Rousseau's Social Contract is a benchmark in political philosophy and has influenced moral and political thought since its publication. Rousseau and the Social Contract introduces and assesses:

*Rousseau's life and the background of the Social Contract
*The ideas and arguments of the Social Contract
*Rousseau's continuing importance to politics and philosophy

Rousseau and the Social Contract will be essential reading for all students of philosophy and politics, and anyone coming to Rousseau for the first time.

Friedrich Nietzsche is often depicted in popular and scholarly discourse as a lonely philosopher dealing with abstract concerns unconnected to the intellectual debates of his time and place. Robert C. Holub counters this narrative, arguing that Nietzsche was very well attuned to the events and issues of his era and responded to them frequently in his writings. Organized around nine important questions circulating in Europe at the time in the realms of politics, society, and science, Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century presents a thorough investigation of Nietzsche's familiarity with contemporary life, his contact with and comments on these various questions, and the sources from which he gathered his knowledge. Holub begins his analysis with Nietzsche's views on education, nationhood, and the working-class movement, turns to questions of women and women's emancipation, colonialism, and Jews and Judaism, and looks at Nietzsche's dealings with evolutionary biology, cosmological theories, and the new "science" of eugenics. He shows how Nietzsche, although infrequently read during his lifetime, formulated his thought in an ongoing dialogue with the concerns of his contemporaries, and how his philosophy can be conceived as a contribution to the debates taking place in the nineteenth century. Throughout his examination, Holub finds that, against conventional wisdom, Nietzsche was only indirectly in conversation with the modern philosophical tradition from Descartes through German idealism, and that the books and individuals central to his development were more obscure writers, most of whom have long since been forgotten. This book thus sheds light on Nietzsche's thought as enmeshed in a web of nineteenth-century discourses and offers new insights into his interactive method of engaging with the philosophical universe of his time.

Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660-1710 investigates the biblical criticism of Spinoza from the perspective of the Dutch Reformed society in which the philosopher lived and worked. It focuses on philological investigation of the Bible: its words, language, and the historical context in which it originated. Jetze Touber expertly charts contested issues of biblical philology in mainstream Dutch Calvinism to determine if Spinoza's work on the Bible had bearing on the Reformed understanding of the way society should handle Scripture. Spinoza has received considerable attention both in and outside academia. His unconventional interpretation of the Old Testament passages has been examined repeatedly during the past decades. So has that of fellow 'radicals' (rationalists, radicals, deists, libertines, and enthusiasts), against the backdrop of a society that is assumed to have been hostile, overwhelmed, static, and uniform. Touber counteracts this perspective and considers how the Dutch Republic used biblical philology and biblical criticism, including that of Spinoza. In doing so, Touber takes into account the highly neglected area of the Dutch Reformed ministry and theology of the Dutch Golden Age. The study concludes that Spinoza-rather than simply pushing biblical scholarship in the direction of modernity-acted in an indirect way upon ongoing debates, shifting trends in those debates, but not always in the same direction, and not always equally profoundly at all times, on all levels.

Fifteen leading philosophers explore a set of themes from the pioneering work of Gail Fine and Terence Irwin, in ancient philosophy but also in later periods and in systematic philosophy. The contributors discuss knowledge, rhetoric, freedom and practical reason, virtue and the good life, ethics and politics in Plato and Aristotle and beyond. The editors offer an introduction charting the scholarly contributions of Fine and Irwin and assessing their individual and joint impact, together with a complete bibliography of their writings.

Kant and Applied Ethics makes an important contribution to Kant scholarship, illuminating the vital moral parameters of key ethical debates. * Offers a critical analysis of Kant s ethics, interrogating the theoretical bases of his theory and evaluating their strengths and weaknesses * Examines the controversies surrounding the most important ethical discussions taking place today, including abortion, the death penalty, and same-sex marriage * Joins innovative thinkers in contemporary Kantian scholarship, including Christine Korsgaard, Allen Wood, and Barbara Herman, in taking Kant s philosophy in new and interesting directions * Clarifies Kant s legacy for applied ethics, helping us to understand how these debates have been structured historically and providing us with the philosophical tools to address them

What is time? This is one of the most fundamental questions we can ask. Traditionally, the answer was that time is a product of the human mind, or of the motion of celestial bodies. In the mid-seventeenth century, a new kind of answer emerged: time or eternal duration is 'absolute', in the sense that it is independent of human minds and material bodies. Emily Thomas explores the development of absolute time or eternal duration during one of Britain's richest and most creative metaphysical periods, from the 1640s to the 1730s. She introduces an interconnected set of main characters - Henry More, Walter Charleton, Isaac Barrow, Isaac Newton, John Locke, Samuel Clarke, and John Jackson - alongside a large and varied supporting cast, whose metaphysical views are all read in their historical context and given a place in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century development of thought about time.

