Understands Nietzsche in the light of his activity as a creative writer from his juvenilia through the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, providing the first extensive study in English of his early literary works. The name Friedrich Nietzsche resonates around the world. Although known primarily as a philosopher, Nietzsche began his writing career while still a boy with literary texts: poetry, prose, and dramas. The present book is the first extensive study in English of these early literary works. It understands Nietzsche in the light of his activity as a creative writer from his juvenilia through his first two years as professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, that is, through the 1872 publication of his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. Knowledge of Nietzsche's early literary writings further underscores the value of The Birth of Tragedy as a work of world literature. The present study makes available almost all of Nietzsche's early poetry and extensive excerpts from his early prose works and dramas - much of it in English for the first time - along with commentary. A final, extensive chapter on The Birth of Tragedy treats it as the culmination of the early literary works. The book contains many new insights into Nietzsche and his work and essential source material for future research. All quotations from Nietzsche are given in both the original German and in English.

Removing the Commons examines the moral condition in which people can remove--through either use or appropriation--natural resources from the commons. This task begins with a robust defense of the view that natural resources initially belong to all people. Granting that natural resources initially belong to all people, it follows that all people have a claim that limits the way in which others may go about taking or removing natural resources from the commons. In assessing these limitations, Eric Roark argues for a Lockean left-libertarian theory of justice in which all people have the right of self-ownership and may only remove natural resources from the commons if they adhere to the Lockean Proviso by leaving "enough and as good" for others. Roark's account goes beyond existing treatments of the Lockean Proviso by insisting that the duty to leave enough and as good for others applies not merely to those who appropriate natural resources from the commons, but also to those who use natural resources within the commons. Removing the Commons defends a Georgist interpretation of the Lockean Proviso in which those who remove natural resources from the commons must pay the competitive rent of their removal in a fashion that best promotes equal opportunity for welfare. Finally, Roark gives extended consideration to the implications that the developed Lockean Left-Libertarian account of removing natural resources from the commons poses toward both global poverty and environmental degradation.

This book defines the relationship between the thought of Adam Smith and that of the ancients---Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and the Stoics. Vivenza offers a complete survey of all Smith's writings with the aim of illustrating how classical arguments shaped opinions and scholarship in the eighteenth century.

In Of Liberty and Necessity James A. Harris presents the first comprehensive account of the free will problem in eighteenth-century British philosophy. Harris proposes new interpretations of the positions of familiar figures such as Locke, Hume, Edwards, and Reid. He also gives careful attention to writers such as William King, Samuel Clarke, Anthony Collins, Lord Kames, James Beattie, David Hartley, Joseph Priestley, and Dugald Stewart, who, while well-known in the eighteenth century, have since been largely ignored by historians of philosophy. Through detailed textual analysis, and by making precise use of a variety of different contexts, Harris elucidates the contribution that each of these writers makes to the eighteenth-century discussion of the will and its freedom. In this period, the question of the nature of human freedom is posed principally in terms of the influence of motives upon the will. On one side of the debate are those who believe that we are free in our choices. A motive, these philosophers believe, constitutes a reason to act in a particular way, but it is up to us which motive we act upon. On the other side of the debate are those who believe that, on the contrary, there is no such thing as freedom of choice. According to these philosophers, one motive is always intrinsically stronger than the rest and so is the one that must determine choice. Several important issues are raised as this disagreement is explored and developed, including the nature of motives, the value of 'indifference' to the will's freedom, the distinction between 'moral' and 'physical' necessity, the relation between the will and the understanding, and the internal coherence of the concept of freedom of will. One of Harris's primary objectives is to place this debate in the context of the eighteenth-century concern with replicating in the mental sphere what Newton had achieved in the philosophy of nature. All of the philosophers discussed in Of Liberty and Necessity conceive of themselves as 'experimental' reasoners, and, when examining the will, focus primarily upon what experience reveals about the influence of motives upon choice. The nature and significance of introspection is therefore at the very centre of the free will problem in this period, as is the question of what can legitimately be inferred from observable regularities in human behaviour.

Here is a universal biology that draws upon the contributions of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel to unravel the mystery of life and conceive what is essential to living things anywhere they may arise. The book develops a philosopher's guide to life in the universe, conceiving how nature becomes a biosphere in which life can emerge, what are the basic life processes common to any organism, how evolution can give rise to the different possible forms of life, and what distinguishes the essential life forms from one another.

