Contrary to the long-cherished opinion of John Locke's infatuation with natural law, there is abundant proof that the amount of intellectual energy Locke devoted to his philosophical views was nowhere as narrow as the attempt to justify a natural law outlook. John Locke's Moral Revolution critiques two traditional approaches to John Locke's philosophy. The first approach interprets John Locke as committed to justifying his early his early Christian / Aristotelian views of the law of nature. The second approach sees Locke attempting to manage a cluster of inconsistent moral views. In this new work, author Samuel Zinaich, Jr. argues that Locke attempts to establish a solid underpinning for religious, moral, and political ideas upon the philosophy of corpuscularism.

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

In this book, first published in 1973, the editor has drawn heavily on Bentham's manuscripts and has tried to provide a coherent statement of Bentham's legal and political thought. Unlike Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes or Mill, Bentham did not write one single work containing the basic principles of his legal and political philosophy. This titles presents Bentham's work in a systematic manner, and will be of interest to students of philosophy, politics and history.

The Limits of Reason in Hobbes's Commonwealth explores Hobbes's attempt to construct a political philosophy of enduring peace on the foundation of the rational individual. Hobbes's rational individual, motivated by self-preservation, obeys the laws of the commonwealth and thus is conceived as the model citizen. Yet Hobbes intimates that there are limits to what such an actor will do for peace, and that the glory-seeker - "too rarely found to be presumed on" - is capable of a generosity that is necessary for political longevity. Michael P. Krom identifies this as a fundamental contradiction in Hobbes's system: he builds the commonwealth on the rational actor, yet acknowledges the need for the irrational glory-seeker. Krom argues that Hobbes's attempt to establish a "king of the proud" fails to overcome the limits of reason and the precariousness of politics. This book synthesizes recent work on Hobbes's understanding of glory and political stability, challenging the view that Hobbes succeeds in incorporating glory-seekers into his political theory and explores the implications of this for contemporary political philosophy after Rawls.

Volume 4 of "The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche" contains two works, "Mixed Opinions and Maxims" (1879) and "The Wanderer and His Shadow" (1880), originally published separately, then republished together in the 1886 edition of Nietzsche's works. They mingle aphorisms drawn from notebooks of 1875-79, years when worsening health forced Nietzsche toward an increasingly solitary existence. Like its predecessor, "Human, All Too Human II" is above all an act of resistance not only to the intellectual influences that Nietzsche felt called upon to critique, but to the basic physical facts of his daily life. It turns an increasingly sharply formulated genealogical method of analysis toward Nietzsche's persistent concerns--metaphysics, morality, religion, art, style, society, politics and culture. The notebook entries included here offer a window into the intellectual sources behind Nietzsche's evolution as a philosopher, the reading and self-reflection that nourished his lines of thought. The linking of notebook entries to specific published aphorisms, included in the notes, allows readers of Nietzsche in English to trace for the first time the intensive process of revision through which he transformed raw notebook material into the finely crafted sequences of aphoristic reflection that signal his distinctiveness as a philosophical stylist.

Drawing on Nietzsche's prolific early notebooks and correspondence, this book challenges the polarized picture of Nietzsche as a philosopher who abandoned classical philology. It traces the contours of his earliest philological thinking and opens the way to a fresh view of his later thinking. The book's primary aim is to displace the developmental logic that has been a controlling factor in Nietzsche's reception, namely the assumption that Nietzsche passed from a precritical phase to an enlightened phase in which he liberated himself from metaphysics. A subsidiary aim is to decenter the view that fastens onto "The Birth of Tragedy" as a dramatic turning point in Nietzsche's thought.
For Nietzsche, questions about the religion, art, and history of the classical world are bound up with fundamental questions about knowledge, culture, history, and the status of the subject. From his early writings, Nietzsche finds it difficult to separate questions about modernity from those about antiquity. Nor are the problems of classical philology ever far from his mind, even toward the end of his career. By showing how frequently the "later" Nietzsche appears in the early writings, the author hopes to provoke reflection on the adequacy of current characterizations of Nietzsche, and not just to raise questions about the periodization of his life and thought.
The book traces Nietzsche's efforts, throughout his career, to determine the ways in which philosophy and philology are symptomatic of modern cultural habits, ideologies, and imaginings. In the form of a cultural anthropology, he may even have outlined the most trenchant model still available for confronting the ghostly specters that haunt Western society. Nietzsche's incessant preoccupation with the symptomatology of the modern subject--its ailments, its allusions, and the signs of its irrepressible presence--unifies his oeuvre more than any other single question.
The author argues that Nietzsche arrived at this inquiry from a philological perspective, according to which subjective identity is viewed as part of a historical process. Embodied in practices, habits, and institutions, these inheritances of culture--of which classical antiquity is a crucial part--undergo the vicissitudes of transmission, decipherment, reconstruction, reception, and especially falsification (whether through unwilled or deliberate misunderstanding). All of these factors are intimately bound up with the ways in which subjects form themselves.

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.

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

This book connects Schopenhauer's philosophy with transcendental idealism by exploring the distinctly Kantian roots of his pessimism. By clearly discerning four types of coming to knowledge, it demonstrates how Schopenhauer's epistemology can enlighten this connection with other areas of his philosophy. The individual chapters in this book discuss how these knowledge types-immediate or mediate, representational or non-representational-relate to Schopenhauer's metaphysics, ethics and action, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and asceticism. In each of these areas, a specific sense of pessimism serves to disarm a number of paradoxes and inconsistencies typically associated with Schopenhauer's philosophy. The Kantian Foundation of Schopenhauer's Pessismism shows how Schopenhauer's claim that he is a true successor to Kant can be justified.

