Benjamin Hale – författare

From barometers to the famous BBC shipping forecast, we have - over the centuries - developed the means to predict, harness, and shield ourselves from what is happening in the atmosphere. Attitudes about the planet's weather, as well as about human identity, have thereby taken on new meanings. In an era of climatic anxiety, what weather is and how weather behaves have taken on additional currency. Benjamin Hale weaves together philosophy and anecdote into a many-faceted exploration of this powerful force that shapes who we are and how we think about our place in the world. He argues that in our drive to 'scientize' weather, with all the technological advances in managing, anticipating, and understanding it, we also risk distancing ourselves from weather and losing a complete sense of what it is. This entertaining book reminds us that the weather is and always will be in some sense outside our control, and that consequently we are and forever will be learning to live alongside it.

Chess, the ancient strategy game, meets the latest, cutting-edge philosophy in this unique book. When 12 philosophers weigh in on one of the world's oldest and most beloved pastimes, the results are often surprising. Philosophical concepts as varied as phenomenology and determinism share the page with a treatise on hip-hop chess tactics and the question of whether Garry Kasparov is, in fact, a cyborg. Putting forth a remarkable array of different views on chess from philosophers with varied chess-proficiency, Philosophy Looks at Chess is an engaging read for chess adherents and the philosophically inclined alike.

Written for a wide range of readers in environmental science, philosophy, and policy-oriented programs The Routledge Companion to Environmental Ethics is a landmark, comprehensive reference work in this interdisciplinary field. Not merely a review of theoretical approaches to the ethics of the environment, the Companion focuses on specific environmental problems and other concrete issues. Its 65 chapters, all appearing in print here for the first time, have been organized into the following eleven parts:I. AnimalsII. LandIII. WaterIV. ClimateV. Energy and ExtractionVI. CitiesVII. AgricultureVIII. Environmental TransformationIX. Policy Frameworks and Response MeasuresX. Regulatory ToolsXI. Advocacy and ActivismThe volume not only explains the nuances of important core philosophical positions, but also cuts new pathways for the integration of important ethical and policy issues into environmental philosophy. It will be of immense help to undergraduate students and other readers coming up to the field for the first time, but also serve as a valuable resource for more advanced students as well as researchers who need a trusted resource that also offers fresh, policy-centered approaches.

Written for a wide range of readers in environmental science, philosophy, and policy-oriented programs The Routledge Companion to Environmental Ethics is a landmark, comprehensive reference work in this interdisciplinary field. Not merely a review of theoretical approaches to the ethics of the environment, the Companion focuses on specific environmental problems and other concrete issues. Its 65 chapters, all appearing in print here for the first time, have been organized into the following eleven parts:I. AnimalsII. LandIII. WaterIV. ClimateV. Energy and ExtractionVI. CitiesVII. AgricultureVIII. Environmental TransformationIX. Policy Frameworks and Response MeasuresX. Regulatory ToolsXI. Advocacy and ActivismThe volume not only explains the nuances of important core philosophical positions, but also cuts new pathways for the integration of important ethical and policy issues into environmental philosophy. It will be of immense help to undergraduate students and other readers coming up to the field for the first time, but also serve as a valuable resource for more advanced students as well as researchers who need a trusted resource that also offers fresh, policy-centered approaches.

Benjamin Hale's fiction abounds with a love of language and a wild joy for storytelling. In prose alternately stark, lush, and hallucinatory, occasionally nightmarish and often absurd, the seven stories in this collection are suffused with fear and desire, introducing us to a company of indelible characters reeling with love, jealousy, megalomania, and despair.As in his acclaimed debut novel, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, the voices in these stories speak from the margins: a dominatrix whose longtime client, a U.S. congressman, drops dead during a tryst in a hotel room; an addict in precarious recovery who lands a job driving a truck full of live squid; a heartbroken performance artist who attempts to eat himself to death as a work of art. From underground radicals hiding in Morocco to an aging hippie in Colorado in the summer before 9/11 to a young drag queen in New York at the cusp of the AIDS crisis, these stories rove freely across time and place, carried by haunting, peculiar narratives, threads in the vast tapestry of American life.Weaving a pleasure in the absurd with an exploration of the extraordinary variety of the human condition and the sway our most private selves and hidden pasts hold over us, the stories in The Fat Artist reside in the unnerving intersections between life and death, art and ridicule, consumption and creation.