A brilliant and original reimagining of sexuality, this book examines how concepts lend themselves to power/knowledge formations, and offers a robust synthesis of insights from Foucault and Deleuze to extend those into a proposal for a conceptual next step for imagining the structures of sexuality as eros. Many contemporary French philosophers make incidental use of the notion of a ruse. Its names are legion: 'duplicity,' 'concealment,' 'forgetting,' and 'subterfuge,' among others. This book employs Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of the concept to describe three specifically conceptual ruses, or sleights, that make up part of the conceptual support for the concept of sex. These are the sleights associated with the concepts of norm, bisexuality and development. Mary Beth Mader argues that concepts can trick us, and shows how they can effect conceptual sleights, or what she calls sleights of reason.

In The Sonic Episteme Robin James examines how twenty-first-century conceptions of sound as acoustic resonance shape notions of the social world, personhood, and materiality in ways that support white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Drawing on fields ranging from philosophy and sound studies to black feminist studies and musicology, James shows how what she calls the sonic episteme—a set of sound-based rules that qualitatively structure social practices in much the same way that neoliberalism uses statistics—employs a politics of exception to maintain hegemonic neoliberal and biopolitical projects. Where James sees the normcore averageness of Taylor Swift and Spandau Ballet as contributing to the sonic episteme's marginalization of nonnormative conceptions of gender, race, and personhood, the black feminist political ontologies she identifies in Beyoncé's and Rihanna's music challenge such marginalization. In using sound to theorize political ontology, subjectivity, and power, James argues for the further articulation of sonic practices that avoid contributing to the systemic relations of domination that biopolitical neoliberalism creates and polices.

This “fun, brain-twisting book . . . will make you think” as it explores more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, philosophy, physics, and the social sciences (Sean Carroll, New York Times–bestselling author of Something Deeply Hidden). Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician’s purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn’t require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind, Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts—and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world—and much more.

What can magic tell us about ourselves and our daily lives? If you subtly change the subject during an uncomfortable conversation, did you know you're using attentional 'misdirection', a core technique of magic? And if you've ever bought an expensive item you'd sworn never to buy, you were probably unaware that the salesperson was, like an accomplished magician, a master at creating the 'illusion of choice'. Leading neuroscientists Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde meet with magicians from all over the world to explain how the magician's art sheds light on consciousness, memory, attention, and belief. As the founders of the new discipline of NeuroMagic, they combine cutting-edge scientific research with startling insights into the tricks of the magic trade. By understanding how magic manipulates the processes in our brains, we can better understand how we work - in fields from law and education to marketing, health and psychology - for good and for ill.

This is the first book to assess bisexuality through a range of psychoanalytic and critical perspectives, highlighting both the issues faced by bisexual people in contemporary society and the challenges that can be presented by bisexual clients within a clinical setting. Examining bisexuality through the lenses of Lacanian, Winnicottian and Relational psychoanalytic theories, the book outlines the ways in which the concept is at once both dated and yet still tremendously important. It includes case studies to explore the issue of widespread countertransference responses in the clinical setting, in addition to using both bisexual theory and empirical research on biphobia to comment on the social pressures facing bisexual men and women, and the resultant psychological effects. Bisexual identities and practices have become increasingly visible in recent years, and this important book addresses the lack of critical reckoning with the topic within the psychoanalytic community. It will be of great interest to practicing psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as well as to researchers across the fields of psychoanalysis and gender and sexuality studies.

As the magazine of the Texas Exes, The Alcalde has united alumni and friends of The University of Texas at Austin for nearly 100 years. The Alcalde serves as an intellectual crossroads where UT's luminaries - artists, engineers, executives, musicians, attorneys, journalists, lawmakers, and professors among them - meet bimonthly to exchange ideas. Its pages also offer a place for Texas Exes to swap stories and share memories of Austin and their alma mater. The magazine's unique name is Spanish for "mayor" or "chief magistrate"; the nickname of the governor who signed UT into existence was "The Old Alcalde."

Much of the history of Western ethical thought has revolved around debates about what constitutes a good life, and claims that a good life is achievable only by certain human beings. In Feminist Philosophies of Life, feminist, new materialist, posthumanist, and ecofeminist philosophers challenge this tendency, approaching the question of life from alternative perspectives. Signalling the importance of distinctively feminist reflections on matters of shared concern, Feminist Philosophies of Life not only exposes the propensity of discourses to normalize and exclude differently abled, racialized, feminized, and gender nonconforming people, it also asks questions about how life is constituted and understood without limiting itself to the human. A collection of articles that focuses on life as an organizing principle for ontology, ethics, and politics, chapters of this study respond to feminist thinkers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, and Søren Kierkegaard. Divided into three parts, the book debates the question of life in and against the emerging school of new feminist materialism, provides feminist phenomenological and existentialist accounts of life, and focuses on lives marked by a particular precarity such as disability or incarceration, as well as life in the face of a changing climate. Calling for a broader account of lived experience, Feminist Philosophies of Life contains persuasive, original, and diverse analyses that address some of the most crucial feminist issues. Contributors include Christine Daigle (Brock University), Shannon Dea (University of Waterloo), Lindsay Eales (University of Alberta), Elizabeth Grosz (Duke University), Lisa Guenther (Vanderbilt University), Lynne Huffer (Emory University), Ada Jaarsma (Mount Royal University), Stephanie Jenkins (Oregon State University), Ladelle McWhorter (University of Richmond), Jane Barter Moulaison (University of Winnipeg), Astrida Neimanis (University of Sydney), Danielle Peers (University of Alberta), Stephen Seely (Rutgers University), Hasana Sharp (McGill University), Chloë Taylor (University of Alberta), Florentien Verhage (Washington and Lee University), Rachel Loewen Walker (Out Saskatoon), and Cynthia Willett (Emory University).