This book addresses the 'perennial' question of the meaning of life from the point of view of a novel interpretation of Aristotle's teleology. Beginning with the premise that at the core of modernity and modern moral imagination are the entropy of meaning and the sense of meaninglessness, the author critically engages with the work of the post-war existentialists, chiefly that of Albert Camus and Martin Heidegger, to argue that their analyses are unconvincing and that the question of the meaning of being should therefore be approached using different assumptions, based on the notion of...

Bringing together leading interpreters of Zygmunt Bauman s sociology, this volume thinks with and beyond Bauman s work in order to show its continued relevance as a theory in its own right, as an object of criticism and as a stepping stone towards a fuller understanding of contemporary society.

The volume deals with some proposed omissions and absences in Bauman s sociology, with chapters comparing Bauman s ideas to those of other prominent social thinkers as well as chapters devoted to teasing out some problems and pitfalls in his work. Paying attention to central concepts...

This book is a groundbreaking attempt to rethink the landscapes of the social world and historical practice by theorizing social haunting: the ways in which the social forms, figures, phantasms and ghosts of the past become present to us time and time again.

Examining the relationship between historical practices such as archaeology and archival work in order to think about how the social landscape is reinvented with reference to the ghosts of the past, the author explores the literary and historical status and accounts of the ghost, not for what they might tell us about...