Nietzsche, Tension, and the Tragic Disposition examines the role that tension plays in Nietzsche s recovery, in his mature thought, of the Greek tragic disposition. This is achieved by examining the ontological structure to the tragic disposition presented in his earliest work on the Greeks and then exploring its presence in points of tension that emerge in the more mature concerns with nobility. In pursuing this ontological foundation, the work builds upon the centrality of a naturalist argument derived from the influence of the pre-Platonic Greeks. It is the ontological aspect of the tragic disposition, identified in Nietzsche s earliest interpretations of Greek phusis and the inherent tensions of the chthonic present in this hylemorphic foundation, that are examined to demonstrate the importance of the notion of tension to Nietzsche s recovery of a new nobility. By bringing to light the functional importance of tension for the Greeks in the ontological, varying points of tension can be identified that demonstrate a reemergence at different aspects in Nietzsche's later work. Once these aspects are elaborated, the evolving influence of tension is shown to play a central role in the re-emergence of the noble that possesses the tragic disposition. With solid argumentation linking Nietzsche with pre=Platonic Greek tradition, Matthew Tones's book brings new insight to studies of metaphysics, ontology, naturalism, and German, continental, and Greek philosophies."

This title was first published in 2001. Explaining and defending a Heideggarian account of the self and our knowledge of the world, this book addresses the fundamental issues of selfhood and the elemental question of what it means to be human. Mitchell critically examines theories of the self derived from two distinct schools of thought: Descartes, Hume, Kant, Sartre and Stirner representing a tradition which has dominated Western philosophy since Descartes; Heidegger and Laing representing a radical departure from the tradition. Mitchell focuses on two key philosophical problems throughout: the problem of knowledge and the problem of identity. Mitchell argues that ultimately Heidegger does no more than echo Stirner's empty egoism and provides a bleak, inescapable heroism for the individual.

Hannah Arendt (1906-75) is one of the most interesting thinkers of modern times, and her ideas have had profound influence across philosophy, political theory, law, history, international relations, sociology and literature. Presenting new and powerful ways to think about human freedom and responsibility, Arendt's work has provoked intense debate and controversy. Hannah Arendt: Key Concepts explores the central ideas of Arendt's thought, such as freedom, action, power, judgement, evil, forgiveness and the social. Bringing together an international team of contributors, the essays provide lucid accounts of Arendt's fundamental themes and their ethical and political implications. The specific concepts Arendt deployed to make sense of the human condition, the phenomena of political violence, terror and totalitarianism, and the prospects of sustaining a shared public world are all examined. Hannah Arendt: Key Concepts consolidates the disparate strands of Arendt's thought to provide an accessible and essential guide for anybody who wishes to gain a deeper understanding of this leading intellectual.

This book presents a systematic reconstruction of Leibniz's dynamics project (c. 1676-1700) that contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the concepts of physical causality in Leibniz's work and 17th century physics. It argues that Leibniz's theory of forces privileges the causal relationship between structural organization and physical phenomena instead of body-to-body mechanical causation. The mature conception of Leibnizian force is not the power of one body to cause motion in another, but a kind of structural causation related to the configuration of integral systems of bodies in physical evolution. By treating the immanent philosophy of Leibniz's dynamics, this book makes explicit the systematic aims and inherent limits of Leibniz's physical project, in addition to providing an alternative vision of the scientific understanding of the physical world in the late 17th and early 18th century.

Nietzsche and Classical Greek Philosophy: Beautiful and Diseased explains Friedrich Nietzsche's ambivalence toward Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Daw-Nay N. R. Evans Jr. argues that Nietzsche's relationship to his classical Greek predecessors is more subtle and systematic than previously believed. He contends that Nietzsche's seemingly personal attacks on his philosophical rivals hide philosophically sophisticated disputes that deserve greater attention. Evans demonstrates how Nietzsche's encounters with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle reveal the philosophical influence they exercised on Nietzsche's thought and the philosophical problems that he sought to address through those encounters. Having illustrated Nietzsche's ambivalence Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, Evans draws on Nietzsche's admiration for Heraclitus as a counterpoint to Plato to suggest that the classical Greek philosophers are just as important to Nietzsche's thought as their pre-Socratic precursors. This book will appeal to those interested in continental philosophy, ancient philosophy, and German studies.

