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.

This collection of essays investigates the darker aspects of Diderot, writer, art critic, philosopher and encyclopediste. The chapters focus on the schism between positive images of the Enlightenment and an undercurrent of disorder, transgression and clandestine intellectual and social practices. Diderot's role in this fissure is critically scrutinised through an analysis of the interface between Enlightenment and its dark side. In his reticence before authority and censorship, in the richness and complexity of his literary and philosophical works, in the emotional conflict of his theatre, or in his innovative aesthetic vision, Diderot consistently evokes the darker side of the Enlightenment. Cet ouvrage interroge l'aspect plus sombre de Diderot, ecrivain, critique d'art, philosophe et encyclopediste. Les contributeurs traitent du clivage entre d'un cote, les images positives des Lumieres et, de l'autre, le desordre, la revolte, la transgression, les pratiques sociales et intellectuelles clandestines qui en constituent son corollaire parfois sous-jacent. Le role de Diderot au coeur de ce clivage sera analyse dans le cadre d'une interrogation plus large du couple Ombres/Lumieres. Diderot incarne - dans ses reticences devant les autorites et la censure, dans la richesse et la complexite de ses ouvrages litteraires et philosophiques, dans les conflits affectifs de son theatre, ou encore dans sa vision esthetique innovatrice - une alternative, plus sombre, a la marche des Lumieres triomphantes.

Hegel's philosophy has witnessed periods of revival and oblivion, at times considered to be an unrivalled and all-embracing system of thought, but often renounced with no less ardour. This book renews the dialogue with Hegel by looking at his legacy as a source of insight and judgement that helps us rethink contemporary economics. This book focuses on a concept of institution which is equally important for Hegel's political philosophy and for economic theory to date. The key contributions of this Hegelian perspective on economics lead us to the synthesis of traditional approaches and new ideas gained in economic experiments and advanced by neuroeconomists, sociologists and cognitive scientists. The proper account of contemporary 'civil society' involves comprehending it as a historically evolving totality of individual minds, ideas and intersubjective structures that are mutually dependent, tied by recognitive relations, and assert themselves as a whole in the ongoing performative movement of 'objective spitit'. The ethics of recognition is paired with the ethics of associations that supports moral principles and gives them true, concrete universality. This unusual constellation of seemingly remote fields suggests that Hegel, read in a pragmatist mode, anticipated the new theories and philosophies of extended mind, social cognition and performativity. By providing a new conceptual apparatus and reformulating the theory of institutions in the light of this new synthesis, this book claims to give new meaning both to Hegel as interpreted from today, and to the social sciences. Seen from this perspective, such phenomena as cooperation in games, personal identity or justice in the version of Amartya Sen's 'realization-focused comparisons' are reinscribed into the logic of institutional theory. This 'Hegel' clearly goes beyond the limits of philosophical discussion and becomes a decisive reference for economists, sociologists, political scientists and other scholars who study the foundations and consequences of human sociality and try to explore and design the institutions necessary for a worthy common life.

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.

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.

Satire was core to the work of Thomas Hobbes although his critics also used it as a weapon to ridicule him. Condren uses Hobbes as an example to demonstrate that an examination of the persona is needed to advance our understanding of a writer's philosophy.

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.

