Spinoza is a key figure in modern philosophy. Ethics is his most studied and well known work. Being both up-to-date and clear, this Guidebook is designed to lead the reader through this complex seminal text.
Spinoza's Ethics introduces and assess:
* Spinoza'a life, and its connection with his thought
* The text of the Ethics
* Spinoza's continuing relevence to contemporary philosophy

Gottlob Frege's brief article "Uber Sinn und Bedeutung" ("On Sense and Reference") has come to be seen, in the century since its publication in 1892, as one of the seminal texts of analytic philosophy. It, along with the rest of Frege's writings on logic and mathematics, came to mark out a whole new domain of inquiry and to set the agenda for it. This volume bears witness to the continuing importance and influence of that agenda. It contains original papers written by leading Frege scholars for the conference held in 1992 in Karlovy Vary to celebrate the centenary of the publication of Frege's essay. The 14 essays show how the questions Frege discusses in that essay connect intimately with issues much debated in current philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.

Portraits of Integrity depicts more than 20 historical, fictional and contemporary figures whose character or life raises questions about what integrity is and how it is perceived. Integrity might be culturally bound, but this diverse set of portraits demonstrates that it is not the special preserve of any one culture. Portraits of Socrates, Mencius, Rama and Job, alongside the aspirational 16th-century couple John and Dorothy Kaye, civil rights activist Ella Baker and an anonymous banker, highlight the persisting - sometimes conflicting - features of a life lived with integrity. An introduction identifies and discusses the key questions and themes raised by the case studies, encouraging the reader to determine for themselves the weight and significance of the recurring topics integrity brings up - truth, awkwardness, goodness, and charisma. For anyone looking to learn more about this elusive virtue, Portraits of Integrity is an essential collection. It uncovers the manifold aspects of integrity, illustrates the various possibilities for its expression in a life and asks whether living a life of integrity means living a life of isolation and hardship, or if it is possible to live with integrity without jeopardising all else.

This volume makes Adorno's lectures on the problems of moral philosophy available for the first time to English-speaking readers. It is one of several volumes of Adorno's unpublished writings which are currently being published in Germany, and which will be published in translation by Polity. The book is organized around an account of Kant's moral theory, and introduces most of the central topics of Adorno's far more difficult work Negative Dialectics. He examines concepts such as the primacy of practical reason, the relation between freedom and experience, and the desubstantialization of moral thought. These and other concepts are discussed in an accessible and entertaining style which is very different from the rest of Adorno's published work. Problems of Moral Philosophy will be an important resource for scholars drawing on Adorno's thought, and its nature as a lecture course makes it a very useful and accessible introduction for students to Adorno's ideas about moral philosophy. It will be of great interest to those working in philosophy and in social and political thought.

René Descartes (1596-1650) is the father of modern philosophy, and one of the greatest thinkers of all time. His unique contribution to Western thought covers not only philosophy but also science and mathematics, though his most famous project was the exploration of the foundations of human knowledge, starting from the formula Cogito ergo sum, `I am thinking therefore I exist'.

This is the first intellectual biography of Descartes in English. Stephen Gaukroger, a leading expert on Descartes, traces his intellectual development from childhood, establishing the connections between his intellectual and personal life, and placing these in the context of the cultural environment of the time. This book offers for the first time a full understanding of how Descartes developed his revolutionary ideas.

For those that have mastered the basics of memoir and wish to probe this brand of creative nonfiction further, Writing the Radical Memoir uses salient theories about memory and the self to challenge assumptions about how we remember and tell the truth of our lives when we write about it. Innovative in approach and making new critical ideas accessible, each chapter maps out the key principles of such writers as Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Lewis Mehl-Madrona, Philippe Le Jeune and Joseph Campbell, invokes literary examples to show how other writers have mastered the idea before reflecting on how you can practically apply the theory to your writing. With original exercises and prompts for further reading that bridge the gap between the theoretical and how it might be put into practice, the book is attentive to the multiple facets of the genre of nonfiction writing generally, covering such topics as: - The writer/ reader contract - How to embark on a thematic/ symbolic exploration of themes and incidents in your life - How neuro-scientific theory can inform our understanding of memory and recall and what happens to our memories when we remember them - Character development and the ethics of writing about real people - How constructing your identity in memoir offers a chance to push back against traditional structures - That memoir might not be preservation of your past but a process of self-erasure - How J. M. Coetzee’s Autrebiography trilogy challenges traditional biography By bringing together lived experience, post-structuralist and postmodernist theories, praxis and artistic vision as a unique approach to writing memoir, this book encourages you to think the self, how it is portrayed, created, erased and made strange through the process of writing and remembering.

