Irish philosopher George Bishop Berkeley was one of the greatest philosophers of the early modern period. Along with David Hume and John Locke he is considered one of the fathers of British Empiricism. Berkeley is a clear, concise, and sympathetic introduction to George Berkeley s philosophy, and a thorough review of his most important texts. Daniel E. Flage explores his works on vision, metaphysics, morality, and economics in an attempt to develop a philosophically plausible interpretation of Berkeley s oeuvre as whole. Many scholars blur the rejection of material substance (immaterialism) with the claim that only minds and things dependent upon minds exist (idealism). However Flage shows how, by distinguishing idealism from immaterialism and arguing that Berkeley s account of what there is (metaphysics) is dependent upon what is known (epistemology), a careful and plausible philosophy emerges. The author sets out the implications of this valuable insight for Berkeley s moral and economic works, showing how they are a natural outgrowth of his metaphysics, casting new light on the appreciation of these and other lesser-known areas of Berkeley s thought. Daniel E. Flage s Berkeley presents the student and general reader with a clear and eminently readable introduction to Berkeley s works which also challenges standard interpretations of Berkeley s philosophy.

Through a series of close readings of most of Rousseau's major writings, this book provides a new interpretation of the eighteenth-century philosopher's sexual politics. The text argues that Rousseau's writings provide a critique of not only normative gender identity, but also normative familial and kinship relations.

The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard brings together some of the most distinguished contemporary contributors to Kierkegaard research together with some of the more gifted younger commentators on Kierkegaard's work. There is significant input from scholars based in Copenhagen's Soren Kierkegaard Research Centre, as well as from philosophers and theologians from Britain, Germany, and the United States. Part 1 presents some of the philological, historical and contextual work that has been produced in recent years, establishing a firm basis for the more interpretative essays found in following parts. This includes looking at the history of his published and unpublished works, his cultural and social context, and his relation to Romanticism, German Idealism, the Church, the Bible, and theological traditions. Part 2 moves from context and background to the exposition of some of the key ideas and issues in Kierkegaard's writings. Attention is paid to his style, his treatment of ethics, culture, society, the self, time, theology, love, irony, and death. Part 3 looks at the impact of Kierkegaard's thought and at how it continues to influence philosophy, theology, and literature. After an examination of issues around translating Kierkegaard, this section includes comparisons with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, as well as examining his role in modern theology, moral theology, phenomenology, postmodernism, and literature.

This is the first English translation of the seminar Martin Heidegger gave during the Winter of 1934-35, which dealt with Hegel's Philosophy of Right. This remarkable text is the only one in which Heidegger interprets Hegel's masterpiece in the tradition of Continental political philosophy while offering a glimpse into Heidegger's own political thought following his engagement with Nazism. It also confronts the ideas of Carl Schmitt, allowing readers to reconstruct the relation between politics and ontology. The book is enriched by a collection of interpretations of the seminar, written by select European and North American political thinkers and philosophers. Their essays aim to make the seminar accessible to students of political theory and philosophy, as well as to open new directions for debating the relation between the two disciplines. A unique contribution, this volume makes available key lectures by Heidegger that will interest a wide readership of students and scholars.

John Stuart Mill expressed many of the central tenets of liberalism with unsurpassed clarity and enduring influence. Yet Mill's apparent victory in the marketplace of ideas has numbed us to the power of his arguments. To many readers today, his views can seem utterly familiar, even banal. Sharing insights from teaching Mill for many years, the eminent philosopher Philip Kitcher makes a cogent case for why we should read this nineteenth-century thinker now. He portrays Mill as a conflicted humanist who wrestled with problems that are equally urgent in our own time. Kitcher reflects on Mill's ideas in the context of contemporary ethical, social, and political issues such as COVID mandates, gun control, income inequality, gay rights, and climate change. More broadly, he shows, Mill's writings help us cultivate our own capacities for critical thought and ethical decision making. Inviting readers into a conversation with Mill, this book shows that he supplies tools for thinking that are as valuable today as they were in the nineteenth century.

