The concept of systematicity is central to Immanuel Kant's conception of scientific knowledge and to his practical philosophy. But Kant also held that we must be able to unite the separate systems of nature and freedom into a single system: on the one hand, morality itself requires that we be able to see its commands and goals as realizable within nature, while on the other hand our experience of nature itself leads us to see it as a system with the goal of human moral development. The essays in this volume, including two published here for the first time, explore various aspects of Kant's conception of the system of nature, the system of freedom, and the system of nature and freedom. The essays in the first part explore the systematicity of concepts and laws as the ultimate goal of natural science, consider the implications of Kant's account of our experience of organisms for the goal of the unity of science, and examine Kant's attempts to prove that the existence of an ether is a necessary condition for a physical system of nature. The essays in the second part explore Kant's view that morality requires a systematic union of persons as ends in themselves and of the ends that persons set for themselves, and examine the system of duties and obligations necessary to realize such a systematic union of persons and their ends. These essays thus examine both the general foundations of Kant's moral philosophy and his final account of the duties of right or justice and of ethics or virtue in his late work, the Metaphysics of Morals. The essays in the third part examine Kant's attempt, in the last of his three great critiques, the Critique of the Power of Judgment., to unify the systems of nature and freedom through a radical transformation of traditional teleology as a theory of the creation of organic nature into an account of our experience of organic nature and of nature as a whole.

Oxford University Press is proud to present the second volume in a new annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of philosophy.
Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, very roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It will also publish papers on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought.
The articles in OSEMP will be of importance to specialists within the discipline, but the editors also intend that they should appeal to a larger audience of philosophers, intellectual historians, and others who are interested in the development of modern thought.

A Companion to Schopenhauer provides a comprehensive guide to all the important facets of Schopenhauer s philosophy. The volume contains 26 newly commissioned essays by prominent Schopenhauer scholars working in the field today. * A thoroughly comprehensive guide to the life, work, and thought of Arthur Schopenhauer * Demonstrates the range of Schopenhauer s work and illuminates the debates it has generated *26 newly commissioned essays by some of the most prominent Schopenhauer scholars working today reflect the very latest trends in Schopenhauer scholarship * Covers the full range of historical and philosophical perspectives on Schopenhauer s work * Discusses his seminal contributions to our understanding of knowledge, perception, morality, science, logic and mathematics, Platonic Ideas, the unconscious, aesthetic experience, art, colours, sexuality, will, compassion, pessimism, tragedy, pleasure, and happiness

Hegel and the Challenge of Spinoza explores the powerful continuing influence of Spinoza's metaphysical thinking in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German philosophy. George di Giovanni examines the ways in which Hegel's own metaphysics sought to meet the challenges posed by Spinoza's monism, not by disproving monism, but by rendering it moot. In this, di Giovanni argues, Hegel was much closer in spirit to Kant and Fichte than to Schelling. This book will be of interest to students and researchers interested in post-Kantian Idealism, Romanticism, and metaphysics.

Norman Kemp Smith's The Philosophy of David Hume has long been regarded as a classic study by scholars in the field - a ground-breaking book that has since been unsurpassed in its comprehensive coverage of the ideas and issues of Hume's Treatise. This reissue brings this currently out-of-print and highly sought-after classic up-to-date with a new introduction by Don Garrett. Garrett's new introduction sets the book in its contemporary context and makes the case for its continuing importance in the field of Hume scholarship.

During years of close friendship, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Paul Ree (1849-1901) shared ideas and developed a new and original approach to philosophy and ethics. The course of their partnership, from its origins in shared hopes to its ending in a painful breakdown of personal relations, is the subject of this book. The full story has not been told before. Some of its biographical aspects - especially the three-sided relationship involving the young Lou Salome which had severe emotional consequences for Nietzsche - have been known. Yet many personal details are presented here for the first time. The philosophical account is equally absorbing, showing how this collaboration was a crucial stage on Nietzsche's way toward his most original and radical contributions to philosophy. 'Reealism' was the label Nietzsche gave to Ree's naturalistic doctrine, which drew on the evolutionary theory of natural selection to explain the moral concepts of good, evil, conscience and justice. Just as importantly, Ree wrote in a cool, highly disciplined style, very different from most German writers of the time. Both aspects of his work made a strong impact on Nietzsche, who developed this project in his own way in a series of works starting with Human, All-Too-Human. Yet he eventually came to criticise and reject 'Reealism' as inadequate to the task of a revaluation of values, and replaced the 'historical approach' with his own genealogy of morality. In a strikingly poetic passage in The Gay Science, Nietzsche describes a 'star friendship': the brief meeting of two stars whose paths cross and then diverge forever, perhaps as part of some pattern beyond their knowledge. This book gives the 'star friendship' of Nietzsche and Ree the treatment it has always needed. In doing so, it brings to light fresh aspects of one of the most important of modern thinkers.

