztof Pomian, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; Mari Carmen Ramírez, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Fiammetta Rocco, The Economist; Sabyasachi Mukherjee, CSMVS Mumbai; Bénédicte Savoy; Collège de France; Kavita Singh, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; Amit Sood, Google Arts & Culture.

 
 

Written as an undergraduate textbook, Understanding Our Being treats central topics about our knowledge of being, the being of the natural world, and, via the latter, being as such

How can the infinite, a subject so remote from our finite experience, be an everyday tool for the working mathematician? Blending history, philosophy, mathematics, and logic, Shaughan Lavine answers this question with exceptional clarity. Making use of the mathematical work of Jan Mycielski, he demonstrates that knowledge of the infinite is possible, even according to strict standards that require some intuitive basis for knowledge.

2004 — A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

From astronomy to zoology, the practice of science proceeds from scientific ways of thinking. These patterns of thought, such as defining and classifying, hypothesizing and experimenting, form the building blocks of all scientific endeavor. Understanding how they work is therefore an essential foundation for everyone involved in scientific study or teaching, from elementary school students to classroom teachers and professional scientists.

In this book, Steven Darian examines the language of science in order to analyze the patterns of thinking that underlie scientific endeavor. He draws examples from university science textbooks in a variety of disciplines, since these offer a common, even canonical, language for scientific expression. Darian identifies and focuses in depth on nine patterns—defining, classifying, using figurative language, determining cause and effect, hypothesizing, experimenting, visualizing, quantifying, and comparing—and shows how they interact in practice. He also traces how these thought modes developed historically from Pythagoras through Newton.

Franz Rosenzweig, one of the century’s great Jewish thinkers, wrote his gem of a book in 1921 as a more accessible précis of his famous Star of Redemption. An elegant introduction to Rosenzweig’s “new thinking,” Understanding the Sick and the Healthy was written for a lay audience and takes the form of an ironic narrative about convalescence. With superb simplicity and beauty, it puts forth an important critique of the nineteenth-century German Idealist philosophical tradition and expresses a powerful vision of Jewish religion. Harvard’s Hilary Putnam provides a new introduction to this classic work for a contemporary audience.

“Today, more than three-quarters of a century after it was written, the critique of philosophy in this book is what makes it of such great interest. Critique of philosophy has been a central theme of twentieth-century philosophy, and many philosophers have attacked some of the targets that Rosenzweig attacked in his little book. Yet this early attack by a profound religious thinker is far more powerful and far more interesting than most.”—From the new Introduction by Hilary Putnam

The primacy of words over images has deep roots in Western culture. But what if the two are inextricably linked, equal partners in meaning-making? Written and drawn entirely as comics, Unflattening is an experiment in visual thinking. Nick Sousanis defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge.

Unflattening is an insurrection against the fixed viewpoint. Weaving together diverse ways of seeing drawn from science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, it uses the collage-like capacity of comics to show that perception is always an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points. While its vibrant, constantly morphing images occasionally serve as illustrations of text, they more often connect in nonlinear fashion to other visual references throughout the book. They become allusions, allegories, and motifs, pitting realism against abstraction and making us aware that more meets the eye than is presented on the page.

In its graphic innovations and restless shape-shifting, Unflattening is meant to counteract the type of narrow, rigid thinking that Sousanis calls “flatness.” Just as the two-dimensional inhabitants of Edwin A. Abbott’s novella Flatland could not fathom the concept of “upwards,” Sousanis says, we are often unable to see past the boundaries of our current frame of mind. Fusing words and images to produce new forms of knowledge, Unflattening teaches us how to access modes of understanding beyond what we normally apprehend.

Psychology is now ready for unified theories of cognition—so says Allen Newell, a leading investigator in computer science and cognitive psychology. Not everyone will agree on a single set of mechanisms that will explain the full range of human cognition, but such theories are within reach and we should strive to articulate them.

In this book, Newell makes the case for unified theories by setting forth a candidate. After reviewing the foundational concepts of cognitive science—knowledge, representation, computation, symbols, architecture, intelligence, and search—Newell introduces Soar, an architecture for general cognition. A pioneer system in artificial intelligence, Soar is the first problem solver to create its own subgoals and learn continuously from its own experience.

Newell shows how Soar’s ability to operate within the real-time constraints of intelligent behavior, such as immediate-response and item-recognition tasks, illustrates important characteristics of the human cognitive structure. Throughout, Soar remains an exemplar: we know only enough to work toward a fully developed theory of cognition, but Soar’s success so far establishes the viability of the enterprise.

