Buddhist philosophy asserts that human suffering is caused by ignorance regarding the true nature of reality. According to this, perceptions and thoughts are largely fabrications of our own minds, based on conditioned tendencies which often involve problematic fears, aversions, compulsions, etc. In Buddhist psychology, these tendencies reside in a portion of mind known as Store consciousness. Here, I suggest a correspondence between this Buddhist Store consciousness and the neuroscientific idea of stored synaptic weights. These weights are strong synaptic connections built (...) in through experience. Buddhist philosophy claims that humans can find relief from suffering through a process in which the Store consciousness is transformed. Here, I argue that this Buddhist 'transformation at the base' corresponds to a loosening of the learned synaptic connections. I will argue that Buddhist meditation practices create conditions in the brain which are optimal for diminishing the strength of our conditioned perceptual and behavioural tendencies. (shrink)

A main objective of this study is to assess the opinions of 50 behavioral health patients on selective control over their behavioral and physical health information. We explored patients' preferences regarding current consent models, what health information should be shared for care and research and whether these preferences vary based on the sensitivity of health information and/or the type of provider involved. The other objective of this study was to solicit opinions of 8 behavioral health providers on patient-driven granular control (...) of health information and potential impact on care.Electronic surveys were implemented at an outpatient Behavioral Health facility that provides care for behavioral health patients with non-serious mental illnesses. The Patient Survey included questions regarding patients' demographics and about their concerns and preferences for data sharing for care and research. The Provider Survey included questions about their view on the current consent process and perceptions on barriers and facilitators to implement patient-controlled granular consent models.This novel study provides valuable preliminary data that can help guide future studies to better understand privacy choices of this underrepresented patient group. (shrink)

During the past several decades, many epistemologists have argued for and contributed to a paradigm shift according to which knowledge is central to assertion, action, and interaction. This general position stands in sharp contrast to several recently developed accounts regarding specific epistemic contexts. These specific accounts resist applying traditional epistemic norms, including strong knowledge norms, to real-world situations of interest. In particular, I consider recent arguments about the epistemic standards for scientific pronouncements, expert testimony in a political context, and interactive (...) reasoning. I argue, firstly, that knowledge does have a crucial role to play in each case, contrary to appearances. Clarifying the role of knowledge fills gaps in our understanding left open by the existing accounts. Secondly, I show that combining the insights from the knowledge-centric approach and from the more specific accounts provides a new perspective on the open problem of developing an account of knowledge-based decisions. Specifically, I argue that the biggest open problem regarding knowledge-based decisions is not how we respond to uncertainty, but rather how we assess the relevance of our many disparate pieces of knowledge, choosing which to integrate, and how. A strong case emerges for a procedural solution to this part of the problem of how to make knowledge-based decisions. (shrink)