Why were Chinese and Indian ways of thinking excluded from European philosophy in early modern times? This is a study of what happened to the European understanding of China and India between the late 16th century and the first half of the 18th century. Investigating the description of these two Asian civilizations during a century and a half of histories of philosophy, this book accounts for the change of historiographical paradigms, from Neoplatonic philosophia perennis and Spinozistic atheism to German Eclecticism. Uncovering the reasons for inserting or excluding Chinese and Indian ways of thinking within the field of Philosophy in early modern times, it reveals the origin of the Eurocentric understanding of Philosophy as a Greek-European prerogative. By highlighting how this narrowing and exclusion of non-Western ways of thought was a result of conviction of superiority and religious prejudice, this book provides a new way of thinking about the place of Asian traditions among World philosophies.

Although widely recognized as founder and key figure in the current re-emergence of pragmatism, Charles Peirce is rarely brought into contemporary dialogue. In this book, Kory Sorrell shows that Peirce has much to offer contemporary debate and deepens the value of Peirce's view of representation in light of feminist epistemology, philosophy of science, and cultural anthropology. Drawing also on William James and John Dewey, Sorrell identifies ways in which bias, authority, and purpose are ineluctable constituents of shared representation. He nevertheless defends Peirce's realistic account of representation, showing how the independently real world both constrains social representation and informs its content. Most importantly, Sorrell shows how members of a given community not only represent but transform a shared world-and how those practices of representation may, and should, be improved.

This book introduces architects to a philosopher, Immanuel Kant, whose work was constantly informed by a concern for the world as an evolving whole. According to Kant, in this interconnected and dynamic world, humans should act as mutually dependent and responsible subjects. Given his future-oriented and ethico-politically concerned thinking, Kant is a thinker who clearly speaks to architects. This introduction demonstrates how his ideas bear pertinently and creatively upon the world in which we live now and for which we should care thoughtfully. Kant grounded his enlightened vision of philosophy's mission using an architectural metaphor: of the modest 'dwelling-house'. Far from constructing speculative 'castles in the sky' or vertiginous 'towers which reach to the heavens', he tells us that his humble aim is rather to build a 'secure home for ourselves', one which appropriately corresponds at once to the limited material resources available on our planet, and to our need for firm and solid principles to live by. This book also explores Kant's notions of cosmopolitics, which attempts to think politics from a global perspective by taking into account the geographical fact that the earth is a sphere with limited land mass and natural resources. Given the urgent topicality of sustainable development, these Kantian texts are of particular interest for architects of today. Students of architecture, who are necessarily trained in negotiating between theory and practice, gain much from considering Kant, whose critical project also consisted of testing and exploring the viability of ideas, so as to ascertain to what extent, and crucially, how ideas can have a constructive effect on the whole world, and on us as active agents therein.

Hume's Enlightenment Tract is the first full book-length study for forty years of David Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. The Enquiry has, contrary to its author's expressed wishes, long lived in the shadow of its predecessor, A Treatise of Human Nature. Stephen Buckle presents the Enquiry in a fresh light, and aims to raise it to its rightful position in Hume's work and in the history of philosophy. He argues that the Enquiry is not, as so often assumed, a mere collection of watered-down extracts from the earlier work. It is, rather, a coherent work with a unified argument; and, when this argument is grasped as a whole, the Enquiry shows itself to be the best introduction to the lineaments of its author's general philosophy. Buckle offers a careful guide through the argument and structure of the work. He shows how the central sections of the Enquiry offer a critique of the dogmatic empiricisms of the ancient world (Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Aristotelianism), and set in place an alternative conception of human powers based on the sceptical principles of habit and probability. These principles are then put to work, to rule out philosophy's metaphysical ambitions and their consequences: religious systems and their attendant conception of human beings as semi-divine rational animals. Hume's scepticism, experimentalism, and naturalism are thus shown to be different aspects of the one unified philosophy - a sceptical version of the Enlightenment vision.