Debates in Nineteenth-Century European Philosophy offers an engaging and in-depth introduction to the philosophical questions raised by this rich and far reaching period in the history of philosophy. Throughout thirty chapters (organized into fifteen sections), the volume surveys the intellectual contributions of European philosophy in the nineteenth century, but it also engages the on-going debates about how these contributions can and should be understood. As such, the volume provides both an overview of nineteenth-century European philosophy and an introduction to contemporary scholarship in this field. KEY DEBATES IN EUROPEAN NINETEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY Kristin Gjesdal (ed.) Contributors Editor's Introduction I. Kantian Presuppositions 1. The Reception of the Critique of Pure Reason in German Idealism by Rolf-Peter Horstmann 2. The Reception of the Critique of Pure Reason in German Idealism: A Response to Rolf-Peter Horstmann by Paul Guyer II. Fichte (1762-1814) 3. Fichte's Original Insight by Dieter Henrich 4. Fichte's Original Insight: Dieter Henrich's Pioneering Piece Half A Century Later by Gunter Zoeller III. Romanticism 5. Philosophical Foundations of Early Romanticism by Manfred Frank 6. Response to Manfred Frank, "Philosophical Foundations of Early Romanticism" by Michael N. Forster IV. Hegel (1770-1831) 7. From Desire to Recognition: Hegel's Account of Human Sociality by Axel Honneth 8. On Honneth's Interpretation of Hegel's "Phenomenology of Self-Consciousness" by Robert B. Pippin V. Schelling (1775-1854) 9. The Nature of Subjectivity: The Critical and Systematic Function of Schelling's Philosophy of Nature by Dieter Sturma 10. Nature as Unconditioned? The Critical and Systematic Function of Schelling's Early Works by Dalia Nassar VI. Schopenhauer (1788-1860) 11. The Real Essence of Human Beings: Schopenhauer and the Unconscious Will by Christopher Janaway 12. Emancipation from the Will by David E. Wellbery VII. Comte (1798-1857) 13. Auguste Comte and Modern Epistemology by Johan Heilbron 14. Why Was Comte an Epistemologist? by Robert C. Scharff VIII. Mill (1806-1873) 15. Mill: The Principle of Liberty by John Rawls 16. John Rawls on Mill's Principle of Liberty by John Skorupski IX. Darwin (1809-1882) 17. Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection and its Moral Purpose by Robert J. Richards 18. Response to Richards by Gabriel Finkelstein X. Kierkegaard (1813-1855) 19. Kierkegaard's On Authority and Revelation by Stanley Cavell 20. A Nice Arrangement of Epigrams: Stanley Cavell on Soren Kierkegaard by Stephen Mulhall XI. Marx (1818-1883) 21. Marx's Metacritique of Hegel: Synthesis Through Social Labor by Jurgen Habermas 22. Epistemology and Self-Reflection in the Young Marx by Espen Hammer XII. Dilthey (1833-1911) 23. Wilhelm Dilthey after 150 Years (Between Romanticism and Positivism) by Hans-Georg Gadamer 24. Gadamer on Dilthey by Frederick C. Beiser XIII. Nietzsche (1844-1900) 25. Nietzsche's Minimalist Moral Psychology by Bernard Williams 26. Naturalism, Minimalism, and the Scope of Nietzsche's Philosophical Psychology by Paul Katsafanas XIV. Freud (1856-1939) 27. Bad Faith and Falsehood by Jean-Paul Sartre 28. Freud by Sebastian Gardner XV. Twentieth-Century Developments 29. Analytic and Conversational Philosophy by Richard Rorty 30. Not Knowing What the Right Hand is Doing: Rorty's "Ambidextrous" Analytic Redescription of Nineteenth-Century Hegelian Philosophy by Paul Redding References for Republished Texts Accompanying Original Works (Suggested Reading)