This volume gathers a collection of fourteen original articles discussing the concept of drive in classical German philosophy. Its aim is to offer a comprehensive historical overview of the concept of drive at the turn of the 19th century and to discuss it both historically and systematically. From the 18th century onward, the concept of drive started to play an important role in emerging disciplines such as biology, anthropology, and psychology. In these fields, the concept of drive was used to describe the inner forces of organic nature, or, more particularly, human urges and desires. But it was in the period of classical German philosophy that this concept developed into an important philosophical concept crucial to Kant's and post-Kantian idealistic systems. Reflecting the complexity of this concept, the volume first discusses historical sources of drive theories in Leibniz, Reimarus, and Blumenbach. Afterwards, the volume presents the philosophical accounts of drives in Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and also gives a systematic overview of other important drive theories that were formed around 1800 by Herder, Goethe, Jacobi, Novalis, Reinhold, Schiller, and Schopenhauer.

It is commonly argued that William Morris's notion of the good society is uniquely tolerant - a claim which this book tests, asking whether Victorian medievalism and the associated ideal of hospitality offered Morris the resources to develop a new conception of utopia, characterized by openness rather than classical exclusivity. This central theme is addressed across a range of artistic and intellectual contexts, from Victorian neo-feudalism to socialism and the Arts and Crafts Movement, and drawing from work in literature, architecture, anthropology, political theory, law, art history and translation. Together with an analysis of the roots and legacy of Morris's work, the book offers a detailed survey of his many projects. Dr MARCUS WAITHE lectures in Victorian Literature at the University of Sheffield.

How is it that we feel with fictional characters and so approve or disapprove of their actions? For many British Enlightenment thinkers writing at a time when sympathy was the pivot of ethics as well as poetics, this question was crucial. Asserting that the notion of the sympathetic imagination prominent in Romantic criticism and poetry originates in Moral Sentimentalism, this study traces the emergence of what became a key concept of intersubjectivity. It shows how, contrary to earlier traditions, Francis Hutcheson and his disciples successively established the imagination rather than reason as the pivotal faculty through which sympathy is rendered morally effective. Writing at the interface of ethics and poetics, Adam Smith, Lord Kames and others explored the sympathetic imagination as a means of both explaining emotional reader response and discovering moral distinctions. As a result, the sentimental novel became the sight of ethical controversy. Arguing against the dominant view of research which claims that the novel of sensibility is mostly uncritically sentimental, the book demonstrates that it is precisely in this genre that the sympathetic imagination is sceptically assessed in terms of its literary and moral potential.

Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan is one of the most important philosophical texts in the English language, and one of the most influential works of political philosophy ever written. This is the first critical edition based on a full study of the manuscript and printing history. It is also the first edition to place the English text side by side with Hobbes's later Latin version of it, complete with a set of notes in which the many passages that differ in the Latin are translated into English. So, for the first time, readers of Leviathan will be able to see clearly every stage of the development of the text. Both texts are fully annotated with explanatory notes. The editor's Introduction, which takes up the whole of the first volume, gives a path-breaking account of the work's context, sources, and textual history. This definitive edition will set the study of Hobbes's masterwork on a new basis. This hardback three-volume set is also available in paperback, in the following components: Three-volume set (comprising the Editorial Introduction, and The English and Latin Texts): 978-0-19-870908-4 Editorial Introduction (Volume 1): 978-0-19-870909-1 The English and Latin Texts (Volumes 2 and 3): 978-0-19-872396-7

A thoroughly researched and documented history of a seminal idea, from its inception by Augustine through to its various manifestations down the centuries, both inside and outside the Church

David and Mary Norton present the definitive scholarly edition of Hume's 'A Treatise of Human Nature', one of the greatest philosophical works ever written. This set comprises the two volumes of texts and editorial material, which are also available for purchase separately.

