Books in the The Berkeley Tanner Lectures series

Can the concept of reification, introduced by Georg Lukacs in the early 20th century but largely abandoned by its end, inspire 21st-century political theory? Axel Honneth, the leader of the Frankfurt School's third generation, answers by drawing on his theory of recognition and then responds to three eminent critics: Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss, and Jonathan Lear.

The issue of the canon has been debated in academic circles for many years. This title contains two lectures on this important subject - delivered as the Tanner lectures at Berkeley in November of 2001 - by the literary critic Sir Frank Kermode. It reinterprets the question of canon formation in light of two central notions: pleasure and change.

In The Weight of All Flesh, what Marx characterized as the dual character of the labor embodied in the commodity is shown to be a two-body doctrine transferred from the political theology of sovereignty (and its inherent doxa of the King's Two Bodies) to the realm of political economy.

Explores a pervasive but puzzling aspect of our world: value. Starting with the "Berkeley Tanner Lectures" delivered in 2001, this work aims to make sense of the dependence of value on social practice, without falling back on cultural relativism.

Benhabib argues that since the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, we have entered a phase of global civil society which is governed by cosmopolitan norms of universal justice - norms which are difficult for some to accept as legitimate since they are in conflict with democratic ideals.

This is the second volume of a major new work in moral philosophy. It starts with critiques of Derek Parfit's work by four eminent moral philosophers, and his responses. The largest part of the volume is a self-contained monograph on normativity. The final part comprises seven new essays on Kant, reasons, and why the universe exists.

In these three Tanner lectures, distinguished ethical theorist Allan Gibbard explores the nature of normative thought and the bases of ethics.

In these three Tanner lectures, distinguished ethical theorist Allan Gibbard explores the nature of normative thought and the bases of ethics. In the first lecture he explores the role of intuitions in moral thinking and offers a way of thinking about the intuitive method of moral inquiry that both places this activity within the natural world and makes sense of it as an indispensable part of our lives as planners. In the second and third lectures he takes up thekind of substantive ethical inquiry he has described in the first lecture, asking how we might live together on terms that none of us could reasonably reject. Since working at cross purposes loses fruits that might stem from cooperation, he argues, any consistent ethos that meets this test would be, ina crucial way, utilitarian. It would reconcile our individual aims to establish, in Kant's phrase, a 'kingdom of ends'. The volume also contains an introduction by Barry Stroud, the volume editor, critiques by Michael Bratman (Stanford University), John Broome (Oxford University), and F. M. Kamm (Harvard University), and Gibbard's responses. THE BERKELEY TANNER LECTURESThe Tanner Lectures on Human Values, which are presented annually at each of nine universities in the United States and Great Britain, are among the most prestigious and notable events of the academic year. This volume is the latest in a new interdisciplinary series of books based on the Tanner Lectures given at the University of California, Berkeley. The series aims to make these distinguished lectures, and the lively debates stimulated by their presentation in Berkeley, available to a broadreadership.

We normally take it for granted that other people will live on after we ourselves have died. Even if we do not believe in a personal afterlife in which we survive our own deaths, we assume that there will be a "collective afterlife" in which humanity survives long after we are gone. Samuel Scheffler maintains that this assumption plays a surprising - indeed astonishing - role in our lives.

To know the nature of any phenomenon or practice, it is often a good idea to learn about how it might have emerged or might have been constructed. The Birth of Ethics offers an account of how morality might have emerged, without any planning, in a society with language but without any properly ethical concepts or practices. The conjectural history that it documents serves a philosophical purpose, for it directs us the role that morality plays in human lifeand the nature of morality that enables it to play that role.