Bücher von Margaret Gilbert

"The poet's work to establish agency in the midst of sickness is so clear and hard fought, that one is filled with admiration and wonderment at the ability to carry the reader so deep into her journey with all of its subcurrents."-MARY STEWART HAMMOND, author of Out of Canaan (W.W. Norton, 1991) & Entering History (W.W. Norton, 2016)"These poems interrogate seizure disorder and recovery, its spectrum, the people around it, family, community. In those waters swim a sense of history, distortion, victimhood, the inevitability of scapegoating, in fact, discrimination and racism. The poems themselves seize. Their strongest light is their willingness to inhabit the very "kindling" of the neurons, "the highway clothed in goldenrod." Indeed, as the poet writes in "Blue Electrode," the title poem, "Yes, my mother thinks to herself/ tying her torn scarf,/ the words Epilepsy and Woe/ are synonymous."-RALPH BURNS, author of but not yet (Lynx House Press, 2017) Winner of The Blue Lynx Poetry Prize, & Ghost Notes (Oberlin College Press, 2000), Winner of The Field Poetry Prize

In this wide-ranging collection of essays, distinguished philosopher Margaret Gilbert investigates the structure of our social world. People often speak of what we do, think, and feel, and of our values, conventions, and laws. Asking what we mean by such talk, Gilbert invokes the foundational idea of joint commitment. She applies this idea to topics ranging from the mutual recognition of two people to the unity of the European Union, from marital love to patriotism, from promissory obligation to the rights of those who issue authoritative commands. Written clearly and without undue technicality, this richly textured collection of essays makes a powerful argument for the importance of joint commitment in our personal and public lives.

This collection of essays develops the theory of social groups as "plural subjects". Gilbert argues that one must go beyond the prevailing "game theoretic" picture of people acting as independent individuals, to incorporate them as plural subjects bound together by joint commitments.

Develops an analyses of a number of central everyday concepts of social phenomena, including shared action, a social convention, a group's belief, and a group itself. This book proposes that the core social phenomena among human beings are "plural subject" phenomena.