It is no exaggeration to say that of the early 20th century German philosophers who claimed to establish a new ontology, former neo-Kantian turned realist Nicolai Hartmann is the only one to have actually followed through. "Ontology: Laying the Foundations" deals with "what is insofar as it is," and its four parts tackle traditional ontological assumptions and prejudices and traditional categories such as substance, thing, individual, whole, object, and phenomenon; a novel redefinition of existence and essence in terms of the ontological factors Dasein and Sosein and their interrelations; an analysis of modes of "givenness" and the ontological embeddedness of cognition in affective transcendent acts; and a discussion of the status of ideal being, including mathematical being, phenomenological essences, logical laws, values, and the interconnections between the ideal and real spheres. Hartmann's work offers rich resources for those interested in overcoming the human-centeredness of much 20th century philosophy. Hartmann's work offers rich resources for those interested in overcoming the human-centeredness of much 20th century philosophy.

Nobody should really have to point out that political philosophy is political. Yet in this highly original and provocative book Lorna Finlayson argues that in fact it is necessary to do so. Offering a critique of mainstream liberal political philosophy through close, critical engagement with a series of specific debates and arguments, Finlayson analyzes the way in which apparently neutral methodological devices such as "charitable interpretation" and "constructive criticism" function so as to protect against challenges to the status quo. At each stage, Finlayson demonstrates that political philosophy is suffering from a complex process of "de-politicization." Even in cases where it appears that the dominant framework of liberal political philosophy is being strongly challenged-as, for example, in the case of the 'realist' critique of "ideal theory"-this book argues that the debate is set up in such a way as to impose strict limits on the kind of dissent that is possible. Only by dragging these hidden presuppositions into the foreground can we arrive at a clear-eyed appreciation of such debates, and perhaps look beyond the artificially constricted landscape in which they seek to confine us.

Major philosophical history of the concept of Europe, the first full-scale book of its kind Author is a leading figure in pioneering the philosophical study of Europe Potential to appeal to readers in several broad areas of study: philosophy, European studies, politics, and history.

Major philosophical history of the concept of Europe, the first full-scale book of its kind Author is a leading figure in pioneering the philosophical study of Europe Potential to appeal to readers in several broad areas of study: philosophy, European studies, politics, and history.

Major philosophical history of the concept of Europe, the first full-scale book of its kind Author is a leading figure in pioneering the philosophical study of Europe Potential to appeal to readers in several broad areas of study: philosophy, European studies, politics, and history.

Walking Inside Out is the first text that attempts to merge the work of literary and artist practitioners with academics to critically explore the state of psychogeography today. The collection explores contemporary psychogeographical practices, shows how a critical form of walking can highlight easily overlooked urban phenomenon, and examines the impact that everyday life in the city has on the individual. Through a variety of case studies, it offers a British perspective of international spaces, from the British metropolis to the post-communist European city. By situating the current strand of psychogeography within its historical, political and creative context along with careful consideration of the challenges it faces Walking Inside Out offers a vision for the future of the discipline.

This book brings together essays from leading scholars who, rather than taking a strictly exegetical approach, attempt to show how discussions in moral philosophy can benefit from Wittgenstein's later philosophical work. The essays in this volume make the argument that Wittgenstein's relevance for moral philosophy depends not only on his views about ethics, but also on the methods he introduces, on his views on the nature of philosophy and philosophical problems, and on the insights into language developed in his philosophy. They also focus on the 'Wittgensteinian tradition' in moral philosophy and its relation to more mainstream analytic moral philosophy, addressing how several prominent philosophers use these ideas and methods in their work. Ethics in the Wake of Wittgenstein seeks to answer the following question: Can we apply Wittgenstein's ways of dealing with problems in logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of mathematics to moral philosophy as well? It will be of interest to Wittgenstein scholars and those working on current debates in moral philosophy, metaethics, and normative ethics.

Wilfrid Sellars's ethical theory was rich and deeply innovative. On Sellars's view, moral judgments express a special kind of shared intention. Thus, we should see Sellars as an early advocate of an expressivism of plans and intentions, and an early theorist of collective intentionality. He supplemented this theory with a sophisticated logic of intentions, a robust theory of the categorical validity of normative expressions, a subtle way of reconciling the cognitive and motivating aspects of moral judgment, and much more-all within a strict nominalism that preserves Sellars's commitment to naturalism. The Ethics of Wilfrid Sellars offers the first systematic treatment of this sadly-neglected aspect of Sellars's work, and demonstrates that his ethical theory-just like his more widely-discussed epistemology-has much to contribute to current debates.