My Back Is To A Life Passed. A year, maybe more, in liminal space. Waiting. For a vaccine. For better therapeutics. For a political climate to shift. All the while, the actual climate turns against us.The waters rise in the East. Fires rage in the West.My back is to a life passed. Retirement, just before the pandemic. Post-retirement and lockdown, simultaneous. A turn to a writing life—solitary, self-directed, coming at a time when my options are limited. My go-to places for (...) connection and inspiration—museums, coffeehouses, lectures, and readings—all off-limits. The natural world, my cathedral, also inaccessible. The fires rage, and the air is unbreathable.Over morning coffee, in our quiet house, the windows shut against dangerously high particulates and a darkened sky, I read an article by Julian Lucas in The New Yorker, “When a Virus Becomes a Muse.” He reviews the work of Hervé Guibert, the French writer who died from AIDS in 1991. Guibert focused on the body. His young, sexual body, with its confounding insistence. His failing body, ravaged by disease. AIDS was his muse, blasting him into a wildly creative few years, writing four books in the last three years of his life (Lucas).How will this virus, the novel coronavirus, serve as muse? The pandemic sets limits: Where can I go? Who can I see? I live within constructs and limitations imposed much like the rules of poetic form. Within those—the sonnet, the haiku—how is language wrought? How sharp, how bright, its expression? If I cannot hug you, how do I show my devotion? In my separate state, how do I live connection? I have a new expression. Mouth and nose covered, only my eyes showing, framed by glasses I need in order to see, I punctuate exchanges at the checkout counter, and with the health-check staff at the entrance to my daughter's physical therapy facility, by forcing my eyes into a warm, glad squint. I want them to beam. From people's responses—the moment of recognition, the tender mirroring, the body tilting to the side, eyes crinkled, head nodding—I can tell that the beam is working. It took time to develop this new way. I learned that I have to smile with my mouth, with my whole face, even when it can't be seen, for my feelings to show.Life, like art, requires structure, the boundaries of form. How to structure a day? It could be embodied. Filled. Wasted. Or used. My back is to a life where hours and minutes had a particular meaning. I am no longer expected at work by a certain hour, nor to put in three hours before my morning break. The collective future, where we tossed plans, goals, places we would see—again, or for the first time!—cannot be reached over the smoothed and worn stepping-stones of, say, weeks until a holiday. The broad swaths of the day become the new metric. The slow, mounting morning. A walk, or a longer one, before getting to the bulk of the day's writing. The noontime pivot, heat of the day rising, the birds quiet. Lunch, and a few chores. Essential errands. Medical appointments.The downslope of afternoon, with its nagging refrain, in the time you have left... The swirling, heated world. Greta Thunberg, 16 years old, sails from Europe to the United States to address a conference on climate change. She sails, rather than flies, so as not to add to her carbon footprint. It takes time, that voyage. She waits on deck while moving toward her future. The past recedes. The stormy Atlantic rises.Is it any clearer now that the food chain originates not in boardrooms but in hot fields, that the first essential worker drops from the back of a truck before sunup with a knife and a crate held in roughened, swollen hands?At night, sitting on the sofa, we watch television, the police procedurals that offer entertainment. Escape and relief. The day has passed. These are the rewards for getting through another day of uncertainty, managing the anxiety of risking exposure in order to get groceries and prescriptions and to bring my daughter to physical therapy. The TV detectives we favor work in teams as they interview suspects, talk to witnesses, confer with one another as they refine their theories and move photographs and bits of evidence around on the bulletin board. Our shows always tie up nicely in the end. In my life now, without the team or the interviews or the meetings that keep the detectives connected, I pretend that I am one of them, that my notebooks and plot maps and drawings and time lines are all clues to a mystery that I will solve. Despite my enervated state, I get up, I work, I look at and handle all the materials I have acquired. The day passes. Each night, a reward for getting through the day. Another day. Standing between worlds. Waiting. (shrink)

Four models are outlined for describing and analysing the role of teachers in the formulation of educational policy and the resulting processes of change. The model of teachers as partners in education policy making draws on a pluralist view of political processes and an assumption of a degree of autonomy for teachers and schools. A model of teachers as implementers of change draws a sharp distinction between the processes of policy making and policy execution and excludes teachers from an involvement (...) in the former. A model of teachers as resisting change has been put forward both by those most opposed to and those most supportive of current educational policy developments. Finally, a model of teachers as policy makers in practice is proposed to describe the way in which the reality of teaching situations can lead to the independent actions of individual teachers having systematic policy effects. The applicability of these models is considered in the context of contemporary educational changes drawing on empirical research evidence, in particular that of the PACE study of the implementation of the National Curriculum at KS1 and KS2. (shrink)

Jean-Marc Vallée’s HBO miniseries, Sharp Objects (2018), follows Camille Preaker (Amy Adams) as she returns to her childhood home in Wind Gap, Missouri, to investigate the murders of two young girls. This article explores a specific type of object related to the systems of violence that reveal themselves over the course of the miniseries: ivory tiles. Here, the ivory tiles affixed to the floor of Camille’s mother’s, Adora Crellin’s (Patricia Clarkson), master bedroom both reveal and influence sinister behaviours of (...) the household’s women. In employing concepts inspired from Thing Theory and Object-Oriented Ontology, as well as critical theory, this article examines how the ivory tiles possess multilayered excesses that constitute an object’s thingness. The foremost excess that informs the ivory tiles’ thingness, I contend, is its relationship to white supremacy. It is not only the tiles’ material history that informs its relationship to white supremacy, but how, through outlining the forms of agency things possess under Thing Theory, the tiles are able to reveal the forms of violence that are structured within the domestic sphere of the Crellin home. A product of violence, the ivory tiles as things speak back to the design of white supremacy. (shrink)

Introduction to the Institutional Logics Perspective -- Precursors to the Institutional Logics Perspective -- Defining the Inter-institutional System -- The Emergence, Stability and Change of the Inter-institutional System -- Micro-Foundations of Institutional Logics -- The Dynamics of Organizational Practices and Identities -- The Emergence and Evolution of Field-Level Logics -- Implications for Future Research.