Russell Hardin presents a new explication of David Hume's moral and political theory. With Hume, he holds that our normative views can be scientifically explained but they cannot be justified as true. Hume argued for the psychological basis of such views. In particular, he argued for sympathy as the mirroring of the psychological sensations and emotions of others. By placing Hume in the developing tradition of social science, as a strong forerunner of his younger friend Adam Smith, Hardin demonstrates Hume's strong strategic sense, his nascent utilitarianism, his powerful theory of convention as a main source of social and political order, and his recognition of moral and political theory as a single enterprise.

Marchetti offers a revisionist account of James's contribution to moral thought in the light of his pragmatic conception of philosophical activity. He sketches a composite picture of a Jamesian approach to ethics revolving around the key notion and practice of a therapeutic critique of one's ordinary moral convictions and style of moral reasoning.

Pragmatist philosopher William James has long been deemed a dubious guide to ethical reasoning. This book overturns such thinking, demonstrating the coherence of James's efforts to develop a flexible but rigorous framework for individuals and societies seeking freedom, meaning, and justice in a world of interdependence, uncertainty, and change.

Reading Hobbes in light of both the history of ethics and the conceptual apparatus developed in recent work on normativity, this book challenges received interpretations of Hobbes and his historical significance. Arash Abizadeh uncovers the fundamental distinction underwriting Hobbes's ethics: between prudential reasons of the good, articulated via natural laws prescribing the means of self-preservation, and reasons of the right or justice, comprising contractual obligations for which we are accountable to others. He shows how Hobbes's distinction marks a watershed in the transition from the ancient Greek to the modern conception of ethics, and demonstrates the relevance of Hobbes's thought to current debates about normativity, reasons, and responsibility. His book will interest Hobbes scholars, historians of ethics, moral philosophers, and political theorists.

Irony, humour and the comic play vital yet under-appreciated roles in Kierkegaard's thought. Focusing upon the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, this book investigates these roles, relating irony and humour as forms of the comic to central Kierkegaardian themes. How does the comic function as a form of 'indirect communication'? What roles can irony and humour play in the infamous Kierkegaardian 'leap'? Do certain forms of wisdom depend upon possessing a sense of humour? And is such a sense of humour thus a genuine virtue?

Through a close and extensive reading of his works, Dialectics of Human Nature in Marx's Philosophy demonstrates that Marx's explanations are fundamentally dialectical, and that his dialectic method, as well as his philosophical system, is inconceivable without his conception of human nature. An exploration of Marx's thought without any favorable or critical ideological agendas, this book opposes the compartmentalization of Marx's thought into various competing doctrines, such as historical materialism, dialectical materialism, and different forms of economic determinism. Mehmet Tabak highlights Marx's humanism; however, instead of pitting Marx's humanism against materialism, dialectical and historical, this book demonstrates their unity in a novel way.

Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of Nature: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning analyses the works of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) on natural philosophy in a series of contexts within which they may best be explored and understood. Its aim is to place Edwards's writings on natural philosophy in the broad historical, theological and scientific context of a wide variety of religious responses to the rise of modern science in the early modern period - John Donne's reaction to the new astronomical philosophy of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, as well as to Francis Bacon's new natural philosophy; Blaise Pascal's response to Descartes' mechanical philosophy; the reactions to Newtonian science and finally Jonathan Edwards's response to the scientific culture and imagination of his time.

Kierkegaard and the Refusal of Transcendence challenges the standard view that Kierkegaard's God is infinitely other than the world. It argues that his work immerses us in the paradoxical nature of existence itself, and opposes any flight into another world.

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 offers first time translations of the initial (1781-1789) critical reactions to Kant's philosophy. Also included is a selection of writings by Kant's contemporaries who took on the task of defending the critical philosophy against early attacks. This collection, which includes a glossary of key terms and biographical sketches of the critics on both sides of the debate, is a major addition to Kant scholarship and should be seen as a companion volume to the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant.

What does the philosophy of a bunch of dead white men have to tell us about oppression? Rather a lot, Hay argues.
This is a book about the harms of oppression, and about addressing these harms using the resources of liberalism and Kantianism. Its central thesis is that people who are oppressed are bound by the duty of self-respect to resist their own oppression.
Hay defends certain core ideals of the liberal tradition - specifically, the fundamental importance of autonomy and rationality, the intrinsic and inalienable dignity of the individual, and the duty of self-respect - making the case that these ideals are pivotal in both understanding and counteracting oppression. She argues that if we take these ideals seriously then it follows that people who are oppressed have an obligation to themselves to resist their own oppression.

