Moby-Dick is considered to be an undisputed classic, and many believe it to be the epitome of the great American novel. With an unforgettable cast of characters, including the mad Captain Ahab, Melville skillfully documents the Pequod crew's tragic hunt for the great white whale. The full-length essays presented in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Updated Edition provide expert commentary on the huge canvas of symbols, themes, and subjects presented in this novel, as well as an introduction, a chronology, a bibliography, and an index, that will help students navigate confidently through Melville's masterpiece.
Published in 1797, the Doctrine of Right is Kant's most significant contribution to legal and political philosophy. As the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals, it deals with the legal rights which persons have or can acquire, and aims at providing the grounding for lasting international peace through the idea of the juridical state (Rechtsstaat). This commentary analyzes Kant's system of individual rights, starting from the original innate right to external freedom, and ending with the right to own property and to have contractual and family claims.
Law's Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory
Recent literary-critical work in legal studies reads law as a genre of literature, noting that Western law originated as a branch of rhetoric in classical Greece and lamenting the fact that the law has lost its connection to poetic language, narrative, and imagination. But modern legal scholarship has paid little attention to the actual juridical discourse of ancient Greece.
Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy
In Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy, Susan Lape demonstrates how a race ideology grounded citizen identity. Although this ideology did not manifest itself in a fully developed race myth, its study offers insight into the causes and conditions that can give rise to race and racisms in both modern and pre-modern cultures.
Debates about freedom, an ideal continually contested, were first set out in their modern version by the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His ideas and analyses were taken up during the philosophical enlightenment, often invoked during the French Revolution, and still resonate in contemporary discussions of freedom.
