The Eighteenth century is one of the most important periods in the history of Western philosophy, witnessing philosophical, scientific, and social and political change on a vast scale.
The Routledge Companion to Ancient Philosophy is a collection of new essays on the philosophy and philosophers of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds.
Embodied cognition is one of the foremost areas of study and research in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology and cognitive science.
There are deep and pervasive disagreements today in universities and colleges, and popular culture in general, over the credibility and value of belief in God.
The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Law provides a comprehensive, non-technical philosophical treatment of the fundamental questions about the nature of law.
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science is an indispensable reference source and guide to the major themes, debates, problems and topics in philosophy of science.
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion, Second edition is an indispensable guide and reference source to the major themes, movements, debates and topics in philosophy of religion.
The third edition of the acclaimed Routledge Companion to Aesthetics contains over sixty chapters written by leading international scholars covering all aspects of aesthetics.
Phenomenology was one of the twentieth century’s major philosophical movements and continues to be a vibrant and widely studied subject today.
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key topics, subjects, thinkers and debates in philosophy and music.
Epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge, is at the core of many of the central debates and issues in philosophy, interrogating the notions of truth, objectivity, trust, belief and perception.
The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics is an outstanding, comprehensive and accessible guide to the major themes, thinkers, and issues in metaphysics.
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film is the first comprehensive volume to explore the main themes, topics, thinkers and issues in philosophy and film.
The nineteenth century is a period of stunning philosophical originality, characterised by radical engagement with the emerging human sciences.
The Routledge Companion to Ethics is an outstanding survey of the whole field of ethics by a distinguished international team of contributors.
Philosophy of language is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature of meaning, the relationship of language to reality, and the ways in which we use, learn, and understand language.
The Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy is a comprehensive, definitive reference work, providing an up-to-date survey of the field, charting its history and key figures and movement...
The origins of the Western philosophical tradition lie in the ancient Greco-Roman world.
Virtue ethics has emerged as a distinct field within moral theory - whether as an alternative account of right action or as a conception of normativity which departs entirely from the obligatoriness...
The Routledge Handbook of Neoplatonism is an authoritative and comprehensive survey of the most important issues and developments in one of the fastest growing areas of research in ancient philosophy.
The nineteenth century was a turbulent period in the history of the philosophical scrutiny of religion.
The Routledge Companion to Bioethics is a comprehensive reference guide to a wide range of contemporary concerns in bioethics.
The twentieth century was one of the most significant and exciting periods ever witnessed in philosophy, characterized by intellectual change and development on a massive scale.
Global ethics focuses on the most pressing contemporary ethical issues - poverty, global trade, terrorism, torture, pollution, climate change and the management of scarce recourses.
Virtue ethics is on the move both in Anglo-American philosophy and in the rest of the world.
Hermeneutics is a major theoretical and practical form of intellectual enquiry, central not only to philosophy but many other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.
Philosophy of religion has experienced a renaissance in recent times, paralleling the resurgence in public debate about the place and value of religion in contemporary Western societies.
The concept of well-being is one of the oldest and most important topics in philosophy and ethics, going back to ancient Greek philosophy.
The Handbook of Epistemic Cognition brings together leading work from across disciplines, to provide a comprehensive overview of an increasingly important topic: how people acquire, understand, justif...
Information and communication technology occupies a central place in the modern world, with society becoming increasingly dependent on it every day.
While the history of philosophy has traditionally given scant attention to food and the ethics of eating, in the last few decades the subject of food ethics has emerged as a major topic, encompassing ...
Biological diversity - or ‘biodiversity’ - is the degree of variation of life within an ecosystem.
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine is a comprehensive guide to topics in the fields of epistemology and metaphysics of medicine.
Introducing the reader to the very latest developments in the philosophical foundations of physics, this book covers advanced material at a level suitable for beginner and intermediate students.
Questions concerning free will are intertwined with issues in almost every area of philosophy, from metaphysics to philosophy of mind to moral philosophy, and are also informed by work in different ar...
Imagination occupies a central place in philosophy, going back to Aristotle.
This rich and diverse collection offers a range of perspectives and practices of Philosophy for Children (P4C).
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science is an outstanding guide to the major themes, movements, debates, and topics in the philosophy of social science.