Overview -- Locke's internal sense and Kant's changing views -- Personal identity amd its problems -- Rationalist metaphysics of mind -- Consciousness, self-consciousness, and cognition -- Strands of Argument in the Duisburg Nachlass -- A transcendental deduction for a priori concepts -- Synthesis : why and how? -- Arguing for apperception -- The power of apperception -- "I-think" as the destroyer of rational psychology -- Is Kant's theory consistent? -- The normativity objection -- Is Kant's thinker (as such) a free (...) and responsible agent? -- Kant our contemporary. (shrink)

Reconfiguring the human -- Lines, planes, and bodies: redefining human action -- Action as affect -- The transindividuality of affect -- The tongue -- Renaturalizing ideology: Spinoza's ecosystem of ideas -- The matrix -- Ideology critique today? -- The fly in the coach -- "I am in ideology," or the attribute of thought -- What is to be done? -- Man's utility to man: reason and its place in nature -- The politics of human nature -- Reason and the human (...) essence -- Man's utility to man -- Nonhuman utility -- Beyond the image of man -- Desire for recognition? Butler, Hegel, and Spinoza -- Spinoza in Hegel -- Desire in Hegel -- Conatus and cupiditas in Spinoza -- From interpersonal recognition to impersonal glory -- Judith Butler's post-Hegelian politics of recognition -- The impersonal is political: Spinoza and a feminist politics of imperceptibility -- The politics of recognition -- Elizabeth Grosz's critique of the politics of recognition -- Thinking beyond the (hu)man -- A politics of imperceptibility -- Nature, norms, and beasts -- The beast within -- Animal affects (and) the first man -- Ethics as ethology? (shrink)

Abstract:During recent years, the principle and practice of employment-at-will have been under attack. While progress has been made in eroding the practice, the principle still governs the philosophical assumptions underlying employment practices in the United States, and, indeed, EAW has been promulgated as one of the ways to address economic ills in other countries. This paper will briefly review the major critiques of EAW. Given the failure of these arguments to erode the underpinnings of EAW, we shall suggest new avenues (...) for approaching employment issues to achieve the desirable goal of employee dignity and respect. (shrink)

The ways in which knowledge relates to power have been much discussed in radical education theory. New emphasis on the role of gender and the growing debate about subjectivity have deepened the discussion, while making it more complex. In Getting Smart , Patti Lather makes use of her unique integration of feminism and postmodernism into critical education theory to address some of the most vital questions facing education researchers and teachers.

In Frege's Conception of Logic Patricia A. Blanchette explores the relationship between Gottlob Frege's understanding of conceptual analysis and his understanding of logic.

In the United States today, the human body defines a lucrative site of reusable parts, ranging from whole organs to minuscule and even microscopic tissues. Although the medical practices that enable the transfer of parts from one body to another most certainly relieve suffering and extend lives, they have also irrevocably altered perceptions of the cultural values assigned to the body. Organ transfer is rich terrain to investigate—especially in the American context, where sophisticated technological interventions have significantly shaped understandings of (...) health and well-being, suffering, and death. In _Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies_, Lesley Sharp probes the ideological assumptions underlying the transfer of body parts, the social significance of donors' deaths, and the medico-scientific desires surrounding complex forms of body repair. Sharp also considers the experimental realm, in which nonhuman species and artificial devices present further opportunities for recovery and for controversy. A compelling scientific investigation and social critique, _Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies_ explores the pervasive, and at times pernicious, practices shaping American biomedicine in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Cognitive science, with its exuberant neuromythologies, is a regular target for wise humanists who insist that our rich, sharp, sad, and chancy mental life will easily resist the misplaced physics-envy of over-zealous reductionists. Yet there is little true cause for their concern: in the current confusion of multidisciplinary inquiry into computation and the brain, there are few even half-developed visions of a future completed psychology which challenge straightforward metaphysical and moral faith in personal identity and rational agency. It can seem (...) as if those who fear the encroach of science on mind, warning that it will swamp cultural-historical awareness and care, are bewitched only by the memory of a ghoulish behaviourism. (shrink)

