[This book] offers lucid and thorough explications of key Sartrean concepts and even phrases, and it contains revealing accounts of the numerous thinkers and writers who influenced Sartre...This book will open doors.-David Pugmire, Department of Philosophy, University of Southampton, UK The Sartre Dictionary is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the world of Jean- Paul Sartre. Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all of his major works, ideas and influences and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Sartres thought. Students will discover a wealth of useful information, analysis and criticism. More than 350 A-Z entries include clear definitions of all the key terms used in Sartres writings and detailed synopses of his key works, novels and plays. The Dictionary also includes entries on Sartres major philosophical influences, from Descartes to Heidegger, and his contemporaries, including de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty. It covers everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Sartres existentialism, offering clear explanations of often complex terminology.

There has been a significant renewal of interest in the British Idealists in recent years. Scholars have acknowledged their critical contribution to the development of a communitarian theory of the relation of the individual to society and a widely accepted theory of rights. "British Idealism: A Guide for the Perplexed" offers a clear and thorough account of this key philosophical movement, providing an outline of the key terms and central arguments employed by the idealists. David Boucher and Andrew Vincent lay out the historical context and employ analytical and critical methods to explain the philosophical background and key concepts. The book explores the contribution of British Idealism to contemporary philosophical, political and social debates, emphasising the continuing relevance of the central themes. Geared towards the specific requirements of students who need to reach a sound understanding of British Idealism, the book serves as an ideal companion to study of this most influential and important of movements. "Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging - or indeed downright bewildering. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to grasp, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material.

Despite the increasing prominence of Klossowski's philosophical work, there exists no full-length or sustained treatment of his writings on Nietzsche. This study analyses Klossowski's semiotic of intensity as a conceptual foundation for his philosophy and interpretation of Nietzsche, grounded in the central principles of his theory of signs. It then explores its implications for the categories of chance, causality, individuation and time, drawing a series of parallels between Klossowski's texts and the work of other scholars, such as McTaggart, Eco, D. Z. Albert, M. Silverstein, Meillassoux, N. Land and J. Stambaugh. Throughout, this work lends accessibility to Klossowski's often opaque and idiosyncratic style. It should be relevant to anyone interested in Klossowski's philosophical work, in contemporary Nietzsche scholarship, or in the 20th Century linguistic and existential Continental tradition.

In this provocative historiography, Peter K. J. Park provides a penetrating account of a crucial period in the development of philosophy as an academic discipline. During these decades, a number of European philosophers influenced by Immanuel Kant began to formulate the history of philosophy as a march of progress from the Greeks to Kant a genealogy that supplanted existing accounts beginning in Egypt or Western Asia and at a time when European interest in Sanskrit and Persian literature was flourishing. Not without debate, these traditions were ultimately deemed outside the scope of philosophy and relegated to the study of religion. Park uncovers this debate and recounts the development of an exclusionary canon of philosophy in the decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To what extent was this exclusion of Africa and Asia a result of the scientization of philosophy? To what extent was it a result of racism?
This book includes the most extensive description available anywhere of Joseph-Marie de Gerando s "Histoire comparee des systemes de philosophie," Friedrich Schlegel s lectures on the history of philosophy, Friedrich Ast s and Thadda Anselm Rixner s systematic integration of Africa and Asia into the history of philosophy, and the controversy between G. W. F. Hegel and the theologian August Tholuck over pantheism. "

This book argues that the primary function of human thinking in language is to make judgments, which are logical-normative connections of concepts. Robert Abele points out that this presupposes cognitive conditions that cannot be accounted for by empirical-linguistic analyses of language content or social conditions alone. Judgments rather assume both reason and a unified subject, and this requires recognition of a Kantian-type of transcendental dimension to them. Judgments are related to perception in that both are syntheses, defined as the unity of representations according to a rule/form. Perceptual syntheses are simultaneously pre-linguistic and proto-rational, and the understanding (Kant's Verstand) makes these syntheses conceptually and thus self-consciously explicit. Abele concludes with a transcendental critique of postmodernism and what its deflationary view of ontological categories-such as the unified and reasoning subject-has done to political thinking. He presents an alternative that calls for a return to normativity and a recognition of reason, objectivity, and the universality of principles.

Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to fathom, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material. Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the most influential twentieth century philosophers with his ideas occupying a central place in the history and study of modern philosophy. Students will inevitably encounter his major contributions to the philosophies of language, mind, logic and mathematics. However, there is no escaping the extent of the challenge posed by Wittgenstein whose complex ideas are often enigmatically expressed. Wittgenstein: A Guide for the Perplexed is an authoritative, comprehensive and lucid commentary on the philosophy of this eminent modern thinker. It offers sound guidance to reading Wittgenstein and a valuable methodology for interpreting his works. The illuminating text covers the entirety of Wittgenstein's thought, examining the relationship between the early, middle and late periods of his philosophy. Detailed attention is paid to Wittgenstein's great works the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations, as well as to other published writings. Valuably, the guide also covers ground not commonly explored in studies of Wittgenstein, including his contributions to aesthetics and philosophy of religion. This is the most thorough and fully engaged account of Wittgenstein available - an invaluable resource for students and anyone interested in philosophy and modern intellectual history.

This book provides a clear and comprehensive introduction to Arendt's key ideas and texts, ideal for students coming to her work for the first time. Hannah Arendt is considered to be one of the most influential political thinkers of the twentieth century. Although her writing is somewhat clear, the enormous breadth of her work places particular demands on the student coming to her thought for the first time. "Arendt: A Guide for the Perplexed" provides a clear, concise and accessible introduction to this hugely important political thinker. The book examines the most important themes of Hannah Arendt's work, as well as the main controversies surrounding it. Karin Fry explores the systematic nature of Arendt's political thought that arose in response to the political controversies of her time and describes how she sought to envision a coherent framework for thinking about politics in a new way.Thematically structured and covering all Arendt's key writings and ideas, this book is designed specifically to meet the needs of students coming to her work for the first time. "Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging - or indeed downright bewildering. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to grasp, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material.

During his late period, Nietzsche is particularly concerned with the value that mankind attributes to truth. In dealing with that topic, Nietzsche is not primarly interested in the metaphysical disputes on truth, but rather in the effects that the "will to truth" has on the human being. In fact, he argues that the "faith in a value as such of truth" influenced Western culture and started the anthropological degeneration of the human type that characterizes European morality. To call into question the value of truth is therefore necessary, if one wants to help mankind to find her way in the labyrinth of nihilism. In this new addition to Nietzsche scholarship, Gori explores the origin and aim of the philosopher's late perspectival thought by merging the theoretical with the historical approach, with a special focus on the epistemological debate that influenced Nietzsche. As a result, the book provides a contextual reading of the issue that supports the idea that Nietzsche's attitude in addressing the problem of truth is, in a broad sense, pragmatic.

Two words describe a "modern" world: limits and limitless. Traditionally, humans recognized limits of their power. Modernity meant a break. Its protagonists aspired to bring worlds of their imagination into reality. They taught a new anthropology. Humans could ascend to a God-like status. Schabert analyzes the history of the project and its result: a civilization in a perennial crisis. Symptoms of the crisis have been exposed, today mostly in ecological terms. Schabert takes his material from many fields: philosophy, cosmology, natural sciences, literature, social studies, economics, architecture, and political thought. While modernity is endlessly disrupted, a world beyond modernity can be traced, especially in the modern theory of constitutional government. Constitutional governments are formed by limitations within a civilization that is meant to have no limits. What appears to be paradoxical has its own logic, as Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Montesquieu, John Adams, the Federalist Papers, John Stuart Mill, Walter Bagehot, and Woodrow Wilson have shown. Schabert carefully explicates their constitutional thought. It realized the limits through which modernity holds a promise.