Social robotics is a cutting edge research area gathering researchers and stakeholders from various disciplines and organizations. The transformational potential that these machines, in the form of, for example, caregiving, entertainment or partner robots, pose to our societies and to us as individuals seems to be limited by our technical limitations and phantasy alone. This collection contributes to the field of social robotics by exploring its boundaries from a philosophically informed standpoint. It constructively outlines central potentials and challenges and thereby also provides a stable fundament for further research of empirical, qualitative or methodological nature.

Who is God? The variety of images of God tends to overwhelm us in the present age. Is 'God' a fiction of human construction, or a reality that makes claims upon how we practice 'faith in God'? How does this quest for an understanding of 'God' illumine who 'we' are? God in Postliberal Perspective presents an introduction to the doctrine and concept of God in contemporary philosophy and theology, exploring how some theologians and philosophers dare to speak of God as "real" in our sceptical, pluralistic, and interfaith age. Robert Cathey tours the "house of realism" as constructed by postliberal Christians (David Burrell, William Placher, Bruce Marshall), in conversation with living communities of faith and critical work in philosophy and theology, and develops a distinctive argument about the relation of realism and non-realism in constructing the doctrine of God in postliberal theology. Offering a reading of postliberal theology which is open to critical discussion with other types of theology, philosophy, and faith traditions, this book proposes a model of theological reflection that may be extended to the reality-claims of a wide range of doctrines and concepts.

Impossible God introduces Derrida's theology for a new generation interested in Derrida's writings and in the future of theology, and clarifies Derrida's theology for those already familiar with his writings. Derrida's theological concerns are now widely recognised but Impossible God shows how Derrida's theology takes its shape from his earliest writings on Edmund Husserl and from explorations into Husserl's unpublished manuscripts on time and theology. Rayment-Pickard argues that Derrida goes beyond both the nihilism of the 'death of God' and the denials of negative theology to affirm a theology of God's 'impossibility'. Derrida's 'impossible God' is not another God of the philosophers but a powerful deity capable of wakening us into faith, ethical responsibility and love. Showing how central theology has been to Derrida's philosophy since the beginning of his career, Impossible God presents an accessible study of a neglected area of Derrida's writing which students of philosophy and theology will find invaluable.

This book proposes a pragmatist methodological framework for generating practically relevant political philosophy. It draws on John Dewey's social and political philosophy to develop an "experimentalist" method, thus charting a middle course between idealism and realism in political philosophy. Deweyan experimentalism promises to balance civic deliberation, empirical facts, and moral considerations by reconstructing Dewey's pragmatist conceptions of 'philosophy' and 'democracy' from the perspective of social action. While some authors have taken the steps to articulate Dewey's experimentalism, they have focused on institutional rather than methodological implications. This book is original in the ways in which it situates the role of ideas in political practice and contemporary political problems. Additionally, it underlines the similarities between today and the historical context in which Dewey wrote, connects Dewey's social and political philosophy to Greek and Roman mythology, and concludes with a timely case study in which the author's methodological insights are applied. The result is a book that offers a focused reconstruction of Dewey's work and shows its relevance for engaging with contemporary issues in political philosophy and political theory.

The claim according to which there is a categorial gap between meaning and saying - between what sentences mean and what we say by using them on particular occasions - has come to be widely regarded as being exclusively a claim in the philosophy of language. The present essay collection takes a different approach to these issues. It seeks to explore the ways in which that claim - as defended first by ordinary language philosophy and, more recently, by various contextualist projects - is grounded in considerations that transcend the philosophy of language. More specifically, the volume seeks to explore how that claim is inextricably linked to considerations about the nature of truth and representation. It is thus part of the objective of this volume to rethink the current way of framing the debates on these issues. By framing the debate in terms of an opposition between "ideal language theorists" and their semanticist heirs on the one hand and "communication theorists" and their contextualist heirs on the other, one brackets important controversies and risks obscuring the undoubtedly very real oppositions that exist between different currents of thought.

An internationally famous philosopher and best-selling author during his lifetime, Georg Simmel has been marginalized in contemporary intellectual and cultural history. This neglect belies his pathbreaking role in revealing the theoretical significance of phenomena-including money, gender, urban life, and technology-that subsequently became established arenas of inquiry in cultural theory. It further ignores his philosophical impact on thinkers as diverse as Benjamin, Musil, and Heidegger. Integrating intellectual biography, philosophical interpretation, and a critical examination of the history of academic disciplines, this book restores Simmel to his rightful place as a major figure and challenges the frameworks through which his contributions to modern thought have been at once remembered and forgotten.

