Dive into the fascinating world of movie merchandise with Brian Barry's engaging ex-ploration of how films have inspired toys, collectibles, and pop culture treasures for over a century. From silent-era wind-up Charlie Chaplin figures to high-tech LEGO sets and limited-edition prop replicas, this book traces the evolution of licensed movie products through the decades.Discover the surprising stories behind iconic lines like Star Wars action figures, LEGO builds, Ghostbusters proton...

George Orwell is sometimes read as disinterested in (if not outright hostile) to philosophy. Yet a fair reading of Orwell's work reveals an author whose work was deeply informed by philosophy and who often revealed his philosophical sympathies. Orwell's written works are of ethical significance, but he also affirmed and defended substantive ethical claims about humanism, well-being, normative ethics, free will and moral responsibility, moral psychology, decency, equality, liberty, justice,...

Since its publication in 1965, Brian Barry's seminal work has occupied an important role in the revival of Anglo-American political philosophy. A number of ideas and terms in it have become part of the standard vocabulary, such as the distinction between "ideal-regarding" and "want-regarding" principles and the division of principles into aggregative and distributive. The book provided the first precise analysis of the concept of political values having trade-off relations and its analysis...

What makes someone an evil person? How are evil people different from merely bad people? Do evil people really exist? Can we make sense of evil people if we mythologize them? Do evil people take pleasure in the suffering of others? Can evil people be redeemed?Peter Brian Barry answers these questions by examining a wide range of works from renowned authors, including works of literature by Kazuo Ishiguro, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Oscar Wilde alongside class...

This book examines what makes someone an evil person and how evil people are different from merely bad people. Rather than focusing on the "problem of evil" that occupies philosophers of religion, Barry looks instead to moral psychology—the intersection of ethics and psychology. He provides both a philosophical account of what evil people are like and considers the implications of that account for social, legal, and criminal institutions. He also engages in traditional philosophical reason...

All major western countries today contain groups that differ in their religious beliefs, customary practices or ideas about the right way in which to live. How should public policy respond to this diversity? In this important new work, Brian Barry challenges the currently orthodox answer and develops a powerful restatement of an egalitarian liberalism for the twenty-first century.Until recently it was assumed without much question that cultural diversity could best be accommodated ...

The lotus blossoms in July, so the other day I took a trip−something of an annual pilgrimage of sorts−to a provincial park famous for its sea of pink lotuses. I go there every summer and just saunter around the huge pond for half a day or so and then return.The rainy season had already begun and when I arrived it was drizzling and the park was deserted. With umbrella in hand, I stood on the footbridge in the center of the pond, inhaling the mystical fragrance and watching the raind...

Philippa Foot has for many years been one of the most distinctive and influential thinkers in moral philosophy. Long dissatisfied with the moral theories of her contemporaries, she has gradually evolved a theory of her own that is radically opposed not only to emotivism and prescriptivism but also to the whole subjectivist, anti-naturalist movement deriving from David Hume. Dissatisfied also with both Kantian and utilitarian ethics, she claims to have isolated a special form ofevaluation t...

Six magnificent and stimulating essays examining the role of technology in shaping how we live, by one of Canada’s most influential philosophers, now reissued in a handsome A List edition.Originally published in 1986, the six essays that comprise Technology and Justice offer absorbing reflections on the extent to which technology has shaped the way we live now. George Grant explores the fate of traditional values in modern education, social behaviour, and ...

Suppose there is no God. This might imply that human life is meaningless, that there are no moral obligations and hence people can do whatever they want, and that the notions of virtue and vice and good and evil have no place. Erik J. Wielenberg believes this view to be mistaken and in this book he explains why. He argues that even if God does not exist, human life can have meaning, we do have moral obligations, and virtue is possible. Naturally, the author sees virtue in a Godless univers...

Modernism in legal theory is no different from modernism in the arts: both respond to a cultural crisis, a sense that institutions and traditions have lost their validity. Some doubt the importance of the rule of law, others question the objectivity of legal reasoning. We have lost confidence in the justice of our legal institutions, and even in our very capacity to identify justice.Legal philosopher David Luban argues that we cannot escape the modernist predicament. Accusing conte...

Rhetoric is the art of speech and persuasion, the study of argument and, in Classical times, an essential component in the education of the citizen. For rhetoricians, politics is a skill to be performed and not merely observed. Yet in modern democracies we often suspect political speech of malign intent and remain uncertain how properly to interpret and evaluate it. Public arguments are easily dismissed as ‘mere rhetoric’ rather than engaged critically, with citizens encouraged to be passi...