This book examines the philosophical and political relevance of perversion in the works of three key representatives of contemporary philosophy and psychoanalysis: Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Lacan. Perversion is often understood simply in terms of cultural or sexual phenomena. By contrast, Boštjan Nedoh places perversion at the heart of philosophical, ontological and political issues in the works of Deleuze, Agamben and Lacan. He examines the relevance of their discussions of perversion for their respective critical ontological projects. By tracing the differences between these thinkers’ understanding of perversion, the book finally draws lines of delimitation between the vitalist and the structuralist or psychoanalytic philosophical positions in contemporary philosophy.

This book offers a bold and controversial new thesis regarding the nature of prejudice. The authors' central claim is that prejudice is not simply learned, rather it is predisposed in all human beings and is thus the foundation for ethical valuation. They aim to destroy the illusion that prejudice is merely the result of learned beliefs, socially conditioned attitudes, or pathological states of development. Contrary to traditional accounts, prejudice itself is not a negative attribute of human nature, rather it is the necessary precondition for the self and civilization to emerge. Defined as the preferential self-expression of valuation, prejudice gives rise to greater existential complexities and novelties that elevate selfhood and society to higher states of ethical realization. Rather than offer another contribution that highlights the destructive nature of prejudice, Mills and Polanowski address the ontological, psychological, and dialectical origins of prejudice as it manifests itself in the process of selfhood and culture. They provide an original conceptualization of the phenomenology of prejudice and its dialectical instantiation in the ontology of the individual, worldhood, and the very structures of subjectivity. As a unique synthesis of psychoanalysis, Hegelian idealism, Heideggerian existential ontology, and Whiteheadian process philosophy, prejudice is the indispensable ground for humanity to actualize its highest potentiality-for-Being. The striking result is (1) a revolutionary theory of human nature, (2) a new ethical system, and (3) the elevation of dialectical ethics to the domain of metaphysics.

Exploring the fields of architecture, philosophy, and queer theory, Grosz shows how feminism and cultural analysis have conceptually stripped bodies of their specificity, their corporeality, and the vestigal traces of their production as bodies. She investigates the work of Michel Foucault, Teresa de Lauretis, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler and Alphonso Lingi, considering their work by examining the ways in which the functioning of bodies transforms understandings of space and time, knowledge and desire. Grosz moves toward a radical consideration of bodies and their relationship to transgression and perversity.

Karl Jaspers is one of the least understood and most neglected major philosophers of the twentieth century, and yet his ideas, particularly those concerned with death, have immense contemporary relevance.Filiz Peach provides a clear explanation of Jaspers' philosophy of existence, clarifying and reassessing the concept of death that is central to his thought. For Jaspers, a human being is not merely a physical entity but a being with a transcendent aspect and so, in some sense 'deathless'. Peach explores this transcendent aspect of humanity and what it is to be 'deathless' in Jaspersian terms.This book is a major contribution to the scarce literature on Jaspers and will be valuable to student and academic alike.

As the (in)famous definition states: "An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization". However, an ontology is also a philosophical theory of existence, a knowledge management resource, a database schema, or a type of knowledge representation artefact on the semantic web. Over the years the term 'ontology' has been used in so many different ways that one can no longer be sure what is meant by it at any given occasion. This book clarifies the role ontologies play in knowledge representation; it discusses the distinctions with their use in philosophy, gives insight in the features, rationale and limitations of the OWL 2 web ontology language, and provides a critical review of methodologies and design principles advocated to improve the quality of ontologies. It covers both theory and practice of knowledge acquisition, representation and ontologies; it emphasises human understanding as knowledge structuring principle, and demonstrates this approach in the development of a core ontology of basic legal concepts (LKIF Core) and in the exploration of expressive ontology design patterns for the representation of social reality, change and causation, actions and transactions. In doing so it contributes to a better understanding of the representation of ontologies; or rather, what it means to do ontology representation.

This the first of a new three-part series in which Antonio Negri, a leading political thinker of our time, explores key ideas that have animated radical thought and examines some of the social and economic forces that are shaping our world today. In this first volume Negri shows how the thinking of Marx and Foucault were brought together to create an original theoretical synthesis - particularly in the context of Italy from May ’68 onwards. At around that time, the structures of industry and production began to change radically, with the emergence of new producer-subjects and new fields of capitalist value creation. New concepts and theories were developed by Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and others to help make sense of these and related developments - concepts such as biopower and biopolitics, subjectivation and subsumption, public and common, power and potentiality. These concepts and theories are examined by Negri within the broader context of the development of European philosophical discourse in the twentieth century. Marx and Foucault provides a unique account of the development of radical thought in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and will be a key text for anyone interested in radical politics today.

On hard core pornographic cinema.

History of twentieth-century philosophy of science opens with an introduction to contemporary philosophy of science as of the beginning of the twenty-first century, and describes the new specialty of computational philosophy of science. Seven chapters describing the philosophies of several major philosophers of science follow this introductory chapter. These major philosophers include Ernst Mach and Pierre Duhem, Rudolf Carnap and Willard Van Quine, Werner Heisenberg, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, Norwood Russell Hanson, and Paul Thagard and Herbert Simon. The book concludes with a large bibliography.

Much has been written about Heidegger's reappropriation of Aristotle, but little has been said about the philosophical import and theoretical context of this element of Heidegger's work. In this important new book, Michael Bowler sheds new light on the philosophical context of Heidegger's return to Aristotle in his early works and thereby advances a reinterpretation of the background to Heidegger's forceful critique of the primacy of theoretical reason and his radical reconception of the very nature of philosophical thinking. This book offers a detailed analysis of the development of Heidegger's thought from his early enagagement with neo-Kantianism and Husserlian phenomenology. Through this reading, a criticism of the theoretical conception of philosophy as primordial science, especially in relation to life and lived-experience (Erlebnis), emerges. It is in this context that Bowler examines Heidegger's reappropriation of key aspects of Aristotle's thought. In Aristotle's notions of movement, life and activity proper (praxis), Heidegger perceives a new approach to the dilemma presently facing philosophy, namely how philosophy is situated within life and human existence.

Eroticisms: Love, Sex, and Perversion explores the elusiveness of human sensuality. In an era of conflicting moral relativism, political correctness, validation of lifestyle choices, liberation, hedonism, and postmodern pansexualism, versus resurgent puritanism, conservatism, fundamentalism, and theological anti-sexualism, this fifth volume of Psychological Undercurrents of History penetrates current debates and delves into the past to grasp the viscous ambiguities of sexuality, and reassess the question of whether the erotic can be perverse.