This is a new edition of T. H. Green's Prolegomena to Ethics (1883), a classic of modern philosophy, in which Green sets out his perfectionist ethical theory. In addition to the text of the Prolegomena itself, this new edition provides an introductory essay, a bibliographical essay, and an index. Brink's extended editorial introduction examines the context, themes, and significance of Green's work and will be of special interest to readers working on the history of ethics, ethical theory, political philosophy, and nineteenth century philosophy.

This work charts the development of political economy in eighteenth-century Italy, and it argues that the focus on economic thought is characteristic of the Italian enlightenment at large. Through an analysis of the debate about luxury, it traces the shaping of a new language of political economy which was inspired by, and contributed to, European debate, but which offered solutions that were as much shaped by intellectual traditions and socio-economic circumstances as by French or Scottish precedent. Ultimately, those traditions were responsible for the development of very distinct 'cultures of enlightenment' across the peninsula -from the insertion of the economy into the edifice of enlightened Catholicism, to the development of physiocracy in Tuscany, to a new analytical approach to economics in the Milanese enlightenment. Wahnbaeck draws on treatises, academic debates, university lectures, sermons, letters, dictionaries and personal sketches to trace the development of a public culture in Italy in the middle of the century, to establish the channels for the transmission of ideas between Italy, France and Scotland, and the development of an analytical language of economy in Milan in the second half of the century. This work relates those developments to the socio-economic and political contexts in which they occurred and argues that the focus on the economy (especially in northern Italy) can be explained by a triple reason: against the background of a declining economy and a shift towards agriculture in a competitive European environment, economic thought addressed the region's most pressing needs; secondly, subjection to Habsburg rule meant that political reform was monopolized in Vienna, whereas economic policy was an area of developed government and hence offered a safe route to influence without infringing on Hapsburg prerogatives; and finally, advances in economic thinking in Milan in particular provided a claim to power against the previous generation which had dominated the field of jurisprudence.

Oxford University Press is proud to announce an annual volume presenting a selection of the best new work in the history of philosophy. Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy will focus on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - the period that begins, very roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It will also publish papers on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. The core of the subject matter will, of course, be philosophy and its history. But the volume's papers will reflect the fact that philosophy in this period was much broader in scope that it is now taken to be, and included a great deal of what currently belongs to the natural sciences: so the notion of 'philosophy' will be interpreted rather broadly. Furthermore, philosophy in the period was closely connected with other disciplines, such as theology, and with larger questions of social, political, and religious history. Again, while maintaining a focus on philosophy, the volumes will also include articles that examine the larger intellectual, social, and political context of early modern philosophy. The articles in OSEMP will be of importance to specialists within the discipline, but the editors also intend that they should appeal to a larger audience of philosophers, intellectual historians, and others who are interested in the development of modern thought.

This work, by one of the most innovative and challenging of contemporary thinkers, pivots on a "Remark" added by Hegel in 1831 to the second edition of his "Science of Logic." As a model of close reading applied both to philosophical texts and the making of philosophical systems, "The Speculative Remark" played a significant role in transforming the practice of philosophy away from system building to analysis of specific linguistic detail, with meticulous attention to etymological, philological, and rhetorical nuance.
Nancy uses his extended examination of the "Remark" to delineate certain overall strategies in several Hegelian texts that militate for language-oriented readings of Hegel, as shown in Nancy's redefinition of such key terms as "Aufhebung," "mediation," and "speculation." Nancy's reading progresses from speculative words and propositions to registering the speculative itself. While he avoids analyzing Hegel's system as such, Nancy reconstructs the Hegelian trajectory on a basis of tropes, building from propositions rather than structures, elements, and cycles.
The overview that emerges in the final chapter and epilogue constitutes a broad statement about Hegel's practice and significance, one nuanced by close attention to his deployment of rhetoric and linguistic play. "The Speculative Remark" thus furnishes a model for a theoretically aware approach to all systematic philosophy, while providing a significant historical contribution to the evolution of contemporary critical theory.