Given its integrative approach, Unified Theories of Cognition will be of tremendous interest to researchers in a variety of fields, including cognitive science, artificial intelligence, psychology, and computer science. This exploration of the nature of mind, one of the great problems of philosophy, should also transcend disciplines and attract a large scientific audience.

Kant holds a key position in the history of modern philosophy as the last great figure to belong fully to both the Anglo-American analytic tradition and the Continental tradition. As the world's foremost scholar of Kant and German Idealism, Dieter Henrich combines an encyclopedic knowledge of Kant's texts with an equally profound understanding of the philosophers of preceding and succeeding centuries. In this collection comprising four of his most influential essays, Henrich proves himself unique in the conjunction of philosophical acumen, insight, and originality that he brings to Kant interpretation.

Henrich's distinctive contribution has been to break through the entrenched stereotypes of the ontological and neo-Kantian schools of Kant interpretation in order to place Kant's major ideas in their historical and developmental context, demonstrating their enduring philosophical significance. Henrich has shown how Kant's attempt to overcome the dichotomy between rationalism and moral-sense philosophy led to a lifelong struggle to establish the unity of theoretical and practical reason and the inseparability of the motivational force of the principle of ethics from its function as a principle for ethical judgment. But Henrich has also shown how Kant's project of unification contained fundamental tensions that called forth the projects of such post-Kantians as Schiller, Fichte, and Hegel, which explored new approaches within the Kantian framework.

The heart of Henrich's interpretation of Kant, the essays in this book present a persuasive picture of the development of Kant's moral philosophy and give an account of the argumentative strategies determining all the aspects of Kant's philosophy. They reflect Henrich's general interest in the unity of reason as well as his special interest in self-consciousness as both a key concept of modern philosophy and the key to the highly disputed interpretation of Kant's transcendental deduction of categories.

Our current understanding of our world is nearly 350 years old. It stems from the ideas of Descartes and Newton and has brought us many great things, including modern science and increases in wealth, health and everyday living standards. Furthermore, it is so ingrained in our daily lives that we have forgotten it is a paradigm, not a fact. There are, however, some problems with it. First, there is no satisfactory explanation for why we have consciousness and experience meaning in our lives. Second, modern-day physics tells us that observations depend on characteristics of the observer at the large, cosmic, and small, subatomic scales. Third, ongoing humanitarian and environmental crises show us that our world is vastly interconnected. Our understanding of reality is expanding to incorporate these issues. In The Universe, Life and Everything . . . Dialogues on our Changing Understanding of Reality, some of the scholars at the forefront of this change, from the fields of physics, psychology, and social sciences, discuss the direction it is taking and its urgency.

The Universe We Think In arises from a tradition of realism, both philosophical and political, a universe in which the common sense understanding of things is included in our judgement about them. The scope is both vast and narrow – vast because it

An Unnatural Attitude traces a style of musical thought that coalesced in the intellectual milieu of the Weimar Republic—a phenomenological style that sought to renew contact with music as a worldly circumstance. Deeply critical of the influence of naturalism in aesthetics and ethics, proponents of this new style argued for the description of music as something accessible neither through introspection nor through experimental research, but rather in an attitude of outward, open orientation toward the world. With this approach, music acquires meaning in particular when the act of listening is understood to be shared with others.
 
Benjamin Steege interprets this discourse as the response of a young, post–World War I generation amid a virtually uninterrupted experience of war, actual or imminent—a cohort for whom disenchantment with scientific achievement was to be answered by reasserting the value of imaginative thought. Steege draws on a wide range of published and unpublished texts from music theory, pedagogy, criticism, and philosophy of music, some of which appear for the first time in English translation in the book’s appendixes. An Unnatural Attitude considers the question: What are we thinking about when we think about music in non-naturalistic terms?

How is it that nobody—except maybe scientists—sees science for what it is? In this entertaining and provocative book, Lewis Wolpert draws on the entire history of science, from Thales of Miletus to Watson and Crick, from the study of eugenics to the discovery of the double helix. The result is a scientist’s view of the culture of science, authoritative and informed and at the same time mercifully accessible to those who find cohabiting with this culture a puzzling experience.

Science is arguably the defining feature of our age. For anyone who hopes to understand its nature, this lively and thoughtful book provides the perfect starting point.

A patient, genealogical investigation of the dichotomies that are foundational to the Western philosophical tradition.