Stephen Gaukroger presents an original account of the development of empirical science and the understanding of human behaviour from the mid-eighteenth century. Since the seventeenth century, science in the west has undergone a unique form of cumulative development in which it has been consolidated through integration into and shaping of a culture. But in the eighteenth century, science was cut loose from the legitimating culture in which it had had a public rationale as a fruitful

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra presents an original study of the place and role of the Identity of Indiscernibles in Leibniz's philosophy. The Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles rules out numerically distinct but perfectly similar things; Leibniz derived it from more basic principles and used it to establish important philosophical theses. Rodriguez-Pereyra aims to establish what Leibniz meant by the Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles, what his arguments for and from it were, and to assess those arguments and Leibniz's claims about the Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles. He argues that Leibniz had a very strong version of the principle, according to which no possibilia (whether or not they belong to the same possible world) are intrinsically perfectly similar, where this excludes things that differ in magnitude alone. The book discusses Leibniz's arguments for the Identity of Indiscernibles in the Meditation on the Principle of the Individual, the Discourse on Metaphysics, Notationes Generales, Primary Truths, the letter to Casati of 1689, the correspondence with Clarke, as well as the use of the Identity of Indiscernibles in Leibniz's arguments against the Cartesian conception of the material world, atoms, absolute space and time, the Lockean conception of the mind as a tabula rasa, and freedom of indifference. Rodriguez-Pereyra argues that the Identity of Indiscernibles was a central but inessential principle of Leibniz's philosophy.

Russell B. Goodman tells the story of the development of philosophy in America from the mid-18th century to the late 19th century. The key figures in this story, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, the writers of The Federalist, and the romantics (or 'transcendentalists') Emerson and Thoreau, were not professors but men of the world, whose deep formative influence on American thought brought philosophy together with religion, politics, and literature. Goodman considers their work in relation to the philosophers and other thinkers they found important: the deism of John Toland and Matthew Tindal, the moral sense theories of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and David Hume, the political and religious philosophy of John Locke, the romanticism of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant. Goodman discusses Edwards's condemnation and Franklin's acceptance of deism, argues that Jefferson was an Epicurean in his metaphysical views and a Christian, Stoic, and Epicurean in his moral outlook, traces Emerson's debts to writers from Madame de Stael to William Ellery Channing, and considers Thoreau's orientation to the universe through sitting and walking. The morality of American slavery is a major theme in American Philosophy before Pragmatism, introduced not to excuse or condemn, but to study how five formidably intelligent people thought about the question when it was-as it no longer is for us-open. Edwards, Franklin and Jefferson owned slaves, though Franklin and Jefferson played important roles in disturbing the uneasy American moral equilibrium that included slavery, even as they approved an American constitution that included it. Emerson and Thoreau were prominent public opponents of slavery in the eighteen forties and fifties. The book contains an Interlude on the concept of a republic and concludes with an Epilogue documenting some continuities in American philosophy, particularly between Emerson and the pragmatists.

In Freedom and the End of Reason, Richard L. Velkley offers an influential interpretation of the central issue of Kant's philosophy and an evaluation of its position within modern philosophy's larger history. He persuasively argues that the whole of Kantianism - not merely the Second Critique - focuses on a "critique of practical reason" and is a response to a problem that Kant saw as intrinsic to reason itself: the teleological problem of its goodness. Reconstructing the influence of Rousseau on Kant's thought, Velkley demonstrates that the relationship between speculative philosophy and practical philosophy in Kant is far more intimate than generally has been perceived. By stressing a Rousseau-inspired notion of reason as a provider of practical ends, he is able to offer an unusually complete account of Kant's idea of moral culture.