Francois Laruelle has been developing his project of non-philosophy since the 1970s. Throughout this time he has aimed at nothing less than the discovery and development of a new form of thinking that draws its material from philosophy and related disciplines, but uses them in inventive new ways that are seen as heretical by standard philosophical approaches. The contributions to this volume highlight Laruelle's own distinctive approach to the history of thought and bring together researchers in the Anglophone and Francophone world who have taken up the project of non-philosophy in their own way, developing new heresies, sometimes even in relation to non-philosophy itself. The contributions here show the scope of non-philosophy with essays on gender, science, religion, politics, animals, and the history of philosophy. They are all brought together, not in a city of intellectuals bound together by law, but within a city of heretics bound together only by their status as stranger. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

"I do not expect a good reception from professional philosophers" wrote Whitehead in 1929, immediately after the publication of Process and Reality. Indeed, it took nearly thirty years before scholars seriously started to try to decipher the book taken as a whole. And there remains today "professional" Whiteheadians who claim that this work can - or even should - be bracketed by anyone wishing to get a clear picture of Whitehead's true speculative agenda. Creativity and Its Discontents aims to provide evidence of the conditions for this state of affairs by gathering and contextualizing all the major reviews (translated where need be) of Process and Reality: its original 1929 edition, its various translations (some of them still ongoing) and its 1978 corrected edition. It is designed as the ideal tool to accompany the recently published Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought.

Naomi Scheman argues that the concerns of philosophy emerge not from the universal human condition but from conditions of privilege. Her books represent a powerful challenge to the notion that gender makes no difference in the construction of philosophical reasoning. At the same time, it criticizes the narrow focus of most feminist theorizing and calls for a more inclusive form of inquiry.

With so much focus on contemporary theory, it is easy to forget that the serious analysis of clothing and fashion has a long history. In fact, they have been the subject of intense cultural debate since the nineteenth century. Fashion Classics provides an interpretative overview of the groundbreaking and often idiosyncratic writings of eight theorists whose work has profoundly influenced the conceptual and theoretical basis of our contemporary understanding of clothes and the fashion system.
Carter fully revives early 'fashion theorists' - some canonical and others less well known - and examines them in light of more recent work. From Carlyle's fantastical character Professor Teufelsdrockh, through the first Freudian analysis of clothes by J.C. Flugel, the pioneering work of Spencer, Veblen, Simmel, Kroeber, Laver and finally Barthes' monumental work on the modern fashion system, this book explores and explains the foundations of fashion theory. Not only does it provide an historical outline of Western conceptions of clothes and fashion, but it also highlights how ideas intermix and build on one another.
Carter's lively narrative clearly shows that views on fashion have always been impassioned - perhaps most notably Carlyle's notorious attack on Dandyism and Veblen's suggestion that clothes should be made out of old newspaper. This book also makes sense of complex theory and is essential reading for anyone seeking an overview of the history of fashion theory.

First published in 1970, original blurb: 'Alienation' is the catchword of our time. It has been applied to everything from the new politics to the anti-heroes of today's films. But what does it mean to say that someone is alienated? Is alienation a state of mind, or a relationship? If modern man is indeed alienated, is it from his work, his government, his society, or himself - or from all of these? Richard Schacht, in this intelligent analysis, gets to the root of these questions. Examining the concept of alienation in the works of Hegel and Marx, he gives a clear account of the origins of the modern usage of the term. Among the many insights to be gained from this analysis is a clear understanding of Hegel's influence on Marx in this most crucial area. Mr Schacht goes on to discuss the concept of alienation in recent philosophical and sociological literature, particularly in the writings of Erich Fromm. Here he finds a great deal of confusion, which has resulted in a series of almost universally unquestioned misconceptions. This, then, is a book for all of us who use - and mis-use - the term 'alienation', and who are interested in the concepts it brings to mind. The arguments of Professor Walter Kaufmann's introductory essay provide a useful background for Mr Schacht's analysis. In this essay, Professor Kaufmann states that 'henceforth nobody should write about alienation without first reading Schacht's book.'

