"[His] way with the familiar essay--that flexible, forgiving genre in which anything goes except charmlessness and anonymity--has much in common with that of Messrs, Beerbohm, Liebling, and Mencken. Each piece is exquisitely sustained, moving from point to point with the relaxed economy of a pro." --Wall Street Journal

Gossip and reputation are core processes in societies and have substantial consequences for individuals, groups, communities, organizations, and markets.. Academic studies have found that gossip and reputation have the power to enforce social norms, facilitate cooperation, and act as a means of social control. The key mechanism for the creation, maintenance, and destruction of reputations in everyday life is gossip - evaluative talk about absent third parties. Reputation and gossip are inseparably intertwined, but up until now have been mostly studied in isolation. The Oxford Handbook of Gossip and Reputation fills this intellectual gap, providing an integrated understanding of the foundations of gossip and reputation, as well as outlining a potential framework for future research. Volume editors Francesca Giardini and Rafael Wittek bring together a diverse group of researchers to analyze gossip and reputation from different disciplines, social domains, and levels of analysis. Being the first integrated and comprehensive collection of studies on both phenomena, each of the 25 chapters explores the current research on the antecedents, processes, and outcomes of the gossip-reputation link in contexts as diverse as online markets, non-industrial societies, organizations, social networks, or schools. International in scope, the volume is organized into seven sections devoted to the exploration of a different facet of gossip and reputation. Contributions from eminent experts on gossip and reputation not only help us better understand the complex interplay between two delicate social mechanisms, but also sketch the contours of a long term research agenda by pointing to new problems and newly emerging cross-disciplinary solutions.

A selection of poems and seminal prose texts about poetics from major Russian writers of the Modernist era.

Without question, modernist texts have been haunted by what can be known, or more aptly, what cannot be known. This position is foundational to one of the pivotal readings of modernism. Simultaneously, economic, legal, and political shifts that occurred during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced real material changes pertaining to the status of women. Thus, as many others have adeptly argued, modernism is also a crisis in gender. Modernism, Metaphysics, and Sexuality keenly suggests that these narratives - the thinking of what constitutes truth and the rethinking of gender - are intertwined. Interpreting Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Victory, Forster's A Passage to India and Maurice, Lawrence's Women in Love, and Woolf's A Room of One's Own and To the Lighthouse through Luce Irigaray's rereading of western metaphysics, Raschke suggests that where there is a crisis in knowing, there is also a crisis in gender.

Representing the world is a puzzling thing. How can it be that mundane events such as processing a thought--and from there putting those thoughts into words--acquire this property of 'aboutness'? How can expressions, which depend on anything from the most fundamental regularities in the universe to trivial matters of gossip, be either true or false? In The Metaphysics of Representation, J. Robert G. Williams tells a story about how representational properties arise out of a fundamentally non-representational world. The representational properties of language are reduced, via convention, to the representational properties of thoughts. The representational properties of thoughts are reduced, via principles of rationalization, to the representational properties of perception and intention. And this most fundamental layer of representation is explained in terms of the functions they have to communicate. Williams integrates work from rival traditions to present a combined perspective in the metaphysics of representation, give new predictions and explanations of representational phenomena, and offer new solutions to long-standing problems.

Martin Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, first published in 1953, is a highly significant work by a towering figure in twentieth-century philosophy. The volume is known for its incisive analysis of the Western understanding of Being, its original interpretations of Greek philosophy and poetry, and its vehement political statements. This new companion to the Introduction to Metaphysics presents an overview of Heidegger's text and a variety of perspectives on its interpretation from more than a dozen highly respected contributors. In the editors' introduction to the book, Richard Polt and Gregory Fried alert readers to the important themes and problems of Introduction to Metaphysics. The contributors then offer original essays on three broad topics: the question of Being, Heidegger and the Greeks, and politics and ethics. Both for readers who are approaching Heidegger for the first time and for those who are studying Heidegger on an advanced level, this Companion offers a clear guide to one of the philosopher's most difficult yet most influential writings.