This collection of specially commissioned essays offers a wide array of new psychoanalytic approaches impacted by Lacanian theory, queer studies, post-colonial studies, feminism, and deconstruction in the domains of film and literature. We have witnessed a remarkable return to psychoanalysis in those fields, fields from which it had been excluded or discredited for a while. This has changed recently, and we need to understand why. The fourteen essays make use a freshly minted psychoanalytic concepts to read diverse texts, films and social practices. The distinguished authors gathered here, an international group of scholars coming from Japan, China, Korea, India, Belgium, Greece, France, Australia, and the USA, are all cognizant of the advances of theory under the form of deconstruction, feminism, post-colonial studies and trauma studies. These essays take into account the latest developments in Lacanian theory and never bracket off subjective agency when dealing with literature or film. The authors make sense of changes brought to psychoanalytical theory by redefinitions of the Oedipus complex, reconsiderations of the death drive, applications of Lacan's symptom and the concept of the Real, reassessments of the links between affect and trauma, insights into the resilience of Romantic excess and jouissance, awareness of the role of transference in classical and modernist texts, and pedagogical techniques aimed at teaching difficult texts, all the while testifying to the influence on Lacanian theory of thinkers like Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, Melanie Klein, Didier Anzieu, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003002727

This book elaborates Jean Amery's critique of philosophy and his discussion of some central philosophical themes in At the Mind's Limits and his other writings. It shows how Amery elaborates the shortcomings and unfitness of philosophical theories to account for torture, the experience of homelessness, and other indignities, and their inability to assist with overcoming resentment. It thus teases out the philosophical import of Jean Amery's critique of philosophy, which constitutes his own philosophical testament of being an inmate at Auschwitz. This book situates At the Mind's Limits in the context of twentieth-century Continental philosophy. On the one hand, it elaborates Amery's engagement with key philosophical figures. On the other hand, it shows how thoroughly Amery denounces the limits of the philosophical enterprise, and its impotence in capturing and accounting for the crimes of the Third Reich.

An internationally famous philosopher and best-selling author during his lifetime, Georg Simmel has been marginalized in contemporary intellectual and cultural history. This neglect belies his pathbreaking role in revealing the theoretical significance of phenomena-including money, gender, urban life, and technology-that subsequently became established arenas of inquiry in cultural theory. It further ignores his philosophical impact on thinkers as diverse as Benjamin, Musil, and Heidegger. Integrating intellectual biography, philosophical interpretation, and a critical examination of the history of academic disciplines, this book restores Simmel to his rightful place as a major figure and challenges the frameworks through which his contributions to modern thought have been at once remembered and forgotten.

This volume engages with translations of philosophy as complex, socially structured narratives bound by emotional, political and philosophical connections, exploring these dynamics at work in A.V. Miller's Hegel translations and retranslations published between 1969 and 1986. The book contextualises Miller's lifelong commitment to Hegel and builds on this narrative to lay the foundations for its socio-narrative, Bourdieusian and feminist theoretical frameworks, applied to the texts and paratexts of Miller's six retranslations. The volume's plurifocal sociological approach both illuminates the role of translators and publishers of philosophy in the "great transformation" of political liberalism and subsequently seeks to transform understanding about the ethical responsibilities of translators of philosophy in communicating values of diversity and change in political thinking. In highlighting the value of sociologically-grounded analyses of translations of philosophical works, this book is key reading for students and scholars in translation studies, German studies, continental and feminist-informed philosophies.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's brief Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) is one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century, yet it offers little orientation for the reader. The first-time reader is left wondering what it could be about, and the scholar is left with little guidance for interpretation. In Tractatus in Context, James C. Klagge presents the vital background necessary for appreciating Wittgenstein's gnomic masterpiece. Tractatus in Context contains the early reactions to the Tractatus, including the initial reviews written in 1922-1924. And while we can't talk with Wittgenstein, we can do the next best thing-hear what he had to say about the Tractatus. Klagge thus presents what Wittgenstein thought about germane issues leading up to his writing the book, in discussions and correspondence with others about his ideas, and what he had to say about the Tractatus after it was written-in letters, lectures and conversations. It offers, you might say, Wittgenstein's own commentary on the book. Key Features: Illuminates what is at stake in the Tractatus, by providing the views of others that engaged Wittgenstein as he was writing it. Includes Wittgenstein's earlier thoughts on ideas in the book as recorded in his notebooks, letters, and conversations as well as his later, retrospective comments on those ideas. Draws on new or little-known sources, such as Wittgenstein's coded notebooks, Hermine's notes, Frege's letters, Hansel's diary, Ramsey's notes, and Skinner's dictations. Draws connections between the background context and specific passages in the Tractatus, using a proposition-by-proposition commentary.