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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, perhaps the most influential of all German philosophers, made one of the last great attempts to develop philosophy as an all-embracing scientific system. This system places Hegel among the “classical” philosophers—Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza—who also attempted to build grand conceptual edifices.

In this study, available for the first time in paperback, Howard P. Kainz emphasizes the uniqueness of Hegel’s system by focusing on his methodology, terminology, metaphorical and paradoxical language, and his special contributions to metaphysics, the philosophy of nature, philosophical anthropology, and other areas.

Kainz focuses on Hegel’s system as a whole and its seminal ideas, making generous use of representative texts. He gives special attention to the interrelationship between dialectical methodology and paradoxical propositions; the prevalence of metaphor in the philosophy of nature; and the close interrelationship between Christian doctrine and Hegelian speculation. A rich array of diagrams and tables further elucidates Kainz’s analyses.

An ideal text for the student of philosophy coming to Hegel for the first time, G. W. F. Hegel provides the reader with useful insights into Hegel’s work and illuminates Hegel’s enduring significance in the late twentieth century.

Although they were originally considered an American phenomenon, gangs today have grown and transformed into global enterprises. Despite these changes, criminologists have not yet reassessed worldwide gangs in terms of the other changes associated with globalization.

John M. Hagedorn aims to correct this oversight by incorporating important theoretical advances in urban political economy and understanding changes in gangs around the world as a result of globalization and the growth of the information economy. Contrary to older conceptions, today’s gangs are international, are often institutionalized, and may be explicitly concerned with race and ethnicity. Gangs in the Global City presents the work of an assortment of international scholars that challenges traditional approaches to problems in criminology from many different perspectives and includes theoretical discussions, case studies, and examinations of gang members’ identities. The contributors consider gangs not as fundamentally a crime problem but as variable social organizations in poor communities that are transitioning to the new economy.

How can we accept the gender system in view of its ills? Yet, are we really at liberty to abolish gender differences, "when the gender system gives us benchmarks of personal identity and worth along with primary channels in which to pursue the rewards of love?" With this double question, Steven G. Smith introduces his inquiry into the idea of gender and how it is implicated in love, respect, equality, and personal character. Gender Thinking is the first comprehensive philosophical exploration of the concept of gender Asking the question, what is gender?—that is, what sort of thing do we take femininity and masculinity to be?—Smith considers how gender thinking is interwoven with ideas about human nature. He suggests ways in which ideas about race, class, culture age, temperament, and sexual orientation can be understood from clues found in gender thinking. And he calls for a renegotiated procreative partnership between women and men as the key to the redemption of gender.

How does contemporary science contribute to our understanding about what it means to be women or men? What are the social implications of scientific claims about differences between "male" and "female" brains, hormones, and genes? How does culture influence scientific and medical research and its findings about human sexuality, especially so-called normal and deviant desires and behaviors? Gender and the Science of Difference examines how contemporary science shapes and is shaped by gender ideals and images.

Prior scholarship has illustrated how past cultures of science were infused with patriarchal norms and values that influenced the kinds of research that was conducted and the interpretation of findings about differences between men and women. This interdisciplinary volume presents empirical inquiries into today's science, including examples of gendered scientific inquiry and medical interventions and research. It analyzes how scientific and medical knowledge produces gender norms through an emphasis on sex differences, and includes both U.S. and non-U.S. cases and examples.

Contributors. Lauren Berlant, Karen Brennan, Margaret Cohen, Nancy Fraser, Elizabeth Freeman, Carol Jacobs, Silvestra Mariniello, Larysa Mykyta, Laura Rice, Ivy Schweitzer, Doris Sommer, Hortense J. Spillers, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Judith Wilt

Contemporary developments in human genetics are profoundly meaningful, both for the rapidity of scientific discoveries and for their personal and social implications. The Human Genome Project, a worldwide effort to map the 50,000 to 100,000 genes making up the human blueprint, is creating new ways of understanding ourselves as individuals, as parents, as members of a family, an ethnic group, a species. Almost every day yet another medical detective finds a genetic clue to the long-running mystery of human identity.

In 1992, the University of Iowa Humanities Symposium provided a public forum to examine the issues—moral, conceptual, legal, and practical—in modern genetics that are crucial to all of us. This strong, challenging volume is a collection of the major essays presented by historians, philosophers, and other academic humanists to a multidisciplinary audience of molecular and clinical geneticists, genetic counselors, humanists, and members of the public. The essays explore the historical background, philosophical implications, and ethical issues related to the Human Genome Project as well as other developments in modern genetics.

The questions raised in these essays are dramatic and troubling. What kind of knowledge is being produced by molecular geneticists? Do individual human genomes differ significantly from each other? How much do females and males differ from each other at the molecular level? Is there any genetic basis for distinguishing among racial or ethical groups? Can current practices in genetics counseling be compared to the earlier eugenics movement? Will current research lead to updated views on genetic “normalcy” or even “superiority”?

Do you have a smartphone? Billions of people on the planet now navigate their daily lives with the kind of advanced Global Positioning System capabilities once reserved for the most secretive elements of America’s military-industrial complex. But when so many people have access to the most powerful technologies humanity has ever devised for the precise determination of geographical coordinates, do we still need a specialized field of knowledge called geography?