Debates in Nineteenth-Century European Philosophy offers an engaging and in-depth introduction to the philosophical questions raised by this rich and far reaching period in the history of philosophy. Throughout thirty chapters (organized into fifteen sections), the volume surveys the intellectual contributions of European philosophy in the nineteenth century, but it also engages the on-going debates about how these contributions can and should be understood. As such, the volume provides both an overview of nineteenth-century European philosophy and an introduction to contemporary scholarship in this field. KEY DEBATES IN EUROPEAN NINETEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY Kristin Gjesdal (ed.) Contributors Editor's Introduction I. Kantian Presuppositions 1. The Reception of the Critique of Pure Reason in German Idealism by Rolf-Peter Horstmann 2. The Reception of the Critique of Pure Reason in German Idealism: A Response to Rolf-Peter Horstmann by Paul Guyer II. Fichte (1762-1814) 3. Fichte's Original Insight by Dieter Henrich 4. Fichte's Original Insight: Dieter Henrich's Pioneering Piece Half A Century Later by Gunter Zoeller III. Romanticism 5. Philosophical Foundations of Early Romanticism by Manfred Frank 6. Response to Manfred Frank, "Philosophical Foundations of Early Romanticism" by Michael N. Forster IV. Hegel (1770-1831) 7. From Desire to Recognition: Hegel's Account of Human Sociality by Axel Honneth 8. On Honneth's Interpretation of Hegel's "Phenomenology of Self-Consciousness" by Robert B. Pippin V. Schelling (1775-1854) 9. The Nature of Subjectivity: The Critical and Systematic Function of Schelling's Philosophy of Nature by Dieter Sturma 10. Nature as Unconditioned? The Critical and Systematic Function of Schelling's Early Works by Dalia Nassar VI. Schopenhauer (1788-1860) 11. The Real Essence of Human Beings: Schopenhauer and the Unconscious Will by Christopher Janaway 12. Emancipation from the Will by David E. Wellbery VII. Comte (1798-1857) 13. Auguste Comte and Modern Epistemology by Johan Heilbron 14. Why Was Comte an Epistemologist? by Robert C. Scharff VIII. Mill (1806-1873) 15. Mill: The Principle of Liberty by John Rawls 16. John Rawls on Mill's Principle of Liberty by John Skorupski IX. Darwin (1809-1882) 17. Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection and its Moral Purpose by Robert J. Richards 18. Response to Richards by Gabriel Finkelstein X. Kierkegaard (1813-1855) 19. Kierkegaard's On Authority and Revelation by Stanley Cavell 20. A Nice Arrangement of Epigrams: Stanley Cavell on Soren Kierkegaard by Stephen Mulhall XI. Marx (1818-1883) 21. Marx's Metacritique of Hegel: Synthesis Through Social Labor by Jurgen Habermas 22. Epistemology and Self-Reflection in the Young Marx by Espen Hammer XII. Dilthey (1833-1911) 23. Wilhelm Dilthey after 150 Years (Between Romanticism and Positivism) by Hans-Georg Gadamer 24. Gadamer on Dilthey by Frederick C. Beiser XIII. Nietzsche (1844-1900) 25. Nietzsche's Minimalist Moral Psychology by Bernard Williams 26. Naturalism, Minimalism, and the Scope of Nietzsche's Philosophical Psychology by Paul Katsafanas XIV. Freud (1856-1939) 27. Bad Faith and Falsehood by Jean-Paul Sartre 28. Freud by Sebastian Gardner XV. Twentieth-Century Developments 29. Analytic and Conversational Philosophy by Richard Rorty 30. Not Knowing What the Right Hand is Doing: Rorty's "Ambidextrous" Analytic Redescription of Nineteenth-Century Hegelian Philosophy by Paul Redding References for Republished Texts Accompanying Original Works (Suggested Reading)

Philosophers working within the pragmatist tradition have pictured their relation to Kant and Kantianism in very diverse terms: some have presented their work as an appropriation and development of Kantian ideas, some have argued that pragmatism is an approach in complete opposition to Kant. This collection investigates the relationship between pragmatism, Kant, and current Kantian approaches to transcendental arguments in a detailed and original way. Chapters highlight pragmatist aspects of Kant's thought and trace the influence of Kant on the work of pragmatists and neo-pragmatists, engaging with the work of Peirce, James, Lewis, Sellars, Rorty, and Brandom, among others. They also consider to what extent contemporary approaches to transcendental arguments are compatible with a pragmatist standpoint. The book includes contributions from renowned authors working on Kant, pragmatism and contemporary Kantian approaches to philosophy, and provides an authoritative and original perspective on the relationship between pragmatism and Kantianism.

Franz Brentano is one of the founding fathers of twentieth century philosophy, celebrated for introducing the concept of intentionality to philosophy as well as making significant contributions to ethics and logic. His work exerted great influence on major philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, but also philosophers travelling in the opposite direction, such Gottlob Frege. He counted Sigmund Freud amongst his students and Freud expressed great admiration for his teacher in several letters. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint is Brentano's most important and brilliant work. It helped to establish psychology as a scientific discipline, but did so in a highly original and distinctive manner by arguing for a form of introspectionism. Brentano argued that consciousness is always unified and that the hallmark of the mind is that one's thoughts are always directed towards something - his famous theory of 'intentionality' - arguments that have deep implications not just for philosophy but psychology, cognitive science and consciousness studies. With a new foreword by Tim Crane.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was a British philosopher, political economist, civil servant, and Member of Parliament. An advocate of utilitarianism, he was one of the most influential liberal thinkers of the 19th century.

