A new window into Machiavelli’s idea of virtuous leadership and the appropriate relationship among leaders, common citizens, and elites.

For more than a decade, John P. McCormick has been at the forefront of a new wave of scholarship that reveals the anti-elitist and democratic commitments at the center of Niccolo Machiavelli’s political thought. In The People’s Princes, McCormick turns his attention to Machiavelli’s conception of virtuous leadership and Machiavelli’s views on the appropriate relationships among individual leaders, common citizens, and elites.

While most people think of Machiavelli as a cynical advisor of tyrants—a man who counseled leaders to aggrandize themselves, by any means necessary, at the expense of their subjects and citizens—The People’s Princes fundamentally challenges this understanding. Drawing from Machiavelli’s major political works a normative standard for leadership that emphasizes the mutually reinforcing relationship of civic leadership and popular government, McCormick delineates Machiavelli’s method of “political exemplarity” by analyzing in detail the Florentine’s case studies of leaders and their interactions with populaces throughout ancient and modern history.

McCormick argues that Machiavelli suggests that civic leaders should enhance their reputations by providing for their own eventual obsolescence; specifically, they should establish institutional means through which common citizens rule themselves more directly and substantively. The People’s Princes invites readers to consider Machiavelli anew, and also reflect on insights that remain relevant in the twenty-first century amidst growing concerns that political leaders are not accountable or responsive to popular majorities.

An inquiry into the problematic of perjury, or lying, and forgiveness from one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century.
  
“One only ever asks forgiveness for what is unforgivable.” From this contradiction begins Perjury and Pardon, a two-year series of seminars given by Jacques Derrida at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris in the late 1990s. In these sessions, Derrida focuses on the philosophical, ethical, juridical, and political stakes of the concept of responsibility. His primary goal is to develop what he calls a “problematic of lying” by studying diverse forms of betrayal: infidelity, denial, false testimony, perjury, unkept promises, desecration, sacrilege, and blasphemy.

Although forgiveness is a notion inherited from multiple traditions, the process of forgiveness eludes those traditions, disturbing the categories of knowledge, sense, history, and law that attempt to circumscribe it. Derrida insists on the unconditionality of forgiveness and shows how its complex temporality destabilizes all ideas of presence and even of subjecthood. For Derrida, forgiveness cannot be reduced to repentance, punishment, retribution, or salvation, and it is inseparable from, and haunted by, the notion of perjury. Through close readings of Kant, Kierkegaard, Shakespeare, Plato, Jankélévitch, Baudelaire, and Kafka, as well as biblical texts, Derrida explores diverse notions of the “evil” or malignancy of lying while developing a complex account of forgiveness across different traditions.

 

Pagan rhetor, (Neo-)Platonist philosopher, Christian theologian

This collection of essays is devoted to the rhetoric, Neoplatonic philosophy, and Christian theology of Marius Victorinus, a mid-fourth-century professor of rhetoric and philosopher who converted to Christianity late in life. Scholars from eight different countries, some of whom have not previously published in English, reflect on debates about his writings and theological development. These topics include Victorinus's deployment of philosophical sources for trinitarian theology, possible connections in his work to Origen, Augustine, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Gnosticism, as well as his contributions to Latin rhetoric and dialectic. Contributors include Jan Dominik Bogataj, Michael Chase, Nello Cipriani, Stephen A. Cooper, Volker Henning Drecoll, Lenka Karfíková, Josef Lössl, Václav Němec, Thomas Riesenweber, Guadalupe Lopetegui Semperena, Miran Špelič, Chiara O. Tommasi, John D. Turner, and Florian Zacher. The chapters in this volume are of great interest to students of late antique philosophy, Christian theology, and Latin rhetoric.

