"This book examines individually and collectively poets widely recognized as formal and linguistic innovators. Why do their words appear in unconventional orders? What end do these arrangements serve? Why are they striking? Brian Reed focuses on poetic form as a persistent puzzle, utilizing historical fact and the views of other critics to clarify how particular literary works are constructed and how those constructions lead to specific effects." -- Back cover.

This book intersperses philosophical commentary with a new translation of the whole dialogue to present an original case for thinking that Plato's aim in the Theaetetus is to further the cause of his own anti-empiricist theory of knowledge by testing -- and destroying -- a series of empiricist theories of knowledge.

This volume provides an introduction to the major themes of work in experimental philosophy, bringing together some of the most influential articles in the field along with a collection of papers that explore the theoretical significance of this research.

In Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media D. N. Rodowick applies the concept of “the figural” to a variety of philosophical and aesthetic issues. Inspired by the aesthetic philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard, the figural defines a semiotic regime where the distinction between linguistic and plastic representation breaks down. This opposition, which has been the philosophical foundation of aesthetics since the eighteenth century, has been explicitly challenged by the new electronic, televisual, and digital media. Rodowick—one of the foremost film theorists writing today—contemplates this challenge, describing and critiquing the new regime of signs and new ways of thinking that such media have inaugurated. To fully comprehend the emergence of the figural requires a genealogical critique of the aesthetic, Rodowick claims. Seeking allies in this effort to deconstruct the opposition of word and image and to create new concepts for comprehending the figural, he journeys through a range of philosophical writings: Thierry Kuntzel and Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier on film theory; Jacques Derrida on the deconstruction of the aesthetic; Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin on the historical image as a utopian force in photography and film; and Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault on the emergence of the figural as both a semiotic regime and a new stratagem of power coincident with the appearance of digital phenomena and of societies of control. Scholars of philosophy, film theory, cultural criticism, new media, and art history will be interested in the original and sophisticated insights found in this book.

This anthology establishes the existence of a distinct and important post-Investigations Wittgenstein, uncovering the overlooked treasures of the final corpus and crystallising key perceptions of what his last thought was achieving. Speaking of a 'third Wittgenstein', this book seeks to correct the traditional bipartite conception of Wittgenstein's thought into his Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations by focusing on his neglected last masterpiece, On Certainty, and works contemporaneous with it: Remarks on Colour, Last Writings in the Philosophy of Psychology, and Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Leading international Wittgenstein scholars reveal why On Certainty should be recognised as one of Wittgenstein's three great works. This sustained examination shows that the third Wittgenstein breaks new ground with insights unprecedented in both his own work and philosophy more broadly, giving us keys to the solution and dissolution of problems that have plagued philosophy since Descartes, such as philosophical scepticism and the mind-body problem. Wittgenstein's ultimate and revised positions with regard to epistemology, foundationalism, 'grammar', naturalism, the psychology of language, and psychological indeterminacy are clearly delineated. This book also provides new and illuminating accounts of difficult concepts, such as patterns of life, experiencing meaning, meaning blindness, lying and pretence.

Lively, original and highly readable, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at ‘The Beginning’ and concluding with ‘The End’, chapters range from the familiar, such as ‘Character’, ‘Narrative’ and ‘The Author’, to the more unusual, such as ‘Secrets’, ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Ghosts’. Now in its sixth edition, Bennett and Royle’s classic textbook successfully illuminates complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works, so that a reading of Jane Eyre opens up ways of thinking about racial difference, for example, while Chaucer, Monty Python and Hilary Mantel are all invoked in a discussion of literature and laughter. The sixth edition has been revised and updated throughout. In addition, four new chapters – ‘Literature’, ‘Loss’, ‘Human’ and ‘Migrant’ – engage with exciting recent developments in literary studies. As well as fully up-to-date further reading sections at the end of each chapter, the book contains a comprehensive bibliography and an invaluable glossary of key literary terms. A breath of fresh air in a field that can often seem dry and dauntingly theoretical, this book will open the reader’s eyes to the exhilarating possibilities of reading and studying literature.

Leading scholars in the fields of philosophy and the sciences of the mind have contributed to this newest volume in the prestigious Pittsburgh-Konstanz series. Among the problem areas discussed are folk psychology, meanings as conceptual structures, functional and qualitative properties of colors, the role of conscious mental states, representation and mental content, the impact of connectionism on the philosophy of the mind, and supervenience, emergence, and realization. Most of the essays are followed by commentaries that reflect ongoing debates in the philosophy of the mind and often develop a counterpoint to the claims of the essayists.

Since the 1967 publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology, Harold Garfinkel has indelibly influenced the social sciences and humanities worldwide. This new book, the long-awaited sequel to Studies, comprises Garfinkel's work over three decades to further elaborate the study of ethnomethodology. 'Working out Durkheim's Aphorism, ' the title used for this new book, emphasizes Garfinkel's insistence that his position focuses on fundamental sociological issues--and that interpretations of his position as indifferent to sociology have been misunderstandings. Durkheim's aphorism states that the concreteness of social facts is sociology's most fundamental phenomenon. Garfinkel argues that sociologists have, for a century or more, ignored this aphorism and treated social facts as theoretical, or conceptual, constructions. Garfinkel in this new book shows how and why sociology must restore Durkheim's aphorism, through an insistence on the concreteness of social facts that are produced by complex social practices enacted by participants in the social order. Garfinkel's new book, like Studies, will likely stand as another landmark in sociological theory, yet it is clearer and more concrete in revealing human social practices.

Charles Siewert presents a distinctive approach to consciousness that emphasizes our first-person knowledge of experience and argues that we should grant consciousness, understood in this way, a central place in our conception of mind and intentionality. Written in an engaging manner that makes its recently controversial topic accessible to the thoughtful general reader, this book challenges theories that equate consciousness with a functional role or with the mere availability of sensory information to cognitive capacities. Siewert argues that the notion of phenomenal consciousness, slighted in some recent theories, can be made evident by noting our reliance on first-person knowledge and by considering, from the subject's point of view, the difference between having and lacking certain kinds of experience. This contrast is clarified by careful attention to cases, both actual and hypothetical, indicated by research on brain-damaged patients' ability to discriminate visually without conscious visual experience--what has become known as "blindsight." In addition, Siewert convincingly defends such approaches against objections that they make an illegitimate appeal to "introspection." Experiences that are conscious in Siewert's sense differ from each other in ways that only what is conscious can--in phenomenal character--and having this character gives them intentionality. In Siewert's view, consciousness is involved not only in the intentionality of sense experience and imagery, but in that of nonimagistic ways of thinking as well. Consciousness is pervasively bound up with intelligent perception and conceptual thought: it is not mere sensation or "raw feel." Having thus understood consciousness, we can better recognize how, for many of us, it possesses such deep intrinsic value that life without it would be little or no better than death.