This Handbook explores the complex relations between two great schools of continental philosophy: German idealism and existentialism. While the existentialists are commonly thought to have rejected idealism as overly abstract and neglectful of the concrete experience of the individual, the chapters in this collection reveal that the German idealists in fact anticipated many key existentialist ideas. A radically new vision of the history of continental philosophy is thereby established, one that understands existentialism as a continuous development from German idealism. Key Features Operates at both the macro-level and micro-level, treating both the two schools of thought and the individual thinkers associated with them Explores the relations from shifting perspectives by examining how the German idealists anticipated existentialist themes and how the existentialists concretely drew on the work of the idealists Meticulously uncovers and documents many little-known points of contact between the German idealists and the existentialists Includes often neglected figures such as Jacobi and Trendelenburg This Handbook is an essential resource for researchers and advanced students interested in thinking critically about the broad development of continental philosophy. Moreover, the individual chapters on specific philosophers contain a wealth of information that will compel experts in the field to reconsider their views on these figures.

The book is a poetic and philosophic meditation on Thoreau's work, highlighting a "Pedagogy of awakening", that is, a path towards a non-dual and enlightening experience with Nature, a possible answer to the need of addressing the urgency and necessity of our troubled times. The urgency stems from a series of crises that humankind is now facing-epidemiological, environmental, social, political, economic; however, all those crises, as many have already observed, might be better understood as different faces, or different modes, of the same underlying crisis: the Anthropocene crisis, that is, the crisis whose ultimate origins lay at our feet, triggered by the way we, humans, inhabit-and impact-this world. It seems consensual that humankind has never faced such a terrible array of combined crises that, for the first time in history, puts our very survival as a species in danger. A dense fog has alighted on this small and beautiful blue planet, and one can only hope that the pains and suffering we have been through for so long are the pangs of a childbirth-a new beginning, a new promise-, and not the gaspings of a sclerotic organism that is on the brink of its final collapse. Thence, the necessity. The necessity of a new way of inhabiting this world. And I believe that an excellent guide to teach us how to do so is Henry David Thoreau.

This book develops a philosophy of aesthetic experience through two socially significant philosophical movements: early German Romanticism and early critical theory. In examining the relationship between these two closely intertwined movements, we see that aesthetic experience is not merely a passive response to art-it is the capacity to cultivate true personal autonomy, and to critique the social and political context of our lives. Art is political for these thinkers, not only when it paints a picture of society, but even more when it makes us aware of our deeply ingrained forms of experience in a transformative way. Ultimately, the book argues that we have to think of art as a form of truth that is not reducible to communicative rationality or scientific knowledge, and from which philosophy and politics can learn valuable lessons.

Marco Sgarbi tells a new history of epistemology from the Renaissance to Newton through the impact of Aristotelian scientific doctrines on key figures including Galileo Galilei, Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Isaac Newton. This history illuminates the debates philosophers had on deduction, meditation, regressus, syllogism, experiment and observation, the certainty of mathematics and the foundations of scientific knowledge. Sgarbi focuses on the Aristotelian education key philosophers received, providing a concrete historical framework through which to read epistemological re-definitions, developments and transformations over three centuries. The Age of Epistemology further highlights how Aristotelianism itself changed over time by absorbing doctrines from other philosophical traditions and generating a variety of interpretations in the process.

Nietzsche scholarship has fallen into the trap of taking seriously either the epistemological or the existential import of Nietzsche's views on truth at the neglect of the other, obscuring a full understanding of Nietzsche's philosophy, and the potential of his methodology to contribute to the problem of how we can effect deliberate transformation. "Nietzsche, Truth and Transformation" addresses this gap by treating both these dimensions of Nietzsche's approach to truth in depth and considering their interrelation. It addresses the philosophical problem of on what basis, if knowledge is always from a perspective, one can criticise modern humanity and culture, and how such critique can be actively responded to. As well as providing a novel interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophical method, this book shows the continuing relevance of Nietzsche for contemporary debates in epistemology and to concerns for cultural and social change.

