The material reprinted in this two-volume set, first published in 1989, covers the first eighty-five years in responses to George Berkeley's writings. David Berman identifies several key waves of eighteenth-century criticism surrounding Berkeley's philosophies, ranging from hostile and discounted, to valued and defended. The first volume includes an account of the life of Berkeley by J. Murray and key responses from 1711 to 1748, whilst the second volume covers the years between 1745 and 1796. This fascinating reissue illustrates the breadth and diversity of the early reaction to Berkeley's philosophies, and will help students and academics form a clear image of both Berkeley's work and his reputation through the eyes of his contemporaries.

Schelling is often thought to be a protean thinker whose work is difficult to approach or interpret. Devin Zane Shaw shows that the philosophy of art is the guiding thread to understanding Schelling's philosophical development from his early works in 1795-1796 through his theological turn in 1809-1810. Schelling's philosophy of art is the keystone of the system; it unifies his idea of freedom and his philosophy of nature. Schelling's idea of freedom is developed through a critique of the formalism of Kant's and Fichte's practical philosophies, and his nature-philosophy is developed to show how subjectivity and objectivity emerge from a common source in nature. The philosophy of art plays a dual role in the system. First, Schelling argues that artistic activity produces through the artwork a sensible realization of the ideas of philosophy. Second, he argues that artistic production creates the possibility of a new mythology that can overcome the socio-political divisions that structure the relationships between individuals and society. Shaw's careful analysis shows how art, for Schelling, is the highest expression of human freedom.

Descartes has often been called the 'father of modern philosophy'. His attempts to find foundations for knowledge, and to reconcile the existence of the soul with the emerging science of his time, are among the most influential and widely studied in the history of philosophy. This is a classic and challenging introduction to Descartes by one of the most distinguished modern philosophers. Bernard Williams not only analyzes Descartes' project of founding knowledge on certainty, but uncovers the philosophical motives for his search. With acute insight, he demonstrates how Descartes' Meditations are not merely a description but the very enactment of philosophical thought and discovery. Williams covers all of the key areas of Descartes' thought, including God, the will, the possibility of knowledge, and the mind and its place in nature. He also makes profound contributions to the theory of knowledge, metaphysics and philosophy generally. With a new foreword by John Cottingham.

Peter Bornedal provides an interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole in the context of 19th century philosophy of mind and cognition. The study explains Nietzsche's notion of truth; his epistemology; his notions of the split and fragmented subject, of master, slave, and priest; furthermore, it offers a new interpretation of the enigmatic "eternal recurrence". It also suggests how important aspects of Nietzsche's thinking can be read as a sophisticated critique of ideology. From studies in Nietzsche's work as a whole, not least in his so-called Nachgelassene Fragmente, the book reconstructs aspects of Nietzsche's thinking that have largely been under-described in especially the Anglo-Saxon Nietzsche-reception. The study makes the case that Nietzsche in his epistemology, his psychology, and his cognitive theory is responding to several scientific discoveries occuring during the 19th century. Read within the context of contemporary cognitive-psychological-evolutionary debates, Nietzsche's philosophy is seen as far more scientistic, and far less poetical-metaphysical, than it has in recent reception-history been received.

The word "modem" in the title of this book refers primarily to post-medieval discussions, but it also hints at those medieval mo dal theories which were considered modem in contradistinction to ancient conceptions and which in different ways influenced philosophical discussions during the early modem period. The me dieval developments are investigated in the opening paper, 'The Foundations of Modality and Conceivability in Descartes and His Predecessors', by Lilli Alanen and Simo Knuuttila. Boethius's works from the early sixth century belonged to the sources from which early medieval thinkers obtained their knowledge of ancient thought. They offered extensive discus sions of traditional modal conceptions the basic forms of which were: (1) the paradigm of possibility as a potency striving to realize itself; (2) the "statistical" interpretation of modal no tions where necessity means actuality in all relevant cases or omnitemporal actuality, possibility means actuality in some rel evant cases or sometimes, and impossibility means omnitemporal non-actuality; and (3) the "logical" definition of possibility as something which, being assumed, results in nothing contradic tory. Boethius accepted the Aristotelian view according to which total possibilities in the first sense must prove their met tle through actualization and possibilities in the third sense are assumed to be realized in our actual history. On these presump tions, all of the above-mentioned ancient paradigms imply the Principle of Plenitude according to which no genuine possibility remains unrealized."