Sixteenth century philosophy was a unique synthesis of several philosophical frameworks, a blend of old and new, including but not limited to Scholasticism, Humanism, Neo-Thomism, Aristotelianism, and...
The idea that humans are by nature social and political animals can be traced back to Aristotle.
The ancient philosophy of stoicism has been a crucial and formative influence on the development of Western thought since its inception through to the present day.
In the era of information and communication, issues of misinformation and miscommunication are more pressing than ever.
Empathy plays a central role in the history and contemporary study of ethics, interpersonal understanding, and the emotions, yet until now has been relatively underexplored.
Epistemic contextualism is a recent and hotly debated topic in philosophy.
Both through his own work and that of his students, Franz Clemens Brentano (1838–1917) had an often underappreciated influence on the course of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy.
The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key topics, subjects, thinkers, and debates in feminist philosophy.
Experience is inescapably temporal.
Scientists studying the burning of stars, the evolution of species, DNA, the brain, the economy, and social change, all frequently describe their work as searching for mechanisms.
Thought experiments are a means of imaginative reasoning that lie at the heart of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics to the modern era, and they also play central roles in a range of fields, from phys...
The phenomenon of pain presents problems and puzzles for philosophers who want to understand its nature.
While philosophers have been interested in animals since ancient times, in the last few decades the subject of animal minds has emerged as a major topic in philosophy.
The Routledge Handbook of Neuroethics offers the reader an informed view of how the brain sciences are being used to approach, understand, and reinvigorate traditional philosophical questions, as well...
This Handbook surveys the contemporary state of the burgeoning field of metaethics.
Focused on mapping out contemporary and future domains in philosophy of technology, this volume serves as an excellent, forward-looking resource in the field and in cognate areas of study.
While it has many connections to other topics in normative and applied ethics, discrimination is a central subject in philosophy in its own right.
Libertarians often bill their theory as an alternative to both the traditional Left and Right.
In recent years, the relation between contemporary academic philosophy and evolutionary theory has become ever more active, multifaceted, and productive.
The Routledge Companion to Seventeenth Century Philosophy is an outstanding survey of one of the most important eras in the history of Western philosophy - one which witnessed philosophical, scientifi...
The History of Indian Philosophy is a comprehensive and authoritative examination of the movements and thinkers that have shaped Indian philosophy over the last three thousand years.
The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intentionality provides a wide-ranging survey of topics in a rapidly expanding area of interdisciplinary research.
For many decades, race and racism have been common areas of study in departments of sociology, history, political science, English, and anthropology.
Scientific realism is a central, long-standing, and hotly debated topic in philosophy of science.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century.
While paternalism has been a long-standing philosophical issue, it has recently received renewed attention among scholars and the general public.
Interest in pacifism?an idea with a long history in philosophical thought and in several religious traditions?is growing.
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature is an in-depth examination of literature through a philosophical lens, written by distinguished figures across the major divisions of philosophy.
The field of business ethics continues to expand intellectually and geographically.
There has been an explosion of work on consciousness in the last 30?40 years from philosophers, psychologists, and neurologists.
The problem of addiction is one of the major challenges and controversies confronting medicine and society.
While the importance of consent has been discussed widely over the last few decades, interest in its study has received renewed attention in recent years, particularly regarding medical treatme...
Childhood looms large in our understanding of human life, as a phase through which all adults have passed.
<P>Computational approaches dominate contemporary cognitive science, promising a unified, scientific explanation of how the mind works.
While applied epistemology has been neglected for much of the twentieth century, it has seen emerging interest in recent years, with key thinkers in the field helping to put it on the philosophical ma...
What is an epistemic virtue? Are epistemic virtues reliable? Are they motivated by a love of truth? Do epistemic virtues produce knowledge and understanding? How can we develop epistemic virtues? The ...
The ethical treatment of non-human animals is an increasingly significant issue, directly affecting how people share the planet with other creatures and visualize themselves within the natural world.
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy presents the first comprehensive, state of the art overview of the complex relationship between the field of translation studies and the study of p...
Iago?s ?I am not what I am? epitomises how Shakespeare?s work is rich in philosophy, from issues of deception and moral deviance to those concerning the complex nature of the self, the notions of bein...
