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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > General
This text offers an assessment of Jean-Paul Sartre as an exemplary
figure in the evolving political and cultural landscape of
post-1945 France. Sartre's originality is located in the tense
relationship that he maintained between deeply held revolutionary
political beliefs and a residual yet critical attachment to
traditional forms of cultural expression. A series of case studies
centred on Gaullism, communism, Maoism (Part 1), the theatre, art
criticism and the media (Part 2), illustrate the continuing
relevance and appeal of Sartre to the contemporary world.
This book reassesses the ethics of reason in the Age of the Reason,
making use of the neglected category of conscience. Arguing that
conscience was a central feature of British Enlightenment ethical
rationalism, the book explores the links between Enlightenment
philosophy and modern secularisation, while responding to
longstanding criticisms of rational intuitionism and the analogy
between mathematics and morals, derived from David Hume and
Immanuel Kant. Questioning in what sense British Enlightenment
ethical rationalism can be associated with a secularising
'Enlightenment project', Daniel investigates the extent to which
contemporary, and secular liberal, invocations of reason and
conscience rely on the early modern Christian metaphysics they have
otherwise disregarded. The chapters cover a rich collection of
subjects, ranging from the Enlightenment's secular legacy, reason
and conscience in the history of ethics, and controversies in the
Scottish Enlightenment, to the role of British moralists such as
John Locke, Joseph Butler and Adam Smith in the secularisation of
reason and conscience. Each chapter expertly refines Enlightenment
ethical rationalism by reinterpreting its most influential
proponents in eighteenth-century Britain - the followers of 'Isaac
Newton's bulldog' Samuel Clarke - including Richard Price (Edmund
Burke's opponent over the French Revolution) and John Witherspoon
(the only clergyman to sign the US declaration of Independence).
This volume presents a double argumentative analysis of the debate
between Bertrand Russell and Frederick Copleston on the existence
of God. It includes an introduction justifying the choice of text
and describing the historical and philosophical background of the
debate. It also provides a transcript of the debate, based in part
on the original recording. The argumentative analyses occupy Parts
I and II of the book. In Part I the argumentative process is
analysed by means of the ideal model of critical discussion, the
workhorse of pragma-dialectics. Part I shows how the two parties go
through the four stages of a critical discussion. It highlights the
questions raised over and beyond the presiding question of whether
God exists and examines almost a hundred questions that are raised.
Many are left in the air, whereas a few others give rise to sundry
sub-discussions or meta-dialogues. In Part II the theoretical
framework of argument dialectic is put to work: argument structures
are identified by means of punctuation marks, argumentative
connectors and operators, allowing to see the argumentative
exchange as the collaborative construction of a macro-argument.
Such a macro-argument is both a joint product of the arguers and a
complex structure representing the dialectical relationships
between the individual arguments combined in it. Finally, the
complementarity of the two approaches is addressed. Thus the book
can be described as an exercise in adversarial collaboration.
This major study of Kierkegaard and love explores Kierkegaard's description of love's treachery, difficulty, and hope. It reads his Works of Love as a text that both deciphers and complicates the central books in his pseudonymous canon: Fear and Trembling, Repetition, Either/Or and Stages on Life's Way. Amy Laura Hall argues that a spiritual void brings each text into being, and her interpretation is as much about faith as about love. Her scholarly and lyrical style makes this study a poetic contribution to ethics and the philosophy of religion.