We are so used to distinguishing between the possible and the real, between essence and existence that we do not realize that these distinctions, which seem so obvious to us, are the result of a long and laborious process that has led to the splitting of being—the “matter” of thought—into two fragments that are both conflicting and intimately intertwined.

This book argues that the ontological-political machine of the West is based on the splitting of this “matter,” without which neither science nor politics would be possible. Without the partition of reality into essence and existence and into possibility and actuality, neither scientific knowledge nor the ability to control human action—which characterizes the historical power of the West—would have been possible.

If we could not suspend the exclusive concentration of our attention on what immediately exists (as animals seem to do), to think and define its essence, Western science and technology would not have experienced the advances that characterize them. And if the dimension of possibility disappeared entirely, neither plans nor projects would be thinkable, and human actions could be neither directed nor controlled. The incomparable power of the West has one of its essential presuppositions in this ontological machine.

This field-defining volume of queer anthropology foregrounds both the brilliance of anthropological approaches to queer and trans life and the ways queer critique can reorient and transform anthropology.

This book mounts a sustained attack on ideas that are dear to many practitioners of analytic philosophy. Charles Travis targets the seductive illusion that—in Wittgenstein’s terms—“if anyone utters a sentence and means or understands it, he is operating a calculus according to definite rules.” This book rejects the idea that thoughts are essentially representational items whose content is independent of context. In doing so, it undermines the foundations of much contemporary philosophy of mind.

Travis’s main argument in Unshadowed Thought is that linguistic expressions and forms are occasion-sensitive; they cannot be abstracted out of a concrete context. With compelling examples and a thoroughgoing scrutiny of opposing positions, his book systematically works out the implications of the work of J. L. Austin, Hilary Putnam, and John McDowell. Eloquently insisting that there is no particular way one must structure what one relates to, no one way one must represent it, Unshadowed Thought identifies and resists a certain strain of semantic Platonism that permeates current philosophy—a strain that has had profoundly troubling consequences for our ideas about attitudes and beliefs and for our views about what language might be.

Untying Things Together helps to clarify the stakes of the last fifty years of literary and cultural theory by proposing the idea of a sexuality of theory.

In 1905, Freud published his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the book that established the core psychoanalytic thesis that sexuality is central to formations of the unconscious. With this book, Eric L. Santner inverts Freud’s title to take up the sexuality of theory—or, more exactly, the modes of enjoyment to be found in the kinds of critical thinking that, since the 1960s, have laid claim to that ancient word, “theory.” Santner unfolds his argument by tracking his own relationship with this tradition and the ways his intellectual and spiritual development has been informed by it.

Untying Things Together is both an intellectual history of major theoretical paradigms and a call for their reexamination and renewal. Revisiting many of the topics he has addressed in previous work, Santner proposes a new way of conceptualizing the eros of thinking, attuned to how our minds and bodies individually and collectively incorporate or “encyst” on a void at the heart of things. Rather than proposing a “return to theory,” Santner’s book simply employs theory as a way of further “(un)tying together” the resources of philosophy, art and literature, theology, psychoanalysis, political thought, and more.

"The Useless Mouths" and Other Literary Writings brings to English-language readers literary writings--several previously unknown--by Simone de Beauvoir. Culled from sources including various American university collections, the works span decades of Beauvoir's career. Ranging from dramatic works and literary theory to radio broadcasts, they collectively reveal fresh insights into Beauvoir's writing process, personal life, and the honing of her philosophy.

The volume begins with a new translation of the 1945 play The Useless Mouths, written in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Other pieces were discovered after Beauvoir's death in 1986, such as the 1965 short novel "Misunderstanding in Moscow," involving an elderly French couple who confront their fears of aging. Two additional previously unknown texts include the fragmentary "Notes for a Novel," which contains the seed of what she later would call "the problem of the Other," and a lecture on postwar French theater titled Existentialist Theater. The collection notably includes the eagerly awaited translation of Beauvoir's contribution to a 1965 debate among Jean-Paul Sartre and other French writers and intellectuals, "What Can Literature Do?"

Prefaces to well-known works such as Bluebeard and Other Fairy Tales,La Bâtarde, and James Joyce in Paris: His Final Years are also available in English for the first time, alongside essays and other short articles. A landmark contribution to Beauvoir studies and French literary studies, the volume includes informative and engaging introductory essays by prominent and rising scholars.

Contributors are Meryl Altman, Elizabeth Fallaize, Alison S. Fell, Sarah Gendron, Dennis A. Gilbert, Laura Hengehold, Eleanore Holveck, Terry Keefe, J. Debbie Mann, Frederick M. Morrison, Catherine Naji, Justine Sarrot, Liz Stanley, Ursula Tidd, and Veronique Zaytzeff.