This is the first edition of an annual volume to present a selection of the best new work in the history of philosophy. The series focuses on the 17th and 18th centuries - the period that begins, very roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes papers on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. The core of the subject matter is, of course, philosophy and its history, but the volume's papers also reflect the fact that philosophy in this period was much broader in scope than it is now taken to be, and included a great deal of what currently belongs to the natural sciences: so the notion of "philosophy" is interpreted rather broadly. Furthermore, philosophy in the period was closely connected with other disciplines, such as theology, and with larger questions of social, political, and religious history. Again, while maintaining a focus on philosophy, the volumes also include articles that examine the larger intellectual, social and political context of early modern philosophy.

This is a new edition of T. H. Green's Prolegomena to Ethics (1883), a classic of modern philosophy, in which Green sets out his perfectionist ethical theory. In addition to the text of the Prolegomena itself, this new edition provides an introductory essay, a bibliographical essay, and an index. Brink's extended editorial introduction examines the context, themes, and significance of Green's work and will be of special interest to readers working on the history of ethics, ethical theory, political philosophy, and nineteenth century philosophy.

This book offers a provocative interpretation of the theory of the soul in the writings of the French Cartesian, Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715). Though recent work on Malebranche's philosophy of mind has tended to emphasize his account of ideas, Schmaltz focuses rather on his rejection of Descartes' doctrine that the mind is better known than the body. In particular, he considers and defends Malebranche's argument that this rejection has a Cartesian basis. Schmaltz reveals that this argument not only provides a fresh perspective on Cartesianism but also is relevant to current debates in the philosophy of mind.

Descartes is possibly the most famous of all writers on the mind, but his theory of mind has been almost universally misunderstood, because his philosophy has not been seen in the context of his scientific work. Desmond Clarke offers a radical and convincing rereading, undoing the received perception of Descartes as the chief defender of mind/body dualism. For Clarke, the key is to interpret his philosophical efforts as an attempt to reconcile his scientific pursuits with the theologically orthodox views of his time.

Speech act theory has taught us "how to do things with words." "Arresting Language" turns its attention in the opposite direction--toward the surprising things that language can "undo" and leave "undone." In the eight essays of this volume, arresting language is seen as language at rest, words no longer in service to the project of establishing conventions or instituting legal regimes. Concentrating on both widely known and seldom-read texts from a variety of philosophers, writers, and critics--from Leibniz and Mendelssohn, through Kleist and Hebel, to Benjamin and Irigaray--the book analyzes the genesis and structure of interruption, a topic of growing interest to contemporary literary studies, continental philosophy, legal studies, and theological reflection.
Beginning with an exposition of Holderlin's rigorous account of interruption in terms of the "pure word," in which the event of representation alone appears, "Arresting Language" identifies critical moments in philosophical and literary texts during which language itself--without any identifiable speaker--arrests otherwise continuous processes and procedures, including the process of representation and the procedures for its legitimization. The book then investigates a series of pure words: the fatal verdict ("arret") of divine wisdom in Leibniz, the performance of Jewish ceremonial practices in Mendelssohn, the issuing of unauthorized arrest warrants in Kleist, fraudulent acts of storytelling in Hebel, the eruption of tragic silence and the "mass strike" in Benjamin, and the recurrence of angelic intervention in Irigaray.
At the center of this volume is a detailed explication of Benjamin's effort to transform Husserl's program for a phenomenological "epoche" into a paradoxically nonprogrammatic, paradisal "epoche," by means of which the structure of paradise can be exactly outlined and the Messianic moment--as the ultimate event of arresting language--can at last appear to enter into its own.

Kant is generally regarded as the greatest modern philosopher. But that analytic philosophers treat him as a central voice in contemporary debates is largely due to Sir Peter Strawson, the most eminent philosopher living in Britain today. In this collection, leading Kant scholars and analytic philosophers, including Strawson himself, for the first time assess his relation to Kant. The essays raise questions about how philosophy should deal with its past, what kind of insights it can achieve, and whether we can have knowledge of an objective reality.

