Books by Faculty Members

Descartes on Innate Ideas
Deborah A. Boyle

The concept of innateness is central to Descartes’ epistemology; the Meditations display a new, non-Aristotelian method of acquiring knowledge by attending properly to our innate ideas. Yet understanding Descartes’s conception of innate ideas is not an easy task and some commentators have concluded that Descartes held several distinct and unrelated conceptions of innateness.

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Perceiving Reality
Consciousness, Intentionality, and Cognition in Buddhist Philosophy
Christian Coseru

What turns the continuous flow of experience into perceptually distinct objects? Can our verbal descriptions unambiguously capture what it is like to see, hear, or feel? How might we reason about the testimony that perception alone discloses? Christian Coseru proposes a rigorous and highly original way to answer these questions by developing a framework for understanding perception as a mode of apprehension that is intentionally constituted, pragmatically oriented, and causally effective.

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Mirror's Fathom
A Novel
Sheridan Hough

Mirror’s Fathom is the story of Tycho Wilhelm Lund—anarchist, pirate, and thief of a legendary mirror. Tycho is also a great-nephew of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and is, when the novel begins, a mild-mannered antiques dealer who is asked to assess the value of some furniture at the home of Regine Schlegel, Kierkegaard’s famously jilted former love. Upon his arrival, Tycho—who has no interest in philosophy—finds himself at a meeting of the Kierkegaard Circle, a group faithfully reading aloud Kierkegaard’s works.

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Nietzsche's Noontide Friend
The Self as Metaphoric Double
Sheridan Hough

Ever since Heidegger lectured on Nietzsche, philosophers have stressed the active side of the Übermensch, the self who aggressively consumes and exploits value. Sheridan Hough, however, argues that there is a distinctly receptive and passive side to the Nietzschean self, and thus a pervasive doubleness in Nietzsche's thought that hasn't been explored before. This doubleness is the focus of Hough's attention here.

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Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
An Introduction
Larry Krasnoff

This book introduces Hegel’s best known and most influential work, Phenomenology of Spirit, by interpreting it as a unified argument for a single philosophical claim: that human beings achieve their freedom through retrospective self-understanding. In clear, non-technical prose, Larry Krasnoff sets this claim in the context of the history of modern philosophy and shows how it is developed in the major sections of Hegel’s text.

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New Essays on the History of Autonomy
A Collection Honoring J. B. Schneewind
Larry Krasnoff and Natalie Brender, editors

Although Kantian autonomy is often considered independent of time and place, J.B. Schneewind's landmark study, The Invention of Autonomy, has shown that much can be learned by analyzing Kant's moral philosophy in the context of the history of modern moral philosophy. Distinguished contributors accordingly relate Kant's work to the historical context of his predecessors (as well as the empirical context of human agency) in this valuable resource for professionals and advanced students.

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The Future of Punishment
Thomas Nadelhoffer, editor

The Future of Punishment brings together some of the leading researchers in philosophy, psychology, and the law to discuss the future of punishment and retribution in a thoroughly interdisciplinary way.

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Moral Psychology
Historical and Contemporary Readings
Thomas Nadelhoffer, editor

Moral Psychology: Historical and Contemporary Readings is the first book to bring together the most significant contemporary and historical works on the topic from both philosophy and psychology.

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