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What explains the huge popular following for Dexter, currently the most-watched show on cable, which sympathetically depicts a serial killer driven by a cruel compulsion to brutally slay one victim after another? Although Dexter Morgan kills only killers, he is not a vigilante animated by a sense of justice but a charming psychopath animated by a lust to kill, ritualistically and bloodily. However his gory appetite is controlled by “Harry’s Code,” which limits his victims to those who have gotten away with murder, and his job as a blood spatter expert for the Miami police department gives him the inside track on just who those legitimate targets may be. In Dexter and Philosophy, an elite team of philosophers don their rubber gloves and put Dexter’s deeds under the microscope. Since Dexter is driven to ritual murder by his “Dark Passenger,” can he be blamed for killing, especially as he only murders other murderers? Does Dexter fit the profile of the familiar fictional type of the superhero? What part does luck play in making Dexter who he is? How and why are horror and disgust turned into aesthetic pleasure for the TV viewer? How essential is Dexter’s emotional coldness to his lust for slicing people up? Are Dexter’s lies and deceptions any worse than the lies and deceptions of the non-criminals around him? Why does Dexter long to be a normal human being and why can’t he accomplish this apparently simple goal?

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This book deals with questions about the nature of a priori knowledge and its relation to empirical knowledge. Until the twentieth century, it was more or less taken for granted that there was such a thing as a priori knowledge, that is, knowledge whose source is in reason and reflection rather than sensory experience. With a few notable exceptions, philosophers believed that mathematics, logic and philosophy were all a priori. Although the seeds of doubt were planted earlier on, by the early twentieth century, philosophers were widely skeptical of the idea that there was any nontrivial existence of a priori knowledge. By the mid to late twentieth century, it became fashionable to doubt the existence of any kind of a priori knowledge at all. Since many think that philosophy is an a priori discipline if it is any kind of discipline at all, the questions about a priori knowledge are fundamental to our understanding of philosophy itself.

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Antonio Negri is the most important Marxist theorist working today. His writings include novel readings of classical philosophers such as Machiavelli, Descartes, and Spinoza, revolutionary reinterpretations of the central texts of Marx, and works of contemporary political analysis. Negri is known in the English-speaking world primarily through Empire, a work he co-authored with Michael Hardt in 2000 that became a surprise academic best-seller. His other writings, which have great depth and breadth, are equally deserving of attention. While most critical accounts of Negri focus only on Empire, this collection of essays presents readers with a fuller picture of Negri’s thought, one that does justice to his ability to use the great texts of the philosophical tradition to illuminate the present. The collection contains essays from scholars representing a broad spectrum of disciplines and interests, and it offers both criticism of and positive commentary on Negri’s work.

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With social networking and reality television, self-help columns and daytime talk shows, there’s an infinite array of platforms to both expose our deepest thoughts and examine the thoughts of others. In this age of non-stop communication, one’s privacy is subject to unrelenting examination, intrusion, and attack from the media, the government, friends, family, and complete strangers.So what are we trying to hide? And what are we trying to find out about others? Practicing psychoanalyst and professor of literature Josh Cohen tackles those questions in his study of privacy and personality, the “most vulnerable and indestructible region of your self.” Using Sigmund Freud’s theories on identity and the ego as a foundation, Cohen weaves through time and place to study an extensive variety of people who unearthed and revealed the rawest form of their selves. From Adam and Eve to the ballerinas in the hit 2010 film Black Swan, from Hester Prynne to British celebrity Katie Price, Cohen finds Freud’s ideas in both fiction and reality alike.Yet even with all the times that we’ve exposed the inner workings of our psyches, Cohen is sure to emphasize that some part of every individual will always remain hidden. Like Freud once wrote, “The ego is not master in its own house.” In a culture that floods our lives with light, how is it that we remain so helplessly in the dark?

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“The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all else a difference of imagination.The imagination is like the drunk man who has lost his watch, and must get drunk again to find it. It is as intimate as speech and custom, and to trace its ways we need to re-educate our eyes.”—Guy DavenportModernism spawned the greatest explosion of art, architecture, literature, painting, music, and dance of any era since the Renaissance. In its long unfolding, from Yeats, Pound and Eliot to Picasso and Matisse, from Diaghilev and Balanchine to Cunningham and Stravinsky and Cage, the work of Modernism has provided the cultural vocabulary of our time. One of the last pure Modernists, Guy Davenport was perhaps the finest stylist and most protean craftsman of his generation. Publishing more than two dozen books of fiction, essays, poetry and translations over a career of more than forty years, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1990. In poetry and prose, Davenport drew upon the most archaic and the most modern of influences to create what he called “assemblages”—lush experiments that often defy classification. Woven throughout is a radical and coherent philosophy of desire, design and human happiness. But never before has Davenport’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry and translations been collected together in one compendium. Eight years after his death, The Guy Davenport Reader offers the first true introduction to the far-ranging work of this neglected genius.

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The «Sophist» is a Platonic dialogue from the philosopher's late period, most likely written in 360 BC. Its main theme is to identify what a sophist is and how a sophist differs from a philosopher and statesman. Because each seems distinguished by a particular form of knowledge, the dialogue continues some of the lines of inquiry pursued in the epistemological dialogue, Theaetetus, which is said to have taken place the day before. Because the Sophist treats these matters, it is often taken to shed light on Plato's Theory of Forms and is compared with the Parmenides, which criticized what is often taken to be the theory of forms.

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Meno is a Socratic dialogue written by Plato. It appears to attempt to determine the definition of virtue, or arete, meaning virtue in general, rather than particular virtues, such as justice or temperance. The first part of the work is written in the Socratic dialectical style and Meno is reduced to confusion or aporia. In response to Meno's paradox (or the learner's paradox), however, Socrates introduces positive ideas: the immortality of the soul, the theory of knowledge as recollection (anamnesis), which Socrates demonstrates by posing a mathematical puzzle to one of Meno's slaves, the method of hypothesis, and, in the final lines, the distinction between knowledge and true belief.

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The «Laws» is Plato's last and longest dialogue. The conversation depicted in the work's twelve books begins with the question of who is given the credit for establishing a civilization's laws. Its musings on the ethics of government and law have established it as a classic of political philosophy alongside Plato's more widely read Republic.

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In Plato's «Ion,» Socrates discusses with the titular character, a professional rhapsode who also lectures on Homer, the question of whether the rhapsode, a performer of poetry, gives his performance on account of his skill and knowledge or by virtue of divine possession. It is one of the shortest of Plato's dialogues.

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Protagoras is a dialogue by Plato. The traditional subtitle (which may or may not be Plato's) is «or the Sophists». The main argument is between the elderly Protagoras, a celebrated Sophist, and Socrates. The discussion takes place at the home of Callias, who is host to Protagoras while he is in town, and concerns the nature of Sophists, the unity and the teachability of virtue. A total of twenty-one people are named as present.

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