In the first decade of the twentieth century, William James and Josiah Royce, both professors of philosophy at Harvard, towered over American philosophy and exerted wide influence on European thought. This volume offers a unique view of the state of the discussion on James and Royce across several disciplines. It is noteworthy both for the presence of most leading scholars in the field and for its attention to the European influence of these thinkers and the revival of interest in America and Europe.

In Looking Away, Rei Terada revisits debates about appearance and reality in order to make a startling claim: that the purpose of such debates is to police feelings of dissatisfaction with the given world. Terada proposes that the connection between dissatisfaction and ephemeral phenomenality reveals a hitherto-unknown alternative to aesthetics that expresses our right to desire something other than experience “as is,” even those parts of it that really cannot be otherwise.

One of the leading humanists of Quattrocento Italy, Lorenzo Valla (1406–1457) has been praised as a brilliant debunker of medieval scholastic philosophy. In this book Lodi Nauta seeks a more balanced assessment, presenting us with the first comprehensive analysis of the humanist’s attempt at radical reform of Aristotelian scholasticism.