The Poverty of Conceptual Truth is based on a simple idea. Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments underwrites a powerful argument against the metaphysical program of his Leibnizian-Wolffian predecessors-an argument from fundamental limits on its expressive power. In that tradition, metaphysics promised to reveal the deep rational structure of the world through a systematic philosophy consisting of strictly conceptual truths, which flow from a logically perspicuous relation of 'containment' among concepts. That is, all truths would be 'analytic,' in Kant's sense. Kant's distinction shows to the contrary that far reaching and scientifically indispensable parts of our knowledge of the world (including mathematics, the foundations of natural science, all knowledge from experience, and the central principles of metaphysics itself) are essentially synthetic and could never be restated in analytic form. Thus, the metaphysics of Kant's predecessors is doomed, because knowledge crucial to any adequate theory of the world cannot even be expressed in the idiom to which it restricts itself (and which was the basis of its claim to provide a transparently rational account of things). Traditional metaphysics founders on the expressive poverty of conceptual truth. To establish these claims, R. Lanier Anderson shows how Kant's distinction can be given a clear basis within traditional logic, and traces Kant's long, difficult path to discovering it. Once analyticity is framed in clear logical terms, it is possible to reconstruct compelling arguments that elementary mathematics must be synthetic, and then to show how similar considerations about irreducible syntheticity animate Kant's famous arguments against traditional metaphysics in the Critique of Pure Reason.

Jacqueline Taylor offers an original reconstruction of Hume's social theory, which examines the passions and imagination in relation to institutions such as government and the economy. Reflecting Subjects begins with a close examination of Hume's use of an experimental method to explain the origin, nature and effects of pride, an indirect passion that reflects a person's sense of self-worth in virtue of her valuable qualities, for example, her character or wealth. In explaining the origin of pride in terms of efficient causes, Hume displaces the traditional appeal to final causes, and is positioned to give an account of the significance for us of the passions in terms of a social theory. Subsequent chapters reconstruct this social theory, looking in particular at how the principle of sympathy functions to transmit cultural meanings and values, before examining Hume's account of social power-especially with regard to rank and sex. Turning to Hume's system of ethics, Taylor argues for the importance of Hume's more sophisticated moral philosophy in his Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, since it emphasizes certain virtues of good moral evaluation. She demonstrates that the principle of humanity stands as the central concept of Hume's Enlightenment philosophy.

The influence of Ibn 'Arabi, the 12th century Andalusian mystic philosopher extended beyond the Muslim world from Spain, to China, to Indonesia. Interest in Ibn 'Arabi in the west has grown over the last century. "Ibn Arabi and the Contemporary West" examines 'Arabi's teachings through the work of the Beshara Trust and the Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society. The study investigates how the Beshara School has used Ibn 'Arabi's teachings in assisting a range of students from around the world towards personal, spiritual development and how the Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society has evolved into an international organisation with increasing influence in both the West and the Muslim world.

Why did David Hume feel so deeply about publishing The Dialouges Concerning Natural Religion that he set aside funds in his will providing for its posthumous publication? Part of the answer is that it provided a literary, satirical work responding to his mean-spirited theological critics. In Hume's Presence Robert J. Fogelin provides a textual analysis that demonstrates the close relationship of The Dialogues with his central philosophical writings and its centrality to his relationship with skepticism. A striking feature of The Dialogues is that Cleanthes and Philo seem well versed in the works of the philosopher David Hume. Their arguments often echo in content-even wording-claims found in Hume's central philosophical writings. Beyond this, the overall dialectical structure of The Dialogues mirrors dialectical developments found in both The Treatise of Human Nature and the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: the naturalistic effort to provide a rational defense of religion ends in weakening religious commitments rather than in strengthening them. Nowhere in The Dialogues does Hume address his readers directly. As a result, it may not immediately be clear whether Hume is expressing his own opinions through one of his characters or is using a character to represent a position he wishes to examine, perhaps to reject. The Dialogues is a contest, and Hume, by not speaking directly in his own voice, leaves it-officially, at least-to his readers to judge who, if anyone, wins. The central problem of The Dialogues is to consider what Hume understood by skepticism. The second section of this book examines competing views of Hume's skepticism, concluding with his own remarks. In the Treatise and the Enquiry, Hume says, when consumed by skeptical arguments and reasoning, he finds philosophical nurture in rejoining the practices of everyday life. His famous, concluding remark in The Dialogues about skepticism being the basis for a believing Christian seems cut from the same cloth.

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.

