Vinod Acharya presents a new existential interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy. He contends that Nietzsche's peculiar form of existentialism can be understood only by undertaking a thorough analysis of his characterization and critique of metaphysics. This reading remedies the shortcomings of previous existential interpretations of Nietzsche, which typically view existentialism as concerned primarily with the meaning of individual existence, and therefore necessarily at odds with the abstraction and objectivity of metaphysical thought. Acharya argues that the approach of Nietzsche's philosophy, especially in his mature works, is to make the typical existential position foundational, and then to develop to the fullest the implications of this position. This meta-existential approach necessarily yields an ambiguous and open-ended critique of metaphysics. Taking issue with the Heideggerian, the poststructuralist, and the naturalistic interpretations, this book contends that Nietzsche neither simply overcomes metaphysics nor remains trapped within its confines. Acharya argues that an ever-renewed encounter with and critique of metaphysics is an essential aspect of Nietzsche's meta-existentialism.

In this wide ranging collection of original essays, the intersection of philosophy and social theory is examined from a variety of viewpoints, some from the interpretative side of the discipline, and others from within the camp of formal and mathematical modeling. Leading practitioners from both of these major theoretical factions give voice to their plans for enlarging the scope of social theory, and maintaining its vitality, into the next century. They seek to help alleviate some of the crises that have recently afflicted sociology as it has struggled to accommodate postmodernism, feminism, moral philosophy, and other challengers to its classical analytic tradition.With chapters by Peter Blau and Stanley Lieberson, the old guard is well represented, as are newer interests concerning Nietzsche, the sociology of knowledge and of science, feminist phenomenology, neo-Kantian ethical theory, formal models of power and social action, to name a few. By including chapters by some of the best representatives from various contemporary modes of theorizing, the book fills a unique role as a guide to philosophically informed social thought as it is practised today.

This book explores a little-noticed tradition in the history of European political thought. From Plato to Aristotle to Tacitus and Machiavelli, and from Tocqueville to Max Weber and Hannah Arendt, political thinkers have examined the tyrannies of their times and have wondered how these tyrannies come about, how they work, and how they might be defeated. In examining this perennial problem of tyranny, Roger Boesche looks at how these thinkers borrowed from the past--thus entering into an established dialogue--to analyze the present. Although obviously tyrannies are not identical over time (Hitler certainly did not rule as Nero), we can learn partial lessons from past thinkers that can help us to better understand twentieth-century tyrannies.

This book examines the Irish philosopher George Berkeley's contributions to debates concerning the role of virtue in society, which formed the foundation of his reputation as "the good bishop." Through a close analysis of key texts and the larger historical contexts within which they were composed, this study explores Berkeley's engagement with the social and economic threats facing Ireland and Britain, highlighting his belief that virtue and religion could help alleviate these problems. In doing so, Breuninger provides a more complete view of Berkeley's work outside the realm of philosophy and thus broadens our understanding of his place in the early Enlightenment.

This volume presents an innovative look at early modern medicine and natural philosophy as historically interrelated developments. The individual chapters chart this interrelation in a variety of contexts, from the Humanists who drew on Hippocrates, Galen, and Aristotle to answer philosophical and medical questions, to medical debates on the limits and power of mechanism, and on to eighteenth-century controversies over medical materialism and 'atheism.' The work presented here broadens our understanding of both philosophy and medicine in this period by illustrating the ways these disciplines were in deep theoretical and methodological dialogue and by demonstrating the importance of this dialogue for understanding their history. Taken together, these papers argue that to overlook the medical context of natural philosophy and the philosophical context of medicine is to overlook fundamentally important aspects of these intellectual endeavors.

The development of Simone de Beauvoir's notion of self in both her philosophical and autobiographical writings is analyzed in this volume. Two ideas of the self are isolated: the existential notion of the self and the gendered self, which she developed in "The Second Sex," and which represents a major departure from existential philosophy. Beginning with a study of her early essays, the author proceeds to discuss Beauvoir's major philosophical works and her autobiographical writings where three personae emerge--the child, the woman in love, and the writer. This analysis highlights the innovative quality of Beauvoir's thought. It also shows that writing an autobiography can be a philosophically inventive enterprise and one in which Beauvoir created her most profound analysis of the self.

Paul Grice (1913-1988) is best known for his psychological account of meaning, and for his theory of conversational implicature, although these form only part of a large and diverse body of work. This is the first book to consider Grice's work as a whole. Drawing on the range of his published writing, and also on unpublished manuscripts, lectures and notes, Siobhan Chapman discusses the development of Grice's ideas and relates his work to the major events of his intellectual and professional life.

