Charles Larmore develops a theory of the self that challenges the widespread view that the we always know our own thoughts.

Peace, Culture, and Violence examines deeper sources of violence by providing a critical reflection on the forms of violence that permeate everyday life and our inability to recognize these forms of violence. Exploring the elements of culture that legitimize and normalize violence, the essays collected in this volume invite us to recognize and critically approach the violent aspects of reality we live in and encourage us to envision peaceful alternatives. Including chapters written by important scholars in the fields of Peace Studies and Social and Political Philosophy, the volume represents an endeavour to seek peace in a world deeply marred by violence. Topics include: thug culture, language, hegemony, police violence, war on drugs, war, terrorism, gender, anti-Semitism, and other topics. Contributors are: Amin Asfari, Edward Demenchonok, Andrew Fiala, William Gay, Fuat Gursozlu, Joshua M. Hall , Ron Hirschbein, Todd Jones, Sanjay Lal, Alessandro Rovati, Laleye Solomon Akinyemi, David Speetzen, and Lloyd Steffen.

In this book Sergey Horujy undertakes a novel comparative analysis of Foucault’s theory of practices of the self and the Eastern Orthodox ascetical tradition of Hesychasm, revealing great affinity between these two radical “subject-less” approaches to anthropology. As he facilitates the dialogue between the two, he offers both an original treatment of ascetical and mystical practices and an up-to-date interpretation of Foucault that goes against the grain of mainstream scholarship. In the second half of the book Horujy transitions from the dialogue with Foucault to his own work of Christian philosophy, rooted in -- but not limited to -- the Eastern Christian philosophical and theological tradition. Horujy’s thinking exemplifies the postsecular nature of our contemporary period and serves as a powerful invitation to think beyond religious-secular divides in philosophy and Eastern-Western divides in intellectual history.

In Becoming a New Self, Moshe Sluhovsky examines the diffusion of spiritual practices among lay Catholics in early modern Europe. By offering a close examination of early modern Catholic penitential and meditative techniques, Sluhovsky makes the case that these practices promoted the idea of achieving a new self through the knowing of oneself. Practices such as the examination of conscience, general confession, and spiritual exercises, which until the 1400s had been restricted to monastic elites, breached the walls of monasteries in the period that followed. Thanks in large part to Franciscans and Jesuits, lay urban elites—both men and women—gained access to spiritual practices whose goal was to enhance belief and create new selves. Using Michel Foucault’s writing on the hermeneutics of the self, and the French philosopher’s intuition that the early modern period was a moment of transition in the configurations of the self, Sluhovsky offers a broad panorama of spiritual and devotional techniques of self-formation and subjectivation.

This is a book designed with the teacher educator in mind. It provides in depth examination of specific methods used effectively in self-study research. The chapters are written by researchers engaged in self-study of their practice.

Twenty first century, flexible capitalism creates new demands for those who work to acknowledge that all aspects of their lives have come to be seen as performance related, and consequently of interest to those who employ them (or fire them). At the start of the 21st century we can identify, borrowing from Max Weber, new work ethics that provide novel ethically slanted maxims for the conduct of a life, and which suggest that the cultivation of the self as an enterprise is the life-long activity that should give meaning, purpose and direction to a life. The book provides an innovative theoretical and methodological approach that draws on the problematising critique of Michel Foucault, the sociological imagination of Zygmunt Bauman and the work influenced by these authors in social theory and social research in the last three decades. The author takes seriously the ambivalence and irony that marks many people’s experience of their working lives, and the demands of work at the start of the 21st century. The book makes an important contribution to the continuing debate about the nature of work related identities and the consequences of the intensification of the work regimes in which these identities are performed and regulated. In a post global financial crisis (GFC) world of sovereign debt, austerity and recession the author’s analysis focuses academic and professional interest on neo-liberal injunctions to imagine ourselves as an enterprise, and to reap the rewards and carry the costs of the conduct of this enterprise.

In The Autonomy of Morality, Charles Larmore challenges two ideas that have shaped the modern mind. The world, he argues, is not a realm of value-neutral fact, nor is reason our capacity to impose principles of our own devising on an alien reality. Rather, reason consists in being responsive to reasons for thought and action that arise from the world itself. In particular, Larmore shows that the moral good has an authority that speaks for itself. Only in this light does the true basis of a liberal political order come into view, as well as the role of unexpected goods in the makeup of a life lived well. Charles Larmore is W. Duncan MacMillan Family Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Brown University. The author of The Morals of Modernity and The Romantic Legacy, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2004 he received the Grand Prix de Philosophie from the Académie Française for his book Les pratiques du moi.