David Hume (1711?1776) is widely acknowledged as one of the most important philosophers in the English language, with his work continuing to exert major influence on philosophy today.
What does it mean to do public policy ethics today? How should philosophers engage with ethical issues in policy-making when policy decisions are circumscribed by political and pragmatic concerns? How...
The Routledge Handbook of Moral Epistemology brings together philosophers, cognitive scientists, developmental and evolutionary psychologists, animal ethologists, intellectual historians, and educato...
The portentous terms and phrases associated with the first decades of the Frankfurt School ? exile, the dominance of capitalism, fascism ? seem as salient today as they were in the early twentiet...
<I> <P>The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy</I> collects 39 original chapters from prominent philosophers on the nature, meaning, value, and predicaments of love, presented i...
<P>Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is a major figure in Western Philosophy and is one of the most widely read and studied political philosophers of all time.
<P>The study of perception and the role of the senses have recently risen to prominence in philosophy and are now a major area of study and research.
<P>Luck permeates our lives, and this raises a number of pressing questions: What is luck? When we attribute luck to people, circumstances, or events, what are we attributing? Do we have any obl...
Emergence is often described as the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts: interactions among the components of a system lead to distinctive novel properties.
Why ought we concern ourselves with understanding a concept of evil? It is an elusive and politically charged concept which critics argue has no explanatory power and is a relic of a superstitious and...
There has been a rising interest in the study of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) in philosophy, political theory, literary studies and the history of political thought in recent decades.
Edited by an international team of leading scholars, The Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology is the first major reference work devoted to this growing field.
The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City is an outstanding reference source to this exciting subject and the first collection of its kind.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) remains one of the most enigmatic, captivating, and elusive thinkers in the history of European thought.
Relativism can be found in all philosophical traditions and subfields of philosophy.
There isn?t one conversation about animal ethics.
Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century.
Some of philosophy?s biggest questions, both historically and today, are in-virtue-of questions: In virtue of what is an action right or wrong? In virtue of what am I the same person my mother bore? I...
The emotions occupy a fundamental place in philosophy, going back to Aristotle.
Trust is pervasive in our lives.
The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility comprehensively addresses questions about who is responsible and how blame or praise should be attributed when human agents act together.
Humility is a vital aspect of political discussion, social media and self-help, whilst recent empirical research has linked humility to improved well-being, open-mindedness and increased accuracy in a...
Hellenistic philosophy concerns the thought of the Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics, the most influential philosophical groups in the era between the death of Alexander the Great (323 BCE) and the def...
Philosophical questions regarding the nature and methodology of philosophical inquiry have garnered much attention in recent years.
Philosophical questions surrounding skill and expertise can be traced back as far as Ancient Greece, China, and India.
In 1688 the Irish scientist and politician William Molyneux sent a letter to the philosopher John Locke.
Philosophers, legal scholars, criminologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists have long asked important questions about punishment: What is its purpose? What theories help us better understand its na...
The Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies is a comprehensive and interdisciplinary resource, which frames and contextualises the rapidly expanding fields that explore yoga and meditative t...
From David Hume?s famous puzzle about "the missing shade of blue," to current research into the science of colour, the topic of colour is an incredibly fertile region of study and debate, cutting acro...
Phenomenology was one of the twentieth century?s major philosophical movements, and it continues to be a vibrant and widely studied subject today with relevance beyond philosophy in areas such as medi...
Phenomenology has primarily been concerned with questions about knowledge and ontology.
This volume offers the most comprehensive survey available of the philosophical background to the works of early Christian writers and the development of early Christian doctrine.
The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Philosophy of Science is a comprehensive resource for feminist thinking about and in the sciences.
This Handbook offers students and more advanced readers a valuable resource for understanding linguistic reference; the relation between an expression (word, phrase, sentence) and what that expression...
Engineering has always been a part of human life but has only recently become the subject matter of systematic philosophical inquiry.
Modality - the question of what is possible and what is necessary - is a fundamental area of philosophy and philosophical research.
This Handbook offers an authoritative, up-to-date introduction to the rich scholarly conversation about anarchy?about the possibility, dynamics, and appeal of social order without the state.
Over the last several decades, questions about practical reason have come to occupy the center stage in ethics and metaethics.