In the United States today, the human body defines a lucrative site of reusable parts, ranging from whole organs to minuscule and even microscopic tissues. Although the medical practices that enable the transfer of parts from one body to another most certainly relieve suffering and extend lives, they have also irrevocably altered perceptions of the cultural values assigned to the body. Organ transfer is rich terrain to investigate—especially in the American context, where sophisticated technological interventions have significantly shaped understandings of (...) health and well-being, suffering, and death. In _Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies_, Lesley Sharp probes the ideological assumptions underlying the transfer of body parts, the social significance of donors' deaths, and the medico-scientific desires surrounding complex forms of body repair. Sharp also considers the experimental realm, in which nonhuman species and artificial devices present further opportunities for recovery and for controversy. A compelling scientific investigation and social critique, _Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies_ explores the pervasive, and at times pernicious, practices shaping American biomedicine in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Progress in the neurosciences is profoundly changing our conception of ourselves. Contrary to time-honored intuition, the mind turns out to be a complex of brain functions. And contrary to the wishful thinking of some philosophers, there is no stemming the revolutionary impact that brain research will have on our understanding of how the mind works. Brain-Wise is the sequel to Patricia Smith Churchland's Neurophilosophy, the book that launched a subfield. In a clear, conversational manner, this book examines old questions (...) about the nature of the mind within the new framework of the brain sciences. What, it asks, is the neurobiological basis of consciousness, the self, and free choice? How does the brain learn about the external world and about its own introspective world? What can neurophilosophy tell us about the basis and significance of religious and moral experiences? Drawing on results from research at the neuronal, neurochemical, system, and whole-brain levels, the book gives an up-to-date perspective on the state of neurophilosophy—what we know, what we do not know, and where things may go from here. (shrink)

Current treatments of practical rationality understand reasons as considerations counting in favor of or against some practical option, treating the positive and the negative case as symmetrical. Typically the focus is on examples of positive reasons. However, I want to shift the spotlight to negative reasons, as making a tighter or more direct link to rationality — and ultimately to morality, which is what much of the current interest in reasons is meant to clarify. Recognizing a positive/negative asymmetry in normative (...) force will let us reconcile the view of moral or other requirements as based on reasons with the denial that reasons as such, even all-thingsconsidered reasons, yield requirements — or as I like to put it, rationally compel. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.2 (2003) 109-118 [Access article in PDF] Editing the Rhetorical Tradition Patricia Bizzell The rhetorical tradition is always being edited. I know because I have edited it myself—that's a sort of pun, in which the words "the rhetorical tradition" refer both to a book and to the cultural phenomenon the book represents. Bruce Herzberg and I (2001) have co-edited an anthology entitled The Rhetorical Tradition: (...) Readings from Classical Times to the Present. That project also involved editing the tradition itself, because, at least since the days of Isidore of Seville, it is through inclusions and exclusions in anthologies such as ours that the rhetorical tradition is established, grows, and changes. Anthologies seem always to have played a large role in the definition of the rhetorical tradition because the accessibility of texts has so often been an issue in the study of rhetoric, whether transmission problems have been caused by the dissipation of classical learning at the end of the Roman period or are caused by the vagaries of print publication today. Then and now, the changing shape of the tradition may be discerned from the tables of contents of anthologies, a circumstance that has become especially evident to me now that we have had the opportunity to edit our volume twice. The tables of contents of the first edition, appearing in 1990, and the second, in 2001, show both some enduring similarities and some interesting differences.It is important to remember that what we inherit as the "rhetorical tradition," for blessing or curse, comprises at least three modalities: texts deemed worthy of rhetorical study, methods of analyzing those texts, and methods of teaching rhetoric according to precepts and principles derived from those texts. Such a description of our cultural legacy would seem to put texts at the center of the tradition, and indeed, anthologies focus our attention on the rhetorical tradition as a set of texts. Tables of contents organized chronologically suggest a neat progression of supposedly major works marching through the centuries, but why those particular works? In [End Page 109] the study of rhetoric as in the study of imaginative literature, scholars now realize that these supposedly inevitable textual monuments to an unbroken and progressively more sophisticated discipline are in fact quarried from among the masses of material each era produces by traditions, that is, methodological and pedagogical traditions, in how to study rhetoric. Although the tradition appears to be text-based, how we wish to analyze verbal productions and how we prefer to teach the art of producing them govern our choices of rhetorical texts to preserve, elevate, or delete. And modern histories of rhetoric have shown that the preferences governing these choices arise out of complex cultural factors relating to gender, race, social class, national identity, and more.Once upon a time, these choices were dominated by the preferences of socially privileged men who saw Western culture as the best in the world, and that culture itself as springing primarily from Greek and Roman roots. As Walter Ong (1981) has explained in Fighting for Life, these men believed that education in rhetoric must be for men only and that boys must be introduced to it via agonistic competition. From these assumptions sprang buttresses for what we might call the "traditional tradition" in the study of rhetoric, a progression of texts written by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Augustine, Erasmus, Bacon, Blair, and so on. This kind of study of rhetoric required extensive education, first, in Latin and Greek, often inculcated with the aid of corporal punishment, as Ong describes, and it persisted well into the twentieth century (though, one trusts, with much less flogging—that went out with co-education, as Ong explains). For example, until 1936, Greek was a graduation requirement at the Jesuit college where I teach, the College of the Holy Cross, and Latin was not dropped as a graduation requirement there until 1959 (the college was still all male, but the rationale for dropping the requirement appears to have centered upon the need to make room in the curriculum for pre-professional studies). Here... (shrink)