This volume signals reinvigoration of Russell the public campaigner. The title of the volume is taken from one of his most famous and eloquent short essays and probably the best known of his many broadcasts for the BBC. "Man's Peril, 1954-55 not only captures the essence of Russell's thinking about nuclear weapons and the Cold War in the mid-1950s, its extraordinary impact served to jolt him into political protest once again.

For most of its history, western philosophy has regarded woman as an imperfect version of man. Like so many aspects of European culture, this tradition builds on foundations laid in ancient Greece. Yet the first philosophers of antiquity were hardly agreed on first principles. Vigdis Songe-Muller examines the differences between Presocratic monists like Parmenides, and implicit pluralists such as Anaximander, and shows how the Greeks made intellectual choices that would prove fateful for half of humankind. The text re-evaluates Greek mythology, throws a harsh new light on the invention of democracy, and exposes Platonic harmony to be an ideal driven by a peculiarly masculine fear of death. It was a fear that could only be overcome by denying the significance of difference, and at times even the rightful existence of that which embodied difference. For the Greek man, the difference that mattered was nowhere more frighteningly apparent than in woman.

Containing three previously unpublished papers by W.V. Quine as well as historical, exegetical, and critical papers by several leading Quine scholars including Hylton, Ebbs, and Ben-Menahem, this volume aims to remedy the comparative lack of historical investigation of Quine and his philosophical context.

A leading expert in informal logic, Douglas Walton turns his attention in this new book to how reasoning operates in trials and other legal contexts, with special emphasis on the law of evidence. The new model he develops, drawing on methods of argumentation theory that are gaining wide acceptance in computing fields like artificial intelligence, can be used to identify, analyze, and evaluate specific types of legal argument. In contrast with approaches that rely on deductive and inductive logic and rule out many common types of argument as fallacious, Walton's aim is to provide a more expansive view of what can be considered "reasonable" in legal argument when it is construed as a dynamic, rule-governed, and goal-directed conversation. This dialogical model gives new meaning to the key notions of relevance and probative weight, with the latter analyzed in terms of pragmatic criteria for what constitutes plausible evidence rather than truth.

Hoy establishes a basis for a naturalistic political theory that can be sustained as a continuity from Aristotle through the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment contributions of David Hume, John Dewey, Evolutionary Biology, and Deep Ecology.

This entails several contentions. First he argues that the contemporary relevance of Aristotelian naturalism can be defended within the context of a pragmatic realism without recourse to a no-longer-tenable metaphysical biology. Second, he calls for an emphasis on a historicized nature--the human capacities for language, sociality, and habituation that are the product of biological-cultural interaction in human evolution. Third, Hoy contends that, while humans are perceived as the apex of other forms of life, a compassionate relation of humans to non-human nature is a logical extension of human community and moral obligation. His final contention is that an integrative framework for a naturalistic political theory can be formulated within the theoretical categories contributed by John Dewey. Scholars and students of political theory, philosophy, evolutionary biology, and deep ecology in particular will find this study of interest.

German Idealism develops its philosophy of history as the theory of becoming absolute and as absolute knowledge. Historism also originates from Hegel's and Schelling's discovery of absolute historicity as it turns against Idealism's philosophy of history by emphasizing the singular and unique in the process of history. German Idealism and Historism can be considered as the central German contribution to the history of ideas. Since Idealism became most influential for modern philosophy and Historism for modern historiography, they are analyzed in this volume in a collaboration of philosophers and historians. German Idealism is presented in Schelling and its critics Schlegel, Baader, and Nietzsche; Historism in Ranke, Droysen, Burckhardt, and Treitschke. The volume further presents the impact of Idealism and Historism on present German approaches to the philosophy of history and outlines the debates on the possibility of a philosophy of history and on the methodology of the historical sciences.

This collection of essays is addressed to the legacy of Enlightenment thought, with respect to 18th-century notions of human nature, human rights, representative democracy or the nation state, and with regard to the barbarism, including the Holocaust, allegedly unleashed by 18th-century ideals of civilization. Each author offers an interpretation of modern or postmodern philosophy against the background of a so-called Enlightenment Project, envisaged as the conceptual ghost that haunts modernity.