Mortal Thought seeks to illustrate the artistic and philosophical contexts for Hoelderlin's poetic thought and to trace his profound impact upon subsequent philosophy, most notably Nietzsche, the Frankfurt School, Heidegger and Post-structuralism. Beginning with the point of departure of Hoelderlin in Kant and Fichte, Mortal Thought outlines the novel philosophical innovations of Hoelderlin, and their influence upon philosophy from the 19th century to the present day. A renewed appreciation of Hoelderlin will allow us to retrieve an authentic philosophy for our own era. Mortal Thought lays out a concise, clear and comprehensive account of the emergence of Hoelderlin as philosopher and poet, of his influence upon the four dominant strands of Continental philosophy - Nietzsche, Heidegger, Critical Theory and Poet-structuralism - and of his relevance for us in our own era.

Max Stirner was one of the most important and seminal thinkers of the mid-nineteenth century. He exposed the religiosity behind secular humanism and rationalism, and the domination of the individual behind liberal modes of politics. This edited collection explores Stirner's radical and contemporary importance as a political theorist.

Grounds of Pragmatic Realism argues that Hegel's philosophy from the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit through his last Berlin lectures on philosophical psychology demonstates how Kant's critique of rational judgment across his Critical corpus can be disentangled from Kant's failed Transcendental Idealism and developed into a cogent, pragmatic realism, within which the social and historical aspects of rational inquiry and justification are shown to justify realism about the objects of empirical knowledge. Hegel's demonstration reveals how deeply contemporary epistemology remains beholden to pre-Critical options, none of which are adequate to the natural sciences, nor to commonsense. Hegel recognised and justified (independently) Kant's semantics of singular cognitive reference to particulars within space and time. Hegel's analysis of mutual recognition develops Kant's insights into the self-critical and inter-subjective aspects of rational judgment and justification, to show that none of us can be properly rational judges, nor can we properly justify our judgments rationally, without constructive self-criticism and without acknowledging and benefitting from constructive critical assessment by others.

The material reprinted in this two-volume set, first published in 1989, covers the first eighty-five years in responses to George Berkeley's writings. David Berman identifies several key waves of eighteenth-century criticism surrounding Berkeley's philosophies, ranging from hostile and discounted, to valued and defended. The first volume includes an account of the life of Berkeley by J. Murray and key responses from 1711 to 1748, whilst the second volume covers the years between 1745 and 1796. This fascinating reissue illustrates the breadth and diversity of the early reaction to Berkeley's philosophies, and will help students and academics form a clear image of both Berkeley's work and his reputation through the eyes of his contemporaries.

The essence of Hume's eighteenth-century philosophy was that all the sciences were 'dependent on the science of man', and that the foundations of any such science need to rest on experience and observation. This title, first published in 1932, examines in detail how Hume interpreted 'the science of man' and how he applied his experimental methodology to humankind's understanding, passions, social duties, economic activities, religious beliefs and secular history throughout his career. Particular attention is paid to the English, French and Latin sources that shaped Hume's theories. This is a full and fascinating title, of particular relevance to students with an interest in the philosophy of Hume specifically, as well as the philosophy of human nature and the methodologies applied to its study more generally.

This book is intended for the use of the candid student, devised as a monitory preparation for deeper study of the philosophy of Spinoza. By its means it is hoped that the student may avoid the chief pitfalls of Spinoza-interpretation, and be carried past many of the difficulties encountered by the modern mind in the study of his writings. To this end perhaps the greatest hindrance to be met by the beginner is the 'popular' exposition that attempts to expound the thought of one age in terms of the favoured categories of another. By providing the necessary safeguards against misinterpretations arising from such causes, the author has sought to awaken interest in the closely knit fabric of Spinoza's doctrine of man and nature and God, and its practical import - and thus to revivify a specimen too long deprived of its native air.

In this rigorous historical analysis, Lauer challenges traditional readings that have reduced two of German idealism's most important thinkers to opposing caricatures: Hegel the uncompromising systematist blind to the novelty and contingency of human life and Schelling the protean thinker drawn to all manner of pseudoscientific charlatanry. Bringing together recent scholarship that is just beginning to realise Schelling's centrality in the overthrow of metaphysics and Hegel's openness to diversity and innovation, this book shows that both thinkers can be read as contributing to the Kantian project of showing both the utter necessity and the limitations of reason. In readings of texts spanning each thinker's career, Lauer shows that animating much of Hegel and Schellings' most passionate work is their recognition of the need neither for a canonization of reason nor for its overthrow, but for its 'suspension'. Their lifelong willingness to revisit both their definitions of reason and their accounts of its role in philosophy give these discussions a vitality and depth that few in the history of philosophy can match.

