Against jurisprudential reductions of Spinoza's thinking to a kind of eccentric version of Hobbes, this book argues that Spinoza's theory of natural right contains an important idea of absolute freedom, which would be inconceivable within Hobbes' own schema. Spinoza famously thought that the universe and all of the beings and events within it are fully determined by their causes. This has led jurisprudential commentators to believe that Spinoza has no room for natural right - in the sense that whatever happens by definition has a 'right' to happen. But, although this book demonstrates how Spinoza constructs a system in which right is understood as the work of machines, by fixing right as determinate and invariable, Stephen Connolly argues that Spinoza is not limiting his theory. The universe as a whole is capable of acting only in determinate ways but, he argues, for Spinoza these exist within a field of infinite possibilities. In an analysis that offers much to ongoing attempts to conceive of justice post-foundationally, the argument of this book is that Spinoza opens up right to a future of determinate interventions -as when an engineer, working with already-existing materials, improves a machine. As such, an idea of freedom emerges in Spinoza: as the artful rearrangement of the given into new possibilities. An exciting and original contribution, this book is an invaluable addition, both to the new wave of interest in Spinoza's philosophy, and to contemporary legal and political theory.

This book argues that "The Birth of Tragedy," Nietzsche's first book, does not mark a rupture with his prior philosophical undertakings but is, in fact, continuous with them and with his later writings as well. These continuities are displayed above all in the entanglement of his surface narratives, in the self-consuming artifice of his writing, in the interplay of his voices, posturings, and ironies--in a word, in his staging of meaning rather than in his advocacy of one position or another.
The author shows that many of the substantive elements of "The Birth of Tragedy" are reminiscent of Nietzsche's earlier revisions of philology and that they anticipate the later writings: the inversion of the Dionysian and Appollinian domains; the interest in the atomistic challenge to Platonism (one of Nietzsche's lifelong concerns); and the theory of the all-too-human subject that emerges as a cultural anthropology, a hauntingly present reminder of human pretensions and their limits, which is likewise a thread that runs through the whole of Nietzsche's oeuvre, critically undoing what his philosophy appears to erect. The author argues that the coherence of Nietzsche's writings up to and including "The Birth of Tragedy" is incontestable. It points to a fact that needs to be turned to account in any reading of "The Birth of Tragedy," namely that Nietzsche is a most unreliable witness to his own meaning.
The first parts of the study focus on broader issues: the relation of "The Birth of Tragedy" to the later writings; the problems of what the author calls "the metaphysics of appearances" (as opposed to the identification of the metaphysical as a realm lurking "behind" appearances); and the appearance--the apparition--of metaphysics in both the early and late works. In the latter parts of the study, the focus falls more narrowly on the formal and thematic complications in the narrative of "The Birth of Tragedy." This book, the author argues, is a self-standing, complexly organized, and complete piece of imagining that needs to be examined on its own terms. And so while the surrounding philosophical reflections that Nietzsche made prior to and at the time of "The Birth of Tragedy" are brought in as needed, for instance the notes on Kant, Schopenhauer, and Lange, the primary interest lies in the self-presentation of the work itself.

Kant once famously declared in the Prolegomena that "it was the objection of David Hume that first, many years ago, interrupted my dogmatic slumber." Abraham Anderson here offers an interpretation of this utterance, arguing that Hume roused Kant not (as has often been thought) by challenging the principle that "every event has a cause" which governs experience, but rather by attacking the principle of sufficient reason, the basis of both rationalist metaphysics and the cosmological proof of the existence of God. This suggestion, Anderson proposes, allows us to reconcile Kant's declaration with his later assertion that it was the Antinomy of pure reason - the clash of opposing theses - that first woke him from dogmatic slumber. For the Antinomy suspends the dogmatic principle of sufficient reason; in doing so, Anderson proposes, it is extending Hume's attack on that principle. This reading of Kant also explains why Kant speaks of "the objection of David Hume" after mentioning Hume's attack on metaphysics. The "objection" that Kant has in mind, Anderson argues, is a challenge to metaphysics, rather than to the foundations of empirical knowledge. Consequently, Anderson's analysis issues a new view of Hume himself-as primarily interested, not in the foundations of experience, but in the problem of metaphysics and theology. It thereby positions Kant and Hume as champions of the Enlightenment in its struggle with superstition. Shedding new light on the connection between two of the most influential figures in the history of philosophy, this volume will appeal not only to scholars of Kant, Hume, and early modern philosophy, but to philosophers and students interested in the history of philosophy and metaphysics generally.

