This book presents surveys of significant trends in contemporary philosophy. Contributing authors explore themes relating to justice including natural rights, equality, freedom, democracy, morality and cultural traditions. Key movements and thinkers are considered, ranging from ancient Greek philosophy, Roman and Christian traditions to the development of Muslim law, Enlightenment perspectives and beyond. Authors discuss important works, including those of Aristotle, Ibn Khaldun, John Locke, Immanuel Kant and Mary Wollstonecraft. Readers are also invited to examine Hegel and the foundation of right, Karl Marx as a utopian socialist and the works of Paul Ricœur, amongst the wealth of perspectives presented in this book. Through these chapters, readers are able to explore the relationship of the state to justice and consider the rights of the individual and the role of law. Contributions presented here discuss concepts including Sharia law, freedom in the community and Libertarian Anarchism. Readers may follow accounts of justice in the Scottish Enlightenment and consider fairness, social justice and the concept of injustice. The surveys presented here show different approaches and a variety of interpretations. Each contribution has its own bibliography.

This eleventh volume in the Poincaré Seminar Series presents an interdisciplinary perspective on the concept of Time, which poses some of the most challenging questions in science. Five articles, written by the Fields medalist C. Villani, the two outstanding theoretical physicists T. Damour and C. Jarzynski, the leading experimentalist C. Salomon, and the famous philosopher of science H. Price, describe recent developments related to the mathematical, physical, experimental, and philosophical facets of this fascinating concept. These articles are also highly pedagogical, as befits their origin in lectures to a broad scientific audience. Highlights include a description of the manifold fundamental physical issues in play with time, in particular with the changes of perspective implied by Special and General Relativity; a mathematically precise discussion of irreversibility and entropy in the context of Boltzmann's and Vlasov's equations; a thorough survey of the recently developed “thermodynamics at the nanoscale,” the scale most relevant to biological physics; a description of the new cold atom space clock PHARAO to be installed in 2015 onboard the International Space Station, which will allow a test of Einstein's gravitational shift with a record precision of 2 × 10-6, and enable a test of the stability over time of the fundamental constants of physics, an issue first raised by Dirac in 1937; and last, but not least, a logical and clarifying philosophical discussion of ‘Time's arrow’, a phrase first coined by Eddington in 1928 in a challenge to physics to resolve the puzzle of the time-asymmetry of our universe, and echoed here in a short poème en prose by C. de Mitry. This book should be of broad general interest to physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.