This ain't your grandpappy's dusty old philosophy class! It's the philosophy seminar your college ethics professor wished he could teach! It's . . . the definitive tenth-anniversary edition of Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey's award-winning, best-selling Action Philosophers! Study the tenets of Plato, the wrestling superstar from ancient Greece, learn the lessons of Nietzsche, the original übermensch, and meditate on the messages of Bodhidharma, a kung fu master. Laugh, learn, laugh some more, and ponder the messages of history's great thinkers as Van Lente and Dunlavey deliver this comprehensive cartoon history from the pre-Socratics to Jacques Derrida!

"The material in this book originally appeared in periodical form in Action philosophers #1-3"--T.p. verso.

Study the tenets of Plato, the wrestling superstar from ancient Greece; learn the lessons of Nietzsche, the original Ubermensch; and meditate on the Bohdidharma, a kung-fu master. Laugh, learn, laugh a bit more and ponder the messages of history's greatest thinkers as Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavy deliver this comprehensive cartoon history from the pre-Socratics to Derrida! This highly original, pretension-free and riotously funny collection celebrates its 10th anniversary in print with this deluxe hardback 'Uberedition'!

Computer science as an engineering discipline has been spectacularly successful. Yet it is also a philosophical enterprise in the way it represents the world and creates and manipulates models of reality, people, and action. In this book, Paul Dourish addresses the philosophical bases of human-computer interaction. He looks at how what he calls "embodied interaction"—an approach to interacting with software systems that emphasizes skilled, engaged practice rather than disembodied rationality—reflects the phenomenological approaches of Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other twentieth-century philosophers. The phenomenological tradition emphasizes the primacy of natural practice over abstract cognition in everyday activity. Dourish shows how this perspective can shed light on the foundational underpinnings of current research on embodied interaction. He looks in particular at how tangible and social approaches to interaction are related, how they can be used to analyze and understand embodied interaction, and how they could affect the design of future interactive systems.

Any sound practical philosophy must be clear on practical concepts—concepts, in particular, of life, action, and practice. This clarity is Michael Thompson’s aim in his ambitious work. In Thompson’s view, failure to comprehend the structures of thought and judgment expressed in these concepts has disfigured modern moral philosophy, rendering it incapable of addressing the larger questions that should be its focus. In three investigations, Thompson considers life, action, and practice successively, attempting to exhibit these interrelated concepts as pure categories of thought, and to show how a proper exposition of them must be Aristotelian in character. He contends that the pure character of these categories, and the Aristotelian forms of reflection necessary to grasp them, are systematically obscured by modern theoretical philosophy, which thus blocks the way to the renewal of practical philosophy. His work recovers the possibility, within the tradition of analytic philosophy, of hazarding powerful generalities, and of focusing on the larger issues—like “life”—that have the power to revive philosophy. As an attempt to relocate crucial concepts from moral philosophy and the theory of action into what might be called the metaphysics of life, this original work promises to reconfigure a whole sector of philosophy. It is a work that any student of contemporary philosophy must grapple with.

Human agency has four irreducibly different dimensions--psychological, ethical, intellectual and physical--which the traditional idea of a 'will' tended to conflate. Twentieth-century philosophers criticized this idea, but the study of human action continued to be governed by a tendency to equate intentional action, voluntary action, action done for reasons, and action in general, or to reduce one of these phenomena to another. Examining the four dimensions of human agency separately deepens our understanding of human conduct and its causes. In Action, Knowledge, and Will, John Hyman ranges across the branches of philosophy, from logic and epistemology to ethics and jurisprudence, defends comprehensive theories of action and knowledge, and offers new answers to some of the most challenging theoretical and practical questions about human conduct, for example: What is the difference between the changes in our bodies we cause personally ourselves, such as the movements of our legs when we walk, and the movements we do not cause personally, such as the contraction of the heart? Are the acts we do to escape threats or fulfil obligations done voluntarily, out of choice? Should duress exculpate a defendant completely, or should it merely mitigate the criminality of an act? When we explain an intentional act by stating our reasons for doing it, do we explain it causally or teleologically or both? How does knowledge inform rational behaviour? Is knowledge a better guide to action than belief?