About this book series
TOPOI Library is sponsored by the Department of Philosophy and the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine
Like the journal TOPOI, the TOPOI Library is based on the assumption that philosophy is a lively, provocative, delightful activity, which constantly challenges our inherited habits, painstakingly elaborates on how things could be different, in other stories, in counterfactual situations, in alternative possible worlds. Whatever its ideology, whether with the intent of uncovering a truer structure of reality or of soothing our anxiety, of exposing myths or of following them through, the outcome of philosophical activity is always the destabilizing, unsettling generation of doubts, of objections, of criticisms.
It follows that this activity is intrinsically a dialogue, that philosophy is first and foremost philosophical discussion, that it requires bringing out conflicting points of view, paying careful, sympathetic attention to their structure, and using this dialectic to articulate one's approach, to make it richer, more thoughtful, more open to variation and play. And it follows that the spirit which one brings to this activity must be one of tolerance, of always suspecting one's own blindness and consequently looking with unbiased eye in every corner, without fearing to pass a (fallible) judgment on what is there but also without failing to show interest and respect.
It is no rhetoric to say that the TOPOI Library has no affiliation to any philosophical school or jargon, that its only policy is to publish exciting, original, carefully reasoned works, and that its main ambition is to generate serious and rsponsible exchanges among different traditions, to have disparate intellectual tools encounter and cross-fertilize each other, to contribute not so much to the notarization of yesterday's syntheses but rather to the blossoming of tomorrow's.
Like the journal TOPOI, the TOPOI Library is based on the assumption that philosophy is a lively, provocative, delightful activity, which constantly challenges our inherited habits, painstakingly elaborates on how things could be different, in other stories, in counterfactual situations, in alternative possible worlds. Whatever its ideology, whether with the intent of uncovering a truer structure of reality or of soothing our anxiety, of exposing myths or of following them through, the outcome of philosophical activity is always the destabilizing, unsettling generation of doubts, of objections, of criticisms.
It follows that this activity is intrinsically a dialogue, that philosophy is first and foremost philosophical discussion, that it requires bringing out conflicting points of view, paying careful, sympathetic attention to their structure, and using this dialectic to articulate one's approach, to make it richer, more thoughtful, more open to variation and play. And it follows that the spirit which one brings to this activity must be one of tolerance, of always suspecting one's own blindness and consequently looking with unbiased eye in every corner, without fearing to pass a (fallible) judgment on what is there but also without failing to show interest and respect.
It is no rhetoric to say that the TOPOI Library has no affiliation to any philosophical school or jargon, that its only policy is to publish exciting, original, carefully reasoned works, and that its main ambition is to generate serious and rsponsible exchanges among different traditions, to have disparate intellectual tools encounter and cross-fertilize each other, to contribute not so much to the notarization of yesterday's syntheses but rather to the blossoming of tomorrow's.
- Print ISSN
- 1389-689X
