Few historical figures have been more important in modeling the ideal of impartial critical scholarship than Erasmus of Rotterdam (1469-1536). Yet his critical scholarship, though beholden to no one, was not dispassionate. James Tracy shows how Erasmus the scholar sought through his writings to promote the moral and religious renewal of Christian society. Tracy finds the genesis of the humanist's notion of a "Christian republic" of pious and learned individuals in his "Burgundian," or Low Countries, roots. Erasmus's vision of reform, Tracy argues, sprung from a humanist tradition focusing on the importance of teaching (doctrina), a tradition from which Erasmus departed in his optimism about human nature and his deep suspicion of the powers that be. Amid the storms of Reformation controversy, he pruned back the "dissimulation" by which he had thought to convey different meanings to different readers, yet in the end he could not control the way his words were read. If Erasmus's scholarly ideal carries an enduring fascination, so too does his dilemma as a man of circumspection who would also be a reformer. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1966.

The German-Austrian social theorist and philosopher Leo Kofler (1907-1995) represents what Oskar Negt once called 'unmutilated, living Marxism'. Throughout his life he dealt with issues of history and modernity, Marxist philosophy and the critique of ideology, philosophical anthropology and aesthetics. In this volume, author and Kofler biographer Christoph Junke elucidates the contours of his philosophy of praxis, traces an arc from the socialist classics to postmodernism, and outlines the socialist humanist thinker's enduring relevance. The book also includes six essays by Leo Kofler published in English for the first time. The main work was first published in German as Leo Koflers Philosophie der Praxis: Eine Einfuhrung in sein Denken by Laika Verlag, 2015, ISBN 978-944233-33-8. Copyright by Laika Verlag.

Translation exposes aspects of language that can easily be ignored, renewing the sense of the proximity and inseparability of language and thought. The ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature was an early expression of a self-understanding of philosophy that has, in some quarters at least, survived the centuries. This book explores the idea of translation as a philosophical theme and as an important feature of philosophy and practical life, especially in relation to the work of Stanley Cavell. The essays in this volume explore philosophical questions about translation, especially in the light of the work of Stanley Cavell. They take the questions raised by translation to be of key importance not only for philosophical thinking but for our lives as a whole. Thoreau's enigmatic remark "The truth is translated" reveals that apparently technical matters of translation extend through human lives to remarkable effect, conditioning the ways in which the world comes to light. The experience of the translator exemplifies the challenge of judgement where governing rules and principles are incommensurable; and it shows something of the ways in which words come to us, opening new possibilities of thought. This book puts Cavell's rich exploration of these matters into conversation with traditions of pragmatism and European thought. Translation, then, far from a merely technical matter, is at work in human being, and it is the means of humanisation. The book brings together philosophers and translators with common interests in Cavell and in the questions of language at the heart of his work.

Deleuze's fondness for geography has long been recognised as central to his thought. This is the first book to introduce researchers to the breadth of his engagements with space, place and movement. Focusing on pressing global issues such as urbanization, war, migration, and climate change, Arun Saldanha presents a detailed Deleuzian rejoinder to a number of theoretical and political questions about globalization in a variety of disciplines. This systematic overview of moments in Deleuze's corpus where space is implicitly or explicitly theorized shows why he can be called the twentieth century's most interesting thinker of space. Anyone with an interest in refining such concepts as territory, assemblage, body, event and Anthropocene will learn much from the "geophilosophy" which Deleuze and Guattari proposed for our critical times.