Interpreting Kierkegaard in the general context of Golden Age Denmark, this interdisciplinary anthology features articles which treat his various relations to his most famous Danish contemporaries. It aims to see them not as minor figures laboring in Kierkegaard's shadow but rather as significant thinkers and artists in their own right. The articles illuminate both Kierkegaard's influence on his contemporaries and their varied influences on him. By means of the analyses of these various relations, aspects of Kierkegaard's authorship are brought into new and insightful perspectives. The featured essays treat some of the most important figures from the time, representing the fields of philosophy, theology, literature, criticism and art.

One of Victorian England s most famous philosophers harbored a secret: Herbert Spencer suffered from an illness so laden with stigma that he feared its revelation would ruin him. He therefore went to extraordinary lengths to hide his malady from the public. Exceptionally, he drew two of his closest friends the novelist George Eliot and her partner, G. H. Lewes into his secret. Years later, he also shared it with a remarkable neurologist, John Hughlings-Jackson, better placed than anyone else in England to understand his illness. Spencer insisted that all three support him without betraying his condition to others and two of them did so. But George Eliot, still smarting from Spencer s rejection, years earlier, of her offer of love, did not. Ingeniously, she devised a means both of nominally respecting (for their contemporaries) and of violating (for our benefit) Spencer s injunction. What she hid from her peers she reveals to us in an act of deferred, but audacious literary revenge. It s here decoded for the first time. Indeed The Complicity of Friends comprises the first disclosure of Spencer s hidden frailty but also, more importantly, of the responses it generated in the lives and works of his three notable friends. This book provides a complete rethinking of its principal figures. The novelist who emerges in these pages is a more sinuous and passionate George Eliot than the oracular Victorian we are used to hearing about. The significance of the friendship between Lewes, her irrepressible partner, and the inventive Hughlings-Jackson is outlined for the first time. And in an ironic twist, even his three farsighted confidants could not anticipate that, late in the twentieth century, certain of Spencer s own intuitions about the nature and provenance of his illness would be vindicated. Those with any interest in George Eliot, Lewes, Hughlings-Jackson, or Spencer will be compelled to re-envision their personalities after reading The Complicity of Friends."

Locke scholarship has been flourishing in Japan for several decades, but its output is largely unknown to the West. This collection makes available in English for the first time the fruits of recent Japanese research, opening up the possibility of advancing Locke studies on an international scale. Covering three important areas of Locke's philosophical thought - knowledge and experimental method, law and politics, and religion and toleration - this volume criticizes established interpretations and replaces them with novel alternatives, breaking away from standard narratives and providing fresh ways of looking at Locke's relationship with philosophers such as Boyle, Berkeley and Hume. The specific topics that have been selected are ones that continue to have important contemporary moral and political implications, from constitutionalism and toleration to marriage and the death penalty. Applying Locke's views to 21st-century questions, this collection presents provocative readings of the defining aspects of Locke's philosophical thought, stimulating current debates and heralding a new era of collaborative work for Locke scholars around the world.

This book explores the thought of Alexius Meinong, a philosopher known for his unconventional theory of reference and predication. The chapters cover a natural progression of topics, beginning with the origins of Gegenstandstheorie, Meinong's theory of objects, and his discovery of assumptions as a fourth category of mental states to supplement his teacher Franz Brentano's references to presentations, feelings, and judgments. The chapters explore further the meaning and metaphysics of fictional and other nonexistent intended objects, fine points in Meinongian object theory are considered and new and previously unanticipated problems are addressed. The author traces being and non-being and aspects of beingless objects including objects in fiction, ideal objects in scientific theory, objects ostensibly referred to in false science and false history and intentional imaginative projection of future states of affairs. The chapters focus on an essential choice of conceptual, logical, semantic, ontic and more generally metaphysical problems and an argument is progressively developed from the first to the final chapter, as key ideas are introduced and refined. Meinong studies have come a long way from Bertrand Russell's off-target criticisms and recent times have seen a rise of interest in a Meinongian approach to logic and the theory of meaning. New thinkers see Meinong as a bridge figure between analytic and continental thought, thanks to the need for an adequate semantics of meaning in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, making this book a particularly timely publication.

