Myerson's collection draws together in their entirety the essential writings of the Transcendentalist group during its most active period, 1836-1844. It includes the major publications of the Dial, the writings on democratic and social reform (Brownson and Parker), the early poetry, nature writings and all of Emerson's major essays. The volume anticipates and complements the three major full-length works that followed the Transcendentalist period and are traditionally bought separately: Thoreau's Walden, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Myerson, whose credibility as a scholar in this period is unsurpassed, is the ideal editor to organize the volume.

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 three volume paperback set is also available in component parts: The Editorial Introduction (Volume 1), ISBN 978-0-19-870909-1, and The English and Latin Texts (Volumes 2 and 3), ISBN 978-0-19-872396-7. The hardback three-volume set is also available, ISBN 978-0-19-960262-9

Positive philosophy is the name that Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) gave to a new type of philosophizing that stands in contrast to the so-called negative philosophy that is predominant in modern rationalism. But what exactly is positive philosophy? Schelling on Truth and Person: The Meaning of Positive Philosophy argues that its meaning lies in a distinctive view of the human person as a seeker of truth. Truth is presented as historically woven in the movement of life with the phenomena of mythology and religion that reveal the human being's falling away from and return to the truth. Nikolaj Zunic demonstrates that this novel understanding of truth accompanies the development and expression of positive philosophy itself. The anthropological dimension of truth relates to self-knowledge, the soul, spirit, and personality, and Schelling's positive philosophy sheds light on the grand themes of the meaning of life, the ontological question (why is there something rather than nothing?), the enigma of knowledge and reason, and the affirmation of the existence of God. This book will appeal to students and scholars interested in Schelling's late philosophy as well as broader questions in philosophy concerning meaning, truth, human nature, and rationality.

"Hegel's Philosophy of Right" is a classic text in the history of Western political thought and one with which all serious students of political philosophy must engage. While it is a hugely important and exciting piece of philosophical writing, Hegel's ideas and style are notoriously difficult to understand and the content is particularly challenging. In "Hegel's Philosophy of Right: A Reader's Guide", David Rose explains the philosophical and political background against which the book was written and, taking each part of the book in turn, guides the reader to a clear understanding of the text as a whole. This is the ideal companion to study of this most influential and challenging of texts, offering guidance on philosophical and historical context; key themes; reading the text; reception and influence; and, further reading.

Leibniz published the Dissertation on Combinatorial Art in 1666. This book contains the seeds of Leibniz's mature thought, as well as many of the mathematical ideas that he would go on to further develop after the invention of the calculus. It is in the Dissertation, for instance, that we find the project for the construction of a logical calculus clearly expressed for the first time. The idea of encoding terms and propositions by means of numbers, later developed by Kurt Goedel, also appears in this work. In this text, furthermore, Leibniz conceives the possibility of constituting a universal language or universal characteristic, a project that he would pursue for the rest of his life. Mugnai, van Ruler, and Wilson present the first full English translation of the Dissertation, complete with a critical introduction and a comprehensive commentary.

Steven Nadler presents a collection of essays on the problem of causation in seventeenth-century philosophy. Occasionalism is the doctrine, held by a number of early modern Cartesian thinkers, that created substances are devoid of any true causal powers, and that God is the only real causal agent in the universe. All natural phenomena have God as their direct and immediate cause, with natural things and their states serving only as "occasions" for God to act. Rather than being merely an ad hoc, deus ex machina response to the mind-body problem bequeathed by Descartes to his followers, as it has often been portrayed in the past, occasionalism is in fact a full-blooded, complex and philosophically interesting account of causal relations. These essays examine the philosophical, scientific, theological and religious themes and arguments of occasionalism, as well as its roots in medieval views on God and causality.