Introduction to New Realism provides an overview of the movement of contemporary thought named New Realism, by its creator and most celebrated practitioner, Maurizio Ferraris. Sharing significant concerns and features with Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology, New Realism can be said to be one of the most prescient philosophical positions today. Its desire to overcome the postmodern antirealism of Kantian origin, and to reassert the importance of truth and objectivity in the name of a new Enlightenment, has had an enormous resonance both in Europe and in the US. Introduction to New Realism is the first volume dedicated to exposing this continental movement to an anglophone audience. Featuring a foreword by the eminent contemporary philosopher and leading exponent of Speculative Realism, Iain Hamilton Grant, the book begins by tracing the genesis of New Realism, and outlining its central theoretical tenets, before opening onto three distinct sections. The first, 'Negativity', is a critique of the postmodern idea that the world is constructed by our conceptual schemas, all the more so as we have entered the age of digitality and virtuality. The second thesis, 'positivity', proposes the fundamental ontological assertion of New Realism, namely that not only are there parts of reality that are independent of thought, but these parts are also able to act causally over thought and the human world. The third thesis, 'normativity,' applies New Realism to the sphere of the social world. Finally, an afterword written by two young scholars explains in more detail the relationship between New Realism and other forms of contemporary realism.

Much attention has been paid to Wittgenstein's treatment of solipsism and to Cavell's treatment of skepticism. But comparatively little has been made of the striking connections between the early Wittgenstein's view on the truth of solipsism and Cavell's view on the truth of skepticism, and how that relates to the claim that the later Wittgenstein sees privacy as a constant human possibility. This book offers close readings of representative writings by both authors and argues that an adequate understanding of solipsism and skepticism requires taking into account a set of underlying difficulties related to a disappointment with finitude which might ultimately lead to the threat of solipsism. That threat is further interpreted as a wish not to bear the burden of having to constantly negotiate and nurture the fragile connections with the world and others which are the conditions of possibility for finite beings to achieve meaning and community. By presenting Wittgenstein's and Cavell's responses in an order which reflects the chronology of their writings, the result is a cohesive articulation of some under-appreciated aspects of their philosophical methodologies which has the potential of reorienting our entire reading of their work.

Over the last four decades, John Dewey's pragmatist philosophy has formed an intellectual core in design research, underpinning Donald Schoen's theory of reflective practice, the experiential perspective in HCI and the democratic commitments of participatory design. Taking these existing connections as a starting point, Brian Dixon explores how deeper alignments may be drawn between Dewey's insights and contemporary design research's concern with practice, meaning and collaboration. Chapter by chapter, a fresh intellectual approach is revealed, one which recognises the transformative power of doing, making and knowing as a force for positive change in the world. We see that, for Dewey, experience comes first. It connects us to surrounding world and the society of which we are part; good things can happen and new realities are possible-we just have to work for them. The implications for design research are vast. We are offered a new way of understanding designerly knowledge production, as well as the methodological implications of adopting Deweyan pragmatism in design research. Taken as a whole, Dewey and Design not only draws out the value of Dewey's work for design research but also, crucially, offers a clear articulation of the value of design itself.

The first English translation of his work, The Withholding Power, offers a fascinating introduction to the thought of Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari. Cacciari is a notoriously complex thinker but this title offers a starting point for entering into the very heart of his thinking. The Withholding Power provides a comprehensive and synthetic insight into his interpretation of Christian political theology and leftist Italian political theory more generally. The theme of katechon - originally a biblical concept which has been developed into a political concept - has been absolutely central to the work of Italian philosophers such as Agamben and Eposito for nearly twenty years. In The Withholding Power, Cacciari sets forth his startlingly original perspective on the influence the theological-political questions have traditionally exerted upon ideas of power, sovereignty and the relationship between political and religious authority. With an introduction by Howard Caygill contextualizing the work within the history of Italian thought, this title will offer those coming to Cacciari for the first time a searing insight into his political, theological and philosophical milieu.