An event of the first magnitude in the history of Neo-Confucianism was the debate between Chu Hsi (1130–1200), principal architect of Neo-Confucianism, and Ch’en Liang (1143–1194), who represented an admixture of Confucian humanism with utilitarian approaches to current questions. The issues that engaged them—the conflict between ethical and practical considerations in politics and society, and the tension between traditional values and historical change—persist as human problems to this day.

This volume analyzes that debate and its place in the lives of the two philosophers within a detailed intellectual and historical context. The development of Ch’en Liang’s thought is traced through an examination of his writings, including the rare, hitherto unutilized 1212 edition of his works. Although Ch’en Liang was overshadowed by rival schools of thought in traditional China, contemporary Chinese esteem him as a person who epitomized the spirit and content of much modern criticism of the Neo-Confucian cultural legacy. This is the first book in a Western language to focus closely upon his challenge to Chu Hsi and Chu Hsi’s response.

This year marks the five-hundredth anniversary of Thomas More's widely influential book Utopia, and this volume brings together a number of scholars to consider the book, its long afterlife, and specifically its effects on political activists over the centuries. In addition to thorough studies of Utopia itself, and appraisals of More's relationship with Erasmus, the book presents detailed studies of the effect of Utopia on early modern England and the Low Countries, as well as philosophical reflections on ideology and the utopian mind, and much more.

What is utopia if not a perfect world, impossible to achieve? Anahid Nersessian reveals a basic misunderstanding lurking behind that ideal. In Utopia, Limited she enlists William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and others to redefine utopianism as a positive investment in limitations. Linking the ecological imperative to live within our means to the aesthetic philosophy of the Romantic period, Nersessian’s theory of utopia promises not an unconditionally perfect world but a better world where we get less than we hoped, but more than we had.

For the Romantic writers, the project of utopia and the project of art were identical. Blake believed that without limits, a work of art would be no more than a set of squiggles on a page, or a string of nonsensical letters and sounds. And without boundaries, utopia is merely an extension of the world as we know it, but blighted by a hunger for having it all. Nersessian proposes that we think about utopia as the Romantics thought about aesthetics—as a way to bind and thereby emancipate human political potential within a finite space.

Grounded in an intellectual tradition that begins with Immanuel Kant and includes Theodor Adorno and Northrop Frye, Utopia, Limited lays out a program of “adjustment” that applies the lessons of art to the rigors of life on an imperiled planet. It is a sincere response to environmental devastation, offering us a road map through a restricted future.

This masterly study has a grand sweep. It ranges over centuries, with a long look backward over several millennia. Yet the history it unfolds is primarily the story of individuals: thinkers and dreamers who envisaged an ideal social order and described it persuasively, leaving a mark on their own and later times.

The roster of utopians includes men of all stripes in different countries and eras--figures as disparate as More and Fourier, the Marquis de Sade and Edward Bellamy, Rousseau and Marx. Fascinating character studies of the major figures are among the delights of the book.

Utopian writings run the gamut from fictional narratives to theoretical treatises, from political manifestos to constitutions for a new society. The Manuels have structured five centuries of utopian invention by identifying successive constellations, groups of thinkers joined by common social and moral concerns. Within this framework they analyze individual writings, in the context of the author's life and of the socio-economic, religious, and political exigencies of his time. Concentrating on innovative works, they highlight disjunctures as well as continuities in utopian thought from the Renaissance through the twentieth century.

Witty and erudite, challenging in its interpretations and provocative in the questions it poses, the Manuels' anatomy of utopia is an adventure in ideas.

The Recognition of the Lord (Īśvarapratyabhijñā) by the Kashmirian Utpaladeva (c. 925–975) is a landmark in the history of nondual Śaivism, and one of the masterpieces of Indian philosophy. The detailed commentary (Vivṛti) on it by the author himself was so far considered almost entirely lost, but three chapters of this major work were recently recovered from marginal annotations in manuscripts of other commentaries on Utpaladeva’s treatise. The book provides the first critical edition, annotated translation and study of one of these chapters, which endeavours to justify a fundamental paradox of the system—namely, the idea that Śiva (understood as an infinite, omniscient, and omnipotent consciousness) has a dynamic essence since the core of consciousness is a subtle form of action, and yet is by no means limited by the temporal and spatial sequence that affects all ordinary acts and agents.