It is difficult to imagine a world without common sense, the distinction between truth and falsehood, the belief in some form of morality or an agreement that we are all human. But Friedrich Nietzsche did imagine such a world, and his work has become a crucial point of departure for contemporary critical theory and debate. This volume introduces this key thinker to students of literary and cultural studies, offering a lucid account of Nietzsche's thought on:
* anti-humanism
* good and evil
* the Overman
* nihilism
* the Will to Power.
Lee Spinks prepares readers for their first encounter with Nietzsche's most influential texts, enabling them to begin to apply his thought in studies of literature, art and contemporary culture.

Kierkegaard's Concepts is a comprehensive, multi-volume survey of the key concepts and categories that inform Kierkegaard's writings. Each article is a substantial, original piece of scholarship, which discusses the etymology and lexical meaning of the relevant Danish term, traces the development of the concept over the course of the authorship, and explains how it functions in the wider context of Kierkegaard's thought. Concepts have been selected on the basis of their importance for Kierkegaard's contributions to philosophy, theology, the social sciences, literature and aesthetics, thereby making this volume an ideal reference work for students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines.

Moral Self-Regard draws on the work of Marcia Baron, Joseph Butler and Allen Wood, among others in this first extensive study of the nature, foundation and significance of duties to oneself in Kant's moral theory.

This book explores and details the actuality (Aktualitat) of Hegel's social and political philosophy--its relevance, topicality, and contemporary validity. It asserts--against the assumptions of those in a wide range of traditions--that Hegel's thought not only remains relevant to debates in current social and political theory, but is capable of productively enhancing and enriching those debates. The book is divided into three main sections. Part 1 considers the actuality of Hegel's social and political thought in the context of a constructed dialogues with later social and political theorists, including Marx, Adorno, Habermas, and Rawls. Part 2 explores Hegel's internal criticism of Enlightenment rationality as well as the unique manner in which his thought reaffirms both the classical tradition of politics and the Christian conception of freedom in order to deepen and further develop our understanding of modernity and modern secularity. Part 3 considers Hegel's contribution to current theorizing about globalization.

Nietzschea (TM)s legacy for political thought is a highly contested area of research today. With papers representing a broad range of positions, this collection takes stock of the central controversies (Nietzsche as political / anti-political thinker? Nietzsche and / contra democracy? Arendt and / contra Nietzsche?), as well as new research on key concepts (power, the agon, aristocracy, friendship i.a.), on historical, contemporary and futural aspects of Nietzschea (TM)s political thought. International contributors include well-known names (Conway, Ansell-Pearson, Hatab, Taureck, Patton, Connolly,Villa, van Tongeren) and young emerging scholars from various disciplines.

This volume is a revised and improved edition of the auction catalogue of Kierkegaard's private library. The catalogue has long served as one of the most valuable tools in Kierkegaard studies and has been actively used by commentators, translators and researchers for tracing the various sources of Kierkegaard's thought. With the catalogue in hand, one can determine with some degree of probability what books he read and what editions he used for his information about specific authors. The present volume represents the fourth printing of the catalogue, and it differs from its predecessors in many respects. The previous editions contained incomplete, erroneous and inconsistent bibliographical information about the works in the catalogue. The primary goal of the present edition was to obtain all of the books and check their title pages for the precise bibliographical information. The result is an accurate and reliable edition of the catalogue that conforms to the needs of Kierkegaard studies in the digital age.

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.