Across his relatively short and eccentric authorial career, Soren
Kierkegaard develops a unique, and provocative, account of what it
is to become, to be, and to lose a self, backed up by a rich
phenomenology of self-experience. Yet Kierkegaard has been almost
totally absent from the burgeoning analytic philosophical
literature on self-constitution and personal identity. How, then,
does Kierkegaard's work appear when viewed in light of current
debates about self and identity-and what does Kierkegaard have to
teach philosophers grappling with these problems today? The Naked
Self explores Kierkegaard's understanding of selfhood by situating
his work in relation to central problems in contemporary philosophy
of personal identity: the role of memory in selfhood, the
relationship between the notional and actual subjects of memory and
anticipation, the phenomenology of diachronic self-experience,
affective alienation from our past and future, psychological
continuity, practical and narrative approaches to identity, and the
intelligibility of posthumous survival. By bringing his thought
into dialogue with major living and recent philosophers of identity
(such as Derek Parfit, Galen Strawson, Bernard Williams, J. David
Velleman, Marya Schechtman, Mark Johnston, and others), Stokes
reveals Kierkegaard as a philosopher with a significant-if
challenging-contribution to make to philosophy of self and
identity.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) supported the unification of Europe
and reflected on this like few other philosophers before or after
him. Many of his works are concerned with the present state and
future of European culture and humanity. Resisting the "nationalist
nonsense" and "politics of dissolution" of his day, he advocated
the birth of "good Europeans," i.e. "supra-national" individuals
and the "amalgamation of nations." Nietzsche, Wagner, Europe
analyzes the development of Friedrich Nietzsche's ideal of European
culture based on his musical aesthetics. It does so against the
background of contemporary searches for a wider, cultural meaning
beyond Europe's economic-political union. The book claims that
Nietzsche always propagated the "aestheticization" of Europe, but
that his view on how to achieve this changed as a result of his
dramatically altering philosophy of music. The main focus is on
Nietzsche's passion for and later aversion to Wagner's music, and,
in direct connection with this, his surprising embrace of Italian
operas as new forms of "Dionysian" music and of Goethe as a model
of "Good Europeanism."
In Professor Zhang Yibing's Lenin Revisited we find loyalty to
Marxism, as well as a firm grasp of all the traditions,
psychoanalytical theories, and textual analytical theories of
Western Marxism; such a combination is extremely rare in this day.
Zhang Yibing's interpretation of Philosophical Notebooks is
developed from a textual fact that has long been ignored despite
its truth. This is that Philosophical Notebooks are not a "book,"
but rather a random collection of notes and outlines collected
after the death of the author. Therefore, Lenin's Philosophical
Notebooks should be interpreted as a series of documents that
reflect the theoretical and political conflicts of the time (among
these documents is included a good deal of backtracking and aimless
wandering). These documents are a series of windows opening on the
particular social and political circumstances of Lenin's day (such
as the collapse of the European Social Democratic Party in 1914).
This line of interpretation reveals to us, in a truly miraculous
fashion that has never before been duplicated, a Lenin who survives
the existential test, who is interpreted with the newest
philosophical experiments. This man, a contemporary of Adorno,
Foucault, and Lacan, extends to us the invitation to continue his
critical line of thought. For us today, the words "Lenin revisited"
actually mean to step into the future in the company of this great
historical thinker. Professor Zhang Yibing's newest work is not
merely important in China: it is vital for everyone who wishes to
restore the work of communism with the depth of philosophy. Slavoj
Zizek Replicating the phenomenal research found in Marx Revisited,
Professor Zhang Yibing has forwarded the study of Marxist
philosophy using meticulous textual interpretation. This method,
familiar to Western scholars, means that Zhang Yibing begins from
the context of the modern political - scholarly - debate in
researching the historical developmental process of Marxist
philosophy. Furthermore, unlike many commentators of Marxist theory
in both the East and the West, he has not assumed a dogmatic
necessity for orthodoxy or science at the beginning of his theory.
In his new work Lenin Revisited, Zhang Yibing begins with a broad,
global scholarly scope in revealing that Lenin's Philosophical
Notebooks are really a scholarly "mixture" that has been subjected
to editing and refining. He goes on to conduct careful analysis of
each constitutive element by unifying the dominant textual form and
the editing expectations. This is doubtless a direct contribution
to the furthering of interpretive theory. Zhang Yibing refers to
this as "field work"; he has also learned much from this process.
