This study examines the major works of contemporary American television and film screenwriter Joss Whedon. The authors argue that these works are part of an existentialist tradition that stretches back from the French atheistic existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, through the Danish Christian existentialist S?ren Kierkegaard, to the Russian novelist and existentialist Fyodor Dostoevsky. Whedon and Dostoevsky, for example, seem preoccupied with the problem of evil and human freedom. Both argue that in each and every one of us ?a demon lies hidden.? Chapters cover such topics as Russian...

Native American philosophy has enabled Native American cultures to survive more than five hundred years of attempted cultural assimilation. The first edition of this historical and philosophical work was written as a text for the first course in Native Philosophy ever offered by a philosophy department at a Canadian university. This revised edition, based on more than twenty-five years of research through the Native Philosophy Project and funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation, is expanded to include extensive discussion of Native American philosophy and culture in the United States as...

Drawing on the works of Shakespeare and American screenwriter Joss Whedon, this study in narrative ethics contends that Whedon is the Shakespeare of our time. The Bard wrote before the influence of the modern moral philosophers, while Whedon is writing in the postmodern period. It is argued that Whedon's work is more in harmony with the early modern values of Shakespeare than with modern ethics, which trace their origin to 17th and 18th-century moral philosophy. This study includes a detailed discussion of representative works of Shakespeare and Whedon, showing how they can and should be read...