Sensory experience seems to be the basis of our knowledge and conception of mind-independent things. The puzzle is to understand how that can be: even if the things we experience (apples, tables, trees etc), are mind-independent how does our sensory experience of them enable us to conceive of them as mind-independent? George Berkeley thought that sensory experience can only provide us with the conception of mind-dependent things, things which cannot exist when they aren't being perceived. It's easy to dismiss Berkeley's conclusion but harder to see how to avoid it. In this book, John Campbell and Quassim Cassam propose very different solutions to Berkeley's Puzzle. For Campbell, sensory experience can be the basis of our knowledge of mind-independent things because it is a relation, more primitive than thought, between the perceiver and high-level objects and properties in the mind-independent world. Cassam opposes this 'relationalist' solution to the Puzzle and defends a 'representationalist' solution: sensory experience can give us the conception of mind-independent things because it represents its objects as mind-independent, but does so without presupposing concepts of mind-independent things. This book is written in the form of a debate between two rival approaches to understanding the relationship between concepts and sensory experience. Although Berkeley's Puzzle frames the debate, the questions addressed by Campbell and Cassam aren't just of historical interest. They are among the most fundamental questions in philosophy.

In 1710 G. W. Leibniz published Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil. This book, the only one he published in his lifetime, established his reputation more than anything else he wrote. The Theodicy brings together many different strands of Leibniz's own philosophical system, and we get a rare snapshot of how he intended these disparate aspects of his philosophy to come together into a single, overarching account of divine justice in the face of the world's evils. At the same time, the Theodicy is a fascinating window into the context of philosophical theology in the seventeenth century. Leibniz had his finger on the intellectual pulse of his time, and this comes out very clearly in the Theodicy. He engages with all of the major lines of theological dispute of that time, demonstrating the encyclopaedic breadth of his understanding of the issues. Leibniz's Theodicy remains one of the most abiding systematic accounts of how evil is compatible with divine goodness. Any treatment of the problem of evil must, at some point, come to grips with Leibniz's proposed solution. This volume refreshes and deepens our understanding of this great work. Leading scholars present original essays which critically evaluate the Theodicy, providing a window on its historical context and giving close attention to the subtle and enduring philosophical arguments.

The Free Development of Each collects twelve essays on the history of German philosophy by Allen W. Wood, one of the leading scholars in the field. They explore moral philosophy, politics, society, and history in the works of Kant, Herder, Fichte, Hegel, and Marx, and share the basic theme of freedom, as it appears in morality and in politics. All of the essays have been re-edited and revised for this collection, and five are previously unpublished. They are accompanied by an Introduction which sets out the central, philosophical viewpoint of the volume, and a comprehensive bibliography.

Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel analyzes Hegel's philosophy of religion and develops its significance for ongoing debates about the relation between religion and politics as well as the history of the conceptualization of religion. One of the most vital currents in contemporary Hegel scholarship argues that Hegel radicalizes, rather than reneges upon, Kant's critique of metaphysics. Critics have claimed that this new scholarship cannot account for Hegel's treatment of religion. Addressing an important lacuna in the scholarship, Lewis argues that reading Hegel's philosophy of religion in relation to these non-traditional interpretations of his intellectual project as a whole generates a new understanding of Hegel as well as a new perspective on religion, politics, and modernity. In relation to the conceptualization of religion, Hegel's complex and multi-faceted account of religion reconciles common contrasts, presenting religion as both personal and social, both emotional and cognitive, both theoretical and practical. In relation to politics, it is public without being theocratic and gives a decisive importance to individual conscience. Attending closely to Hegel's social, political, and intellectual context, the book begins with Hegel's early concerns with a modern civil religion in the tumultuous 1790s. After analyzing Hegel's crucial engagement with post-Kantian idealism, Lewis elaborates Hegel's mature philosophy of religion as presented in his Berlin Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. This unique engagement between Hegel and the contemporary study of religion thus advances the non-traditionalist interpretation of Hegel's project as a whole and inspires a promising conception of religion that challenges those that have dominated both public discourse and religious studies scholarship.

"Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) has come to be recognized, not only as an important novelist, but also as a major theorist of early liberalism. This book provides a densely contextualized intellectual biography of Constant that imbeds his thought in French political developments during the revolutionary era. Vincent argues that Constant's distinctive liberal political stance emerged during the Directory and Consulate, earlier than other scholars have claimed. He also demonstrates that Constant's thought was deeply influenced by traditions of sensibility and pluralism. While political issues are privileged, the personal dimension of Constant's trajectory is not overlooked; indeed, the reader also learns much about Constant's tormented love life and in particular about his important and long relationship with Germaine de Sta'el"--

In a 2005 editorial in the British newspaper The Guardian, Kant was declared "the undefeated heavyweight philosophy champion of the world" because he had the "insight ... to remove psychology from epistemology, arguing that knowledge is inevitably mediated by space, time and forms within our minds." This is an accurate reflection of the consensus view of philosophers and scientists that Kant's accounts of space, time, nature, mathematics, and logic on the Critique of Pure Reason are rationalist, normativist, and nativist. Here, Wayne Waxman argues that this is untrue. Kant neither asserted nor implied that Euclid and Newton are the final word in their respective sciences. Rather than supposing that the psyche derives its fundamental forms from epistemology, he traced the first principles of ordinary, scientific, mathematical, and even logical knowledge to the psyche. Aristotelean logic, in particular, exhausts the sphere of the logical for Kant precisely because he deduced it entirely from psychological principles of the unity of consciousness, resulting in a demarcation of logic from mathematics that would set virtually everything regarded as logic today on the mathematical side of the ledger. Although Kant derived his conception of the unity of consciousness from Descartes, he gave it new life by eliminating its epistemological and metaphysical baggage, reducing it to its logical essence, and grounding what remained on a wholly original conception of the a priori unity of sensibility. Thus, far from departing from the course charted by British Empiricism, Kant's anatomy of the understanding is continuous with, indeed the culmination of, the psychologization of philosophy initiated by Locke, advanced by Berkeley, and developed to its empirical outrance by Hume. "This is a superb and very important book. It is certainly one of the best books written on Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason." -Klaus Steigleder, Professor of Applied Ethics, Ruhr-Universitat Bochum.

Presented in modern english for the first time, this is an accessible language edition of Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, the major prose work of the English 16th century. Hooker's monumental work was the first substantial contribution to theology, philosophy, and political thought written in English. It is important for the language and thought of all three fields and is a founding text of Anglophone cultural identity, in particular the self-understanding of the Church of England and its descendants in the worldwide Anglican Communion. Its great human interest lies in its author's personal engagement with the most divisive religious and political issues of his day. But the depth of Hooker's treatment of these issues and the extraordinary range of sources he brings to bear on them makes the Laws a book not only for its own age but for any time when human reason and the human spirit seek coherence. Its style is magnificent, a prototype for later works of English prose writing by the likes of Gibbon, Burke, and Ruskin. This edition includes a detailed introduction explaining the turbulent times in which Hooker came to write the laws and who he wrote them for. Arthur Stephen McGrade provides a tour of each of the eight books of the laws, examines their reception, and considers their legacy today.To assist the reader in navigating the text, a chronology of Hooker's life and times is also provides, along with a glossary, and a guide to the sources and persons Hooker mentions. Extensive indexes are provided.

Baruch Spinoza's Ethics was published in 1677 just after his death. Along with Descartes's Meditations (1641) and Leibniz's mature essays (1685-1714) the Ethics is regarded as among the most important philosophical work of continental Early Modern Europe. In this guide, Michael LeBuffe follows the Ethics closely and helps readers to understand Spinoza's masterpiece for themselves. The Ethics is a hugely ambitious work that offers strong, controversial views on almost every aspect of philosophy. In a geometrical style, in which propositions build upon definitions and axioms, Spinoza contends that there is only one substance, God, and that everything that exists, including God and human beings, is subject to absolute necessity. Nevertheless, he also defends rich theories of human action and ethics. Spinoza maintains that we can and should work to overcome the harmful influence of passion and enjoy salvation and blessedness. LeBuffe includes an introduction designed to supply first time readers with enough background to study the text productively. He then devotes a chapter to each of the Ethics' five parts: on God, mind, the affects or emotions, human bondage, and human freedom. The guide focuses on one manageable part of Spinoza's dense argument at a time, pausing frequently to raise and consider questions for further research. This accessible guide to the Ethics will help readers to understand the challenging text and to develop their own sophisticated interpretations of Spinoza.

