What if Immanuel Kant floated down from his transcendental heights, straight through Alice’s rabbit hole, and into the fabulous world of Lewis Carroll? For Ben-Ami Scharfstein this is a wonderfully instructive scenario and the perfect way to begin this wide-ranging collection of decades of startlingly synthesized thought. Combining a deep knowledge of psychology, cultural anthropology, art history, and the history of religions—not to mention philosophy—he demonstrates again and again the unpredictability of writing and thought and how they can teach us about our experiences. Scharfstein begins with essays on the nature of philosophy itself, moving from an autobiographical account of the trials of being a comparativist to philosophy’s function in the outside world to the fear of death in Kant and Hume. From there he explores an impressive array of art: from China and Japan to India and the West; from an essay on sadistic and masochistic body art to one on the epistemology of the deaf and the blind. He then returns to philosophy, writing on Machiavelli and political ruthlessness, then on the ineffable, and closes with a review of Walter Kaufmann’s multivolume look at the essence of humanity, Discovering the Mind. Altogether, these essays are a testament to adventurous thought, the kind that leaps to the furthest reaches of the possible.

An examination of Carroll's books about Alice explores the contextual knowledge of the time period in which it was written, addressing such topics as time, games, mathematics, and taxonomies.

Kenneth Dorter’s Can Different Cultures Think the Same Thoughts? is a study of fundamental issues in metaphysics and ethics across major philosophical traditions of the world, including the way in which metaphysics can be a foundation for ethics, as well as the importance of metaphysics on its own terms. Dorter examines such questions through a detailed comparison of selected major thinkers and classic works in three global philosophical traditions, those of India, China, and the West. In each chapter Dorter juxtaposes and compares two or more philosophers or classic works from different traditions, from Spinoza and Shankara, to Confucius and Plato, to Marcus Aurelius and the Bhagavad Gita. In doing so he explores different perspectives and reveals limitations and assumptions that might otherwise be obscure. The goal of Dorter’s cross-cultural approach is to consider how far works from different cultures can be understood as holding comparable philosophical views. Although Dorter reveals commonalities across the different traditions, he makes no claim that there is such a thing as a universal philosophy. Clearly there are fundamental disagreements among the philosophers and works studied. Yet in each of the case studies of a particular chapter, we can discover a shared, or at least analogous, way of looking at issues across different cultures. All those interested in metaphysics, ethics, Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy, and comparative philosophy will find much of interest in this book.

This is the first study to systematically confront the question how Brahmanism, which was geographically limited and under threat during the final centuries BCE, transformed itself and spread all over South and Southeast Asia. Brahmanism spread over this vast area without the support of an empire, without the help of conquering armies, and without the intermediary of religious missionaries. This phenomenon has no parallel in world history, yet shaped a major portion of the surface of the earth for a number of centuries. This book focuses on the formative period of this phenomenon, roughly between Alexander and the Guptas.

This book illustrates the extent to which Kant's work has permeated wide areas of learing, across many disciplines, despite a general ignorance, especially in England, of the details of his highly technical philosophy. Consisting of nine major contributions to the Leeds Kant Conference in April 1990, Kant and his Influence shows how Kant's thought has had a marked effect on philosophers, both Continental and Analytic, social and art historians, theologians and Church leaders.

Modernism's Inhuman Worlds explores the centrality of ecological precarity, species indeterminacy, planetary change, and the specter of extinction to modernist and contemporary metamodernist literatures. Modernist ecologies, Rasheed Tazudeen argues, emerge in response to the enigma of how to imagine inhuman being—including soils, forests, oceans, and the earth itself—through languages and epistemologies that have only ever been humanist. How might (meta)modernist aesthetics help us to imagine (with) inhuman worlds, including the worlds still to be made on the other side of mass extinction? Through innovative readings of canonical and emergent modernist and metamodernist works, Tazudeen theorizes inhuman modernism as a call toward further receptivity to the worlds, beings, and relations that tend to go unthought within Western humanist epistemologies. Modernist engagements with the figures of enigma, riddle, and metaphor, according to the book's central argument, offer a means toward what Franz Kafka calls an "otherwise" speaking, based on language's obliqueness to inhuman and planetary being. Drawing on ecocriticism, decolonial and feminist science studies, postcolonial theory, inhuman geography, and sound studies, Tazudeen analyzes an inhuman modernist lineage—spanning from Darwin, Carroll, and Flaubert, through Joyce, Kafka, and Woolf, to contemporary poetic works—as both part of a collaborative rethinking of modernism's planetary and inhuman aesthetics, as well as occasions for imagining new modes of livingness for the extinctions to come.

Ludwig Tieck's 1797 rewriting of Charles Perrault's famous Bluebeard tale (1697) explicitly claims to be an "arabesque" book "without any sense and coherence." The author's close reading of this capricious narrative, based on Kant's theory of what it means to produce nonsense, reveals a specifically Romantic type of nonsense.

Organized around eight core themes in aesthetics today, this book uncovers the complex development of Kant's aesthetic theory. It will be useful to advanced students and scholars in fields across the humanities and studies of the arts.

Creativity matters. We want people to be more creative and admire those who are. Yet creativity is deeply puzzling. Just what is it to be creative? Why is it valuable? Who or what can be creative and how? Creativity and Philosophy is an outstanding collection of specially commissioned chapters by leading philosophers who explore these problems and many more. It provides a comprehensive and creative picture of creativity, including the following themes: creativity as a virtue, imagination, epistemic virtue, moral virtue and personal vice; creativity with and without value, the definition of creativity, creative failures and suffering; creativity in nature, divine creativity and human agency; naturalistic explanations of creativity and the extended mind; creativity in philosophy, mathematics and logic, and the role of heuristics; creativity in art, morality and politics; individual and group creativity. A major feature of the collection is that it explores creativity not only from the perspective of art and aesthetics, but also from a variety of philosophical disciplines, including epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, philosophy of science, political philosophy and ethics. The volume is essential reading for anyone fascinated by creativity, whether their interests lie in philosophy, music, art and visual studies, literature, psychology, neuroscience, management or education, or they are simply intent on learning more about this vital human trait.

Mojca Kuplen connects 18th-century German aesthetics to contemporary theories of self-knowledge in order to highlight the unique cognitive value of art. She does this through revisiting Kant's account of aesthetic ideas, and demonstrating how works of art can increase our understanding of abstract concepts whilst promoting self-knowledge. Addressing some of the most fundamental questions in contemporary aesthetics and philosophy of art, this study covers the value and importance of art, the relationship between art and beauty, the role of knowledge in art and the criteria for artistic excellence. It offers an insight into problems related to the apprehension of meaning and the cognitive processing of abstract representations that have been of interest to contemporary cognitive science. Kant's Aesthetic Cognitivism presents these arguments in a lucid and wide-ranging engagement with the history of aesthetics and current academic debates to understand what art is and why it is valuable.