In The Other Within, Fredrika Scarth offers a reading of The Second Sex as an ethical text, driven by Beauvoir's preoccupation with what possibilities have been closed off to women by patriarchal structures, oppression and inequality. Scarth offers a unique and enlightening study of Beauvoir's writing on the female body, and particularly on maternity as an important piece of Beauvoir's writing. Unlike other feminist scholars who find in Beauvoir's writing a repudiation of mother hood, Scarth argues that Beauvoir's writing on maternity can open up new possibilities of embodied subjectivity and agency, agrounding an authentic ethical relationship with the other.

Martin Heidegger is one of the twentieth century's most influential, controversial and challenging philosophers. His "Being and Time" is a landmark text in modern philosophy, required reading for anyone studying Continental thought. However, the concepts encountered in Heidegger are intricate and frequently confusing, while the language through which they are articulated is deliberately dense and obscure. "Heidegger: A Guide for the Perplexed" is a thorough, cogent and reliable account of Heidegger's philosophy, ideal for the student who needs to reach a sound understanding of this complex and important thinker. The book covers Heidegger's oeuvre in its entirety, offering not only exposition of "Being and Time", but also his later work.His perspectives on, and contributions to, both ontology and phenomenology are explored in full, as is the concept of Dasein, Heidegger's term for the human way of existence. Geared toward the specific requirements of students who need to reach a sound understanding of Heidegger's philosophy, this is the ideal companion to the study of this most influential and challenging of twentieth century philosophers." Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging - or indeed downright bewildering. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to grasp, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material.

This book considers the political potential of affective experiences of desire as reflected in contemporary South African literature. Jason Price argues that definitions of desire deployed by capitalist and colonial culture maintain social inequality by managing relations to ensure a steady flow of capital and pleasure for the dominant classes, whereas affective encounters with animals reveal the nonhuman nature of desire, a biopower that, in its unpredictability, can frustrate regimes of management and control. Price wonders how animals' different desires might enable new modes of thought to positively transform and resist the status quo. This book contends that South African literary works employ nonhuman desire and certain indigenous notions of desire to imagine a South Africa that can be markedly different from the past.

'The originality of this book is that it reverses the tables on all current schools of philosophy, where philosophy and metaphysics are separated and isolated from the sciences. The punch line for Bunge is that practitioners in all intellectual fields need to adopt the appropriate form of metaphysics. Only then will they be enabled to create scientistic research projects.'Marx & Philosophy Review of BooksNearly all philosophers have dealt with the outcomes of scientific research, and have overlooked its philosophical presuppositions, such as those of rationality and realism. Although these presuppositions are mostly tacit and thus easily overlooked, actually they are supremely important, since some of them favor research whereas others hamper it. For instance, whereas subjectivism leads to navel gazing and uncontrolled fantasy, realism encourages us to explore the world and check our conjectures.This book examines science in the making, a process it illustrates with many examples from the natural, social, and biosocial sciences. Therefore it centers on the research process and its philosophical presuppositions. It claims that the latter constitutes a sort of matrix for conceiving and nurturing scientific projects.

'The originality of this book is that it reverses the tables on all current schools of philosophy, where philosophy and metaphysics are separated and isolated from the sciences. The punch line for Bunge is that practitioners in all intellectual fields need to adopt the appropriate form of metaphysics. Only then will they be enabled to create scientistic research projects.'Marx & Philosophy Review of BooksNearly all philosophers have dealt with the outcomes of scientific research, and have overlooked its philosophical presuppositions, such as those of rationality and realism. Although these presuppositions are mostly tacit and thus easily overlooked, actually they are supremely important, since some of them favor research whereas others hamper it. For instance, whereas subjectivism leads to navel gazing and uncontrolled fantasy, realism encourages us to explore the world and check our conjectures.This book examines science in the making, a process it illustrates with many examples from the natural, social, and biosocial sciences. Therefore it centers on the research process and its philosophical presuppositions. It claims that the latter constitutes a sort of matrix for conceiving and nurturing scientific projects.

