A History of Modern Aesthetics narrates the history of philosophical aesthetics from the beginning of the eighteenth century through the twentieth century. Aesthetics began with Aristotle's defense of the cognitive value of tragedy in response to Plato's famous attack on the arts in The Republic, and cognitivist accounts of aesthetic experience have been central to the field ever since. But in the eighteenth century, two new ideas were introduced: that aesthetic experience is important because of emotional impact - precisely what Plato criticized - and because it is a pleasurable free play of many or all of our mental powers. This set tells how these ideas have been synthesized or separated by aestheticians of modern times. This second volume tells how over the course of the century philosophers in Germany, Britain, and eventually the United States struggled to return to a broader approach to the value of aesthetic experience by finding room for the emotional and playful aspects of art.

The Oxford Handbook of Hegel is a comprehensive guide to Hegel's philosophy, from his first published writings to his final lectures. There are six chapters each on the Phenomenology of Spirit and The Science of Logic, in depth analyses of the Encyclopedia and essays on the major parts of the Philosophy of Right. Several chapters cover the many newly edited lecture series from the 1820s, bringing new clarity to Hegel's conception of aesthetics, the philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy. The concluding part focuses on Hegel's legacy, from his role in the formation of Marx's philosophy to his importance for contemporary liberal political philosophy. The Handbook includes many essays from younger scholars who have brought new perspectives and rigor to the study of Hegel's thought. The essays are marked by close engagement with Hegel's difficult texts and by a concern to highlight the ongoing systematic importance of Hegel's philosophy.

Jonathan Swift and Philosophy is the first book to analyse and interpret Swift's writing from a philosophical angle. By placing key texts of Swift in their philosophical and cultural contexts and providing background to their history of ideas, it demonstrates how well informed Swift's criticism of the politics, philosophy, and science of his age actually was. Moreover, it also sets straight preconceptions about Swift as ignorant about the scientific developments of his time. The authors offer insights into, and interpretations of, Swift's political philosophy, ethics, and his philosophy of science and demonstrate how versatile a writer and thinker Swift actually was. This book will be of interest to scholars of philosophy, history of ideas, and 18th century literature and culture.

From America's fight for independence to the Paris Commune - an exotic collection of fanatics, adventurers, poets and thinkers are brought vividly to life. Holy Madness probes into the psyche that was responsible for so many of the founding events of our modern world, and into the instincts that inspired its most generous and most murderous impulses. It explains how the Enlightenment dislodged Christianity from its central position in the life of European societies and how man's quest for ecstasy and transcendence flooded into areas such as the arts, spawning the Romantic movement. This dramatic journey which begins in America in 1776 and goes right up to the last agony of the Paris Commune in 1871, takes in the French revolution, the Irish rebellion, the Polish risings, the war of Greek liberation, the Russian insurrection, the Hungarian struggles for freedom, the liberation of South America, and the Italian Risorgimento. 'An ambitious and in many ways brilliant book' Hilary Mantel

This book argues that Nietzsche bases his affirmative morality on the model of individual responsiveness to otherness which he takes from the mythology of Dionysus. The subject is not free to choose to avoid such responding to the demands of the other. Nietzsche finds that the basic mode of responding is pleasure. This feeling, as a basis for morality, underlies the morality which is true to the earth and the major concepts of "will to power", "eternal return", and "amor fati". The priority of otherness makes all thought ethical and not only aesthetic. The basis of all meanings combines the fundamental impulse of responding outwards with an immediate complement in the individual interpretation-world. This is specifically ethical because the recognition of our own historical specificity arises as a result of the refusal of others to become mere differences within our notion of the Same, and through their demand that we "become who we are" in the recognition of their separate existence.

In one of the most influential philosophical works ever writen, John Stuart Mill explores the risks and responsibilities of liberty. Examining the tyranny that can come both from government and from the herd-like opinion of the majority, Mill proposes a freedom to think, unite, and pursue our pleasures as the most important freedoms, as long as we cause no harm to others. GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Considered by Kant to be the culmination of his critical philosophy, "The Critique of Judgement" was the last work in the trilogy begun with "The Critique of Pure Reason" and continued with "The Critique of Practical Reason". In this work Kant seeks to establish the a priori principles underlying the faculty of judgement, just as he did in his previous analyses of pure and practical reason. The first part deals with the subject of our aesthetic sensibility; we respond to certain natural phenomena as beautiful, says Kant, when we recognise in nature a harmonious order that satisfies the mind's own need for order. The second half of the critique concentrates on the apparent teleology in nature's design of organisms, i.e., organisms display a complex inter-working of parts, which are subordinated as means to serve the purpose of the whole. All of this suggests, concludes Kant, that our minds are inclined to attribute a final purpose to nature's design and to life as a whole. This natural tendency to see purpose in nature is the main principle underlying all of our judgements. Although this might imply a super-sensible Designer behind nature and a theistic interpretation of the world, in the final analysis Kant maintains an agnostic stance. Ever the objective philosopher he insists that though we are predisposed to read design and purpose into nature, we cannot therefore prove a supernatural dimension or the existence of God. Such considerations are beyond reason and are solely the province of faith.

In The Metaphysics of the Material World, Tad M. Schmaltz traces a particular development of the metaphysics of the material world in early modern thought. The route Schmaltz follows derives from a critique of Spinoza in the work of Pierre Bayle. Bayle charged in particular that Spinoza's monistic conception of the material world founders on the account of extension and its "modes" and parts that he inherited from Descartes, and that Descartes in turn inherited from late scholasticism, and ultimately from Aristotle. After an initial discussion of Bayle's critique of Spinoza and its relation to Aristotle's distinction between substance and accident, this study starts with the original re-conceptualization of Aristotle's metaphysics of the material world that we find in the work of the early modern scholastic Suarez. What receives particular attention is Suarez's introduction of the "modal distinction" and his distinctive account of the Aristotelian accident of "continuous quantity." This examination of Suarez is followed by a treatment of the connections of his particular version of the scholastic conception of the material world to the very different conception that Descartes offered. Especially important is Descartes's view of the relation of extended substance both to its modes and to the parts that compose it. Finally, there is a consideration of what these developments in Suarez and Descartes have to teach us about Spinoza's monistic conception of the material world. Of special concern here is to draw on this historical narrative to provide a re-assessment of Bayle's critique of Spinoza.

Agon in Nietzsche is a comprehensive study of Nietzsche's relationship to the agonistic culture of ancient Greece. The book examines not only the overt elements of Greek agonism in Nietzsche's early works, but also shows how his later works embody its spirit as it is manifest in such notions as the will to power, the overhuman and "active justice." While bringing Nietzsche scholarship together with recent studies on Greek agonism and the Olympic tradition, the book explores, in Nietzsche's works, the culture of competition in such areas as mythology, sacrifice, suffering, transfiguration, feeling, justice, training and education, rhetoric, spectacle and power.

This book is a collection of essays on the reception of Leibniz's thinking in the sciences and in the philosophy of science in the 19th and 20th centuries. Authors studied include C.F. Gauss, Georg Cantor, Kurd Lasswitz, Bertrand Russell, Ernst Cassirer, Louis Couturat, Hans Reichenbach, Hermann Weyl, Kurt Goedel and Gregory Chaitin. In addition, we consider concepts and problems central to Leibniz's thought and that of the later authors: the continuum, space, identity, number, the infinite and the infinitely small, the projects of a universal language, a calculus of logic, a mathesis universalis etc. The book brings together two fields of research in the history of philosophy and of science (research on Leibniz, and the research concerned with some major developments in the 19th and 20th centuries); it describes how Leibniz's thought appears in the works of these authors, in order to better understand Leibniz's influence on contemporary science and philosophy; but it also assesses that reception critically, confronting it in particular with the current state of Leibniz research and with the various editions of his work.

Many philosophers and scientists over the course of history have held that the world is alive. It has a soul, which governs it and binds it together. This suggestion, once so wide-spread, may strike many of us today as strange and antiquated-in fact, there are few other concepts that, on their face, so capture the sheer distance between us and our philosophical inheritance. But the idea of a world soul has held so strong a grip upon philosophers' imaginations for over 2,000 years, that it continues to underpin and even structure how we conceive of time and space. The concept of the world soul is difficult to understand in large part because over the course of history it has been invoked to very different ends and within the frameworks of very different ontologies and philosophical systems, with varying concepts of the world soul emerging as a result. This volume brings together eleven chapters by leading philosophers in their respective fields that collectively explore the various ways in which this concept has been understood and employed, covering the following philosophical areas: Platonism, Stoicism, Medieval, Indian or Vedantic, Kabbalah, Renaissance, Early Modern, German Romanticism, German Idealism, American Transcendentalism, and contemporary quantum mechanics and panpsychism theories. In addition, short reflections illuminate the impact the concept of the world soul has had on a small selection of areas outside of philosophy, such as harmony, the biological concept of spontaneous generation, Henry Purcell, psychoanalysis, and Gaia theories.

Joseph Butler's Fifteen Sermons (1729) is a classic work of moral philosophy, which remains widely influential. The topics Butler discusses include the role of conscience in human nature, self-love and egoism, compassion, resentment and forgiveness, and love of our neighbour and of God. The text of the enlarged and corrected second edition is here presented together with a selection of Butler's other ethical writings: A Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue, A Sermon Preached Before the House of Lords, and relevant extracts from his correspondence with Samuel Clarke. While this is a readers' edition that avoids cluttering Butler's text with textual variants and intrusive footnotes, it comes complete with scholarly apparatus intended to aid the reader in studying Butlers work in depth. David McNaughton contributes a substantial historical and philosophical introduction that highlights the continuing importance of these works. In addition, there are extensive notes at the end of the volume, including significant textual variants, and full details of Butler's sources and references, as well as short summaries of Butler's predecessors, and a selective bibliography. This will be the definitive resource for anyone interested in Butler's moral philosophy.

"Eclipse of Grace" offers original insights into the roots of modern theology by introducing systematic theologians and Christian ethicists to Hegel through a focus on three of his seminal texts: "Phenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic, " and "Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion."Presents brilliant and original insights into Hegel's significance for modern theologyArgues that, theologically, Hegel has been misconstrued and that much more can be gained by focusing on the logic that he develops out of an engagement with Christian doctrinesFeatures an original structure organized as a set of commentaries on individual Hegel texts, and not just presenting overviews of his entire corpusOffers detailed engagement with Hegel's texts rather than relying on generalizations about Hegelian philosophyProvides an illuminating, accessible and lucid account of the thinking of the major figures in modern German philosophy and theology

Philosophy in eighteenth-century Britain was diverse, vibrant, and sophisticated. This was the age of Hume and Berkeley and Reid, of Hutcheson and Kames and Smith, of Ferguson and Burke and Wollstonecraft. Important and influential works were published in every area of philosophy, from the theory of vision to theories of political resistance, from the philosophy of language to accounts of ways of governing the passions. The philosophers of eighteenth-century Britain were enormously influential, in France, in Italy, in Germany, and in America. Their ideas and arguments remain a powerful presence in philosophy three centuries later. This Oxford Handbook is the first book ever to provide comprehensive coverage of the full range of philosophical writing in Britain in the eighteenth century. It provides accounts of the writings of all the major figures, but also puts those figures in the context provided by a host of writers less well known today. The book has five principal sections: 'Logic and Metaphysics', 'The Passions', 'Morals', 'Criticism', and 'Politics'. Each section comprises four chapters, providing detailed coverage of all of the important aspects of its subject matter. There is also an introductory section, with chapters on the general character of philosophizing in eighteenth-century Britain, and a concluding section on the important question of the relation at this time between philosophy and religion. The authors of the chapters are experts in their fields. They include philosophers, historians, political theorists, and literary critics, and they teach in colleges and universities in Britain, in Europe, and in North America.

GWF Hegel has long been considered one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the nineteenth century, and his work continues to provoke debate in contemporary philosophy. This new book provides readers with an accessible introduction to Hegel's thought, offering a lucid and highly readable account of his "Phenomenology of Spirit," "Science of Logic," "Philosophy of Nature," "Philosophy of History," and "Philosophy of Right." It provides a cogent and careful analysis of Hegel's main arguments, considers critical responses, evaluates competing interpretations, and assesses the legacy of Hegel's work for philosophy in the present day.In a comprehensive discussion of the major works, J.M Fritzman considers crucial questions of authorial intent raised by the "Phenomenology of Spirit," and discusses Hegel's conceptions of necessity and of philosophical method. In his presentation of Hegel's "Logic," Fritzman evaluates the claim that logic has no presuppositions and examines whether this endorses a foundationalist or coherentist epistemology. Fritzman goes on to scrutinize Hegel's claims that history represents the progressive realization of human freedom, and details how Hegel believes that this is also expressed in art and religion. This book serves as both an excellent introduction to Hegel's wide-ranging philosophy for students, as well as an innovative critique which will contribute to ongoing debates in the field.

Frederick C. Beiser tells the story of the emergence of neo-Kantianism from the late 1790s until the 1880s. He focuses on neo-Kantianism before official or familiar neo-Kantianism, i.e., before the formation of the various schools of neo-Kantianism in the 1880s and 1890s (which included the Marburg school, the Southwestern school, and the Goettingen school). Beiser argues that the source of neo-Kantianism lies in three crucial but neglected figures: Jakob Friedrich Fries,