Robert Brandom's rationalist philosophy of language, expounded in his highly influential Making It Explicit, has been the subject of intense scrutiny and debate, establishing him as one of the leading philosophers of his generation. In A Spirit of Trust, Brandom presents the fruits of his thirty-year engagement with Hegel. He submits that the Phenomenology of Spirit holds not only many lessons for today's philosophy of language, but also a moral lesson much needed in today's increasingly polarized societies, in the form of a postmodern ethics of trust. In this outstanding collection, leading philosophers examine and assess A Spirit of Trust. The twelve specially commissioned chapters explore topics including: negation and truth empirical and speculative concepts experience conflict and recognition varieties of idealism premodern ethical life and modern alienation a postmodern ethics of trust. Reading Brandom: On A Spirit of Trust is essential reading for all students and scholars of Brandom's work and those in philosophy of language. It will also be important reading for those studying nineteenth-century philosophy, particularly Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit.

What do we know about Hegel? What do we know about Marx? What do we know about democracy and totalitarianism? Communism and psychoanalysis? What do we know that isn't a platitude that we've heard a thousand times - or a self-satisfied certainty? Through his brilliant reading of Hegel, Slavoj Zizek - one of the most provocative and widely-read thinkers of our time - upends our traditional understanding, dynamites every cliche and undermines every conviction in order to clear the ground for new ways of answering these questions. When Lacan described Hegel as the most sublime hysteric , he was referring to the way that the hysteric asks questions because he experiences his own desire as if it were the Other's desire. In the dialectical process, the question asked of the Other is resolved through a reflexive turn in which the question begins to function as its own answer. We had made Hegel into the theorist of abstraction and reaction, but by reading Hegel with Lacan, Zizek unveils a Hegel of the concrete and of revolution - his own, and the one to come. This early and dazzlingly original work by Zizek offers a unique insight into the ideas which have since become hallmarks of his mature thought. It will be of great interest to anyone interested in critical theory, philosophy and contemporary social thought.

John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is widely regarded as one of the most influential and stirring pieces of political philosophy ever written. Ever relevant in our increasingly surveillance dominated culture, the essay argues strongly in favour of the moral rights of individuality, including rights of privacy and of freedom of expression. The Routledge Guidebook to Mill's On Liberty introduces the major themes in Mill's great book and aids the reader in understanding this key work, covering: the context of Mill's work and the background to his writing each separate part of the text in relation to its goals, meanings and impact the reception the book received when first seen by the world the relevance of Mill's work to modern philosophy. With further reading included for each chapter, this text is essential reading for all students of philosophy and political theory, and all those wishing to get to grips with this classic work of political philosophy.

Flix Ravaissons seminal philosophical essay, Of Habit, was first published in French in 1838. It traces the origins and development of habit and proposes the principle of habit as the foundation of human nature. This metaphysics of habit steers a path between materialism and idealism in one of the best and most sophisticated treatments of the topic. Ravaissons work was pivotal in the development of European thought and has had a significant influence on such key thinkers as Proust, Bergson, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and Deleuze. This edition makes this remarkable and hugely important work available to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Clare Carlisle and Mark Sinclair provide a comprehensive introduction to Ravaissons life, works and enduring influence that clearly situates Ravaissons text within the European philosophical tradition. The translation also includes a thorough commentary on the text that illuminates its arguments and its context.

Before Marcuse and Laing, before Heidegger and Sartre, even before Freud, the way was prepared for the anarcho-psychological critique of economic man, of all codes of ideology or absolute morality, and of scientific habits of mind. First published in 1974, this title traces this philosophical tradition to its roots in the nineteenth century, to the figures of Stirner, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and to their psychological demolition of the two alternative axes of social theory and practice, a critique which today reads more pertinently than ever, and remains unanswered. To understand this critique is crucial for an age which has shown a mounting revulsion at the consequences of the Crystal Palace, symbol at once of technologico-industrial progress and its rationalist-scientist ideology, an age whose imaginative preoccupations have telescoped onto the individual, and whose interest has switched from the social realm to that of anarchic, inner, 'psychological man'.

