"Chatter" cannot always be taken lightly, for the insignificance and insubstantiality of "idle talk," "prattle," "nonsense," and so forth challenge the very notions of substance and significance through which rational discourses seek justification. This book shows that in "chatter" Kierkegaard uncovered a specfically linguistic mode of negativity-not that of the Hegelian concept-became the medium in which a non-speculative and non-historicist presentation of history could be carried out. The author examines in detail those writings of Kierkegaard in which he undertook complex negotiations with the threat-and also the promise-of "chatter." One effect of these negotiations is revealed as an insistence on "existence," which alone could appear as a counterweight to the lightness and insubstantiality of mere language. The author's readings of both well-known and neglected works do not simply show how indirect communication affects this insistence on "existence"; they also show how the negation of direct communication (which in genderal makes reading necessary) undoes the distinctions through which weighty "existence" and insubstantial "chatter" are set apart.

Hume's comprehensive effort to form an observationally grounded study of human nature employs John Locke's empiric principles to construct a theory of knowledge from which to evaluate metaphysical ideas. A key to modern studies of 18th-century Western philosophy, the "Treatise" considers numerous classic philosophical issues, including causation, existence, freedom and necessity, and morality.

Pierre Gassendi was a major figure in seventeenth-century philosophy whose philosophical and scientific works contributed to shaping Western intellectual identity. This collection of essays constitutes the first book on Gassendi in the English language that covers his biography, bibliography, and all aspects of his work.

What do we know about Hegel? What do we know about Marx? What do we know about democracy and totalitarianism? Communism and psychoanalysis? What do we know that isn't a platitude that we've heard a thousand times - or a self-satisfied certainty? Through his brilliant reading of Hegel, Slavoj Zizek - one of the most provocative and widely-read thinkers of our time - upends our traditional understanding, dynamites every cliche and undermines every conviction in order to clear the ground for new ways of answering these questions. When Lacan described Hegel as the most sublime hysteric , he was referring to the way that the hysteric asks questions because he experiences his own desire as if it were the Other's desire. In the dialectical process, the question asked of the Other is resolved through a reflexive turn in which the question begins to function as its own answer. We had made Hegel into the theorist of abstraction and reaction, but by reading Hegel with Lacan, Zizek unveils a Hegel of the concrete and of revolution - his own, and the one to come. This early and dazzlingly original work by Zizek offers a unique insight into the ideas which have since become hallmarks of his mature thought. It will be of great interest to anyone interested in critical theory, philosophy and contemporary social thought.

Blake's late prophecies, The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem, feature a conflict between the poet-prophet Los and a Spectre embodying all he most opposes: intellectual scepticism, religious despair and a systematic philosophical logic of contraries, which is for Blake an abstraction from, and negation of, his ideal of 'life'. In this 1991 book, Lorraine Clark traces the analogy between Blake's Spectre and Soren Kierkegaard's concept of 'dread', whose spirit of negation and irony he seeks to conquer, in both its philosophical and aesthetic manifestations. Using Kierkegaard's philosophy to illuminate Blake's prophecies, Lorraine Clark shows these concepts to offer the basis for a profound critique both of romanticism, as it has come to be identified with the spirit of dialectic, and of the postmodern irony which it has spawned. Their attempt to rescue an ideal of life from its abstraction within idealist dialectics is itself deeply romantic, and offers a dramatisation of tensions - between scepticism and affirmation, religion and nihilism, philosophy and poetry - central to our understanding of romanticism.

The School of Life offers radical ways to help us raid the treasure trove of human knowledge' Independent on Sunday Soren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, theologian, literary stylist and social critic. Born in 1813 in Copenhagen, his philosophical work addressed living as a single individual and the importance of personal choice. A famously fierce critic of the idealist thinkers of his time, he is regarded as the first existentialist philosopher. Here you will find insights from his greatest works. The Life Lessons series from The School of Life takes a great thinker and highlights those ideas most relevant to ordinary, everyday dilemmas. These books emphasize ways in which wise voices from the past have urgently important and inspiring things to tell us. 'thoroughly welcoming and approachable ... [Robert Ferguson] communicates strongly his enthusiams, indeed his love, for this Manichean of the north, and writes of him beautifully ... If the six books in the Life Lessons series can teach even a few readers to pay passionate heed to the world - to notice things - they will have been an unquestionable success' John Banville, Prospect 'there is a good deal to be learned from these little primers' Observer

First published in 2001, this book sets out to shed light on traditional controversies in Mill scholarship, underscore the significance of the contribution Mill made to associationist psychology, argue he is not entirely successful in explaining why art matters, and that this failure is linked to a deep tension in his mature work - rooted in his unwillingness to shake off the moral psychology he was raised on. The book examines various episodes and tensions in Mill's life and work and how they relate to and informed his philosophy - while also giving a critical account of it. This book will be of interest to students of philosophy.

Most of the major schools of contemporary philosophy, from Marxism to Existentialism, are reactions to Hegelianism and all, if they are to be understood, require some understanding of Hegel's "Logic". From its first appearance in 1812, this work has been recognised by both admirers and detractors alike as being the absolute foundation of Hegel's system.

Resets the scholarship on the philosophical practice and style of Francois HemsterhuisFrancois Hemsterhuis, 1721-1790, was the most significant Dutch philosopher after Spinoza. Daniel Whistler argues that Hemsterhuis' philosophy matters and that its exclusion from the canon of modern philosophy has been unjust. This is not just because of its influence on later German thinkers, such as Goethe, Hegel, Herder, Jacobi, Lessing and Novalis - but primarily because Hemsterhuis' philosophy contains such a rich assemblage of ideas and philosophical practices. Whistler looks specifically at Hemsterhuis' reflections on philosophical style and the strategies he employs to communicate and disclose ideas in his late dialogues. Taking seriously Hemsterhuis' newly-published complete correspondence as a significant philosophical text, he contends that Hemsterhuis deserves to be placed alongside Schlegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as one of the preeminent philosophical stylists of modernity.

Halla Kim explores the leading themes in Kant's philosophical ethics from a structural-methodological point of view to highlight the activities of reason vis-a-vis the blind forces of brute nature. Basing the study on Kant's short, but monumental, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kim also draws on other major writings by Kant and his critics. Kim shows that philosophical ethics, as Kant conceived it, must capture the gist of the ineluctable, inescapable, and irreducible freedom we strive to exemplify in our practical lives. Viewed this way, the moral law is none other than the law of the will determining itself. It is the law of the self-activity of the will. Contending that the concepts and doctrines in Kant's ethics should be understood as an ethics of the self-activity of the will, Kim argues that the categorical imperative is the particular way this moral law is addressed to finite rational beings. Kant and the Foundations of Morality provides new perspective on the philosopher's thought to benefit studies of eighteenth-century philosophy, epistemology, modern philosophy, moral theory, moral philosophy, and ethics.

The Collected Works of Spinoza provides, for the first time in English, a truly satisfactory edition of all of Spinoza's writings, with accurate and readable translations, based on the best critical editions of the original-language texts, done by a scholar who has published extensively on the philosopher's work. The centerpiece of this second volume is Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise, a landmark work in the history of biblical scholarship, the first argument for democracy by a major philosopher, and a forceful defense of freedom of thought and expression. This work is accompanied by Spinoza's later correspondence, much of which responds to criticism of the Theological-Political Treatise. The volume also includes his last work, the unfinished Political Treatise, which builds on the foundations of the Theological-Political Treatise to offer plans for the organization of nontyrannical monarchies and aristocracies. The elaborate editorial apparatus--including prefaces, notes, glossary, and indexes--assists the reader in understanding one of the world's most fascinating, but also most difficult, philosophers. Of particular interest is the glossary-index, which provides extensive commentary on Spinoza's technical vocabulary. A milestone of scholarship more than forty-five years in the making, The Collected Works of Spinoza is an essential edition for anyone with a serious interest in Spinoza or the history of philosophy.

The Possibility of Culture: Pleasure and Moral Development in Kant's Aesthetics presents an in-depth exploration and deconstruction of Kant's depiction of the ways in which aesthetic pursuits can promote personal moral development. Presents an in-depth exploration of the connection between Kant's aesthetics and his views on moral development Reveals the links between Kant's aesthetics and his anthropology and moral psychology Explores Kant's notion of genius and his views on the connections between the social aspects of taste and moral development Addresses aspects of Kant's ethical theory that will interest scholars working in ethics and moral psychology

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is one of the most controversial philosophers of the eighteenth century, and his groundbreaking work still provokes heated debate in contemporary political theory. In this book, Celine Spector, one of the world's foremost experts on Rousseau's thought, provides an accessible introduction to his moral, social and political theory. She explores the themes and central concepts of his thought, ranging from the state of nature, the social contract and the general will to natural and political freedom, religion and education. She combines a skilful exposition of Rousseau as a 'man of paradoxes' with a discussion of his often-overlooked ideas on knowledge, political economy and international relations. The book traces both the overall unity and the significant changes in Rousseau's philosophy, accounting for its complexity and for the importance of its legacy. It will be essential reading for scholars, students and general readers interested in the Enlightenment and more broadly in the history of modern political thought and philosophy.

Immanuel Kant's moral philosophy is almost universally understood at the attempt to analyse and defend a morality based on individual autonomy. In The Kantian Imperative, Paul Saurette challenges this interpretation by arguing that Kant's 'imperative' is actually based on a problematic appeal to 'common sense' and that it is premised on, and seeks to further cultivate and intensify, the feeling of humiliation in every moral subject. Discerning the influence of this model on a wide variety of historical and contemporary political thought and philosophy and critical of its implications, Saurette explores its impact on the work of two seminal and contemporary thinkers in particular: Charles Taylor and Jurgen Habermas. Saurette also shows that an analysis of the Kantian imperative allows a better understanding of current political problems such as the U.S. torture scandal as Abu Ghraib in Iraq and broader post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy. The Kantian Imperative thus demonstrates that philosophy and political theory a are as relevant to contemporary events as at any other time in history.

