Samuel Alexander

Rupert Read

Industrial civilisation has no future. It requires limitless economic growth on a finite planet. The reckless combustion of fossil fuels means that Earth's climate is changing disastrously, in ways that cannot be resolved by piecemeal reform or technological innovation. Sooner rather than later this global capitalist system will come to an end, destroyed by its own ecological contradictions. Unless humanity does something beautiful and unprecedented, the ending of industrial civilisation will take the form of collapse, which could mean a harrowing die-off of billions of people. This book is for those ready to accept the full gravity of the human predicament - and to consider what in the world is to be done. How can humanity mindfully navigate the inevitable descent ahead? Two critical thinkers here remove the rose-tinted glasses of much social and environmental commentary. With unremitting realism and yet defiant positivity, they engage each other in uncomfortable conversations about the end of Empire and what lies beyond.

Conversations on the End of Empire - and what Lies Beyond

This Civilisation is Finished

Jem Bendell

This is the first book to show how professionals across different sectors are beginning to incorporate the acceptance of likely or unfolding societal breakdown into their work and lives. Deep Adaptation refers to the personal and collective changes that might help us to prepare for – and live with – a climate-influenced breakdown or collapse of our societies. It is a framework for responding to the terrifying realisation of increasing and irrevocable disruption, by committing ourselves to reducing suffering while saving more of society and the natural world. The contributors to this book come from diverse fields including philosophy, psychology, education, leadership, facilitation, community development and private enterprise. Unlike mainstream work on climate adaptation, these writers do not assume that our current economic, social, and political systems can be made resilient in the face of rapid and dangerous climate change. Instead, they demonstrate the caring and creative ways that people are responding to the most difficult realisation with which humanity may ever have to come to terms. This book is the essential introduction to the concept, practice and emerging global movement of Deep Adaptation to climate chaos. Edited by the originator of the concept, Professor Jem Bendell, and a leading figure in climate activism, Professor Rupert Read, it brings together scholarship and practical measures for policy and action.

Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos

Deep Adaptation

Kenneth Richman

Includes new essays by renowned philosophers and Hume scholars such as Barry Stround, Simon Blackburn and Galen Strawson, this is the first book to discuss the whole debate about whether Hume was indeed a sceptic.

The New Hume Debate

Alice Crary

This text offers major re-evaluation of Wittgenstein's thinking. It is a collection of essays that presents a significantly different portrait of Wittgenstein. The essays clarify Wittgenstein's modes of philosophical criticism and shed light on the relation between his thought and different philosophical traditions and areas of human concern. With essays by Stanley Cavell, James Conant, Cora Diamond, Peter Winch and Hilary Putnam, we see the emergence of a new way of understanding Wittgenstein's thought. This is a controversial collection, with essays by highly regarded Wittgenstein scholars that may change the way we look at Wittgenstein's body of work.

The New Wittgenstein

Explores important contemporary political and cultural issues from a philosophical perspective in a highly accessible style and format.

Applying Philosophy in Politics and Culture

Philosophy for Life

Wes Sharrock

Phil Hutchinson

The death of Peter Winch in 1997 sparked a revived interest in his work with this book arguing his work suffered misrepresentation in both recent literature and in contemporary critiques of his writing. Debates in philosophy and sociology about foundational questions of social ontology and methodology often claim to have adequately incorporated and moved beyond Winch's concerns. Re-establishing a Winchian voice, the authors examine how such contentions involve a failure to understand central themes in Winch's writings and that the issues which occupied him in his Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy and later papers remain central to social studies. The volume offers a careful reading of the text in alliance with Wittgensteinian insights and alongside a focus on the nature and results of social thought and inquiry. It draws parallels with other movements in the social studies, notably ethnomethodology, to demonstrate how Winch's central claim is both more significant and more difficult to transcend than sociologists and philosophers have hitherto imagined.

In Defence of Peter Winch

There is No Such Thing as a Social Science

A Wittgensteinian way with paradoxes tackles some of the classic philosophical paradoxes that have puzzled philosophers over the centuries and explores how they can be dissolved using the ‘therapeutic’ method of Wittgenstein, according to the ‘resolute’ reading of the latter’s work. The book shows how, by contrast, we should give more serious consideration to real, ‘lived paradoxes’, some of which can be harmful psychically, morally or politically, but others of which can be beneficial.

A Wittgensteinian Way with Paradoxes

That our ecological future appears grave can no longer come as any surprise. And yet we have so far failed, collectively and individually, to begin the kind of action necessary to shift our path away from catastrophic climate collapse. In this stark and startling little book, Rupert Read helps us to understand the direness of our predicament while showing us a metaphor and a method a way of thinking by which we might transform it. From the relatively uncontroversial starting point that we love our own children, we are introduced to a logic of care that iterates far into the future: in caring for our own children, we are committed to caring for the whole of human future; in caring for the whole of human future, we are committed to caring for the future of the natural world. Out of such thinking, hope emerges. As Read demonstrates in this urgent call to action, accepting that we care for our own offspring commits us to a struggle on behalf of us all.

Parents for a Future

Jerry Goodenough

This unique volume treats films as philosophy, rather than speaking of films only in relation to philosophy and subjugating the film in question to pre-existing theories. Bringing together essays from some of the leading scholars in the field, the book also features an interview with Stanley Cavell in which he explains his most recent thinking on the belief that films can think; that they can, indeed, function as philosophy.

Essays on Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell

Film as Philosophy

'This is a book about what might well turn out to be the most important social movement in history.' - David Graeber, author of 'The Democracy Project' 'Activist-philosopher Rupert Read, a key thinker of Extinction Rebellion, has collected a treasure trove of foundational essays that will be immensely valuable for activists around the world. The book is incisive, pertinent, self-critical, well-written, and, in the XR way, occasionally cheeky.' - Ken Ward, protagonist in the documentary, 'The Reluctant Radical''Rupert Read and Samuel Alexander take us deep inside the debates, tactics, and passion that have bound XR together from its founding days, brining us radical reflections from the frontlines of rebellion. If you want to understand the movement that is finally waking us up, read this book.'- Kate Raworth, author of 'Doughnut Economics''From the eruption of XR in our lives in late 2018, Rupert Read has been closely involved in the organisation as an advisor, influencer, spokesperson and occasional critic. These fascinating essays read like dispatches from the front line, crackling with urgency, tempered by timely reflections, and reminding us of the scale of the challenge ahead as we rebuild our shattered, post-coronavirus economies.'- Jonathon Porritt, former Director of the UK Sustainable Development Commission and of Friends of the Earth

Insights from the Inside

Extinction Rebellion

There Is No Such Thing As a Social Science

In this book, Rupert Read offers the first outline of a resolute reading, following the highly influential New Wittgenstein ‘school’, of the Philosophical Investigations. He argues that the key to understanding Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is to understand its liberatory purport. Read contends that a resolute reading coincides in its fundaments with what, building on ideas in the later Gordon Baker, he calls a liberatory reading. Liberatory philosophy is philosophy that can liberate the user from compulsive (and destructive) patterns of thought, freeing one for possibilities that were previously obscured. Such liberation is our prime goal in philosophy. This book consists in a sequential reading, along these lines, of what Read considers the most important and controversial passages in the Philosophical Investigations: 1, 16, 43, 95 & 116 & 122, 130–3, 149–151, 186, 198–201, 217, and 284–6. Read claims that this liberatory conception is simultaneously an ethical conception. The PI should be considered a work of ethics in that its central concern becomes our relation with others. Wittgensteinian liberations challenge widespread assumptions about how we allegedly are independent of and separate from others. Wittgenstein’s Liberatory Philosophy will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Wittgenstein, and to scholars of the political philosophy of liberation and the ethics of relation.

Thinking Through His Philosophical Investigations

Wittgenstein’s Liberatory Philosophy

Thomas Kuhn's shadow hangs over almost every field of intellectual inquiry. His book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has become a modern classic. His influence on philosophy, social science, historiography, feminism, theology, and (of course) the natural sciences themselves is unparalleled. His epoch-making concepts of 'new paradigm' and 'scientific revolution' make him probably the most influential scholar of the twentieth century. Sharrock and Read take the reader through Kuhn's work in a careful and accessible way, emphasizing Kuhn's detailed studies of the history of science, which often assist the understanding of his more abstract philosophical work. These historical studies provide vital insight into what Kuhn was actually trying to achieve in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: an endeavour far less extreme than either his 'foes' or his 'fans' claim. In the book's second half, Sharrock and Read provide excellent explications, defences and, where appropriate, criticisms of Kuhn's central concept of 'incommensurability', and tackle head on the crucial issue of whether Kuhn's insights concerning the natural sciences can be extrapolated to other disciplines, such as the social sciences. This is the first comprehensive introduction to the work of Kuhn and it will be of particular interest to students and scholars in philosophy, theory of science, management science and anthropology.

Rupert Read

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