Building on the work of Roland Barthes, Zhang Yibing again
demonstrates that textual interpretation is not a simple "return"
to the "author himself" in a bookish sense; rather, it is a
creative, productive thought experience shared by the researcher
and the reader. Terrell Carver, Department of Politics University
of Bristol Professor Zhang Yibing's important interpretation of
Lenin's thought from a new perspective is based on the following
theoretical premises. In 1914, with the outbreak of the First World
War, Lenin systematically studied Hegel's Science of Logic; Marxist
research conducted in the former Soviet Union ignored the highly
significant philosophical shift experienced by Lenin during this
time. Zhang Yibing extracts his research from the traditional
dogmatic interpretive scope used to examine Lenin, Marx, and the
dialectic method. Proceeding from the modern French perspective of
literary criticism, Professor Zhang conducts an extraordinary
interpretation of Lenin's philosophical notebooks on Hegel. Kevin
B. Anderson, Purdue University, author of Lenin, Hegel, and Western
Marxism
Der Erste Band dieser Reihe gibt den philosophischen Briefwechsel
von 1663 bis 1685 in 260 Briefen wieder, wobei die Briefe von
Leibniz an seine Partner dominieren. Mit dem fruhesten der heute
bekannten Leibniz-Briefe, geschrieben in der Jenaer Studienzeit an
seinen Lehrer Jakob Thomasius in Leipzig, beginnt der Band und
endet mit der Vorbereitung der ersten grosseren metaphysischen
Konzeption der hannoverschen Zeit, dem Discours de Metaphysique
(1685/86). Dazwischen liegt eine umfangreiche Korrespondenz, seine
Partner sind u. a. Antoine Arnauld, Benedictus de Spinoza, Otto von
Guericke, Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus und Nicolas
Malebranche. Der Band wurde nach den bis 1950 geltenden Prinzipien
der Akademie-Ausgabe bearbeitet und ohne kritischen Apparat,
lediglich mit einem Personenverzeichnis versehen, veroffentlicht."
For the first time in English, this anthology offers a
comprehensive selection of primary sources in the history of
philosophy of language. Beginning with a detailed introduction
contextualizing the subject, the editors draw out recurring themes,
including the origin of language, the role of nature and convention
in fixing form and meaning, language acquisition, ideal languages,
varieties of meanings, language as a tool, and the nexus of
language and thought, linking them to representative texts. The
handbook moves on to offer seminal contributions from philosophers
ranging from the pre-Socratics up to John Stuart Mill, preceding
each major historical section with its own introductory assessment.
With all of the most relevant primary texts on the philosophy of
language included, covering well over two millennia, this
judicious, and generous, selection of source material will be an
indispensable research tool for historians of philosophy, as well
as for philosophers of language, in the twenty-first century. A
vital tool for researchers and contemporary philosophers, it will
be a touchstone for much further research, with coverage of a long
and varied tradition that will benefit today's scholars and enhance
their awareness of earlier contributions to the field.
This book offers a detailed analysis of John Locke's case for
toleration and proposes an interpretation that shows the links
between his political reasoning and his reflection on the ethics of
belief. Locke is concerned with toleration not only when he
discusses the ends of the Commonwealth, but also when he assesses
the duties of private persons regarding the search for truth. The
purpose of this book is to shed light on both of these branches,
which have not been sufficiently explored in other studies on
Locke. With particular attention to the notions of charity,
obstinacy, fallibility, reciprocity and distinction between belief
and knowledge, the author proposes a reading of the Epistola de
Tolerantia, an extensive discussion of the controversy between
Locke and Jonas Proast, as well as an examination of An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding, in order to establish the meaning
and interconnection of Locke's arguments in favour of toleration.
The relationship between two distinct periods in Michel Foucault's
work is the starting point for this book. In "Truth and Power," an
interview Foucault gave in 1976, he states that to create a new
politics of truth is an intellectual's main task. In this book,
Priscila Piazentini Vieira analyzes Foucault's study on ancient
culture and courage of truth in the 1980s as his main contribution
to our construction of a new politics of truth, much diverse from
modernity's prevailing understanding of it grounded on the will to
knowledge. Furthermore, she analyzes Foucault's militant practice
and his GIP experience from a corpus constructed by papers,
courses, interviews, and books written by the philosopher between
the 1970s and 1980s. By clearly linking Foucault's work on to his
own militant activity, the book also aims to develop an original
definition of the intellectual at the crossroad of political
engagement, the production of knowledge, and the manifestation of
the truth.
In the nineteenth century, Charles Dickens backed the cause of
abolition of the death penalty and wrote comprehensively about it,
in public letters and in his novels. At the end of the twentieth
century, Jacques Derrida ran two years of seminars on the subject,
which were published posthumously. What the novelist and the
philosopher of deconstruction discussed independently, this book
brings into comparison. Tambling examines crime and punishment in
Dickens’s novels Barnaby Rudge, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver
Twist and Bleak House and explores those who influenced Dickens’s
work, including Hogarth, Fielding, Godwin and Edgar Allen Poe. This
book also looks at those who influenced Derrida – Freud,
Nietzsche, Foucault and Blanchot – and considers Derrida’s
study on terrorism and the USA as the only major democracy adhering
to the death penalty. A comprehensive study of punishment in
Dickens, and furthering Derrida’s insights by commenting on
Shakespeare and blood, revenge, the French Revolution, and the
enduring power of violence and its fascination, this book is a
major contribution to literary criticism on Dickens and Derrida.
