Essays on Freedom of Action, first published in 1973, brings together original papers by contemporary British and American philosophers on questions which have long concerned philosophers and others: the question of whether persons are wholly a part of the natural world and their actions the necessary effects of causal processes, and the question of whether our actions are free, and such that we can be held responsible for them, even if they are the necessary effects of casual processes. This volume will be of interest not only to those who are primarily concerned with philosophy but also to students in those many other disciplines in which freedom and determinism arise as problems.

Liberalisms, a work first published in 1989, provides a coherent and comprehensive analytical guide to liberal thinking over the past century and considers the dominance of liberal thought in Anglo-American political philosophy over the past 20 years. John Gray assesses the work of all the major liberal political philosophers including J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, Karl Popper, F. A Hayek, John Rawls and Robert Nozick, and explores their mutual connections and differences.

Unashamedly polemical, this reissue of Freedom & Equality, first published in 1986, presents a strong and persuasively argued case for democratic socialism. In contrast to many recent books justifying conservatism and varieties of Marxism, Keith Dixon defends the two great principles underpinning democratic socialism – freedom and equality. He aims both to restore the idea of freedom to its proper place in the political vocabulary of the left and to defend a stark version of freedom as absence of constraint. Only this version of freedom, he argues, is consistent with the proper defence of civil liberties. Dixon also defends radical egalitarianism from its critics, who either repudiate its full force or reject it out of hand. He believes that freedom and equality are potentially realizable socialist goals, that democratic socialism is not necessarily linked with fraternalism, and – above all – that it should be based upon a firm and consistent conception of individuality.

First published in 2001, this book sets out to shed light on traditional controversies in Mill scholarship, underscore the significance of the contribution Mill made to associationist psychology, argue he is not entirely successful in explaining why art matters, and that this failure is linked to a deep tension in his mature work — rooted in his unwillingness to shake off the moral psychology he was raised on. The book examines various episodes and tensions in Mill’s life and work and how they relate to and informed his philosophy — while also giving a critical account of it. This book will be of interest to students of philosophy.

J. L. Austin (1911-1960) exercised in Post-war Oxford an intellectual authority similar to that of Wittgenstein in Cambridge. Although he completed no books of his own and published only seven papers, Austin became through lectures and talks one of the acknowledged leaders in what is called ‘Oxford philosophy’ or ‘ordinary language philosophy’. Few would dispute that among analytic philosophers Austin stands out as a great and original philosophical genius. Three volumes of his writing, published after his death, have become classics in analytical philosophy: Philosophical Papers; Sense and Sensibilia; and How to Do Things with Words. First published in 1969, this book is a collection of critical essays on Austin’s philosophy written by well-known philosophers, many of whom knew Austin personally. A number of essays included were especially written for this volume, but the majority have appeared previously in various journals or books, not all easy to obtain.

This title was first published in 2001. The essays in this highly cosmopolitan collection were selected from over 250 contributions presented at the 19th World Congress in Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (IVR) held in New York in 1999. They represent a cross-section of contemporary work on human rights derived from eleven different countries.