Though John Locke set out to write a book that would resolve questions about the origin and scope of human knowledge, his Essay Concerning Human Understanding is also a profound contribution to metaphysics, full of arguments about the fundamental features of bodies, the notions of essence and kind, the individuation of material objects, personal identity, the nature and scope of volition, freedom of action, freedom of will, and the relationship between matter and mind. Matthew Stuart examines a broad range of these arguments, and explores the relationships between them. He offers fresh interpretations of such familiar material as the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and Locke's account of personal identity; and he also takes us deeper into less familiar territory, including Locke's case against materialism and his philosophy of action. Locke's Metaphysics shows Locke to be a more consistent, systematic and interesting metaphysician than is generally appreciated. It defends him against charges of muddling the definition of 'quality', of waffling between two conceptions of secondary qualities, and of vacillating in his commitment to mechanism. It shows how his rejection of essentialism leads him to embrace relativism about identity, and that his relativism about identity is the key to defending his account of personal identity against several objections. Yet the picture of Locke that emerges is not always a familiar one. Stuart's account reveals that he is a philosopher who denies the existence of relations, who takes bodies to be colored only so long as we are looking at them, and who is not committed to mechanism. He shows that Locke takes persons to be three-dimensional beings whose pasts are 'gappy' rather than continuous. Finally, he shows that Locke is a volitionist who holds that we can will only our own thoughts and bodily motions, and not such episodes as lighting a candle or turning the pages of a book.

In Phenomenology of Spirit (1806) Hegel is often held to have announced the end of history, where 'history' is to be understood as the long pursuit of ends towards which humanity had always been striving. In this, the first book in English to thoroughly critique this entrenched view, Eric Michael Dale argues that it is a misinterpretation. Dale offers a reading of his own, showing how it sits within the larger schema of Hegel's thought and makes room for an understanding of the 'end of history' as Hegel intended. Through an elegant analysis of Hegel's philosophy of history, Dale guides the reader away from the common misinterpretation of the 'end of history' to other valuable elements of Hegel's arguments which are often overlooked and deserve to endure. His book will be of great interest to scholars and advanced students of Hegel, the philosophy of history, and the history of political thought.

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,

While the current philosophical debate surrounding Hegel's aesthetics focuses heavily on the philosopher's controversial 'end of art' thesis, its participants rarely give attention to Hegel's ideas on the nature of beauty and its relation to art. This study seeks to remedy this oversight by placing Hegel's views on beauty front and center. Peters asks us to rethink the common assumption that Hegelian beauty is exclusive to art and argues that for Hegel beauty, like art, is subject to historical development. Her careful analysis of Hegel's notion of beauty not only has crucial implications for our understanding of the 'end of art' and Hegel's aesthetics in general, but also sheds light on other fields of Hegel's philosophy, in particular his anthropology and aspects of his ethical thought.

This is a fresh translation and in-depth commentary of Leibniz's seminal text, the Monadology. Written in 1714, the Monadology is widely considered to be the classic statement of Leibniz's mature philosophy. In the space of 90 numbered paragraphs, totalling little more than 6000 words, Leibniz outlines - and argues for - the core features of his philosophical system. Although rightly regarded as a masterpiece, it is also a very condensed work that generations of students have struggled to understand. Lloyd Strickland presents a new translation of the Monadology accompanied by an in-depth, section-by-section commentary that explains in detail not just what Leibniz is saying in the text but also why he says it. The sharp focus on the various arguments and other justifications Leibniz puts forward makes a deeper and more sympathetic understanding of his doctrines possible. This is a new translation of Leibniz's seminal text, by a well-known translator of Leibniz's works. It is a complete, in-depth, section-by-section commentary of the text, bringing to light Leibniz's arguments, principles and assumptions. It includes a detailed introduction, a schema of the text, glossary of terms, supplementary texts, questions for further study and suggestions for further reading to help you gain a solid understanding of the text.