Just as big data and artificial intelligence promise to automate occupations ranging from customer service and truck driving to stock trading and financial analysis, our age of algorithmic efficiency seems to eliminate the need for humans who call themselves geographers—at the precise moment when engaging with information about the peoples, places, and environments of a diverse world is more popular than ever before. How did we get here? This book traces the recent history of geography, information, and technology through the biography of Edward A. Ackerman, an important but forgotten figure in geography’s “quantitative revolution.” It argues that Ackerman’s work helped encode the hidden logics of a distorted philosophical heritage—a dangerous, cybernetic form of thought known as militant neo-Kantianism—into the network architectures of today’s pervasive worlds of surveillance capitalism.

The first extensive examination of Stein's notebooks, manuscripts and letters, prepared over a period of twenty years, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises asks new questions and explores new ways of reading Stein. This definitive study give us a finely detailed, deeply felt understanding of Stein, the great modernist, throughout one of her most productive periods. From "An Elucidation" in 1923 to Lectures In America in 1934, Ulla E. Dydo examines the process of the making and remaking of Stein's texts as they move from notepad to notebook to manuscript, from an idea to the ultimate refinement of the author's intentions. The result is an unprecedented view of the development of Stein's work, word by word, text by text, and over time.

Throughout his career, the influential new media theorist Vilém Flusser kept the idea of gesture in mind: that people express their being in the world through a sweeping range of movements. He reconsiders familiar actions—from speaking and painting to smoking and telephoning—in terms of particular movement, opening a surprising new perspective on the ways we share and preserve meaning. A gesture may or may not be linked to specialized apparatus, though its form crucially affects the person who makes it.

These essays, published here as a collection in English for the first time, were written over roughly a half century and reflect both an eclectic array of interests and a durable commitment to phenomenological thought. Defining gesture as “a movement of the body or of a tool attached to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation,” Flusser moves around the topic from diverse points of view, angles, and distances: at times he zooms in on a modest, ordinary movement such as taking a photograph, shaving, or listening to music; at others, he pulls back to look at something as vast and varied as human “making,” embracing everything from the fashioning of simple tools to mass manufacturing. But whatever the gesture, Flusser analyzes it as the expression of a particular form of consciousness, that is, as a particular relationship between the world and the one who gestures.

“Avery Gordon’s stunningly original and provocatively imaginative book explores the connections linking horror, history, and haunting. ” —George Lipsitz

“The text is of great value to anyone working on issues pertaining to the fantastic and the uncanny.”  —American Studies International

“Ghostly Matters immediately establishes Avery Gordon as a leader among her generation of social and cultural theorists in all fields. The sheer beauty of her language enhances an intellectual brilliance so daunting that some readers will mark the day they first read this book. One must go back many more years than most of us can remember to find a more important book.” —Charles Lemert

Drawing on a range of sources, including the fiction of Toni Morrison and Luisa Valenzuela (He Who Searches), Avery Gordon demonstrates that past or haunting social forces control present life in different and more complicated ways than most social analysts presume. Written with a power to match its subject, Ghostly Matters has advanced the way we look at the complex intersections of race, gender, and class as they traverse our lives in sharp relief and shadowy manifestations.

Avery F. Gordon is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Janice Radway is professor of literature at Duke University.

Although much has been written about Deleuze’s engagement with the arts, Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy concerns the art of his philosophy. Gregory Flaxman suggests that Deleuze’s notorious rejection of representation gives rise to a singular task—to create new concepts and invent new means of philosophical expression. Tracing this task throughout Deleuze’s vast oeuvre, Flaxman argues that Deleuze’s ambition to think and write “otherwise” constitutes the fabulation of philosophy itself.

For Flaxman, Deleuze’s philosophy is organized around the notion of the friend (philos). This book dramatizes the practice of friendship in Deleuze’s intimate affairs with philosophers—including Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, and Foucault—and close encounters with a range of writers, including Homer, More, Kafka, Woolf, and Borges. Flaxman traces Deleuze’s relationship with Nietzsche, the friend from whom he learned to write “in his own name,” to explain how apprenticeship becomes the initial condition of Deleuze’s philosophical method. Detailing the transformation of Nietzsche’s genealogy into “geophilosophy,” Flaxman goes on to show how Deleuze’s philosophy of the earth precipitates his return to ancient Greece and induces his resolution to overturn Platonism. In this spirit, the book demonstrates Deleuze’s evocation of the “powers of the false” by examining how, in his battle against representation, he makes fiction the basis for a minor philosophy. This first volume draws to a close with a timely elaboration of Deleuze’s avowed, if enigmatic, “style as politics” in an age when capitalism and communication challenge the claims of philosophy as never before.

A stunning and original contribution, Flaxman’s book restores the question of aesthetics to Deleuze’s thinking and writing. Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy not only revitalizes our sense of the philosopher but revises the sense of his philosophy, provoking critical problems and novel possibilities with which readers will wrestle for years to come.