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.

Human rights are thought to guarantee pluralism by protecting individual liberty from imposed religious conceptions of virtue. Yet critics often argue that this secular focus on merely avoiding violations can also enable unfettered individualism and undermine appeals to the common good. This book uncovers in secular rights pioneer Hugo Grotius a rights theory that points toward the enlargement of individual responsibility. It grounds this connection in Grotius' unexplored theological corpus, which reveals a dual metaethics and jurisprudence. Here a deontological natural law undergirds a secular theory of rights that is self-aware of its own limitations. A teleological practical reason then guides the exercise of these rights, so as not to compromise the political order that defends them. The book then illustrates this symbiosis of rights and responsibilities in five areas: consent theories of government, rights of rebellion, criminal punishment, war and international responsibility, and Atonement theology. This reassesses Grotius' legacy as a secularist opponent of classical political thought, and suggests that modern liberalism and universal human rights are compatible with a world of resurgent religion.

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.

Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) is often described as the founder of modern Jewish thought and as a leading philosopher of the late Enlightenment. One of Mendelssohn's main concerns was how to conceive of the relationship between Judaism, philosophy, and the civic life of a modern state. Elias Sacks explores Mendelssohn's landmark account of Jewish practice-Judaism's "living script," to use his famous phrase-to present a broader reading of Mendelssohn's writings and extend inquiry into conversations about modernity and religion. By studying Mendelssohn's thought in these dimensions, Sacks suggests that he shows a deep concern with history. Sacks affords a view of a foundational moment in Jewish modernity and forwards new ways of thinking about ritual practice, the development of traditions, and the role of religion in 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.

This volume collects 12 essays by various contributors on the subject of the importance and influence of Schopenhauer's doctoral dissertation (On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason) for both Schopenhauer's more well-known philosophy and the ongoing discussion of the subject of the principle of sufficient reason. The contributions deal with the historical context of Schopenhauer's reflections, their relationship to (transcendental) idealism, the insights they hold for Schopenhauer's views of consciousness and sensation, and how they illuminate Schopenhauer's theory of action. This is the first full-length, English volume on Schopenhauer's Fourfold Root and its relevance for Schopenhauer's philosophy. The thought-provoking essays collected in this volume will undoubtedly enrich the burgeoning field of Schopenhauer-studies.

Nietzsche is undoubtedly one of the most original and influential thinkers in the history of philosophy. With ideas such as the overman, will to power, the eternal recurrence, and perspectivism, Nietzsche challenges us to reconceive how it is that we know and understand the world, and what it means to be a human being. Further, in his works, he not only grapples with previous great philosophers and their ideas, but he also calls into question and redefines what it means to do philosophy. Nietzsche and the Philosophers for the first time sets out to examine explicitly Nietzsche's relationship to his most important predecessors. This anthology includes essays by many of the leading Nietzsche scholars, including Keith Ansell-Pearson, Daniel Conway, Tracy B. Strong, Gary Shapiro, Babette Babich, Mark Anderson, and Paul S. Loeb. These excellent writers discuss Nietzsche's engagement with such figures as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Socrates, Hume, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Rousseau, and the Buddha. Anyone interested in Nietzsche or the history of philosophy generally will find much of great interest in this volume.

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 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

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.

Fact and Fiction explores the intersection between literature and the sciences, focusing on German and British culture between the eighteenth century and today. Observing that it was in the eighteenth century that the divide between science and literature as disciplines first began to be defined, the contributors to this collection probe how authors from that time onwards have assessed and affected the relationship between literary and scientific cultures. Fact and Fiction's twelve essays cover a wide range of scientific disciplines, from physics and chemistry to medicine and anthropology, and a variety of literary texts, such as Erasmus Darwin's poem The Botanic Garden, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and Goethe's Elective Affinities. The collection will appeal to scholars of literature and of the history of science, and to those interested in the connections between the two.

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.

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.

Among his generation of intellectuals, the eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder is recognized both for his innovative philosophy of language and history and for his passionate criticism of racism, colonialism, and imperialism. A student of Immanuel Kant, Herder challenged the idea that anyone - even the philosophers of the Enlightenment - could have a monopoly on truth. In Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism, John K. Noyes plumbs the connections between Herder's anti-imperialism, often acknowledged but rarely explored in depth, and his epistemological investigations. Noyes argues that Herder's anti-rationalist epistemology, his rejection of universal conceptions of truth, knowledge, and justice, constitutes the first attempt to establish not just a moral but an epistemological foundation for anti-imperialism. Engaging with the work of postcolonial theorists such Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gayatri Spivak, this book is a valuable reassessment of Enlightenment anti-imperialism that demonstrates Herder's continuing relevance to postcolonial studies today.

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.

Blaise Pascal has always been appreciated as a literary giant and a religious guide, but has received only grudging recognition as a philosopher: philosophers have mistaken Pascal's harsh criticism of their discipline as a rejection of it. But according to Graeme Hunter, Pascal's critics have simply failed to grasp his lean, but powerful conception of philosophy. This accessibly written book provides the first introduction to Pascal's philosophy as an organic whole.

Hunter argues that Pascal's aim is not merely to humble philosophy, but to save it from a kind of failure to which it is prone. He lays out Pascal's development of a more promising and fruitful path for philosophical inquiry, one that responded to the scientific, religious, and political upheaval of his time. Finally, Hunter illuminates Pascal's significance for contemporary readers, allowing him to emerge as the rare philosopher who is spiritual, literary, and rigorous all at once - both a brilliant controversialist and a thinker of substance.