This monograph is a new interpretation of Kant's atemporal conception of the causality of the freedom of the will. The interpretation is based on an analysis of Kant's primary conception of an action, viz., as a causal consequence of the will. The analysis in turn is based on H. P. Grice's causal theory of perception and on P. F. Strawson's modification of the theory. The monograph rejects the customary assumption that Kant's maxim of an action is a causal determination of the action. It assumes instead that the maxim is definitive of the action, and since its main thesis is that an action for Kant is to be primarily understood as an effect of the will, it concludes that the maxim of an action can only be its logical determination. Kant's atemporal conception of the causality of free will is confronted not only by contemporary philosophical conceptions of causality, but by Kant's own complementary theory of causality, in the Second Analogy of Experience. According to this latter conception, causality is a natural relation among physical and psychological objects, and is therefore a temporal relation among them. Faced with this conflict, Kant scholars like Allen W. Wood either reject Kant's atemporal conception of causality or like Henry E. Allison accept it, but only in an anodyne form. Both camps, however, make the aforementioned assumption that Kant's maxim of an action is a causal determination of the action. The monograph, rejecting the assumption, belongs to neither camp.

Hegel and Global Justice details the relevance of the thought of G.W.F. Hegel for the burgeoning academic discussions of the topic of global justice. Against the conventional view that Hegel has little constructive to offer to these discussions, this collection, drawing on the expertise of distinguished Hegel scholars and internationally recognized political and social theorists, explicates the contribution both of Hegel himself and his "dialectical" method to the analysis and understanding of a wide range of topics associated with the concept of global justice, construed very broadly. These topics include universal human rights, cosmopolitanism, and cosmopolitan justice, transnationalism, international law, global interculturality, a global poverty, cosmopolitan citizenship, global governance, a global public sphere, a global ethos, and a global notion of collective self-identity. Attention is also accorded the value of Hegel's account of mutual recognition for analysing themes in global justice, both as regards the politics of recognition at the global level and the conditions for a general account of relations of people and persons under conditions of globalization. In exploring these and related themes, the authors of this book regularly compare Hegel to others who have contributed to the discourse on global justice, including Kant, Marx, Rawls, Habermas, Singer, Pogge, Nussbaum, Appiah, and David Miller.

This remarkably comprehensive Handbook provides a multifaceted yet carefully crafted investigation into the work of Immanuel Kant, one of the greatest philosophers the world has ever seen. With original contributions from leading international scholars in the field, this authoritative volume first sets Kant's work in its biographical and historical context. It then proceeds to explain and evaluate his revolutionary work in metaphysics and epistemology, logic, ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, political philosophy, philosophy of history, philosophy of education, and anthropology. Key Features: * Draws attention to the foundations of Kant's varied philosophical insights - transcendental idealism, logic, and the bridge between theoretical and practical reason * Considers hitherto neglected topics such as sexuality and the philosophy of education * Explores the immense impact of his ground-breaking work on subsequent intellectual movements Serving as a touchstone for meaningful discussion about Kant's philosophical and historical importance, this definitive Handbook is essential reading for Kant scholars who want to keep abreast of the field and for advanced students wishing to explore the frontiers of the subject.

Kant's Transition Project and Late Philosophy is the first study to provide a close reading of the connection between texts written by Kant during 1796 and 1798. Connecting Kant's unfinished book project, the Opus postumum, with the Metaphysics of Morals, it identifies and clarifies issues at the forefront of Kant's focus towards the end of his life. Labelled by Kant as the "Transition Project", the Opus postumum generates debate among commentators as to why Kant describes the project as filling a "gap" within his system of critical philosophy. This study argues for a pervasive transition project that can be traced through Kant's entire critical philosophy and is the key to addressing current debates in the scholarship. By showing that there is not only a Transition Project in Kant's theoretical philosophy but also a Transition Project in his practical philosophy, it reveals why an accurate assessment of Kant's critical philosophy requires a new understanding of the Opus postumum and Kant's parallel late writings on practical philosophy. Rather than seeing Kant's late thoughts on a Transition as afterthoughts, they must be seen at the centre of his critical philosophy.

Beth Lord looks at Kant's philosophy in relation to four thinkers who attempted to fuse transcendental idealism with Spinoza's doctrine of immanence. Examining Jacobi, Herder, Maimon and Deleuze, Lord argues that Spinozism is central to the development of Kant's thought, and opens new avenues for understanding Kant's relation to Deleuze.