Visual Political Communication in Popular Chinese Television Series has been granted the EastAsiaNet 2014 Award!

In Visual Political Communication in Popular Chinese Television Series, Florian Schneider analyses political discourses in Chinese TV dramas, the most popular entertainment format in China today. Schneider shows that despite their often nationalistic stories of glorious emperors and courageous officials, such programmes should not be mistaken for official propaganda. Instead, the highly didactical messages of such series are the outcome of complex cultural governance practices, which are influenced by diffuse political interests, commercial considerations, viewing habits, and ideological assumptions. Schneider argues that these interlinking factors lead to a highly restrictive creative environment and to conservative entertainment content that ultimately risks creating precisely the kind of passive masses that Chinese media workers and government officials are trying so hard to emancipate.

The volume dedicates itself to the rather neglected field of political poetry and offers a broad perspective across the centuries from Plato until the post-war period. The first part describes the social function of poetry in Plato, his reception in Heidegger and in Ezra Pound’s poetry. A contribution on Milton complements this with a great poet`s reflection on central political questions. The second part, pre 20th century, is rounded off by two rulers from the edges of Europe or Asia who left their mark both on history and on the literary history of their country: the Georgian king Teimuraz I and the Persian ruler Shah Ismail. This theme is continued in the last contribution dedicated to an outstanding combination of political and poetic talent from recent history, Mao Zedong. Two other contributions refer to the epoch of WWI, Europe`s big cultural caesura, and they dedicate themselves to two eminently influential figures, Stefan George and Vladimir Mayakowsky.

Many scholars see science and politics as mutually exclusive realms, where the latter's influence contaminates former's purity. Karl Marx's critics often interpret him within this framework, where his value-laden judgments render his analysis of capitalism moot. Though defenders argue that Marx rejects an objective-subjective dichotomy, this book offers a different interpretation. Through the method of critique Marx examines problems and biases in putatively neutral forms of scientific knowledge, specifically models that fail to capture the relations of power and knowledge dominant in capitalist society. By incorporating these relations into his abstractions and tracing their historical movement, Marx's corrective to malformed approaches to scientific knowledge more readily lays bare capitalist society’s exploitative and distortive nature. This book demonstrates these principles and applies them to conventional sociological methods, theories of religion, and class analysis.

Modern, liberal democracies in the West living under the rule of law and protection of human rights cannot articulate the very values from which they derive their legitimacy. These pre-political and pre-legal preconditions cannot be guaranteed, let alone be enforced by the state, but constitute nevertheless its moral and spiritual infrastructure. Until recently, a common background and horizon consisted in Christianity, but due to secularisation and globalisation, society has become increasingly multicultural and multireligious. The question can and should be raised how religion relates to these sources of normative order in society, how religion, politics and law relate to each other, and how social cohesion can be attained in society, given the growing varieties of religious experiences. In this book, a philosophical account of this question is carried out, on the one hand historically from Plato to the Enlightenment, on the other hand systematically and practically.

In A History of Ottoman Political Thought up to the Early Nineteenth Century, Marinos Sariyannis offers a survey of Ottoman political texts, examined in a book-length study for the first time. From the last glimpses of gazi ideology and the first instances of Persian political philosophy in the fifteenth century until the apologists of Western-style military reform in the early nineteenth century, the author studies a multitude of theories and views, focusing on an identification of ideological trends rather than a simple enumeration of texts and authors. At the same time, the book offers analytical summaries of texts otherwise difficult to find in English.

In Plato on Democracy and Political technē Sørensen argues that the question of democracy’s ‘epistemic potential’ was one that Plato took more seriously than is usually assumed. While he famously rejected democracy on the basis of its inherent inability to accommodate political expertise ( technē), he did not think that this failure on democracy’s part was necessarily inevitable but a concept that required further examination. Sørensen shows that in a number of his most important dialogues ( Republic, Gorgias, Statesman, Protagoras, Theaetetus), Plato was ready to take up the question of democracy’s epistemic potential and to enter into strikingly technical and sophisticated discussions of what both rule by technē and rule by the people would have to look like in order for the two things to be compatible.

Philosophy and Political Power in Antiquity is a collection of essays examining ancient philosophers' reflections on the connection between political power and philosophy. The ancient Greeks both invented political philosophy and were the first to conceptualize the implicit tension between political activity and the contemplative life as found in ideal political institutions and under conditions of repressive rule. These essays examine discussions of these issues within a wide variety of the major schools of antiquity from both interpretive and analytical perspectives. While providing novel approaches to ancient philosophical texts, this volume attests to the importance of political reflection, deliberation, and resistance for ancient thought, and to the enduring strength and relevance of these reflections for contemporary debates within political philosophy.

This volume addresses issues in epistemology, ethics and political philosophy. It contains new papers on issues such as semantic theory of truth, sandwich theory of knowledge, American pragmatism and scepticism, arguments from ignorance, infallibilism and fallibilism, justification and confirmation, Tarski’s T-schema, experimental results and ordinary truth, epistemic comparativism and experiments, epiphenomenlism and eliminativism about the mental, the identity theory of truth, thoughts and facts, metaontological maximalism and minimalism, morality and rights, aggregation of value judgements and aggregation of preferences, conditional and unconditional ethics, the role of the theory of evolution in moral epistemology, global and international political community, Rawls' views on cosmopolitanism and global justice, international distributive justice.

Contributors are: Tomasz Bigaj, Krzysztof Brzechczyn, Tadeusz Buksiński, Robin Cameron, Jan B. Deręgowski, Nigel Dower, Adam Grobler, Jesper Kallestrup, Adrian Kuźniar, Justyna Miklaszewska, Joanna Miksa, Joanna Odrowąż-Sypniewska, Katarzyna Paprzycka, Krzysztof Posłajko, Wlodek Rabinowicz, John Skorupski, Leslie Stevenson, Piotr Szałek, Tadeusz Szubka, Joseph Ulatowski, Jan Woleński, Rafał Wonicki, Anna Wójtowicz, Renata Ziemińska