Useful to researchers as well as practitioners looking for guidance on designing automated instruction systems, this book provides a snapshot of the state-of-the-art in this research area. In so doing, it focuses on the two critical problems: first, diagnosis of the student's current level of understanding or performance; and second, selection of the appropriate intervention that will transition the student toward expert performance. Containing a comprehensive set of principled approaches to automated instruction, diagnosis, and remediation, it is the first volume on the topic to provide specific, detailed guidance on how to develop these systems. Leading researchers and practitioners represented in this book address the following questions in each chapter: * What is your approach to cognitive diagnosis for automated instruction? * What is the theoretical basis of your approach? * What data support the utility of the approach? * What is the range of applicability of your approach? * What knowledge engineering or task analysis methods are required to support your approach? Referring to automated instruction as instruction that is delivered on any microprocessor-based system, the contributors to -- and editors of -- this book believe that is it possible for automated instructional systems to be more effective than they currently are. Specifically, they argue that by using artificial intelligence programming techniques, it is possible for automated instructional systems to emulate the desirable properties of human tutors in one-on-one instruction.

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.

This is the first comprehensive study in English of Bruno Bauer, a leading philosopher of the 1840s. Inspired by the philosophy of Hegel, Bauer led an intellectual revolution that influenced Marx and shaped modern secular humanism. In the process he offered a republican alternative to liberalism and socialism, criticized religious and political conservatism and set out the terms for the development of modern mass and industrial society.

Through extensive readings in philosophical, legal, medical, and imaginative writing, this book explores notions and experiences of being a person from European antiquity to Descartes. It offers quite new interpretations of what it was to be a person--to experience who-ness--in other times and places, involving new understandings of knowing, willing, and acting, as well as of political and material life, the play of public and private, passions and emotions.
The trajectory the author reveals reaches from the ancient sense of personhood as set in a totality of surroundings inseparable from the person, to an increasing sense of impermeability to the world, in which anger has replaced love in affirming a sense of self. The author develops his analysis through an impressive range of authors, languages, and texts: from Cicero, Seneca, and Galen; through Avicenna, Hildegard of Bingen, and Heloise and Abelard; to Petrarch, Montaigne, and Descartes.

Peter Bornedal provides an interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole in the context of 19th century philosophy of mind and cognition. The study explains Nietzsche's notion of truth; his epistemology; his notions of the split and fragmented subject, of master, slave, and priest; furthermore, it offers a new interpretation of the enigmatic "eternal recurrence". It also suggests how important aspects of Nietzsche's thinking can be read as a sophisticated critique of ideology. From studies in Nietzsche's work as a whole, not least in his so-called Nachgelassene Fragmente, the book reconstructs aspects of Nietzsche's thinking that have largely been under-described in especially the Anglo-Saxon Nietzsche-reception. The study makes the case that Nietzsche in his epistemology, his psychology, and his cognitive theory is responding to several scientific discoveries occuring during the 19th century. Read within the context of contemporary cognitive-psychological-evolutionary debates, Nietzsche's philosophy is seen as far more scientistic, and far less poetical-metaphysical, than it has in recent reception-history been received.

In this historically informed work in moral psychology, Rick Anthony Furtak develops a conceptual account of the emotions that addresses the conventional idea that reason and emotion stand in sharp opposition. Furtak begins with a critical examination of the ancient Stoic position that emotions should be avoided by rational human beings. He argues that, on the contrary, emotions ought to be understood as embodying a kind of authentic insight, which enables us to attain a meaningful and truthful way of seeing the world. Furtak's positive alternative to Stoicism draws heavily on the writings of Soren Kierkegaard, particularly "Either/Or" and "Works of Love," while also engaging a wide range of other relevant philosophical, literary, and religious sources. He argues that a morality of virtue and narrative awareness is necessary for accurate emotional perception, and then attempts to define a qualified value realism based upon a reverential trust in love as the ground of life as we know it. The outcome of this inquiry into the possibility of reliable emotion is an account of the ideal state in which a person could trust himself or herself to be rational in being passionate. Wisdom in Love makes an original contribution to the philosophy of the emotions and provides a new and compelling interpretation of Kierkegaard's work as a whole.

