In the early twentieth century, the life philosophy of Henri Bergson summoned the élan vital, or vital force, as the source of creative evolution. Bergson also appealed to intuition, which focused on experience rather than discursive thought and scientific cognition. Particularly influential for the literary and political Négritude movement of the 1930s, which opposed French colonialism, Bergson's life philosophy formed an appealing alternative to Western modernity, decried as "mechanical," and set the stage for later developments in postcolonial theory and vitalist discourse. Revisiting narratives on life that were produced in this age of machinery and war, Donna V. Jones shows how Bergson, Nietzsche, and the poets Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire fashioned the concept of life into a central aesthetic and metaphysical category while also implicating it in discourses on race and nation. Jones argues that twentieth-century vitalism cannot be understood separately from these racial and anti-Semitic discussions. She also shows that some dominant models of emancipation within black thought become intelligible only when in dialogue with the vitalist tradition. Jones's study strikes at the core of contemporary critical theory, which integrates these older discourses into larger critical frameworks, and she traces the ways in which vitalism continues to draw from and contribute to its making.

What are ethical judgments about? And what is their relation to practice? How can ethical judgment aspire to objectivity? The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of interest in metaethics, placing questions such as these about the nature and status of ethical judgment at the very center of contemporary moral philosophy.Moral Discourse and Practice: Some Philosophical Approaches is a unique anthology which collects important recent work, much of which is not easily available elsewhere, on core metaethical issues. Naturalist moral realism, once devastated by the charge of "naturalistic fallacy," has been reinvigorated, as have versions of moral realism that insist on the discontinuity between ethics and science. Irrealist, expressivist programs have also developed with great subtlety, encouraging the thought that a noncognivist account may actually be able to explain ethical judgments' aspirations to objectivity. Neo-Kantian constructivist theories have flourished as well, offering hope that morality can be grounded in a plausible conception of reasonable conduct. Together, the positions advanced in the essays collected here address these recent developments, constituting a rich array of approaches to contemporary moral philosophy's most fundamental debates. An extensive introduction by Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton is also included, making this volume the most comprehensive and up-to-date work of its kind. Moral Discourse is ideally suited for use in courses in contemporary ethics, ethical theory, and metaethics.

Prominent in the canonical texts and traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is the claim that God speaks. Nicholas Wolterstorff argues that contemporary speech-action theory, when appropriately expanded, offers us a fascinating way of interpreting this claim and showing its intelligibility. He develops an innovative theory of double-hermeneutics - along the way opposing the current near-consensus led by Ricoeur and Derrida that there is something wrong-headed about interpreting a text to find out what its author said. Wolterstorff argues that at least some of us are entitled to believe that God has spoken. Philosophers have never before, in any sustained fashion, reflected on these matters, mainly because they have mistakenly treated speech as revelation.

Many have argued that ubuntu was a formative influence on the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), South Africa’s famous transitional justice mechanism. A Discourse on African Philosophy: A New Perspective on Ubuntu and Transitional Justice in South Africa challenges and contextualizes this view in a way that not only provides new findings and reflections on ubuntu and the TRC, but also contributes to the field of African philosophy. One of Christian B. N. Gade’s key findings, founded on qualitative interviews in South Africa, is that some former TRC commissioners and committee members question the importance of ubuntu in the TRC process. Another is that there are several differing and historically developing interpretations of ubuntu, some of which have evident political implications and reflect non-factual and creative uses of history. Thus ubuntu is not a shared cultural heritage, in the ethnophilosophical sense of a static property characterizing a group. In fact, throughout this book Gade argues that the ethnophilosophical approach to African philosophy as a static group property is highly problematic. Gade’s research presents an alternative collective discourse on African philosophy (“collective” in the sense that it does not focus on any single individual in particular) that takes differences, historical developments, and social contexts seriously. This book will be of interest to scholars in African philosophy, transitional justice, politics and cultural heritage, and law in South Africa.

Language Lost and Found takes as its starting-point Iris Murdoch's claim that "we have suffered a general loss of concepts." By means of a thorough reading of Iris Murdoch's philosophy in the light of this difficulty, it offers a detailed examination of the problem of linguistic community and the roots of the thought that some philosophical problems arise due to our having lost the sense of our own language. But it is also a call for a radical reconsideration of how philosophy and literature relate to each other on a general level and in Murdoch's authorship in particular.

“An invaluable book” of late-career lectures that reveal Foucault’s perspective on truth, truth-telling, and the nature of discourse (Choice). This volume collects a series of lectures given by the renowned French thinker Michel Foucault. The first part presents a talk, Parresia, delivered at the University of Grenoble in 1982. The second presents a series of lectures entitled “Discourse and Truth,” given at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983, which appears here for the first time in its full and correct form. Together, these lectures provide an unprecedented account of Foucault’s reading of the Greek concept of parresia, often translated as “truth-telling” or “frank speech.” The lectures trace the transformation of this concept across Greek, Roman, and early Christian thought, from its origins in pre-Socratic Greece to its role as a central element of the relationship between teacher and student. In mapping the concept’s history, Foucault’s concern is not to advocate for free speech; rather, his aim is to explore the moral and political position one must occupy in order to take the risk to speak truthfully. These lectures—carefully edited and including notes and introductory material to fully illuminate Foucault’s insights—are a major addition to Foucault’s English language corpus.

It is considerably easier to say that modern philosophy began with Descartes than it is to define the modernity and philosophy to which Descartes gave rise. In Lines of Thought, Claudia Brodsky Lacour describes the double origin of modern philosophy in Descartes's Discours de la méthode and Géométrie, works whose interrelation, she argues, reveals the specific nature of the modern in his thought. Her study examines the roles of discourse and writing in Cartesian method and intuition, and the significance of graphic architectonic form in the genealogy of modern philosophy. While Cartesianism has long served as a synonym for rationalism, the contents of Descartes's method and cogito have remained infamously resistant to rational analysis. Similarly, although modern phenomenological analyses descend from Descartes's notion of intuition, the "things" Cartesian intuitions represent bear no resemblance to phenomena. By returning to what Descartes calls the construction of his "foundation" in the Discours, Brodsky Lacour identifies the conceptual problems at the root of Descartes's literary and aesthetic theory as well as epistemology. If, for Descartes, linear extension and "I" are the only "things" we can know exist, the Cartesian subject of thought, she shows, derives first from the intersection of discourse and drawing, representation and matter. The crux of that intersection, Brodsky Lacour concludes, is and must be the cogito, Descartes's theoretical extension of thinking into material being. Describable in accordance with the Géométrie as a freely constructed line of thought, the cogito, she argues, extends historically to link philosophy with theories of discursive representation and graphic delineation after Descartes. In conclusion, Brodsky Lacour analyzes such a link in the writings of Claude Perrault, the architectural theorist whose reflections on beauty helped shape the seventeenth-century dispute between "the ancients and the moderns." Part of a growing body of literary and interdisciplinary considerations of philosophical texts, Lines of Thought will appeal to theorists and historians of literature, architecture, art, and philosophy, and those concerned with the origin and identity of the modern.