What is happening when someone has a mystical experience, such as "feeling at one with the universe" or "hearing God's voice?" Does philosophy provide tools for assessing such claims? Which claims can be dismissed as delusions and which ones convey genuine truths that might be universally meaningful? Valuable insights into such pressing questions can be found in the writings of Immanuel Kant, though few philosophical commentators have appreciated the implications beyond his famous "Copernican hypothesis." In Kant and Mysticism, Stephen R. Palmquist corrects this skewed view of Kant once and for all. Beginning with a detailed analysis of Kant's 1766 work Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Palmquist demonstrates that in Dreams Kant first discovers and explains his plan to write a new, "critical" philosophy that will revolutionize metaphysics by laying bare the limits of human reason. Palmquist shows how the same metaphorical relationship-between reason's dreams (metaphysics) and sensibility's dreams (mysticism)-permeates Kant's mature writings. Clarifying how Kant's final (unfinished) book, Opus Postumum, completes this dual project, Palmquist explains how the "critical mysticism" entailed by Kant's position has profound implications for contemporary understandings of religious and mystical experience, both by religious individuals and by philosophers seeking to understand such experiences.

This volume explores Nietzsche's decisive encounter with the ancient philosopher, Epicurus. The collected essays examine many previously unexplored and underappreciated convergences, and investigate how essential Epicurus was to Nietzsche's philosophical project through two interrelated overarching themes: nature and ethics. Uncovering the nature of Nietzsche's reception of, relation to, and movement beyond Epicurus, contributors provide insights into the relationship between suffering, health and philosophy in both thinkers; Nietzsche's stylistic analysis of Epicurus; the ethics of self-cultivation in Nietzsche's Epicureanism; practices of eating and thinking in Nietzsche and Epicurus; the temporality of Epicurean pleasure; the practice of the gay science, and Epicureanism and politics. The essays also provide creative comparisons with the Stoics, Hobbes, Mill, Guyau, Buddhism, and more. Nietzsche and Epicurus offers original and illuminating perspectives on Nietzsche's relation to the Hellenistic thinker, in whom Nietzsche saw the embodiment of the practice of philosophy as an art of existing.

The thought of G. W. F. Hegel (1770 -1831) has had a deep and lasting influence on a wide range of philosophical, political, religious, aesthetic, cultural and scientific movements. But, despite the far-reaching importance of Hegel's thought, there is often a great deal of confusion about what he actually said or believed. G. W. F. Hegel: Key Concepts provides an accessible introduction to both Hegel's thought and Hegel-inspired philosophy in general, demonstrating how his concepts were understood, adopted and critically transformed by later thinkers. The first section of the book covers the principal philosophical themes in Hegel's system: epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethical theory, political philosophy, philosophy of nature, philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, philosophy of history and theory of the history of philosophy. The second section covers the main post-Hegelian movements in philosophy: Marxism, existentialism, pragmatism, analytic philosophy, hermeneutics and French poststructuralism. The breadth and depth of G. W. F. Hegel: Key Concepts makes it an invaluable introduction for philosophical beginners and a useful reference source for more advanced scholars and researchers.

Happiness in Kant's Practical Philosophy: Morality, Indirect Duties, and Welfare Rights examines the role and normative implications of Kant's understanding of happiness for his moral, political, and legal philosophy. Kant's underlying assumptions about happiness are rarely overtly discussed or given much detail in his works. By bringing these assumptions to the fore, Alice Pinheiro Walla sheds light on some puzzling claims and on the scattered, sometimes contradictory remarks Kant makes about happiness. The book shows that happiness shapes or indirectly influences Kant's methodology and many of his conclusions, including his views on the nature of practical rationality, meta-ethics, the role of the state, and of political justification. The challenge with happiness is that it is impossible to know for certain what will make us happy, and what we take to be happiness changes over our lifetime. The book argues that Kant offers a distinctive strategy for dealing with this indeterminacy of happiness, one rooted in understanding our duties to ourselves and others. Happiness in Kant's Practical Philosophy provides a map of the areas in which the concept of happiness or considerations about the happiness of individuals appear in Kant's practical works and analyses the way they relate to central themes of his practical theory.