Why do we make promises? And what motivates us to keep those we make? Are there good reasons for breaking commitments? Promises, the foundation of our social relationships, are an enigma. Vincent Boyer helps us get to the bottom of this.
Jane Mansbridge has made a major contribution to political theory. She has spent her life combining empirical research with a theoretical approach, and has played a vital role in developing the critique of rational choice and the study of democracy as a permanent process continually in flux.
We construct ourselves through the models that we choose for ourselves or those that are constantly produced by society. Nassim El Kabli’s book unpacks the various dimensions of the relationship with the other by which the singular self comes into being.
The first English translator of Spinoza’s Ethics was a woman, and not any woman: the great novelist George Eliot who, before taking to writing fiction, had translated Feuerbach, David Strauss—and Spinoza. Her beautiful translation had remained unpublished until now. It has nothing to envy of the ones that followed.
According to A. Abizadeh, Hobbes’ moral philosophy is based on two complementary but distinct conceptions: one that classically makes the pursuit of happiness the end of human life, the other, resolutely modern, rests on what we owe to each other.
Ruwen Ogien defended moral minimalism, arguing that what can be legitimately prohibited is the harm caused to others, and that, for the rest, individuals should be allowed to live their lives as they see fit. He considered that ethics has meaning only when it is limited.
Climate change does not affect all of us equally. Developed countries are the largest contributors to global warming, but the main victims are the poorest and future generations. This raises a rarely addressed moral and political problem.
How do the social sciences and humanities deal with human-animal relationships? Between epistemic and political aims, animals have progressed on either side of the Atlantic as legitimate subjects of study and even as political subjects in their own right.
Is it rational to act justly? Contemporary moral philosophy would appear to think so, but there is room for doubt: reason often urges us to serve our own interests first and foremost, even if that means being unjust. And much more is therefore required to convince the wicked than the mere force of reason.