It is a commonplace that while Asia is nondualistic, the West, because of its uncritical reliance on Greek-derived intellectual standards, is dualistic. Dualism is a deep-seated habit of thinking and acting in all spheres of life through the prism of binary opposites leads to paralyzing practical and theoretical difficulties. Asia can provide no assistance for the foreseeable future because the West finds Asian nondualism, especially that of Mahayana Buddhism, too alien and nihilistic. On the other hand, postmodern thought, which purports to deliver us from the dualisms embedded in modernity, turns out to be merely a pseudo-postmodernism. This book's novel idea is that the West already contains within one of its more marginalized roots, that of ancient Hebrew culture, a pre-philosophical form of nondualism which makes possible a new form of nondualism, one to which the West can subscribe. This new nondualism, inspired by Buddhism but not identical to it, is an epistemological, ontological, metaphysical, and praxical middle way both for the West and also between East and West.>

Turning Images in Philosophy, Science, and Religion: A New Book of Nature brings together new essays addressing the role of images and imagination recruited in the perennial debates surrounding nature, mind, and God. The debate between "new atheists" and religious apologists today is often hostile. This book sets a new tone by locating the debate between theism and naturalism (most "new atheists" are self-described "naturalists") in the broader context of reflection on imagination and aesthetics. The eleven essays will be of interest to anyone who is fascinated by the power of imagination and the role of aesthetics in deciding between worldviews or philosophies of nature. Representing a variety of points of view, authors include outstanding philosophers of religion and of science, a distinguished art historian, and a visual artist. The book begins with Martin Kemp's essay on the work of the biologist, mathematician and classical scholar D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson in which Kemp develops the idea of "structural intuitions and a critique of reductive thinking about the natural world. This is followed by Geoffrey Gorham's overview and analysis of images of nature and God found in early modern science and philosophy. Anthony O'Hear questions a reductive, naturalist account of the origin of mind and values. Dale Jacquette offers a thoroughgoing naturalistic philosophy of the emergence of intentionality and a unique argument about the emergence of art and the aesthetic appreciation of nature. E.J. Lowe brings to light some challenges facing naturalistic approaches to human imaginative sensibility. Douglas Hedley articulates and defends a cognitive account of imagination, highlighting some of the difficulties confronting naturalism. Daniel N. Robinson offers a sweeping treatment of nature and naturalism, historically engaging Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and others. Conor Cunningham provides an aggressive critique of contemporary naturalism. Gordon Graham investigates the resources of naturalism in accounting for our sense of the sacred. Mark Wynn provides a subtle understanding of imagination and perception, suggesting how these may play into the theism - naturalism debate. The book concludes with Jil Evans' reflections on how images of the Galapagos Islands have been employed philosophically to picture either a naturalist or theistic image of nature.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Judging it to be "of all my writings incomparably the best, " Hume accurately assessed this groundbreaking classic, which continues to influence philosophical thinking on ethics to this day through the force of its ideas and its clarity of expression. Among the many insights that Hume expounds in this work is that morality is grounded in feelings, not in knowledge. Based on moral sentiment, people naturally value agreeable qualities and shun disagreeable ones. On closer analysis, Hume concludes that the feeling of agreeableness comes from an innate perception of the utility of a particular quality or person to one's self. Anticipating later utilitarian philosophy, he maintains that the virtues that are most highly esteemed are those that have the greatest usefulness to most people. Justice, for example, is greatly prized because it ideally ensures to everyone a fair share of happiness and security. Hume puts special emphasis on altruism, which he says is rooted in the natural feeling that each of us has for our fellow human beings. When surrounded by people in enjoyable circumstances, we tend also to feel the same enjoyment, and when learning of tragedy, even among people on the other side of the world, we tend to feel sad. Out of such natural sympathy and our general moral sentiments, moral distinctions between good and bad arise, and we are motivated to direct our actions toward ideal goals, not only for ourselves but especially for others. In many ways, Hume's thinking about ethics was considered radical in its day. His empirical method of interpreting morality as an outgrowth of innate, human emotions helped to steer later philosophy away from the transcendentalist notions of ethicsthat had earlier prevailed.

By marginalizing methodological and other more specialized theoretical concerns, this book focuses on Habermas’s substantive portrayal of contemporary society and its discontents. Over the last four decades Jürgen Habermas has forged an innovative and much-discussed theory of contemporary capitalist society. Building on Max Weber’s thesis that the dynamic of capitalism actually erodes individual freedom and the meaningfulness of social life—famously resulting in a culture of “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart”—Habermas traces contemporary social conflict to resistance to this dynamic by a variety of social groups. His theory of “communicative action” attempts to show the possibilities in contemporary society for moving toward a more balanced social life that, unlike other political currents today, would not sacrifice the truly progressive features of complex modern societies.