In recent years interest in the thought of Kierkegaard has grown dramatically, and with it the body of secondary literature has expanded so quickly that it has become impossible for even the most conscientious scholar to keep pace. The problem of the explosion of secondary literature is made more acute by the fact that much of what is written about Kierkegaard appears in languages that most Kierkegaard scholars do not know. Kierkegaard has become a global phenomenon, and new research traditions have emerged in different languages, countries and regions. The present volume is dedicated to trying to help to resolve these two problems in Kierkegaard studies. Its purpose is, first, to provide book reviews of some of the leading monographic studies in the Kierkegaard secondary literature so as to assist the community of scholars to become familiar with the works that they have not read for themselves. The aim is thus to offer students and scholars of Kierkegaard a comprehensive survey of works that have played a more or less significant role in the research. Second, the present volume also tries to make accessible many works in the Kierkegaard secondary literature that are written in different languages and thus to give a glimpse into various and lesser-known research traditions. The six tomes of the present volume present reviews of works written in Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, and Swedish.

Spinoza is commonly perceived as the great metaphysician of coherence. The Euclidean manner in which he presented his philosophy in the Ethics has led readers to assume they are facing a strict and consistent philosophical system that necessarily follows from itself. As opposed to the prevailing understanding of Spinoza and his work, The Role of Contradictions in Spinoza's Philosophy explores an array of profound and pervasive contradictions in Spinoza's system and argues they are deliberate and constitutive of his philosophical thinking and the notion of God at its heart. Relying on a meticulous and careful reading of the Theological-Political Treatise and the Ethics, this book reconstructs Spinoza's philosophy of contradictions as a key to the ascending three degrees of knowledge leading to the Amor intellectualis Dei. Offering an exciting and clearly-argued interpretation of Spinoza's philosophy, this book will interest students and scholars of modern philosophy and philosophy of religion, as well as Jewish studies. Yuval Jobani is Assistant Professor at the Department of Hebrew Culture Studies and the School of Education at Tel-Aviv University.

Berkeley's Principles: Expanded and Explained includes the entire classical text of the Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge in bold font, a running commentary blended seamlessly into the text in regular font and analytic summaries of each section. The commentary is like a professor on hand to guide the reader through every line of the daunting prose and every move in the intricate argumentation. The unique design helps today's students learn how to read and engage with one of modern philosophy's most important and exciting classics.

"Beyond Good and Evil" is a concise and comprehensive statement of Nietzsche's mature philosophy and is an ideal entry point into Nietzsche's work as a whole. Pithy, lyrical and densely complex, "Beyond Good and Evil" demands that its readers are already familiar with key Nietzschean concepts - such as the will-to-power, perspectivism or eternal recurrence - and are able to leap with Nietzschean agility from topic to topic, across metaphysics, psychology, religion, morality and politics. "Reading Nietzsche" explains the key concepts, the range of Nietzsche's concerns, and highlights Nietzsche's writing strategies that are the key to understanding his work and processes of thought. In its close analysis of the text, "Reading Nietzsche" reassesses this most creative of philosophers and presents a significant contribution to the study of his thought. In setting this analysis within a comprehensive survey of Nietzsche's ideas, the book is a guide both to this key work and to Nietzsche's philosophy more generally.

Blaise Pascal began as a mathematical prodigy, developed into a physicist and inventor, and had become by the end of his life in 1662 a profound religious thinker. As a philosopher, he was most convinced by the long tradition of scepticism, and so refused - like Kierkegaard - to build a philosophical or theological system. Instead, he argued that the human heart required other forms of discourse to come to terms with the basic existential questions - our nature, purpose and relationship with God. This introduction to the life and philosophical thought of Pascal is intended for the general reader. Strikingly illustrated, it traces the antithetical tensions in Pascal's life from his infancy, when he was said to have been placed under the spell of a sorceress, to his final years of extreme asceticism. Pascal stressed both the misery and greatness of humanity, our finitude and our comprehension of the infinite. The book shows how his life, philosophical thought and literary style can best be understood in the light of the paradoxical view of human nature. It covers the methods of argument and the central issues of the Provincial Letters and of the Pensees; the Introduction places Pascal's thought in the religious and political climate of seventeenth-century France, and a 'Chronology of the Life of Pascal' is also included.

Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy has proven to be not only one of the canonical texts of Western philosophy, but also the site of a great deal of interpretive activity in scholarship on the history of early modern philosophy over the last two decades. David Cunning's monograph proposes a new interpretation, which is that from beginning to end the reasoning of the Meditations is the first-person reasoning of a thinker who starts from a confused non-Cartesian paradigm and moves slowly and awkwardly toward a grasp of just a few of the central theses of Descartes' system. The meditator of the Meditations is not a full-blown Cartesian at the start or middle or even the end of inquiry, and accordingly the Meditations is riddled with confusions throughout. Cunning argues that Descartes is trying to capture the kind of reasoning that a non-Cartesian would have to engage in to make the relevant epistemic progress, and that the Meditations rhetorically models that reasoning. He proposes that Descartes is reflecting on what happens in philosophical inquiry: we are unclear about something, we roam about using our existing concepts and intuitions, we abandon or revise some of these, and then eventually we come to see a result as clear that we did not see as clear before. Thus Cunning's fundamental insight is that Descartes is a teacher, and the reader a student. With that reading in mind, a significant number of the interpretive problems that arise in the Descartes literature dissolve when we make a distinction between the Cartesian and non-Cartesian elements of the Meditations, and a better understanding of surrounding texts is achieved as well. This important volume will be of great interest to scholars of early modern philosophy.

The Idea of Beginning in Jules Lequier's Philosophy analyzes the work of an author mostly unknown in Anglophone countries, but who greatly influenced the trajectory of French philosophy over the last two centuries. Jules Lequier, in The Search for a First Truth, argues that beginning such a search is the goal towards which philosophy must tend. To achieve this, Lequier established a postulate, that of freedom against necessity, and set out a program as an inaugural gesture: "TO MAKE, not to become, but to make, and, in making, TO MAKE ONESELF." By the fertility of possible beginnings, the making in Lequier is always first and radical. As Ghislain Deslandes reveals in this exploration of Lequier's work, that something new is possible in philosophy after all, and that it should even be possible to invent it in other fields, applying the principle that "everything is to be relearned, and started again, but in another truth." Deslandes explores parallels between the "classical" antiphilosophers Pascal and Kierkegaard and Lequier, whose importance to French philosophy is today better documented and more widely recognized.

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.

In this book, Chris W. Surprenant puts forward an original position concerning Kant's practical philosophy and the intersection between his moral and political philosophy. Although Kant provides a detailed account of the nature of morality, the nature of human virtue, and how right manifests itself in civil society, he does not explain fully how individuals are able to become virtuous. This book aims to resolve this problem by showing how an individual is able to cultivate virtue, the aim of Kant's practical philosophy. Through an examination of Kant's accounts of autonomy, the state, and religion, and their effects on the cultivation of virtue, Surprenant develops a Kantian framework for moral education, and ultimately raises the question of whether or not Kantian virtue is possible in practice.

The Paradox of Philosophical Education: Nietzsche's New Nobility and the Eternal Recurrence in Beyond Good and Evil is the first coherent interpretation of Nietzsche's mature thought. Author Harvey Lomax pays particular attention to the problematic concept of nobility which concerned the philosopher during his later years. This sensitive reading of Nietzsche examines nobility as the philosopher himself must have seen it: as a true and powerful longing of the human soul, interwoven with poetry, philosophy, religion, and aristocratic politics. Both a close textual analysis and a thoughtful reconceptualization of Beyond Good and Evil, The Paradox of Philosophical Education penetrates beyond the philosopher's mask of caustic irony to the face of the real Nietzsche: a lover of wisdom whose work sought to resurrect it in all its Socratic splendor

