Despite an abundance of violence occurring in political contexts, no liberal political theorist since Thomas Hobbes has talked directly and coherently about death. John E. Seery does. He contends that liberalism desperately needs a theoretical framework in which to discuss pressing matters of human mortality. Among the contemporary political issues that cry out for theoretical articulation, Seery suggests, are abortion politics, ethnic cleansing, suicide assistance, national reparations, environmental degradation, and capital punishment. Seery offers a new conception of social contract theory as a framework for confronting death issues. He urges us to look to an older tradition of descent into an underworld, wherein classic theorists consulted poetically with the dead and acquired from them political insight and direction.In this lively book, Seery excavates the infernal tradition by rereading the politics of death in Platonism, early Christianity, and contemporary feminism. Building on those traditions, he proposes a new, constructive image of death that can serve democratic theory productively. Reconsidered from the "land of the shades," social contractarian theory is sufficiently altered that, for example, a pro-life Christian and a pro-choice secularist might be able to strike common ground upon which to discuss abortion politics.

This path-breaking and eloquent analysis of The Odyssey, and the way it has been interpreted by political philosophers throughout the centuries, has dramatic implications for the current state of political thought. This important book offers readers original insights into The Odyssey and it provides a new understanding of the classic works of Plato, Rousseau, Vico, Horkheimer, and Adorno. Through his analysis Patrick J. Deneen requires readers to rethink the issues that are truly at the heart of our contemporary 'Culture Wars,' and he encourages us to reassess our assumptions about the Western canon's virtues or viciousness. Deneen's penetrating exploration of Odysseus's and our own enduring battles between the dual temptations of homecoming and exploration, patriotism and cosmopolitanism, and relativism and universality provides an original perspective on contentious debates at the center of modern political theory and philosophy.

While much has been written in recent years on death and dying, there has been little treatment of how people cope with death in the absence of religious belief, and virtually no examination of the potential political repercussions of a wider acceptance of mortality in American society. Alfred Killilea's strikingly original book revolves around a central irony: though the subject of death has been largely shunned in American culture lest it rob life of meaning and contentment, confronting death may be crucial to enable us as individuals and as a society to affirm life, even to survive, in this nuclear age. Killilea argues that the denial of death has fostered a disavowal of limits in general, and that a greater awareness of our mortality would provide a much needed catalyst for change in our political response to narcissism and nuclearism. He traces how, from John Locke to the present, a politics and an economics based on growth for the sake of growth have required an avoidance of human vulnerability. Our confrontation with mortality, Killilea argues, would goad us to question our roles as mere acquirers and to take more seriously the need for equality and community in our society. In charting how we can come to terms with death and how profoundly our attitudes toward death affect our attitudes toward politics, Killilea vides lucid and authoritative commentaries on such provocative thinkers as Earnest Becker, Robert Jay Lifton, Michael Novak, Daniel Bell, Christopher Lasch, and Jonathan Schell. Scholars in many fields as well as interested lay readers will find the treatment of these issues and thinkers compelling. This easily accessible book is an urgent reminder that the most valuable spur to the examined life extolled by Socrates is the knowledge that we will die.

According to the commonly accepted view, Thomas Hobbes began his intellectual career as a humanist, but his discovery, in midlife, of the wonders of geometry initiated a critical transition from humanism to the scientific study of politics. In Mortal Gods, Ted Miller radically revises this view, arguing that Hobbes never ceased to be a humanist. While previous scholars have made the case for Hobbes as humanist by looking to his use of rhetoric, Miller rejects the humanism/mathematics dichotomy altogether and shows us the humanist face of Hobbes’s affinity for mathematical learning and practice. He thus reconnects Hobbes with the humanists who admired and cultivated mathematical learning—and with the material fruits of Great Britain’s mathematical practitioners. The result is a fundamental recasting of Hobbes’s project, a recontextualization of his thought within early modern humanist pedagogy and the court culture of the Stuart regimes. Mortal Gods stands as a new challenge to contemporary political theory and its settled narratives concerning politics, rationality, and violence.

Publisher description: This book examines the role of the female and the feminine in Plato's philosophy, and suggests that Plato's views on women are central to his political philosophy. Morag Buchan explores Plato's writings to argue his notions of the inferior female and the superior male. While Plato appears to allow women equal opportunity and participation of political life in the Ideal State in The Republic, his motivation rests on masculine ideals. Women in Plato's Political Theory examines issues including women's relationship to men, to reproduction, to rational thought and politics in Plato's work, and addresses more generally the problem of sexual identity in philosophy. This book is an important contribution toward a wider interpretation of Platonic philosophy.

The Mortal God is a study in intellectual history which uncovers how actors in colonial India imagined various figures of human, divine, and messianic rulers to battle over the nature and locus of sovereignty. It studies British and Indian political-intellectual elites as well as South Asian peasant activists, giving particular attention to Bengal, including the associated princely states of Cooch Behar and Tripura. Global intellectual history approaches are deployed to place India within wider trajectories of royal nationhood that unfolded across contemporaneous Europe and Asia. The book intervenes within theoretical debates about sovereignty and political theology, and offers novel arguments about decolonizing and subalternizing sovereignty.

This book by one of today's leading theologians examines how Christians might more faithfully and realistically imagine their political vocation. Ephraim Radner explains that our Christian calling is to limit our political concerns to the boundaries of our created lives: our birth, parents, siblings, families, brief persistence in life, raising of children, relations, decline, and death. He shows that a Christian approach to politics is aimed at tending and protecting these "mortal goods" and argues for a more constrained view of our mortal life and our political duty than is common in both progressive and conservative Christian perspectives. Radner encourages us to take seriously what is most valuable in our lives and allow this to shape our social posture. Our vocation is to offer our limited life to God, give thanks for it, and glorify God by living our lives as a gift. Radner also shows how "catastrophe" reveals our time to be fragile, bounded, and easily overturned. And he exposes "betterment," which lies behind most modern politics, as a false motive for human life. The book concludes with a vision of the good life articulated in the form of a letter to his adult children.

Mortal Thought seeks to illustrate the artistic and philosophical contexts for Hölderlin's poetic thought and to trace his profound impact upon subsequent philosophy, most notably Nietzsche, the Frankfurt School, Heidegger and Post-structuralism. Beginning with the point of departure of Hölderlin in Kant and Fichte, Mortal Thought outlines the novel philosophical innovations of Hölderlin, and their influence upon philosophy from the 19th century to the present day. A renewed appreciation of Hölderlin will allow us to retrieve an authentic philosophy for our own era. Mortal Thought lays out a concise, clear and comprehensive account of the emergence of Hölderlin as philosopher and poet, of his influence upon the four dominant strands of Continental philosophy - Nietzsche, Heidegger, Critical Theory and Poet-structuralism - and of his relevance for us in our own era.

Preface Sources 1 Death 2 The absurd 3 Moral luck 4 Sexual perversion 5 War and massacre 6 Ruthlessness in public life 7 The policy of preference 8 Equality 9 The fragmentation of value 10 Ethics without biology 11 Brain bisection and the unity of consciousness 12 What is it like to be a bat? 13 Panpsychism 14 Subjective and objective Index.