Best known for reviving the tradition of classical liberalism, F. A. Hayek was also a prominent scholar of the philosopher John Stuart Mill. One of his greatest undertakings was a collection of Mill's extensive correspondence with his longstanding friend and later companion and wife, Harriet Taylor-Mill. Hayek first published the Mill-Taylor correspondence in 1951, and his edition soon became required reading for any study of the nineteenth-century foundations of liberalism. This latest addition to the Collected Works of F. A. Hayek series showcases the fascinating intersections between two of the most prominent thinkers from two successive centuries. Hayek situates Mill within the complex social and intellectual milieu of nineteenth-century Europe-as well as within twentieth-century debates on socialism and planning-and uncovers the influence of Taylor-Mill on Mill's political economy. The volume features the Mill-Taylor correspondence and brings together for the first time Hayek's related writings, which were widely credited with beginning a new era of Mill scholarship.

How should one respond, personally or theologically, to genocide committed on one's behalf? After the Allied bombing of Darmstadt, Germany, in 1944, some Lutheran young women perceived their citys destruction as an expression of God's wratha punishment for Hitlers murder of six million Jews, purportedly on behalf of the German people. George Faithful tells the story of a number of these young women, who formed the Ecumenical Sisterhood of Mary in 1947 in order to embrace lives of radical repentance for the sins of the German people against God and against the Jews. Under Mother Basilea Schlink, the sisters embraced an ideology of collective national guilt. According to Schlink, a handful of true Christians were called to lead their nation in repentance, interceding and making spiritual sacrifices as priests on its behalf and saving it from looming destruction. Schlink explained that these ideas were rooted in her reading of the Hebrew Bible; in fact, Faithful discovers, they also bore the influence of German nationalism. Schlinks vision resulted in penitential practices that dominated the life of her community. While the women of the sisterhood were subject to each other, they elevated themselves and their spiritual authority above that of any male leaders. They offered female and gender-neutral paradigms of self-sacrifice as normative for all Christians. Mothering the Fatherland shows how the sisters overturned German Protestant norms for gender roles, communal life, and nationalism in their pursuit of redemption.

The topic of George Berkeley and common sense is challenging: Berkeley claims that matter does not exist and at the same time he writes a whole book (Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous) on how his system agrees with common sense. However, once we understand why he felt so confident that his immaterialism is not an affront to the plain man, we will get a better insight into the metaphysical system itself. The solution involves a more prominent role for science in immaterialism, which justifies the more revisionist aspects of the overall metaphysics, together with a new role of common sense in philosophy. Berkeley was a successful scientist in his own right; his Theory of Vision defined the topic of psychology of vision for the next two centuries. His metaphysics grows naturally out of his science, the crucial term "idea" being a psychological entity anchored in his theory of vision. At the same time, immaterialism is friendlier to the plain man in not redefining key words of his vocabulary, such as "know", "real", and "certain", unlike the then-reigning representative realism harboring skeptical tendencies. Traditionally, common sense has been taken to include the belief that external objects exist. Once we get rid of this philosophical travesty of the plain man's beliefs identifying dualistic metaphysics with common sense, we will be able to appreciate the seminal importance of immaterialism and its twentieth-century analogies in the works of J. L. Austin, Wittgenstein, and others.

Addresses the nature of the influence of the European Enlightenment on the beliefs and practice of the Protestant missionaries who went to Asia and Africa from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, particularly British missions and the formative role of the Scottish Enlightenment on their thinking.

The central theme of this collection of essays, first published in 1978, is the basic tension in Nietzsche, and so in his work, between the urge to weave a satisfying web out of reality and the equally strong compulsion to expose its painful truths. The book aims to stress, not to play down, the embarassing and fruitful fact that he cannot be neatly pigeonholed either as a literary figure or as a professional philosopher. The book meets a long-felt need for a study in English of both the literary and the philosophical aspects of Nietzsche's work, based on his authentic texts, and will be welcomed by all students of modern European thought and Literature.

Kierkegaard's Concepts is a comprehensive, multi-volume survey of the key concepts and categories that inform Kierkegaard's writings. Each article is a substantial, original piece of scholarship, which discusses the etymology and lexical meaning of the relevant Danish term, traces the development of the concept over the course of the authorship, and explains how it functions in the wider context of Kierkegaard's thought. Concepts have been selected on the basis of their importance for Kierkegaard's contributions to philosophy, theology, the social sciences, literature and aesthetics, thereby making this volume an ideal reference work for students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines.