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Books > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present > General
Samuel Pufendorf's seminal work, "The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature" (first published in Latin in 1673), was among the first to suggest a purely conventional basis for natural law. Rejecting scholasticism's metaphysical theories, Pufendorf found the source of natural law in humanity's need to cultivate sociability. At the same time, he distanced himself from Hobbes's deduction of such needs from self-interest. The result was a sophisticated theory of the conventional character of man's social persona and of all political institutions.Pufendorf wrote this work to make his insights accessible to a wide range of readers, especially university students. As ministers, teachers, and public servants, they would have to struggle with issues of sovereignty and of the relationship between church and state that dominated the new state system of Europe in the aftermath of the Peace of Westphalia (1648)."The Whole Duty" was first translated into English in 1691. The fourth edition was significantly revised--by anonymous editors--to include a great deal of the very important editorial material from Jean Barbeyrac's French editions. This was reproduced in the fifth edition from 1735 that is republished here. The English translation provides a fascinating insight into the transplantation of Pufendorf's political theory from a German absolutist milieu to an English parliamentarian one.Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1694) was one of the most important figures in early-modern political thought. An exact contemporary of Locke and Spinoza, he transformed the natural law theories of Grotius and Hobbes, developed striking ideas of toleration and of the relationship between church and state, and wrote extensive political histories and analyses of the constitution of the German empire.Jean Barbeyrac (1674-1744) was a Huguenot refugee who taught natural law successively in Berlin, Lausanne, and Amsterdam, and edited and translated into French the major natural law works of Grotius, Pufendorf, and Cumberland.Andrew Tooke (1673-1732) was headmaster of Chaterhouse School and professor of geometry at Gresham College, London.Ian Hunter is Australian Professorial Fellow in the Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland.David Saunders is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Arts at Griffith University.Knud Haakonssen is Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Sussex, England.
An inquiry into the origins, dissemination, and consequences of the modern belief that humans can solve any problem and overcome any difficulty, given time and resources enough.
What does it take to be subjectively free in an objectively rational social order? In this book Andreja Novakovic offers a fresh interpretation of Hegel's account of ethical life by focusing on his concept of habit or 'second nature'. Novakovic addresses two central and difficult issues facing any interpretation of his Philosophy of Right: why Hegel thinks that it is is better to relate unreflectively to the laws of ethical life, and which forms of reflection, especially critical reflection, remain available within ethical life. Her interpretation draws on numerous parts of Hegel's system, particularly on his 'Anthropology' and his Phenomenology of Spirit, and also explores connections between his account and those of other philosophers. Her aim is to argue that Hegel has a compelling conception of the ordinary ethical standpoint which takes seriously both the virtues and the perils of reflection.
Zentrale Theoriebestandteile der kritischen Philosophie Kants und der fruhen Wissenschaftslehre Fichtes werden in einer detaillierten Interpretation einander gegenubergestellt. Dazu gehoeren sowohl das reine als auch das konkrete Ich, die Einbildungskraft, die Ableitung und die Rechtfertigung der Kategorien sowie das Ding an sich. Bei der Ausarbeitung dieser Themen zeigt sich, dass die Ansatze Kants und Fichtes uber ihre herausragende historische Bedeutung hinaus in verschiedener Weise nach wie vor grundlegende Moeglichkeiten fur eine Philosophie des Geistes und eine Erkenntnistheorie bereitstellen.
Baruch Spinoza's Ethics was published in 1677 just after his death. Along with Descartes's Meditations (1641) and Leibniz's mature essays (1685-1714) the Ethics is regarded as among the most important philosophical work of continental Early Modern Europe. In this guide, Michael LeBuffe follows the Ethics closely and helps readers to understand Spinoza's masterpiece for themselves. The Ethics is a hugely ambitious work that offers strong, controversial views on almost every aspect of philosophy. In a geometrical style, in which propositions build upon definitions and axioms, Spinoza contends that there is only one substance, God, and that everything that exists, including God and human beings, is subject to absolute necessity. Nevertheless, he also defends rich theories of human action and ethics. Spinoza maintains that we can and should work to overcome the harmful influence of passion and enjoy salvation and blessedness. LeBuffe includes an introduction designed to supply first time readers with enough background to study the text productively. He then devotes a chapter to each of the Ethics' five parts: on God, mind, the affects or emotions, human bondage, and human freedom. The guide focuses on one manageable part of Spinoza's dense argument at a time, pausing frequently to raise and consider questions for further research. This accessible guide to the Ethics will help readers to understand the challenging text and to develop their own sophisticated interpretations of Spinoza.