In Ennead I.5 Plotinus attempts to navigate a well-trodden path of inquiry by directly responding to a wide spectrum of popular theories on human flourishing, and insisting emphatically that well-being belongs to the present moment. Indeed, Aristotle—with his insistence that well-being be measured by “a complete life” (Nicomachean Ethics 1098a16–20) or a life measured by virtue, a modus vivendi sustained via the development of appropriate habits (hexis) and the avoidance of misfortunes—is one of Plotinus’ central targets. Nevertheless, it is also obvious that the Hellenistic schools, with their almost evangelical insistence that happiness is available to practitioners in the immediacy of the “now,” take pride of place in Plotinus’ short treatise on the subject. Layne analyzes in depth Plotinus’ unique conception of the value of the present moment by highlighting his dialogue with Aristotle and Hellenistic conceptions of the soul, pleasure and pain, time and eternity, and so forth.

Ennead I.8 was written not long before Plotinus’ death in 270 AD, at a time when he was particularly concerned with ethical issues. The treatise’ primary purpose is to argue that evil is not intrinsic to the soul, but since Plotinus always considers ethical issues within a metaphysical framework, it includes an account of the ontological status of matter. Plotinus does his best to preserve a belief in the dependence of all things on a single, supremely good First Principle while admitting that there is evil in the world. He offers a subtle account of the origin of evil in the soul as caused not by either the soul or matter on its own but by the combination of the two. Sheppard shows how Plotinus is responding to ideas found in Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Middle Platonism as well as to the challenge presented by Gnosticism, and argues that the views expressed in I.8 are not inconsistent with what Plotinus has to say about matter and its generation elsewhere. She further considers the criticisms of Plotinus’ views put forward by Proclus and concludes that, despite its weaknesses, Plotinus’ account remains an ingenious attempt to defend monism and the essential goodness of the soul while recognizing the existence of evils.

This short, early treatise undertakes to explain the controversial thesis that all souls—this includes individual human souls and the world-soul—are in some sense just one soul. Plotinus considers a number of objections that can be raised against the thesis. For instance, if the thesis is true, it may seem to follow that that everything that holds for one soul also holds for every other soul. Plotinus seeks to explain that such objections are off the mark, which also shows that the thesis about the unity of soul is not a claim about strict identity of all souls. He then (chapter 5) considers and rejects two materialistic hypotheses about the relationship between individual souls and the world-soul. In the final chapter he presents his own solution: the individual souls and the world-soul are all the soul hypostasis. He likens the relationship between the hypostatic soul and the individual souls with that between a science and the theorems of the science: each theorem potentially contains the whole science and can in a sense be said to be it.

A short, smart guide to living the good life through the teachings of Epicurus.

As long as there has been human life, we’ve searched for what it means to be happy. More than two thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Epicurus came to his own conclusion: all we really want in life is pleasure. Though today we tend to associate the word “Epicurean” with indulgence in the form of food and wine, the philosophy of Epicurus was about a life well lived even in the hardest of times. As John Sellars shows in this concise, approachable guide, the ideal life envisioned by Epicurus and his followers was a life much more concerned with mental pleasures and the avoidance of pain. Their goal, in short, was a life of tranquility or contentment.
 
In The Pocket Epicurean Sellars walks us through the history of Epicureanism, starting with the private garden on the edge of ancient Athens where Epicurus and his students lived in the fourth century BC, and where women were as welcome as men. Sellars then moves on to ancient Rome, where Epicurean influence flourished thanks to the poet Lucretius and his cohort. Throughout the book, Sellars draws on the ideas of Epicurus to offer a constructive way of thinking about the pleasures of friendship and our place in the world.

 

Many definitions of postmodernism focus on its nature as the aftermath of the modern industrial age when technology developed dynamically. In The Postmodern Condition Jean-Francois Lyotard extends that analysis to postmodernism by looking at the status of science, technology, and the arts, the significance of technocracy, and the way the flow of information and knowledge are controlled in the Western world. Lyotard emphasized language; the world of postmodern knowledge can be represented as a game of language where speaking is participation in the game whose goal is the creation of new and ever-changing social linkages.