It is now 30 years since the publication of seminal articlesby Robert Cox and Richard Ashley, which introduced the project ofcritical theory to the international relations discipline. This2007 book brings together a team of world-class scholars to assessthe impact of critical scholarship on the discipline over thisperiod and point to future directions for the critical project. Thebook is an authoritative overview of the current position ofcritical international relations theory. It is an essentialresource for those working in critical international relationstheory and for undergraduate and graduate courses on InternalRelations theory.

This book considers a variety of explanations of why politicaldisagreement is so extensive and persistent. The author examinesvariants of the 'contestability' and 'imperfection' conceptionswhich have dominated political theory: the idea that politicaldisagreement is so pervasive because of its value-ladenness; thatkey political concepts are essentially contested; that those whooccupy very different political positions fail to understand eachother. He argues that we need to develop a framework which borrowselements from both schools of thought, presupposing some form ofmoral cognitivism, while recognizing that many political disputescannot be resolved to the satisfaction of every reasonable person.Within such a framework he shows how empirical models can beconstructed which give an active role not only to the agent'sreasons for his or her beliefs, but also to other psychological andsociological considerations.

Since its first publication in 1945? Lord Russell's A History of Western Philosophy has been universally acclaimed as the outstanding one-volume work on the subject -- unparalleled in its comprehensiveness, its clarity, its erudition, its grace and wit. In seventy-six chapters he traces philosophy from the rise of Greek civilization to the emergence of logical analysis in the twentieth century. Among the philosophers considered are: Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the Atomists, Protagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Cynics, the Sceptics, the Epicureans, the Stoics, Plotinus, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Benedict, Gregory the Great, John the Scot, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Occam, Machiavelli, Erasmus, More, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the Utilitarians, Marx, Bergson, James, Dewey, and lastly the philosophers with whom Lord Russell himself is most closely associated -- Cantor, Frege, a