Like any other group of philosophers, scholastic thinkers from the Middle Ages disagreed about even the most fundamental of concepts.
A striking feature of atrocities, as seen in genocides, civil wars, or violence against certain racial and ethnic groups, is the attempt to dehumanize ? to deny and strip human beings of their hu...
Understood historically, culturally, politically, geographically, or philosophically, the idea of Europe and notion of European identity conjure up as much controversy as consensus.
As political discourse had been saturated with the ideas of "post-truth", "fake news", "epistemic bubbles", and "truth decay", it was no surprise that in 2017 The New Scientist declared: "Philosophers...
This Handbook brings together philosophical work on how language shapes, and is shaped by, social and political factors.
In recent years the philosophy of information has emerged as an important area of research in philosophy.
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) is widely regarded as the principal founder of phenomenology, one of the most important movements in twentieth-century philosophy.
Over the last few decades, the notion of improvisation has enriched and dynamized research on traditional philosophies of music, theatre, dance, poetry, and even visual art.
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900?2002) is one of the most important philosophers of the post-1945 era.
John Locke (1632?1704) is considered one of the most important philosophers of the modern era and the first of what are often called ?the Great British Empiricists.
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Physics is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the state of the art in the philosophy of physics.
The influence of materialist ontology largely dominates philosophical and scientific discussions.
The most fundamental questions of economics are often philosophical in nature, and philosophers have, since the very beginning of Western philosophy, asked many questions that current observers would ...
Logical empiricism is a philosophical movement that flourished in the 1920s and 30s in Central Europe and in the 1940s and 50s in the United States.
William James (1842?1910) is widely regarded as the founding figure of modern psychology and one of the most important philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Henri Bergson (1859?1941) is widely regarded as one of the most original and important philosophers of the twentieth century.
One of the most basic and important distinctions we draw is between those entities with the capacity of agency and those without.
The central question of naturalism - the relation of philosophy to science - was one of the defining strands of twentieth-century thought and remains a major source of debate and controversy.
This handbook advances the interdisciplinary field of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) by identifying thirty-five topics of ongoing research.
This Handbook provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of the state of the field of the philosophy of meditation and engages primarily in the philosophical assessment of the merits of meditation...
This Handbook covers the most urgent, controversial, and important topics in the philosophy of sex.
Iris Murdoch was a philosopher and novelist of extraordinary breadth and originality whose work defies simple categorisation.
Written for a wide range of readers in environmental science, philosophy, and policy-oriented programs The Routledge Companion to Environmental Ethics is a landmark, comprehensive reference work in th...
The Routledge Handbook of Indian Buddhist Philosophy is the first scholarly reference volume to highlight the diversity and individuality of a large number of the most influential philosophers to have...
For Aristotle, habit was a fundamental aspect of human nature; and for William James, it was the "enormous flywheel" of society.
The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Friendship is a superb compilation of chapters that explore the history, major topics, and controversies in philosophical work on friendship.
Propositions are routinely invoked by philosophers, linguists, logicians, and other theorists engaged in the study of meaning, communication, and the mind.
The Handbook of Philosophy of Education is a comprehensive guide to the most important questions about education that are being addressed by philosophers today.
The Routledge Companion to Pragmatism offers 44 cutting-edge chapters—written specifically for this volume by an international team of distinguished researchers—that assess the past, present, and futu...
In comparison to medicine, the professional field of public health is far less familiar.
Bodily awareness is one of the most interesting and enigmatic forms of experience.
When Marcel Proust started to work on In Search of Lost Time in 1908, he wrote this question in his notebook: ‘Should I make it a novel, a philosophical study, am I a novelist?’ Throughout his famous ...
The question of autonomy is fundamental to understanding some of the most important questions and debates in contemporary political and moral life, from freedom of the individual, free will and decisi...
Humans think of ourselves as acting according to reasons that we can typically articulate and acknowledge, though we may be reluctant to do so.
The Routledge Handbook of Women and Early Modern European Philosophy is an outstanding reference source for the wide range of philosophical contributions made by women writing in Europe from about 156...
Comprising 45 chapters, written especially for this volume by an international team of leading experts, The Routledge Companion to the Philosophies of Painting and Sculpture is the first handbook of i...
