Continuum Philosophy News

Guest post: Deane-Peter Baker on contracted combatants

Deane-Peter Baker is the author of Just Warriors, Inc, which publishes in our Think Now series next month. The book explores the moral issues raised by the use of private military contractors and mercenaries in war. In his guest post below, Deane examines the background to a resolution recently passed by the United Nations Human Rights Council which concluded that contracted combatants constituted a threat to peace, security and human rights.

Sarah

Guest post: Tony Milligan on vegetarianism

This month sees the publication of Beyond Animal Rights by Tony Milligan in our Think Now series. The book explores our responsibilities to the animals with whom we share the planet, an issue that remains at the heart of public debate. In his guest post below, Tony talks a bit more about a topic that has personal significance for him and his family.

Sarah

PS. Watch out later this week for a guest post from another Think Now author, Deane-Peter Baker on the role (and definition) of mercenaries.

Guest post: Stefan Skrimshire on climate change and political action

Last month we published Future Ethics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination, a collection of essays examining the philosophical questions facing activists, policy makers and educators fighting the causes of climate change. The book interrogates the ethical issues underlying social responses to climate change and in particular how these responses draw upon ideas about the future. Below the book's editor, Stefan Skrimshire, talks about what motivated him and his contributors to pursue the project. Researchers and students of environmental ethics, or indeed anyone interested in climate change and political action, please read on...

Sarah

Hello again - and a guest post from Gary Cox

One whole year and one very active little baby boy later, I'm delighted to be back at Continuum, taking up the reins of the Philosophy list once again. Many thanks to David for looking after things so well in my absence. It looks like it was a very exciting year, with some fantastic new publications and lots more to come. It's good to be back.

The first book to land on my desk on my return was Gary Cox's How to Be a Philosopher, and what better way to celebrate the book's release than to hear from the author himself. In the guest post below, Gary talks about what inspired him to write the book, how we are all philosophers whether we know it or not, and what Red Dwarf has to do with David Hume. Over to Gary...

Sarah Campbell Publisher

Guest post: Michael Mack on Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity

Published earlier this year, Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity draws new theoretical conclusions from a study of Spinoza’s legacy in the age of Goethe and beyond.  The book is exciting because it is an entire rethinking of Spinoza's impact on modern though and the author, Michael Mack (Reader in Medical Humanities and English Literature at Durham University), talks more about what his book is trying to do below for those of you that haven't read it yet but are intrigued to find out more.

Carly

Guest post: Edward F. Mooney, author of Lost Intimacy in American Thought

I've been lucky to have been able to make my living over the years doing what I love to do, teaching curious and exploring minds, staying close to the writings of my curious and exploring mentors, and writing for and with these marvelous mentors.

I’ve written about the great Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard and the great Montana philosopher Henry Bugbee. Most recently, I'm writing on Henry Thoreau. Lost Intimacy in American Thought says little about Kierkegaard but I like to think his spirit is akin to that of Thoreau, Henry Bugbee, Henry James, Stanley Cavell, and others who I travel with in this book.

I love the margins of learning and unlearning, the cordial hospitality and heartfelt goodbyes of Thoreau and Cavell and others I’ve mentioned, but also of Wittgenstein, Emily Dickinson, Simon Critchley, and Basho – writers who read and write and then wonder how words fit with other things, and then go to do otherwise before returning to words (and once again leave them -- for us).

I've taught philosophy and religion for more years than I care to know, starting in 1968 in the Bay Area, where before and after class I descended from my Berkeley home to row an open water scull in choppy salt water. I now just enjoy the fresh water shores in Syracuse, NY, where I love the snow and views of the Finger Lakes – though from there I take frequent excursions to Portland Maine and the islands of Casco Bay, with my wife, a Kierkegaard scholar; or to an alpine biological research station in Gothic, Colorado to visit grandkids and kids.

Each of the essays in Lost Intimacy is composed from an immediate yet lasting impulse to celebrate the impact on my reading and thinking life of a philosopher or writer, and of fragments of their thoughts tendered. Recovering personal philosophy is recovering the transfiguring impacts of writing addressed intimately that may well resonate not just with me, but with an indefinitely large circle of hearers—call it an infinite but intimate universal. Some aspect of the words or sentences of these writers would catch me off-guard, seem to resonate with my deepest interests in ways it was up to me to work out. My final essay is on Thoreau. I’m happy to report my discovery, or rediscovery, that he is so much more than an endearing tramper and outspoken defender of civil resistance. In an adventure rich beyond my wildest dreams, I’ve found a subtle and penetrating philosopher who can hold his own, in range and depth, with Schiller or Schopenhauer—and as Cavell had argued in the early 1970s (to little avail), who can converse with Kant and Wittgenstein. This makes a full circle. Both Bugbee and Cavell learned from and leaned on Thoreau, with whom they worked out their conviction that exposing one’s intimacy with place and one’s friends and others can be worthy philosophy. These essays are late appreciations that are tendered to a circle of writers who testify to the intimate side of reflective philosophical life. They deliver works of remarkable accomplishment despite the dispiriting power of professionalization, and despite the deep pressures in philosophy to disown all intimate exposure in pursuit of a broad dispassionate view from the top. I attempt here a measure of appreciation and a gesture of resistance and transformation, a small step down toward recovery of the personal.