Exploring the experiments in individual and national self-consciousness conducted during the Romantic period, this essential comparative study of European literature, philosophy and politics makes original and often surprising connections and contrasts to reveal how personal and social identities were re-orientated and disorientated from the French Revolution onwards. Reviving a contested moment in the history of aesthetic theory, this study shows how the growing awareness of irresolution in Kant's third Kritik allowed Romantic writers to put the aesthetic to radical uses not envisaged by its parent philosophy. It also recounts how they would go on to force philosophy to revise received notions of authority, empowering women and subordinated ethnic groups to re-orientate existing hierarchies. The sheer range and variety of writers covered is testament both to the breadth of writing that Kant's philosophy so rashly legitimated and to the wider importance of philosophy to the understanding of Romantic literature.

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.

This book expounds Kant's Critique of Judgement by interpreting all the details in the light of what Kant himself declares to be his fundamental problem. Providing an excellent introduction to Kant's third critique, it will be of interest to students of philosophy.

First published in 1990. The aim of this thesis is to show that the way to understand the central claims of Kant's ethics is to accept the idea that morality is a distinctive form of rationality; that the moral "ought" belongs to a system of imperatives based in practical reason; and that moral judgment, therefore, is a species of rational assessment of agents' actions. It argues, in effect, that you cannot understand Kant's views about morality if you read him with Humean assumptions about rationality. This title will be of interest to students of philosophy.

First published in 1962. Kant's philosophical works, and especially the Critique of Pure Reason, have had some influence on recent British philosophy. But the complexities of Kant's arguments, and the unfamiliarity of his vocabulary, inhibit understanding of his point of view. In Kant's Theory of Knowledge an attempt is made to relate Kant's arguments in the Critique of Pure Reason to contemporary issues by expressing them in a more modern idiom. The selection of issues discussed is intended to present a continuous argument, of an epistemological kind, which runs centrally through the Critique. The argument deals with essentially with the problems, raised in the Transcendental Analytic, about the status of categories. It deals with certain preliminary assumptions made in setting these problems, and discusses the way in which the various sections of the Analytic contribute to their solution. It also deals with Kant's criticisms of traditional metaphysics, and ends with an account of his effort in the Third Antinomy to resolve the conflict between freedom and causality, and so to effect a transition of knowledge to moral philosophy.

Scottish philosopher Lady Mary Shepherd (1777-1847) wrote two books that she conceived as one unified project: Essay Upon the Relation of Cause and Effect (1824) and Essays on the Perception of an External Universe (1827). While they were well received in her day, Shepherd's insightful philosophical writings have been neglected for some 150 years and are only now receiving the scholarly attention they deserve. Mary Shepherd: A Guide by Deborah Boyle, part of the Oxford Guides to Philosophy series, navigates students of philosophy or general readers through Shepherd's two significant works. The first four chapters address topics raised in the 1824 Essay: Shepherd's arguments for two key causal principles, her objections to Hume and her alternative accounts of causation and causal inference; her theory of objects as bundles of qualities; her critique of Thomas Brown's defence of Humean causation; and her discussion of London surgeon William Lawrence's accounts of sentience and life, which Shepherd treats as a case study of how Humean theory can lead to errors in scientific reasoning. Chapter 5 covers topics central to both of Shepherd's books: what she means by "sensation," "idea," "will," "imagination," "understanding," "reasoning," and "latent reasoning." The remaining five chapters proceed systematically through Shepherd's 1827 book, where she seeks to prove, against Berkeleian idealism, that we can know that an external world of mind-independent matter exists. Boyle discusses Shepherd's proofs for such an external world, her responses to various sceptical challenges, and her specific objections to Berkeley. Each chapter ends with a list of works for further reading and a glossary of terms that explain Shepherd's sometimes idiosyncratic philosophical vocabulary, resulting in an essential guide to a philosopher who exerted considerable influence during her time.

Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is a key element of the system of philosophy which Kant introduced with his Critique of Pure Reason, and a work of major importance in the history of Western religious thought. It represents a great philosopher's attempt to spell out the form and content of a type of religion that would be grounded in moral reason and would meet the needs of ethical life. It includes sharply critical and boldly constructive discussions on topics not often treated by philosophers, including such traditional theological concepts as original sin and the salvation or 'justification' of a sinner, and the idea of the proper role of a church. This new edition includes slightly revised translations, a revised introduction with expanded discussion of certain key themes in the work, and up-to-date guidance on further reading.

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."