More than a century after Guido Adler's appointment to the first chair in musicology at the University of Vienna, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History provides a first look at the discipline in this earliest period, and at the ideological dilemmas and methodological anxieties that characterized it upon its institutionalization. Author Kevin Karnes contends that some of the most vital questions surrounding musicology's disciplinary identities today-the relationship between musicology and criticism, the role of the subject in analysis and the narration of history, and the responsibilities of the scholar to the listening public-originate in these conflicted and largely forgotten beginnings. Karnes lays bare the nature of music study in the late nineteenth century through insightful readings of long-overlooked contributions by three of musicology's foremost pioneers-Adler, Eduard Hanslick, and Heinrich Schenker. Shaped as much by the skeptical pronouncements of the likes of Nietzsche and Wagner as it was by progressivist ideologies of scientific positivism, the new discipline comprised an array of oft-contested and intensely personal visions of music study, its value, and its future. Karnes introduces readers to a Hanslick who rejected the call of positivist scholarship and dedicated himself to penning an avowedly subjective history of Viennese musical life. He argues that Schenker's analytical experiments had roots in a Wagner-inspired search for a critical alternative to Adler's style-obsessed scholarship. And he illuminates Adler's determined response to Nietzsche's warnings about the vitality of artistic and cultural life in an increasingly scientific age. Through sophisticated and meticulous presentation, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History demonstrates that the new discipline of musicology was inextricably tied in with the cultural discourse of its time.

The Absolute, philosophized most saliently about by Georg Hegel, encompasses the entirety of reality. The absolute (reality) is composed of five dimensions - height, length, width, time, and justice. The five dimensions operate dialectically, and the normative values of reality inhere within the fifth dimension (justice) - hard, soft, moral, ethical, yellow, etc. ad infinitum. The normative values from the fifth dimension (justice), in combination with the brain, comprise the human mind. With the issues of climate change, world-wide biosphere destruction, nuclear weapons, international trade regimes, humanity has created the phenomenon of global politics - thereby changing the fifth dimension. The argument in this volume is that the broadcast iterations of Star Trek allow us to comprehend significant aspects of justice and the politics of globalism - created through the advent of science, technology, engineering, etc. The creators of Star Trek hold that nationalism is a psychological pathology and internationalism is rationality.

The first book-length study of the relationship between science and theater during the long eighteenth century in Britain, The Theater of Experiment explores the crucial role of spectacle in the establishment of modern science by analyzing how eighteenth-century science was "staged" in a double sense. On the one hand, this study analyzes science in performance: the way that science and scientists were made a public spectacle in comedies, farces, and pantomimes for purposes that could range from the satiric to the pedagogic to the hagiographic. But this book also considers the way in which these plays laid bare science as performance: that is, the way that eighteenth-century science was itself a kind of performing art, subject to regimes of stagecraft that traversed the laboratory, the lecture hall, the anatomy theater, and the public stage. Not only did the representation of natural philosophy in eighteenth-century plays like Thomas Shadwell's Virtuoso, Aphra Behn's The Emperor of the Moon, Susanna Centlivre's The Basset Table, and John Rich's Necromancer, or Harelequin Doctor Faustus, influence contemporary debates over the role that experimental science was to play public life, the theater shaped the very form that science itself was to take. By disciplining, and ultimately helping to legitimate, experimental philosophy, the eighteenth-century stage helped to naturalize an epistemology based on self-evident, decontextualized facts that might speak for themselves. In this, the stage and the lab jointly fostered an Enlightenment culture of spectacle that transformed the conditions necessary for the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. Precisely because Enlightenment public science initiatives, taking their cue from the public stages, came to embrace the stagecraft and spectacle that Restoration natural philosophy sought to repress from the scene of experimental knowledge production, eighteenth-century science organized itself around not the sober, masculine "modest witness" of experiment but the sentimental, feminized, eager observer of scientific performance.

This volume presents two Leibnizian writings, the Specimen of Philosophical Questions Collected from the Law and the Dissertation on Perplexing Cases. These works, originally published in 1664 and 1666, constitute, respectively, Leibniz's thesis for the title of Master of Philosophy and his doctoral dissertation in law. Besides providing evidence of the earliest development of Leibniz's thought and amazing anticipations of his mature views, they present a genuine intellectual interest, for the freshness and originality of Leibniz's reflections on a striking variety of logico-philosophical puzzles drawn from the law. The Specimen addresses puzzling issues resulting from apparent conflicts between law and philosophy (the latter broadly understood as comprising also mathematics, as well as empirical sciences). The Dissertation addresses cases whose solution is puzzling because of the convoluted logical form of legal dispositions and contractual clauses, or because of conflicting priorities between concurring parties. In each case, Leibniz dissects the problems with the greatest ingenuity, disentangling their different aspects, and proposing solutions always reasonable and sometimes surprising. And he does not refrain from peppering his intellectual acrobatics with some humorous comments.