Despite considerable growth in understanding of various aspects of sporting and exercise embodiment over the last decade, in-depth investigations of embodied affectual experiences in running remain limited. Furthermore, within the corpus of literature investigating pleasure and the hedonic dimension in running, much of this research has focused on experiences of pleasure in relation to performance and achievement, or on specific affective states, such as enjoyment, derived after completing a run. We directly address this gap in the qualitative literature on sporting (...) and exercise embodiment by contributing novel insights on the mind-body pleasures of running via focusing analytic attention towards the pleasures recalled by runners as experienced during positive, rewarding running experiences. Applying conceptual insights drawn from sociological phenomenology, we analyse data from an in-depth, event-focused interview study with distance runners who reported positive, rewarding experiences in recent recreational runs. Through reflexive thematic analysis, we present findings in relation to three themes: (1) ‘running feels like it should’; (2) sensory engagements; and (3) time out. The study contributes fresh perspectives, both conceptually and in relation to data-collection approach, to a small literature on the lived experience of pleasure in sport, exercise and physical cultures. (shrink)

In The Classrooms All Young Children Need, Patricia M. Cooper takes a synoptic view of Paley’s many books and articles, charting the evolution of Paley’s ...

What is morality? Where does it come from? And why do most of us heed its call most of the time? In Braintrust, neurophilosophy pioneer Patricia Churchland argues that morality originates in the biology of the brain. She describes the "neurobiological platform of bonding" that, modified by evolutionary pressures and cultural values, has led to human styles of moral behavior. The result is a provocative genealogy of morals that asks us to reevaluate the priority given to religion, absolute rules, (...) and pure reason in accounting for the basis of morality. Moral values, Churchland argues, are rooted in a behavior common to all mammals--the caring for offspring. The evolved structure, processes, and chemistry of the brain incline humans to strive not only for self-preservation but for the well-being of allied selves--first offspring, then mates, kin, and so on, in wider and wider "caring" circles. Separation and exclusion cause pain, and the company of loved ones causes pleasure; responding to feelings of social pain and pleasure, brains adjust their circuitry to local customs. In this way, caring is apportioned, conscience molded, and moral intuitions instilled. A key part of the story is oxytocin, an ancient body-and-brain molecule that, by decreasing the stress response, allows humans to develop the trust in one another necessary for the development of close-knit ties, social institutions, and morality. A major new account of what really makes us moral, Braintrust challenges us to reconsider the origins of some of our most cherished values. (shrink)

