Acknowledgements

George Matthews, Book Editor

A project like this, with so many moving parts, is certainly a labor of love. I wish to thank all of the many people involved in bringing this book to fruition. First and foremost I’d like to thank Christina Hendricks for her tireless work orchestrating things as series editor and Apurva Ashok for her work as Project Manager for the Rebus Community.

The authors of course are what make this book possible, and I’d like to thank them all. They are, in the order of their chapters: Paul Rezkalla, Jeffrey Morgan, Douglas Giles, Ya-Yun (Sherry) Kao, Frank Aragbonfoh Abumere, Joseph Kranak, Kathryn MacKay, and Michael Klenk. They have contributed their expertise to this effort to better serve students of philosophy with an openly and freely accessible textbook of the highest quality.

Finally I would like to thank the reviewers who patiently read through all of the chapters and contributed their helpful comments, Björn Freter and Vance Ricks, as well as all of the many contributors to the initial discussions that gave rise to this textbook on the forums of the Rebus Foundation. We all hope you enjoy this book!

Christina Hendricks, Series Editor

I would like to thank the authors in this book for their patience as we worked through the process of conceiving the book and getting it to publication. Because this is one of the first books to be published in the Introduction to Philosophy open textbook series, we were sometimes creating processes and workflows as we went along, and this meant things may have taken longer than anyone expected at first!

Special thanks to George Matthews, who was one of the first people to volunteer for this series as a book editor, and has been incredibly flexible, patient, and dedicated to the work all the way through. He has done an excellent job of selecting authors for chapters and helping them refine their work to result in the clear and accessible finished book.

Also instrumental to the success of this book are the peer reviewers, Björn Freter and Vance Ricks, who volunteered their time and expertise to read through a draft of the whole book and provide constructive comments and suggestions.

Jonathan Lashley has done an amazing job with the design of the book covers for this series, using original artwork by Heather Salazar (who is the editor for the Philosophy of Mind book in this series). The book covers are exceptionally well done, and really bring the series together as a whole.

Colleen Cressman has provided much-needed help with copyediting. I am very grateful for her thorough and detailed efforts, and for the suggestions she made to help make the chapters as accessible as possible for introductory-level students. And thank you to Allison Brown for her help with inputting and formatting the content into Pressbooks so that it looks and reads well.

When I started this project there were many discussions amongst philosophers from various parts of the world on the Rebus Community platform, and their ideas and suggestions contributed significantly to the final products. There were also numerous people who gave comments on draft chapter outlines for each book. Thank you to the many unnamed philosophers who have contributed to the book in these and other ways!

This book series would not have gotten beyond the idea stage were it not for the support of the Rebus Community. I want to thank Hugh McGuire for believing in the project enough to support what we both realized at the time was probably much bigger than even our apprehensions about its enormity. Zoe Wake Hyde was instrumental in getting the project started, particularly in helping us develop workflows and documentation. And I’m not sure I can ever thank Apurva Ashok enough for being an unfailingly enthusiastic and patient supporter and guide for more months than I care to count. She spent a good deal of time working with me and the book editors to figure out how to make a project like this work on a day-to-day level, and taught me a great deal about the open publishing process. Apurva kept me on track when I would sometimes drop the ball or get behind on this off-the-side-of-my-desk project. She is one of the best collaborative partners I have never (yet!) met in person.

Finally, I want to thank my family for understanding how important this work is and why I have chosen to stay up late so many nights to do it. And for their patience on the many groggy, pre-coffee mornings that followed.