Kant announces that the Critique of the Power of Judgment will bring his entire critical enterprise to an end. But it is by no means agreed upon that it in fact does so and, if it does, how. In this book, Ido Geiger argues that a principal concern of the third Critique is completing the account of the transcendental conditions of empirical experience and knowledge. This includes both Kant's analysis of natural beauty and his discussion of teleological judgments of organisms and of nature generally. Geiger's original reading of the third Critique shows that it forms a unified whole - and that it does in fact deliver the final part of Kant's transcendental undertaking. His book will be valuable to all who are interested in Kant's theory of the aesthetic and conceptual purposiveness of nature.
Nietzsche scholars have long been divided over whether Nietzsche is an aristocratic or a democratic thinker. Nietzche's Culture of Humanity overcomes this debate by proving both sides wrong. Jeffrey Church argues that in his early period writings, Nietzsche envisioned a cultural meritocracy that drew on the classical German tradition of Kant and Herder. The young Nietzsche's 'culture of humanity' synthesized the high and low, the genius and the people, the nation and humanity. Nietzsche's early ideal of culture can shed light on his mature period thought, since, Church argues, Nietzsche does not abandon this fundamental commitment to a cultural meritocracy. Nietzche's Culture of Humanity argues that Nietzsche's novel defense of culture can overcome some persisting problems in contemporary liberal theories of culture. As such, this book should interest Nietzsche scholars, political theorists and philosophers interested in modern thought, as well as contemporary thinkers concerned with the politics of culture.
The papers published here were given at the second biennial conference of the Hegel Society of America, held at the University of Notre Dame, November 9-11, 1972. They appear in an order which reflects roughly two headings: (1) Hegel's conception of the history of philosophy in general, and (2) his relation to individual thinkers both before and after him. Given the importance of the history of philosophy for Hegel, and the far-reaching impact of his thought upon subsequent philosophy, it becomes immediately apparent that we have here only a beginning. At the conference, cries went up "Why not Hegel and Aristotle, Aquinas, HusserI and Hart mann?" Indeed, why not? The answer, of course, might be given by Hegel himself: if we wish to accomplish anything, we have to limit ourselves. We trust that future conferences and scholarship will bring to light these relationships and the many more which testify to Hegel's profound presence in the mainstream of past and present thought. It is furthermore no accident that the renaissance of Hegelian studies has brought with it a rebirth of the history of philosophy as something relevant to our own problems. For Hegel, the object of philosophy is alone the truth, the history of philosophy is philosophy itself, and this truth which it gives us cannot be what has passed away."
This book offers translations of early critical reactions to Kant's account of free will. Spanning the years 1784-1800, the translations make available, for the first time in English, works by little-known thinkers including Pistorius, Ulrich, Heydenreich, Creuzer and others, as well as familiar figures including Reinhold, Fichte and Schelling. Together they are a testimony to the intense debates surrounding the reception of Kant's account of free will in the 1780s and 1790s, and throw into relief the controversies concerning the coherence of Kant's concept of transcendental freedom, the possibility of reconciling freedom with determinism, the relation between free will and moral imputation, and other arguments central to Kant's view. The volume also includes a helpful introduction, a glossary of key terms and biographical details of the critics, and will provide a valuable foundation for further research on free will in post-Kantian philosophy.
An important figure in the natural law tradition and in the
Scottish Enlightenment, Gershom Carmichael defended a strong theory
of rights and drew attention to Grotius, Pufendorf, and Locke.
Daybreak marks the arrival of Nietzsche's "mature" philosophy and is indispensable for an understanding of his critique of morality and "revaluation of all values." This volume presents the distinguished translation by R. J. Hollingdale, with a new introduction that argues for a dramatic change in Nietzsche's views from Human, All too Human to Daybreak, and shows how this change, in turn, presages the main themes of Nietzsche's later and better-known works such as On the Genealogy of Morality. The edition is completed by a chronology, notes and a guide to further reading.
The present volume represents the proceedings of the Marquette Hegel Symposium, held at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on June 2-5, 1970. The Symposium, celebrating the two-hundredth annivers ary of Hegel's birth, was presented under the combined sponsorship of the Philosophy Department of Marquette University, the American Coun cil of Learned Societies, and the Johnson Foundation of Racine, Wiscon sin. Its general theme embraced not only specific topics of interest in con temporary Hegel studies, but also the wider aspects of the influences and impact of Hegel's thought upon contemporary philosophical, political, and social problems. Principal contributors and panelists were selected for their scholarly achievements in Hegel studies and also in keeping with the broad view of the Hegelian legacy in current thought. All sessions of the Symposium were plenary, and designed for maximum discussion and in terchange among participants. The Symposium Committee regrets that it has not been feasible to incorporate the transcript of the discussions (ex cept for the round-table discussion on editing and translating Hegel) into this volume. The papers presented in each day's sessions are published here with editorial changes and corrections made by their respective authors. The papers by Professors Otto Poggeler and Eric Weil were originally trans lated by members of our Committee: the present versions incorporate many changes and corrections made by their authors. The comments on each paper were brought into their present form only after the Symposium, and in the light of the discussions which took place during it."
"Hume's Politics" provides a comprehensive examination of David Hume's political theory, and is the first book to focus on Hume's monumental "History of England" as the key to his distinctly political ideas. Andrew Sabl argues that conventions of authority are the main building blocks of Humean politics, and explores how the "History" addresses political change and disequilibrium through a dynamic treatment of coordination problems. Dynamic coordination, as employed in Hume's work, explains how conventions of political authority arise, change, adapt to new social and economic conditions, improve or decay, and die. Sabl shows how Humean constitutional conservatism need not hinder--and may in fact facilitate--change and improvement in economic, social, and cultural life. He also identifies how Humean liberalism can offer a systematic alternative to neo-Kantian approaches to politics and liberal theory. At once scholarly and accessibly written, "Hume's Politics" builds bridges between political theory and political science. It treats issues of concern to both fields, including the prehistory of political coordination, the obstacles that must be overcome in order for citizens to see themselves as sharing common political interests, the close and counterintuitive relationship between governmental authority and civic allegiance, the strategic ethics of political crisis and constitutional change, and the ways in which the biases and injustices endemic to executive power can be corrected by legislative contestation and debate.
The present study seeks to treat in depth a relatively restricted portion of Hegel's thought but one that has not yet received intensive treatment by Hegel scholars in English. In the Hegelian system of philosophical sciences, the Anthropology directly follows the Philosophy of Nature and forms the first of the three sciences of Subjective Spirit: 1 Anthropo logy, Phenomenology, and Psychology. The section on Subjective Spirit is then followed by sections on Objective Spirit and Absolute Spirit. The three sections together comprise the Philosophy of Spirit (Philosophie des Geistes 2), which constitutes the third and concluding main division of Hegel's total system as presented in the Encyclopedia of Philosophic Sciences in Outline. a Hegel intended to write a separate full-scale work on the philosophy of Subjective Spirit as he had done on Objective Spirit (the Philosophy of Right), but died before he could do so. . Thus the focus of our study is quite concentrated. Its relatively narrow scope within the vast compass of the Hegelian system may be justified, 1 Iring Fetscher (HegeUt Lehre vom Menschen, Stuttgart, 1970, p. 11) notes the lack of a modem commentary to Hegel's Encyclopedia, and in particular to the section on Subjective Spirit. Brief accounts of this section in English may be found in: Hugh A. Reyburn, The Ethical Theory of Hegel (Oxford, 1921), Chapter V; and O. R. O. Mure, A Study of Hegers Logic (Oxford, 1950), pp. 2-22."
With the publication of the Parerga and Paralipomena in 1851, there finally came some measure of the fame that Schopenhauer thought was his due. Described by Schopenhauer himself as 'incomparably more popular than everything up till now', the Parerga is a miscellany of essays addressing themes that complement his work The World as Will and Representation, along with more divergent, speculative pieces. It includes his 'Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life', reflections on fate and clairvoyance, trenchant views on the philosophers and universities of his day, and an enlightening survey of the history of philosophy. The present volume offers a new translation, a substantial introduction explaining the context of the essays, and extensive editorial notes on the different published versions of the work. This readable and scholarly edition will be an essential reference for those studying Schopenhauer, the history of philosophy, and nineteenth-century German philosophy.
A thoroughly researched and documented history of a seminal idea, from its inception by Augustine through to its various manifestations down the centuries, both inside and outside the Church
In Hating Empire Properly, Sunil Agnani produces a novel attempt to think the eighteenth-century imagination of the West and East Indies together, arguing that this is how contemporary thinkers Edmund Burke and Denis Diderot actually viewed them. This concern with multiple geographical spaces is revealed to be a largely unacknowledged part of the matrix of Enlightenment thought in which eighteenth-century European and American self-conceptions evolved. By focusing on colonial spaces of the Enlightenment, especially India and Haiti, he demonstrates how Burke's fearful view of the French Revolution-the defining event of modernity- as shaped by prior reflection on these other domains. Exploring with sympathy the angry outbursts against injustice in the writings of Diderot, he nonetheless challenges recent understandings of him as a univocal critic of empire by showing the persistence of a fantasy of consensual colonialism in his thought. By looking at the impasses and limits in the thought of both radical and conservative writers, Agnani asks what it means to critique empire "properly." Drawing his method from Theodor Adorno's quip that "one must have tradition in oneself, in order to hate it properly," he proposes a critical inhabiting of dominant forms of reason as a way forward for the critique of both empire and Enlightenment. Thus, this volume makes important contributions to political theory, history, literary studies, American studies, and postcolonial studies.
The Perfection of Freedom seeks to respond to the impoverished conventional notion of freedom through a recovery of an understanding rich with possibilities yet all but forgotten in contemporary thought. This understanding, developed in different but complementary ways by the German thinkers Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel, connects freedom, not exclusively with power and possibility, but rather, most fundamentally, with completion, wholeness, and actuality. What is unique here is specifically the interpretation of freedom in terms of form, whether it be aesthetic form (Schiller), organic form (Schelling), or social form (Hegel). Although this book presents serious criticisms of the three philosophers, it shows that they open new avenues for reflection on the notion of freedom; avenues that promise to overcome many of the dichotomies that continue to haunt contemporary thought - for example, between freedom and order, freedom and nature, and self and other. The Perfection of Freedom offers not only a significantly new interpretation of Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel, but also proposes a modernity more organically rooted in the ancient and classical Christian worlds.
Conceptualism is the view that cognizers can have mental representations of the world only if they possess the adequate concepts by means of which they can specify what they represent. By contrast, non-conceptualism is the view that mental representations of the world do not necessarily presuppose concepts by means of which the content of these representations can be specified, thus cognizers can have mental representations of the world that are non-conceptual. Consequently, if conceptualism is true then non-conceptualism must be false, and vice versa. This incompatibility makes the current debate over conceptualism and non-conceptualism a fundamental controversy since the range of conceptual capacities that cognizers have certainly has an impact on their mental representations of the world, on how sense perception is structured, and how external world beliefs are justified. Conceptualists and non-conceptualists alike refer to Kant as the major authoritative reference point from which they start and develop their arguments. The appeal to Kant attempts to pave the way for a robust answer to the question of whether or not there is non-conceptual content. Since the incompatibility of the conceptualist and non-conceptualist readings of Kant indicate a paradigm case, hopes have risen that the answer to the question of whether Kant is a conceptualist or a non-conceptualist might settle the contemporary controversy across the board. This volume searches for that answer. This book is based on a special issue of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies.
Drawing on over a century of international Nietzschean scholarship, this groundbreaking book discusses some of the unexplored psychological reaches of Nietzsche's thought, as well as their implications for psychotherapeutic practice. Nietzsche's philosophy anticipated some of the most innovative cultural movements of the last century, from expressionism and surrealism to psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology and phenomenology. But his work on psychology often remains discarded, despite its many insights. Addressing this oversight, and in an age of managerialism and evidence-based practice, this book helps to redefine psychotherapy as an experiment that explores the limits and intricacies of human experience. It builds the foundations for a differentialist psychology: a life-affirming project that can deal squarely with the challenges, joys and sorrows of being human. Nietzsche and Psychotherapy will be of great interest to researchers interested in the relationship between psychotherapy and philosophy, Nietzschean scholars, as well as to clinicians grappling with the challenges of working in the so-called "post-truth" age.
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.
This book uncovers the philosophical foundations of a tradition of
ethical socialism best represented
David Hume is generally credited with the classic statement of the `compatibilist' position in the free will dispute. In this study it is argued that Hume's views on this subject, although largely influential, have nevertheless been seriously misrepresented. Classical readings have entirely overlooked Hume's naturalistic concerns and commitments, those very aspects of his general strategy which are of particular significance to the contemporary discussion. First study devoted entirely to Hume's influential views on freedom and responsibility. Gives historical context not only of Hume's laying foundation for a naturalistic approach to issues of moral sentiment and its relevance to problems of responsibility and free will, but also of Hume's anticipation of elements of contemporary discussion on these issues. |
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