Parmenides of Elea was the most important and influential philosopher before Plato. He rejected as impossible the scientific inquiry practiced by the earlier Presocratic philosophers and held that generation, destruction, and change are unreal and that only one thing exists. In this book, Patricia Curd argues that Parmenides sought to reform rather than to reject scientific inquiry, and she offers a more coherent account of his influence on later philosophers._ _The Legacy of Parmenides_ examines Parmenides' arguments, considering his connection (...) to earlier Greek thought and how his account of what-is could have served as a model for later philosophers. Curd also explores the theories of his successors, including the Pluralists, the Atomists, the later Eleatics, and the later Presocratics. She concludes with a discussion of the importance of Parmenides' work to Plato's _Theory of Forms._ _The Legacy of Parmenides_ challenges traditional views of early Greek philosophy and provides new insights into the work of Parmenides. "_The Legacy of Parmenides_ represents a milestone... of Parmenides' interpretation. It is full of ideas and tells a coherent story about Parmenides and early Greek thought." --_ Alexander Nehamas, Princeton University___ "Professor Curd offers a genuinely original and possibly correct interpretation of the core thesis of the poem of Parmenides in a field so well worked over that saying something both new and true is profoundly difficult, this is a notable achievement." --_ Thomas M. Robinson, University of Toronto___ "This will be a substantial book in the story of early Greek philosophy, and future writers on the tradition from Thales through Plato will not be able to ignore it without missing an important interpretive alternative. It will be of value to students of Presocratic philosophy or the Greek tradition, as well as to students of the scientific revolution, cosmology, the origins of logic, or comparative mysticism." --_ Scott W. Austin, Texas A&M University___ PATRICIA CURD_ is professor at Purdue University where she works primarily in Ancient Philosophy. She is a co-editor of _Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy_, and is the editor of _A Presocratics Reader._. (shrink)

Anydomainofscientificresearchhasitssustainingorthodoxy. Thatis, research on a problem, whether in astronomy, physics, or biology, is con- ducted against a backdrop of broadly shared assumptions. It is these as- sumptionsthatguideinquiryandprovidethecanonofwhatisreasonable-- of what "makes sense." And it is these shared assumptions that constitute a framework for the interpretation of research results. Research on the problem of how we see is likewise sustained by broadly shared assump- tions, where the current orthodoxy embraces the very general idea that the business of the visual system is to (...) create a detailed replica of the visual world, and that it accomplishes its business via hierarchical organization and by operatingessentiallyindependently of other sensorymodalitiesas well as independently of previous learning, goals, motor planning, and motor execution. (shrink)

Vaesen infers unique properties of mind from the appearance of specific cultural innovation – a correlation without causal direction. Shifts in habitat, population density, and group dynamics are the only independently verifiable incentives for changes in cultural practices. The transition from Acheulean to Late Stone Age technologies requires that we consider how population and social dynamics affect cultural innovation and mental function.

(NB Published in translation as“Hobbes’ theorie der Zivilreligion”, in Dirk Bantl, Rolf Geiger, Stephan Herzberg, eds, Philosophie, Politik und Religion: Klassische Modelle von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. The Hague: de Gruyter, 2013, pp. 117-132. ABSTRACT: Hobbes's Epicureanism was a house of many mansions. Under the banners of antiquity he could flag modern positions on religion that if openly presented as such would have made him liable to charges of heresy or blasphemy, given the censorship of the modern state. But (...) Hobbes's Epicureanism was also serious and there are important continuities, doctrinal and political, between ancient and modern Epicureanism. (shrink)

This important book proposes a new account of the nature of language, founded upon an original interpretation of Wittgenstein. The authors deny the existence of a direct referential relationship between words and things. Rather, the link between language and world is a two-stage one, in which meaning is used and in which a natural language should be understood as fundamentally a collection of socially devised and maintained practices. Arguing against the philosophical mainstream descending from Frege and Russell to Quine, Davidson, (...) Dummett, McDowell, Evans, Putnam, Kripke and others, the authors demonstrate that discarding the notion of reference does not entail relativism or semantic nihilism. A provocative re-examination of the interrelations of language and social practice, this book will interest not only philosophers of language but also linguists, psycholinguists, students of communication and all those concerned with the nature and acquisition of human linguistic capacities. (shrink)

This book is the first English-language collection of essays by leading Camus scholars around the world to focus on Albert Camus’ place and status as a philosopher amongst philosophers, engaging with leading Western thinkers, and considering themes of enduring interest.