Those interested in literature, criminology, law, gender, and
psychoanalysis will find it an essential intervention in a topic
still rousing intense argument.
This book is a fully updated and expanded new edition of An
Introduction to Continental Philosophy, first published in 1996. It
provides a clear, concise and readable introduction to philosophy
in the continental tradition. It is a wide-ranging and reliable
guide to the work of such major figures as Nietzsche, Habermas,
Heidegger, Arendt, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida and i ek. At the same
time, it situates their thought within a coherent overall account
of the development of continental philosophy since the
Enlightenment. Individual chapters consider the character of
modernity, the Enlightenment and its continental critics; the ideas
of Marxism, the Frankfurt School and Habermas; hermeneutics and
phenomenology; existentialism; structuralism, post-structuralism
and postmodernism. In addition to the thinkers already mentioned,
there is extended discussion of the ideas of Kant, Hegel, Dilthey,
Husserl, Gadamer, Kierkegaard, de Beauvoir and Lyotard. The new
edition includes an additional, full-length chapter on continental
philosophy in the twenty-first century focusing on Giorgio Agamben,
Alain Badiou and Slavoj i ek. Continental Philosophy: An
Introduction is an invaluable introductory text for courses on
continental philosophy as well as courses in the humanities and
social sciences dealing with major figures or influential
approaches within that tradition.
In this book, Sarosh Koshy strives to go beyond the mission model
of Christianity that emerged alongside and within the colonial
enterprise and ethos since the sixteenth century. Rather than
denounce the inheritance of the mission movement that transformed
both the church and world in innumerable ways, it is a simultaneous
expression of appreciation for this precious heritage, and an
attempt to do justice by it through a yearning quest for relevant
paradigms of Christian engagement.Indeed, there is an intense
tension within this book, and in fact a twin tension at that. The
tension is between those seeking to keep the current mission
paradigm alive out of habit or as a self-serving device, thus
corrupting and withering away a bequeathal that essentially set
free the voluntary/independent spirit of Christian individuals and
their intentional collectives from both the ecclesiastical and
political authorities. On the other side are those who enlist
mission both as a subsequent activity and as a basis to pursue
innocuous, and at times apparently heroic options that would
seemingly satisfy a supposed missional mandatory. This work enlists
postcolonial and poststructuralist resources pedagogically, to
teach of mission, missiology, World Christianity, and intercultural
theology.
This book argues for the importance of adopting a postcolonial
perspective in analysing contemporary Italian culture and
literature. Originally published in Italian in 2018 as Riscrivere
la nazione: La letteratura italiana postcoloniale, this new English
translation brings to light the connections between the present,
the colonial past and the great historical waves of international
and intranational migration. By doing so, the book shows how a
sense of Italian national identity emerged, at least in part, as
the result of different migrations and why there is such a strong
resistance in Italy to extending the privilege of italianita, or
Italianness, to those who have arrived on Italian soil in recent
years. Exploring over 100 texts written by migrant and
second-generation writers, the book takes an intersectional
approach to understanding gender and race in Italian identity. It
connects these literary and cultural contexts to the Italian
colonial past, while also looking outwards to a more diffuse
postcolonial condition in Europe.
This is the first full study in English of the German historicist
tradition. Frederick C. Beiser surveys the major German thinkers on
history from the middle of the eighteenth century until the early
twentieth century, providing an introduction to each thinker and
the main issues in interpreting and appraising his thought. The
volume offers new interpretations of well-known philosophers such
as Johann Gottfried Herder and Max Weber, and introduces others who
are scarcely known at all, including J. A. Chladenius, Justus
Moeser, Heinrich Rickert, and Emil Lask. Beyond an exploration of
the historical and intellectual context of each thinker, Beiser
illuminates the sources and reasons for the movement of German
historicism-one of the great revolutions in modern Western thought,
and the source of our historical understanding of the human world.