We live in an era defined by a sense of separation, even in the midst of networked connectivity. As cultural climates sour and divisive political structures spread, we are left wondering about our ties to each other. Consequently, there is no better time than now to reconsider ideas of unity. In The Ethics of Oneness, Jeremy David Engels reads the Bhagavad Gita alongside the works of American thinkers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Drawing on this rich combination of traditions, Engels presents the notion that individuals are fundamentally interconnected in their shared divinity. In other words, everything is one. If the lessons of oneness are taken to heart, particularly as they were expressed and celebrated by Whitman, and the ethical challenges of oneness considered seriously, Engels thinks it is possible to counter the pervasive and problematic American ideals of hierarchy, exclusion, violence, and domination.

Christopher Hookway presents a series of studies of themes from the work of the great American philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), often described as the founder of pragmatism. These themes centre on the question of how we are able to investigate the world rationally; Peirce's ideas about this continue to play an important role in philosophy, as Hookway shows. Topics discussed include Peirce's theory of truth, his metaphysical views, his claim that emotions and sentiments guide us in reasoning well, and his religious views.

This book is both a concise and lucid introduction to Nietzsche and an original contribution to critical debates concerning Nietzsche interpretation and reception. This overview takes issue with the prevailing tendency to focus on Nietzsche's later work, which reaches its extreme with Heidegger's almost exclusive focus on the group of late notes posthumously collected as "The Will to Power." Vattimo aims to mediate between two prominent hermeneutic readings of Nietzsche: Wilhelm Dilthey's view that Nietzsche's work fits into the nineteenth-century tradition of the philosophy of life and Heidegger's belief that Nietzsche is best understood as the author of a pair of ontological doctrines, the will to power and the eternal return of the same.
Vattimo aims to show that Nietzsche's early interest in cultural and historical criticism can be found throughout his corpus and that it informs, and helps to explain, Nietzsche's later doctrines and writings. This allows us to understand these later doctrines in a deeper way, to see their connections with his wider concerns, and thus to make greater sense of Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole.
This working hypothesis guides Vattimo through his elegant exposition of the basic views of the early and late Nietzsche, from the philological beginnings and the musings on Dionysus through the so-called positivist phase of the middle period up to the philosophy of Zarathustra and the fragmented insights that bespeak the will to power. Throughout, Vattimo's intellectual agenda is to present the philosophical relevance of a cultural criticism that does not let itself be reduced to a merely literary presentation of the psychology of decadence and nihilism, or to the grand ontological-metaphysical finale that Heidegger had in mind in his monumental Nietzsche studies.
As an appendix, Vattimo provides a history of Nietzsche reception in Europe that counters the narrow Anglo-American bias of much English-language Nietzsche scholarship.

This book examines the Enlightenment from the perspective of its contemporary opponents. Born in France but spread throughout the world, the Counter-Enlightenment was a major cultural force at the intersection of the development of modern politics and thought about religion, gender, the French Revolution, and the course of history.

In arguing that Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" is a philosophical explanation of the possibility of modernism--that is, of the possibility of radical cultural change through the creation of new values--the author shows that literary fiction can do the work of philosophy.
Nietzsche takes up the problem of modernism by inventing Zarathustra, a self-styled cultural innovator who aspires to subvert the culture of modernity (the repressive culture of the "last man") by creating new values. By showing how Zarathustra can become a creator of new values, notwithstanding the forces that hinder his will to innovate, Nietzsche answers the skeptic who proclaims that new-values creation is impossible. "Zarathustra" is a story of repeated clashes between Zarathustra's avant-garde, modernist intentions and figures of doubt who condemn those intentions.
Through a close reading of "Zarathustra," the author reconstructs Nietzsche's explanation of the possibility of modernism. Showing how parody, irony, and plot organization frame that explanation, he also demonstrates the central significance of Zarathustra's speeches on the body and the will to power. The author argues that Nietzsche's critique of the modern philosophy of the subject revises Kant's concept of the dynamical sublime and makes allegorical use of the myth of Theseus, Ariadne, and Dionysus. He also proposes an original interpretation of the thought of eternal recurrence (according to Nietzsche, the "fundamental conception" of "Zarathustra"). Breaking with conventional Nietzsche scholarship, the author conceptualizes the thought not as a theoretical or a practical doctrine that Nietzsche endorses, but as a developing drama that Zarathustra performs.