Beatrice Longuenesse presents an original exploration of our understanding of ourselves and the way we talk about ourselves. In the first part of the book she discusses contemporary analyses of our use of 'I' in language and thought, and compares them to Kant's account of self-consciousness, especially the type of self-consciousness expressed in the proposition 'I think.' According to many contemporary philosophers, necessarily, any instance of our use of 'I' is backed by our consciousness of our own body. For Kant, in contrast, 'I think' just expresses our consciousness of being engaged in bringing rational unity into the contents of our mental states. In the second part of the book, Longuenesse analyzes the details of Kant's view and argues that contemporary discussions in philosophy and psychology stand to benefit from Kant's insights into self-consciousness and the unity of consciousness. The third and final part of the book outlines similarities between Kant's view of the structure of mental life grounding our uses of 'I' in 'I think' and in the moral 'I ought to,' on the one hand; and Freud's analysis of the organizations of mental processes he calls 'ego' and 'superego' on the other hand. Longuenesse argues that Freudian metapsychology offers a path to a naturalization of Kant's transcendental view of the mind. It offers a developmental account of the normative capacities that ground our uses of 'I,' which Kant thought could not be accounted for without appealing to a world of pure intelligences, distinct from the empirical, natural world of physical entities.

Joseph Butler's Fifteen Sermons (1726) is a classic work of moral philosophy, widely influential ever since. The topics Butler discusses include the role of conscience in human nature, self-love and egoism, compassion, resentment and forgiveness, love of our neighbour and of God. The text of the second edition of the Sermons is here presented together with a selection of Butler's other ethical writings: the Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue, a sermon on hypocrisy and liberty preached before the House of Lords, and relevant extracts from his correspondence with Samuel Clarke. David McNaughton contributes a substantial historical and philosophical introduction to help readers understand these works and see their continuing importance. While it is a readers' edition which avoids the clutter of textual variants and intrusive footnotes, it comes complete with scholarly apparatus intended to aid the reader in studying Butler's work in depth. McNaughton also includes short summaries of Butler's predecessors, and a selective bibliography. This will be the definitive resource for anyone interested in Butler's moral philosophy.

In the twentieth century English-language philosophy came to be science- and logic-oriented, and was suspicious of metaphysics. The Disappearance of the Soul and the Turn against Metaphysics traces our present philosophical outlook back to debates in Austro-German philosophy about the relation between empirical science and metaphysics: does empirical psychology depend on the metaphysics of the soul, the mental substance? The negative answer - that there is 'a psychology without a soul' - shaped Austrian philosophy and provided a model for ontologies that dispense with substances. Mark Textor tells the story of how and why (Austrian) philosophy turned against metaphysics . He introduces the key thinkers of the time, including the 'fathers of Austrian philosophy' Franz Brentano and Ernst Mach, whose Intentionalism (Brentano) and Neutral Monism (Mach) became distinctive and influential positions in the philosophy of mind. Textor goes on to use the 'psychology without a soul' view as a vantage point from which to reconstruct and assess the immediate pre-history and formation of analytic philosophy (Ward, Stout, Moore, Russell). While Austrian philosophers retired the soul, early analytic philosophers were happy to introduce a successor, the subject, and conceive of the mental as constituted by subject-object relations. The final part of the book returns to the theme of anti-metaphysics from a different perspective. In this part the early Moritz Schlick, who would soon become the leading figure of the Vienna Circle, takes centre stage. The final part of the book reconstructs Schlick's arguments for the conclusion that metaphysics lies beyond the limits of knowledge that are rooted in the philosophy of mind discussed in previous parts.

Irony and Idealism investigates the historical and conceptual structure of the development of a philosophically distinctive conception of irony in early- to mid-nineteenth century European philosophy. The principal figures treated are the romantic thinkers Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. Fred Rush argues that the development of philosophical irony in this historical period is best understood as providing a way forward in philosophy in the wake of Kant and Jacobi that is discrete from, and many times opposed to, German idealism. Irony and Idealism argues, against the grain of received opinion, that among the German romantics Schlegel's conception of irony is superior to similar ideas found in Novalis. It also presents a sustained argument showing that historical reconsideration of Schlegel has been hampered by contestable Hegelian assumptions concerning the conceptual viability of romantic irony and by the misinterpretation of what the romantics mean by 'the absolute.' Rush argues that this is primarily a social-ontological term and not, as is often supposed, a metaphysical concept. Kierkegaard, although critical of the romantic conception, deploys his own adaptation of it in his criticism of Hegel, continuing, and in a way completing, the arc of irony through nineteenth-century philosophy. The book concludes by offering suggestions meant to guide contemporary reconsideration of Schlegel's and Kierkegaard's views on the philosophical significance of irony.