This volume of uncollected essays by Barry Stroud explores central issues and ideas in the work of individual philosophers, ranging from Descartes, Berkeley, Locke, and Hume to Quine, Burge, McDowell, Goldman, Fogelin, and Sosa in our own day. Seven of the essays focus on David Hume, and examine the sources and implications of his "naturalism" and his "scepticism." Three others deal with the legacy of that "naturalism" in the twentieth century. In each case Stroud moves beyond providing a description of historical contexts and developments, and confronts the philosophical issues as they present themselves to the philosophers in question.

Organized as a companion volume to Karl Rahner's master work, "Foundations of Christian Faith", this book, now again available, also provides the most useful introduction to his theology as a whole. Each chapter presents a broad commentary on the corresponding chapter of Foundations, beginning with Rahner's method and anthropology and concluding with his theology of the church and eschatology. It includes a separate chapter on Rahner's moral thought. Valuable for classroom or individual use, this volume provides questions for discussion, suggestions for further reading, and an extensive glossary of specialized terminology.

This book introduces student to the three major figures of modern philosophy known as the rationalists. It is not for complete beginners, but it is an accessible account of their thought. By concerning itself with metaphysics, and in particular substance, the book relates an important historical debate largely neglected by the contemporary debates in the once again popular area of traditional metaphysics. in philosophy. (Do Not USE)

eBook available with sample pages: 0203002288

If there has been some modest advance, since Karl Popper's death in 1994, in the general understanding of his critical rationalist theory of knowledge and philosophy of science, there is still widespread resistance both to it and to the recognition of the magnitude of his contribution. Popper long ago diagnosed the logical problems of traditional enlightenment rationalism (as did some irrationalists), but instead of pretending that they are readily solved or embracing irrational defeatism (as do postmodernists), he provided a cogent and liberating rationalist alternative. This book promotes, defends, criticizes, and refines this alternative. David Miller is the foremost exponent of the purist critical rationalist doctrine and here presents his mature views, discussing the role that logic and argument play in the growth of knowledge, criticizing the common understanding of argument as an instrument of justification, persuasion or discovery and instead advocating the critical rationalist view that only criticism matters. Miller patiently and thoroughly undoes the damage done by those writers who attack critical rationalism by invoking the sterile mythology of induction and justification that it seeks to sweep away. In addition his new material on the debate on verisimilitude is essential reading for all working in this field.

What does it mean to theorize Christianity in light of the decolonial turn? This volume invites distinguished Latinx and Latin American scholars to a conversation that engages the rich theoretical contributions of the decolonial turn, while relocating Indigenous, Afro-Latin American, Latinx, and other often marginalized practices and hermeneutical perspectives to the center-stage of religious discourse in the Americas. Keeping in mind that all religions-Christianity included-are cultured, and avoiding the abstract references to Christianity common to the modern Eurocentric hegemonic project, the contributors favor embodied religious practices that emerge in concrete contexts and communities. Featuring essays from scholars such as Sylvia Marcos, Enrique Dussel, and Luis Rivera-Pagan, this volume represents a major step to bring Christian theology into the conversation with decolonial theory.

Heidegger's Shadow is an important contribution to the understanding of Heidegger's ambivalent relation to transcendental philosophy. Its contention is that Heidegger recognizes the importance of transcendental philosophy as the necessary point of entry to his thought, but he nonetheless comes to regard it as something that he must strive to overcome even though he knows such an attempt can never succeed. Engelland thoroughly engages with major texts such as Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Being and Time, and Contributions and traces the progression of Heidegger's readings of Kant and Husserl to show that Heidegger cannot abandon his own earlier breakthrough work in transcendental philosophy. This book will be of interest to those working on phenomenology, continental philosophy, and transcendental philosophy.

Intentionality is one of the central problems of modern philosophy. How can a thought, action or belief be about something? Sachs draws on the work of Wilfrid Sellars, C I Lewis and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to build a new theory of intentionality that solves many of the problems faced by traditional conceptions.

This much needed book is the first to show how dominant forms of masculinity are implicated in the traditions of social theory that have emerged since the Enlightenment. The author shows how an 'unreasonable' form of reason has emerged from the separation of reason from emotion, mind from body, nature from culture, public from private, matter from spirit - the dualities that have shaped our vision of modernity. The book argues that men need to explore critically their power and experience which has been rendered invisible by the dominant traditions of social theory. Instead of legislating for others they have to learn to speak more personally for themselves.