This book reconstructs, both from the historical and theoretical points of view, Leibniza (TM)s geometrical studies, focusing in particular on the research Leibniz carried on in the last years of his life. The main purpose of the work is to offer a better understanding of the philosophy of space and in general of the mature Leibnizean metaphysics, through a pressing confrontation with the problems of geometric foundation. Regarding this scope of problems, the book also deals quite in depth with Leibniza (TM)s theory of sensibility, thus favouring the comparison and contrast between Leibniza (TM)s philosophy and Kanta (TM)s transcendentalist solution. The Appendix gives editing to a number of previously unpublished manuscripts on geometry from the Leibniz Archiv.

While there had been much radical thought before John Stuart Mill, Joseph Persky argues it was Mill, as he moved to the left, who provided the radical wing of liberalism with its first serious analytical foundation, a political economy of progress that still echoes today. A rereading of Mill's mature work suggests his theoretical understanding of accumulation led him to see laissez-faire capitalism as a transitional system. Deeply committed to the egalitarian precepts of the Enlightenment, Mill advocated gradualism and rejected revolutionary expropriation on utilitarian grounds: gradualism, not expropriation, promised meaningful long-term gains for the working classes. He endorsed laissez-faire capitalism because his theory of accumulation saw that system approaching a stationary state characterized by a great reduction in inequality and an expansion of cooperative production. These tendencies, in combination with an aggressive reform agenda made possible by the extension of the franchise, promised to provide a material base for social progress and individual development. The Political Economy of Progress goes on to claim that Mill's radical political economy anticipated more than a little of Marx's analysis of capitalism and laid a foundation for the work of Fabians and other gradualist radicals in the 20th century. More recently, modern philosophic radicals, such as Rawls, have deep links to this Millean political economy. These links are still worthy of development. In particular, a politically meaningful acceptance of Rawls's radical liberalism waits on a movement capable of re-engineering the workplace in a manner consistent with Mill's endorsement of worker management.

Weltschmerz is a study of the pessimism that dominated German philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century. Pessimism was essentially the theory that life is not worth living. This theory was introduced into German philosophy by Schopenhauer, whose philosophy became very fashionable in the 1860s. Frederick C. Beiser examines the intense and long controversy that arose from Schopenhauer's pessimism, which changed the agenda of philosophy in Germany away from the logic of the sciences and toward an examination of the value of life. He examines the major defenders of pessimism (Philipp Mainlander, Eduard von Hartmann and Julius Bahnsen) and its chief critics, especially Eugen Duhring and the neo-Kantians. The pessimism dispute of the second half of the century has been largely ignored in secondary literature and this book is a first attempt since the 1880s to re-examine it and to analyze the important philosophical issues raised by it. The dispute concerned the most fundamental philosophical issue of them all: whether life is worth living.

Samuel C. Rickless presents a novel interpretation of the thought of George Berkeley. In A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (1713), Berkeley argues for the astonishing view that physical objects (such as tables and chairs) are nothing but collections of ideas (idealism); that there is no such thing as material substance (immaterialism); that abstract ideas are impossible (anti-abstractionism); and that an idea can be like nothing but an idea (the likeness principle). It is a matter of great controversy what Berkeley's argument for idealism is and whether it succeeds. Most scholars believe that the argument is based on immaterialism, anti-abstractionism, or the likeness principle. In Berkeley's Argument for Idealism, Rickless argues that Berkeley distinguishes between two kinds of abstraction, 'singling' abstraction and 'generalizing' abstraction; that his argument for idealism depends on the impossibility of singling abstraction but not on the impossibility of generalizing abstraction; and that the argument depends neither on immaterialism nor the likeness principle. According to Rickless, the heart of the argument for idealism rests on the distinction between mediate and immediate perception, and in particular on the thesis that everything that is perceived by means of the senses is immediately perceived. After analyzing the argument, Rickless concludes that it is valid and may well be sound. This is Berkeley's most enduring philosophical legacy.

Friedrich Nietzsche regarded himself as the most musical philosopher - he played the piano, wrote his own compositions and espoused a philosophy encouraging all to dance for joy. Central to his life and his ideas were the music and personality of Richard Wagner, whom he both loved and loathed at different times of his life. Nietzsche had considerable influence on contemporary composers, many of whom employed Wagnerian sonorities set to his words (although he had by then broken with Wagner, advocating Bizet instead). This book explores Nietzsche's relationship with Wagner, the influence of his writings on the music of Strauss, Mahler, Delius, Scriabin, Busoni and others, his place in Thomas Mann's critique of German Romantic music in the novel Doctor Faustus and his impact on 20th-century popular music.