Kant's Transcendental Deduction of the Categories: Unity, Representation, and Apperception is a distinctively new reading of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories in the Critique of Pure Reason. Lawrence J. Kaye has discovered a number of previously overlooked arguments and explanations, one of the most significant being an argument that demonstrates that the use of concepts requires the necessary unity of consciousness. He also provides a detailed investigation of Kant's account of representation in the first edition of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories and shows how it can be understood as a unique type of functional role view. This view of representation leads to a new understanding of Kant's blend of realism and idealism. Kant's notion of transcendental apperception (a priori self-awareness) is also carefully explained. Kaye shows that there is an extremely tight inter-relation between the unity of consciousness, representation, and apperception that constitutes a well-supported framework, one that offers a surprisingly strong set of replies to Hume's skeptical challenges. He applies this framework to produce a coherent and detailed explanation of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories, offering a thorough, paragraph-by-paragraph examination of the text in both editions. This work should not only be of interest to Kant scholars, but also to any philosophers and cognitive scientists who are invested in any of the following topics: the unity and structure of consciousness, concepts, mental representation, self-awareness, and realism and idealism.

German Idealism was one of the most fertile and important movements in the history of Western philosophy. This volume includes eleven chapters on all aspects and the period's most influential philosophers, including Kant and Hegel.

Typically, the first decade of Friedrich Nietzsche's career is considered a sort of precis to his mature thinking. Yet his philological articles, lectures, and notebooks on Ancient Greek culture and thought - much of which has received insufficient scholarly attention - were never intended to serve as a preparatory ground to future thought. Nietzsche's early scholarship was intended to express his insights into the character of antiquity. Many of those insights are not only important for better understanding Nietzsche; they remain vital for understanding antiquity today. Interdisciplinary in scope and international in perspective, this volume investigates Nietzsche as a scholar of antiquity, offering the first thorough examination of his articles, lectures, notebooks on Ancient Greek culture and thought in English. With eleven original chapters by some of the leading Nietzsche scholars and classicists from around the world and with reproductions of two definitive essays, this book analyzes Nietzsche's scholarly methods and aims, his understanding of antiquity, and his influence on the history of classical studies.

With his An Interpretation of Nietzsche's "On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life", Anthony K. Jensen shows how 'timely' Nietzsche's second "Untimely Meditation" really is. This comprehensive and insightful study contextualizes and analyzes a wide range of Nietzsche's earlier thoughts about history: teleology, typology, psychology, memory, classical philology, Hegelianism, and the role historiography plays in modern culture. On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life is shown to be a 'timely' work, too, insofar as it weaves together a number of Nietzsche's most important influences and thematic directions at that time: ancient culture, science, epistemology, and the thought of Schopenhauer and Burckhardt. Rather than dismiss it as a mere 'early' work, Jensen shows how the text resonates in Nietzsche's later perspectivism, his theory of subjectivity, and Eternal Recurrence. And by using careful philological analysis of the text's composition history, Jensen is in position to fully elucidate and evaluate Nietzsche's arguments in their proper contexts. As such Jensen's Interpretation should restore Nietzsche's second "Untimely Meditation" to a prominent place among 19th Century philosophies of history.

D'Holbach believed that the misery he saw in mankind around him was caused by religion and its superstitious beliefs - that there was a God who controlled destiny and would reward and punish individuals. The System of Nature was written to replace these delusions with a schema of understanding based solely on the physical workings of nature.

Margaret Cavendish (1623 - 1673) was a philosopher, poet, scientist, novelist, and playwright of the seventeenth century. Her work is important for a number of reasons. It presents an early and compelling version of the naturalism that is found in current-day philosophy; it offers important insights that bear on recent discussions of the nature and characteristics of intelligence and the question of whether or not the bodies that surround us are intelligent or have an intelligent cause; it anticipates some of the central views and arguments that are more commonly associated with figures like Thomas Hobbes and David Hume. This is the first full account of Cavendish's philosophy and covers the whole span of her work. David Cunning begins with an overview of Cavendish's life and work before assessing her contribution to a wide range of philosophical subjects, including her arguments concerning materialism, experimentation, the existence of God, social and political philosophy and free will and compatibilism. Setting Cavendish in both historical and philosophical context, he argues that like Spinoza she builds on central tenets of Descartes' philosophy and develops them in a direction that Descartes himself would avoid. She defends a plenum metaphysics according to which all individuals are causally interdependent, and according to which the physical universe is a larger individual that constitutes all of reality. Cavendish is essential reading for students of seventeenth-century philosophy, early modern philosophy and seventeenth-century literature.