Friedrich Nietzsche has emerged as one of the most important and
influential modern philosophers. For several decades, the book
series Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung (MTNF) has
set the agenda in a rapidly growing and changing field of Nietzsche
scholarship. The scope of the series is interdisciplinary and
international in orientation reflects the entire spectrum of
research on Nietzsche, from philosophy to literary studies and
political theory. The series publishes monographs and edited
volumes that undergo a strict peer-review process. The book series
is led by an international team of editors, whose work represents
the full range of current Nietzsche scholarship.
Truth: Its criteria and conditions is an in-depth
critical-and-constructive inquiry in almost equal measure. The
theories of the nature of empirical truth critically considered
include two forms of the traditional correspondence theory; truth
as appraisal; truth as identity of proposition and truth; en
emotive theory of truth; P.F. Strawson's performative theory, and
N. Rescher's novel theory of a coherentist criterion of truth. The
constructive parts include an analysis of the concept of "a fact,"
the meaning and uses of 'true' and 'false' in empirical statements,
together with the various sorts of conditions for their correct
application; the appraisive/evaluative uses of true and false
statements; and the performative-cum-cognitive uses of 'true'
empirical statements; and the conditions of the performative uses
of 'true.' A significant claim about the concept of truth is its
indefinablity; albeit for quite different reasons from Gottlob
Frege's reason based on his argument against the correspondence
theory of truth.
Since the Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series (KSMS) was first
published in 1997, it has served as the authoritative book series
in the field. Starting from 2011 the Kierkegaard Studies Monograph
Series will intensify the peer-review process with a new editorial
and advisory board. KSMS is published on behalf of the Soren
Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen. KSMS
publishes outstanding monographs in all fields of Kierkegaard
research. This includes Ph.D. dissertations, Habilitation theses,
conference proceedings and single author works by senior scholars.
The goal of KSMS is to advance Kierkegaard studies by encouraging
top-level scholarship in the field. The editorial and advisory
boards are deeply committed to creating a genuinely international
forum for publication which integrates the many different
traditions of Kierkegaard studies and brings them into a
constructive and fruitful dialogue. To this end the series
publishes monographs in English and German. Potential authors
should consult the Submission guidelines. All submissions will be
blindly refereed by established scholars in the field. Only
high-quality manuscripts will be accepted for publication.
Potential authors should be prepared to make changes to their texts
based on the comments received by the referees.
ways of doing it, but it is wrong to project it far into the past:
it did not exist at the turn of the century and only became clearly
apparent after the Second World War. I recently taught at an
American university on the his tory of philosophy from Balzano to
Husserl. The course title had to come from a fixed pool and gave
trouble. Was it philosophical logic, the nine teenth century, or
phenomenology? A logic title would connote over this period Frege,
Russell, Carnap, perhaps a mention of Boole: not continental
enough. The nineteenth century? The century of Kant's successors:
Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Feuer bach, Marx, Nietzsche? What have
they to do with Balzano, Lotze, Brentano, Meinong, Husserl and
Twardowski? Even tually 'Phenomenology' was chosen, misdescribing
more than half of the course. That illustrates the problems one
faces in trying to work against the picture of the period which is
ingrained in minds and syllabuses. This book arises from my efforts
to combat that picture. I backed into writing about the history of
recent philosophy rather than setting out to do so. The beginning
was chance. In Manchester in the early seventies, at a time when
most English philosophy departments breathed re cycled Oxford air,
the intellectual atmosphere derived from Cambridge and Warsaw,
spiced with a breath of Freiburg and Paris."
This volume brings together 25 defining texts in global history.
These pieces cover approaches to the subject from antiquity to the
present century and, taken together, show the development of the
discipline, providing a solid historiographical, theoretical and
methodological overview that will be invaluable for students. The
collection gives a unique sense of how, at different times, in
different cultural circumstances, students of the past have
approached the problems of encompassing the world in a single
narrative or theory. This is a reader with an implicit story to
unfold. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto tracks how a global understanding
of history originated in prophetic writings, how the "Renaissance
discovery of the world" multiplied the opportunities for historians
to think about history globally, how scientific investigations of
change came to exert influence and inspire new thinking among
global historians, how "culture wars" ensued between advocates of
scientific and cultural models and how changing contexts in the
20th century produced new thematic approaches to the world as a
whole. Each part is introduced, setting it in context and
explaining the impact of its subject matter on the discipline, as
well as the relations between the texts and their place in the
overall development of global history.
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