Kant is widely acknowledged for his critique of theoretical reason, his universalistic ethics, and his aesthetics. Scholars, however, often ignore his achievements in the philosophy of law and government. At least four innovations that are still relevant today can be attributed to Kant. He is the first thinker, and to date the only great thinker, to have elevated the concept of peace to the status of a foundational concept of philosophy. Kant links this concept to the political innovation of his time, a republic devoted to human rights. He extends the concept by adding to it the right of nations and cosmopolitan law. Finally, Kant democratizes Plato's notion of philosopher kings with a concept of 'kingly people'. This book examines all aspects of this important, but neglected, body of Kant's writings.

These volumes are the fruits of a major European Science Foundation project and offer the first comprehensive study of republicanism as a shared European heritage. Whilst previous research has mainly focused on Atlantic traditions of republicanism, Professors Skinner and van Gelderen have assembled an internationally distinguished set of contributors whose studies highlight the richness and diversity of European traditions. Volume I focuses on the importance of anti-monarchism in Europe and analyses the relationship between citizenship and civic humanism, concluding with studies of the relationship between constitutionalism and republicanism in the period between 1500 and 1800. Volume II, first published in 2002, is devoted to the study of key republican values such as liberty, virtue, politeness and toleration. This volume also addresses the role of women in European republican traditions, and contains a number of in-depth studies of the relationship between republicanism and the rise of a commercial society in early modern Europe.

This book captures the Indian state's difficult dialogue with divorce, mediated largely through religion. By mapping the trajectories of marriage and divorce laws of Hindu, Muslim, and Christian communities in post-colonial India, it explores the dynamic interplay between law, religion, family, minority rights and gender in Indian politics. It demonstrates that the binary frameworks of the private-public divide, individuals versus group rights, and universal rights versus legal pluralism collapse before the peculiarities of religious personal law. Historicizing the legislative and judicial response to decades of public debates and activism on the question of personal law, it suggests that the sustained negotiations over family life within and across the legal landscape provoked a unique and deeply contextual evolution of both, secularism and religion in India's constitutional order. Personal law, therefore, played a key role in defining the place of religion and determining the content of secularism in India's democracy.

Plotinus is the greatest philosopher in the 700 year period between Aristotle and Augustine. He thought of himself as a disciple of Plato, but in his efforts to defend Platonism against Aristotelians, Stoics, and others, he actually produced a reinvigorated version of Platonism that later came to be known as "Neoplatonism". In this volume, sixteen leading scholars introduce and explain the many facets of Plotinus' complex system. They place Plotinus in the history of ancient philosophy while showing how he was a founder of medieval philosophy.

Plotinus stands at a crossroads in ancient philosophy, between the more than 600 years of philosophy that came before him and the new Platonic tradition. He was the first and perhaps the greatest systematizer of Plato's thought, and all later students of Plato in the following centuries approached Plato through him. This Companion from a new generation of ancient philosophy scholars reflects the current state of research on Plotinus, with chapters on topics including mathematics, fate and determinism, happiness, the theory of forms, categories of reality, matter and evil, and Plotinus' legacy. The volume offers an accessible overview of the thought of one of the pivotal figures in the history of philosophy, and reveals his importance as a thinker whose impact goes far beyond his importance as an interpreter of Plato.

The aim of this book is to collect in one comprehensive volume a representative selection of ancient sources in translation, with commentary, on the history, institutions, society and economy of the Greek world from c. 750 to 338 BC - that is, the period best known and most important for the evolution of the polis, a form of political community which combined the aspects of city and state in a physical and psychological unity unparalleled either before or since. For us, the inheritors of much that the Greeks created, there is an inherent interest in the way in which they organised their society during these centuries. Although this book assumes no knowledge of Greek, the reader is introduced to a range of key Greek words and concepts which offer a direct insight into the mentality, both collective and individual, of the times. The sources themselves (all of which have been translated by the authors) are supported by introductory commentary, notes, bibliographies, chronological tables and maps. All students and teachers of the history of ancient Greece or of classical civilisation generally will find this book an invaluable tool.

Long under-studied, Plato’s Laws has been the object of renewed attention
since the late 1990s, and is now considered to be his major work of political
philosophy besides the Republic. In his last dialogue, Plato returns to the
project of describing the foundation of a just city and sketches in considerable detail its constitution, laws and other social institutions. Written
by leading Platonists, the chapters in this volume cover a wide range of
topics central for understanding the Laws, such as the aim of the Laws as
a whole, the ethical psychology of the Laws, especially its views of pleasure and non-rational motivations, and whether and, if so, how the strict
law code of the Laws can encourage genuine virtue. The chapters make an
important contribution to ongoing debates and will open up fresh lines of
inquiry for further research.

This Element surveys the main claims of Bernard Williams's ethical philosophy. Topics include ethical scepticism, virtue, reasons for action, the critique of the Morality System, moral realism and the nature of theorising in ethics.

What parts of morality ought the law to enforce? What considerations justify its enforcement? What is the relationship between the legal and social enforcement of morality? Are there principled moral limits that constrain the enforcement of morality? How should we think about the pragmatic limits to the effective enforcement of morality? These are some of the main questions addressed by Steven Wall in this comprehensive and provocative study of a fundamental debate in jurisprudence and political theory. The book defends the practice of ethical environmentalism: the deliberate effort to improve the ethical character of the social environment of a society by political, legal and other means. The presumptive case for ethical environmentalism is presented and then assessed in light of a range of important considerations, including fair treatment, governmental neutrality, the value of personal liberty, rights to do wrongs, and free expression.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, his main work of theoretical philosophy, frequently uses metaphors from law. In this first book-length study in English of Kant's legal metaphors and their role in the first Critique, Sofie Møller shows that they are central to Kant's account of reason. Through an analysis of the legal metaphors in their entirety, she demonstrates that Kant conceives of reason as having a structure mirroring that of a legal system in a natural right framework. Her study shows that Kant's aim is to make cognisers become similar to authorized judges within such a system, by proving the legitimacy of the laws and the conditions under which valid judgments can be pronounced. These elements consolidate her conclusion that reason's systematicity is legal systematicity.