Desmond M. Clarke presents new translations of three of the first feminist tracts to support explicitly the equality of the sexes. The alleged inferiority of women's nature and the corresponding roles that women were (in)capable of exercising in society were debated in Western culture from the civilization of ancient Greece to the establishment of early Christian churches. There had also been some proponents of women's superiority (in comparison with men) prior to the early modern period. In contrast with both of these claims, the seventeenth century witnessed the first publications that argued for the equality of men and women. Among the most articulate and original defenders of that view were Marie le Jars de Gournay, Anna Maria van Schurman, and Francois Poulain de la Barre. Gournay published The Equality of Men and Women in Paris in 1622, while one of her Dutch correspondents, Van Schurman, published in Latin her Dissertation in support of women's education in 1641. Poulain wrote a radical Physical and Moral Discourse concerning the Equality of Both Sexes in 1673, which he also published in Paris. These three feminist tracts transformed the language and conceptual framework in which questions about women's equality or otherwise were subsequently discussed. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, anonymous plagiarized editions and pirated translations of Poulain's work appeared in English, as 'vindications' of the rights of women. This edition includes new translations, from French and Latin, of these three key texts, and excerpts from the authors' related writings, together with an extensive introduction to the religious and philosophical context within which they argued against the traditional view of women's natural inferiority to men.

This volume collects contributions from leading scholars of early modern philosophy from a wide variety of philosophical and geographic backgrounds. The distinguished contributors offer very different, competing approaches to the history of philosophy. Many chapters articulate new, detailed methods of doing history of philosophy. These present conflicting visions of the history of philosophy as an autonomous sub-discipline of professional philosophy. Several other chapters offer new approaches to integrating history into one's philosophy. These do so by re-telling the history of recent philosophy. A number of chapters explore the relationship between history of philosophy and history of science. Among the topics discussed and debated in the volume are: the status of the principle of charity; the nature of reading texts; the role of historiography within the history of philosophy; the nature of establishing proper context.

The Essential Berkeley and Neo-Berkeley is an introduction to the life and work of one of the most significant thinkers in the history of philosophy and a penetrating philosophical assessment of his lasting legacy. David Berman goes beyond providing an introduction and gives us a broader and deeper appreciation of Berkeley as a philosopher. He argues for Berkeley's work as a philosophical system with coherence and important key themes hitherto unexplored and provides an analysis of why he thinks Berkeley's work has had such lasting significance. With a particular focus on Berkeley's dualist thinking and theories of 'mental types', Berman provides the reader with a key to unlocking the significance of this work. This introductory text will provide an insight into Berkeley's full body of work, the distinctiveness of his thinking and how deeply relevant this key thinker is to contemporary philosophy.

This book is an original philosophic exploration of the meaning of Kierkegaard's life, his thought, and his works. It makes a bold case for Kierkegaard's recognition of the concrete existence of the individual, including Kierkegaard himself, as crucial to the spiritual life. Written with delicate insight, and beautifully translated from Hebrew, this work offers valuable new turns to understanding the puzzling life-work of a modern giant of spiritual reflection.

Daniel Breazeale presents a critical study of the early philosophy of J.G. Fichte, and the version of the Wissenschaftslehre or 'doctrine of science' that Fichte developed in Jena between 1794 and 1799. The book is intended to assist serious readers in their efforts to understand Fichte's philosophy within the context of its own era and to orient them in the ongoing scholarly debates concerning the character and significance of the Wissenschaftslehre. Breazeale focuses on explaining what Fichte was (and was not) trying to accomplish and precisely how he proposed to accomplish this, as well as upon the difficulties implicit in his project and his often novel strategies for overcoming them. To this end, the volume addresses a variety of specific themes, issues, and problems that will be familiar to any student of Fichte's early writings and which continue to be fiercely debated by his interpreters. These include: the relationship of the finite human self to the purely self-positing I, transcendental philosophy as a 'pragmatic history of the mind', Fichte's 'synthetic' method of philosophizing, the standpoint of life vs. the standpoint of speculation, the extra-philosophical presuppositions and implications of the Wissenschaftslehre, the different senses of 'intellectual intuition' in Fichte's early writings, the controversial doctrine of the 'check' (Anstoss) upon the free actions of the I, the various theoretical and practical tasks of philosophy, the refutation of dogmatism and the 'choice' of a philosophical standpoint, the relationship of transcendental idealism to skepticism, the interests of reason, and the problematic 'primacy of the practical' in Fichte's thought.

Reading Hume on Human Understanding is a companion to the study of one of the great works of Western philosophy. The aims of the volume are: to provide a general overview of Hume's Enquiry on Human Understanding, in the context of Hume's philosophical work as a whole; to elucidate, analyse, and assess the philosophy of the Enquiry; and to discuss recent developments in Hume scholarship. The eminent contributors cover a broad range of topics which remain at the centre of philosophical debate today: meaning, induction, scepticism, belief, personal identity, causation, freedom, miracles, probability, and religious belief.

For all the fame he won as a writer during a brief but astonishingly fertile period in the 1750s and early 1760s, Rousseau thought the making of books essentially foreign to his nature; what mattered most to him was making things. Descended as he was from a long line of watchmakers, and raised in the artisanal heart of Geneva, he helped the promotion of craft associated with his one-time friend Diderot, whose Encyclopedie proclaimed the varied virtues of manual activity. Taking as its point of departure the moral and monetary economy of craftsmanship in eighteenth-century Switzerland, this elegant and original study shows how family tradition and his own unfinished apprenticeship to an engraver led Rousseau to a radical questioning of central issues of the day, particularly in light of the moral utilitarianism of his age. Rousseau's Hand highlights the vital place of handwork in the artistic and social writings of his middle years - from novels and plays to treatises and other forms of discourse - illuminating many matters traditionally seen as inconsistencies in his oeuvre as a whole. Abandoning creative writing for music copying in middle life, Rousseau celebrated homo faber's integrity along with the practicality and usefulness of handwork in the face of depersonalizing technological advance; yet the writings in which he extolled these virtues won him persecution as well as European celebrity. The paradox of craft's material essence in what he thought a world of abhorrent materialism and the problematic mechanization of ordinary existence exercised him throughout his life. Rousseau's Hand explores these preoccuptions.

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.

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.

This study describes the origin, development and crisis of the German nineteenth-century project of theology as science. Its narrative is focused on the two predominant theological schools during this period, the Tubingen School and the Ritschl School. Their work emerges as a grand attempt to synthesize historical and systematic theology within the twin paradigms of historicism and German Idealism. Engaging in detail with the theological, historical and philosophical scholarship of the story's protagonists, Johannes Zachhuber reconstructs the basis of this scholarship as a deep belief in the eventual unity of human knowledge. This idealism clashed with the historicist principles underlying much of the scholars' actual research. The tension between these paradigms ran through the entire period and ultimately led to the disintegration of the project at the end of the century. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, many of which have never been used in English speaking scholarship before, Zachhuber embeds the essentially theological story he presents within broader intellectual developments in nineteenth century Germany. In spite of its eventual failure, the project of theology as science in nineteenth century Germany is here described as a paradigmatic intellectual endeavour of European modernity with far-reaching significance beyond the confines of a single academic discipline.

Frederick C. Beiser presents a study of the two most important idealist philosophers in Germany after Hegel: Adolf Trendelenburg and Rudolf Lotze. Trendelenburg and Lotze dominated philosophy in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century. They were important influences on the generation after them, on Frege, Brentano, Dilthey, Kierkegaard, Cohen, Windelband and Rickert. Late German Idealism is the first book on this significant but neglected chapter in European philosophical history. It provides a general introduction to every aspect of the philosophy of Trendelenburg and Lotze-their logic, metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics; but it is also a study of their intellectual development, from their youth until their death. Their philosophy is placed in the context of their lives and culture.