The Critique of Practical Reason is the second of Kant's three Critiques, and his second work in moral theory after the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Its systematic account of the authority of moral principles grounded in human autonomy unfolds Kant's considered views on morality and provides the keystone to his philosophical system. These new essays shed light on the principal arguments of the second Critique and explore their relation to Kant's critical philosophy as a whole. They examine the genesis of the Critique, Kant's approach to the authority of the moral law given as a 'fact of reason', the metaphysics of free agency, the account of respect for morality as the moral motive, and questions raised by the 'primacy of practical reason' and the idea of the 'postulates'. Engaging and critical, this volume will be invaluable to advanced students and scholars of Kant and to moral theorists alike.

Kant claims that the fundamental principle of morality is given by pure reason itself. Many have interpreted Kant to derive this principle from a conception of pure practical reason (as opposed to merely prudential reasoning about the most effective means to empirically given ends). But Kant maintained that there is only one faculty of reason, although with both theoretical and practical applications. This Element shows how Kant attempted to derive the fundamental principle and goal of morality from the general principles of reason as such, defined by the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason and the ideal of systematicity.

In Aristotle and Law, George Duke argues that Aristotle's seemingly dispersed statements on law and legislation are unified by a commitment to law's status as an achievement of practical reason. This book provides a systematic exposition of the significance and coherence of Aristotle's account of law and also indicates the relevance of this account to contemporary legal theory. It will be of great interest to scholars and students in jurisprudence, philosophy, political science and classics.

Natural law is a perennial though poorly represented and understood issue in political philosophy and the philosophy of law. In this 2006 book, Mark C. Murphy argues that the central thesis of natural law jurisprudence - that law is backed by decisive reasons for compliance - sets the agenda for natural law political philosophy, demonstrating how law gains its binding force by way of the common good of the political community. Murphy's work ranges over the central questions of natural law jurisprudence and political philosophy, including the formulation and defense of the natural law jurisprudential thesis, the nature of the common good, the connection between the promotion of the common good and requirement of obedience to law, and the justification of punishment.

The first extended study of relics of the Holy Blood: portions of the blood of Christ's passion preserved supposedly from the time of the Crucifixion and displayed as objects of wonder and veneration in the churches of medieval Europe. Inspired by the discovery of new evidence relating to the relic deposited by King Henry III at Westminster in 1247, the study proceeds from the particular political and spiritual motives that inspired this gift to a wider consideration of blood relics, their distribution across western Europe, their place in Christian devotion, and the controversies to which they gave rise among theologians. In the process the author advances a new thesis on the role of the sacred in Plantagenet court life as well as exploring various intriguing byways of medieval religion.

W.V. Quine (1908-2000) was quite simply the most distinguished analytic philosopher of the later half of the 20th century. His celebrated attack on the analytic/synthetic tradition heralded a major shift away form the views of language descended from logical positivism. His most important book, Word and Object, introduced the concept of indeterminacy of radical translation, a bleak view of the nature of the language with which we ascribe thoughts and beliefs to ourselves and others.

The goal of this contribution to the Elements series is to closely examine Merge, its form, its function, and its central role in current linguistic theory. It explores what it does (and does not do), why it has the form it has, and its development over time. The basic idea behind Merge is quite simple. However, Merge interacts, in intricate ways, with other components including the language's interfaces, laws of nature, and certain language-specific conditions. Because of this, and because of its fundamental place in the human faculty of language, this Element's focus on Merge provides insights into the goals and development of generative grammar more generally, and its prospects for the future.

The present work is a systematic study of five frameworks or perspectives articulating mathematical structuralism, whose core idea is that mathematics is concerned primarily with interrelations in abstraction from the nature of objects. The first two, set-theoretic and category-theoretic, arose within mathematics itself. After exposing a number of problems, the Element considers three further perspectives formulated by logicians and philosophers of mathematics: sui generis, treating structures as abstract universals, modal, eliminating structures as objects in favor of freely entertained logical possibilities, and finally, modal-set-theoretic, a sort of synthesis of the set-theoretic and modal perspectives.

A comprehensive guide to contemporary investigations into the relationship between language, philosophy, and linguistics.
The philosophy of language is central to the concerns of those working across semantics, pragmatics and cognition, as well as the philosophy of mind and ideas. Bringing together an international team of leading scholars, this handbook provides a comprehensive guide to contemporary investigations into the relationship between language, philosophy, and linguistics. Chapters are grouped into thematic areas and cover a wide range of topics, from key philosophical notions, such as meaning, truth, reference, names and propositions, to characteristics of the most recent research in the field, including logicality of language, vagueness in natural language, value judgments, slurs, deception, proximization in discourse, argumentation theory and linguistic relativity. It also includes chapters that explore selected linguistic theories and their philosophical implications, providing a much-needed interdisciplinary perspective. Showcasing the cutting-edge in research in the field, this book is essential reading for philosophers interested in language and linguistics, and linguists interested in philosophical analyses.