These essays comprise a first attempt to assess overall the attention awarded to Leibniz's philosophy in the English-speaking world in his own time and up to the present day. In addition to an introductory overview there are fourteen original and previously unpublished essays considering Leibniz's connections with his English-speaking contemporaries and near contemporaries as well as the later reception of his thought in Anglo-American philosophy. Some of the papers shed new light on familiar topics, including the influence of Hobbes on Leibniz, his relations with Locke and the well-publicised controversy with Samuel Clarke. Others chart less familiar territory, including Leibniz's connections with Boyle and Berkeley, Wilkins and Dalgarno. And others still break new ground in considering Leibniz's connections with John Wallis and Margaret Cavendish...

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.

This clear, accessible account of Hegelian logic makes a case for its enormous seductiveness, its surprising presence in the collective consciousness, and the dangers associated therewith. Offering comprehensive coverage of Hegel's important works, Bencivenga avoids getting bogged down in short-lived scholarly debates to provide a work of permanent significance and usefulness.

First published in 1999. The purpose of this series is to provide a contemporary assessment and history of the entire course of philosophical thought. Each book constitutes a detailed, critical introduction to the work of a philosopher of major influence and significance. Hegel can be seen in a number of ways: as a metaphysician on the grand scale, as a source of insights into the history of art, religion and society, or as an acute commentator on the culture of his time.

Current discussions of liberalism in world affairs tend to take a shortsighted view of the historical antecedents of the school of thought. Most jump directly from Kant to Wilson with little pause in between. In this book, Clinton has selected three thinkers to exemplify developments in the liberal world, all of whom were figures of real consequence in their own time, yet altogether different in temperament and subsequent fashion. Clinton shows how their interests and concerns, both complementary and divergent, make sense of 19th century liberalism without turning it into the rigid doctrine it has never been - and never can be. By using their published works, speeches, and other correspondences, Clinton explores the way they applied their general insights on politics and society to the particular conditions of the international life. In so doing he provides a comparative study of the variants on a distinctively 'liberal' approach to international relations of this period, which may hold lessons for our own time.

Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to fathom, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material. Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the best known and most widely read of philosophers, whose work and ideas have proved influential to leading figures in all areas of cultural life. Yet his ideas are also among the most challenging regularly encountered by students. His method and language can seem obscure and oblique, forcing the reader to struggle on his or her own and reflecting Nietzsche's desire that his readers form their own answers for themselves. Nietzsche: A Guide for the Perplexed is a clear and thorough account of Nietzsche's philosophy, his major works and ideas, providing an ideal guide to the important and complex thought of this key philosopher. The book covers the whole range of Nietzsche's work, offering a detailed review of his landmark text, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, together with examination of his early and later work. Geared towards the specific requirements of students who need to reach a sound understanding of Nietzsche's thought, the book also provides a cogent and reliable survey of the various, often profoundly different, interpretations of his work and ideas. This is the ideal companion to the study of this most influential and challenging of philosophers.

Distinctions of Reason and Reasonable Distinctions is an intellectual biography of John Wallis (1616-1703), professor of mathematics at Oxford for over half a century. His career spans the political tumult of the English Civil Wars, the religious upheaval of the Church of England, and the fascinating developments in mathematics and natural philosophy. His ability to navigate this terrain and advance human learning in the academic world was facilitated by his use of the Jesuit Francisco Suarez's theory of distinctions. This Roman Catholic's philosophy in the hands of a Protestant divine fostered an instrumentalism necessary to bridge the old and new. With this tool, Wallis brought modern science into the university and helped form the Royal Society.

Thomas Holden presents a fascinating study of theories of matter in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These theories were plagued by a complex of interrelated problems concerning matter's divisibility, composition, and internal architecture. Is any material body infinitely divisible? Must we posit atoms or elemental minima from which bodies are ultimately composed? Are the parts of material bodies themselves material concreta? Or are they merely potentialities or possible existents? Questions such as these - and the press of subtler questions hidden in their amibiguities - deeply unsettled philosophers of the early modern period. They seemed to expose serious paradoxes in the new world view pioneered by Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. The new science's account of a fundamentally geometrical Creation, mathematicizable and intelligible to the human inquirer, seemed to be under threat. This was a great scandal, and the philosophers of the period accordingly made various attempts to disarm the paradoxes. All the great figures address the issue: most famously Leibniz and Kant, but also Galileo, Hobbes, Newton, Hume, and Reid, in addition to a crowd of lesser figures. Thomas Holden offers a brilliant synthesis of these discussions and presents his own overarching interpretation of the controversy, locating the underlying problem in the tension between the early moderns' account of material parts on the one hand and the programme of the geometrization of nature on the other.

Nietzschea (TM)s legacy for political thought is a highly contested area of research today. With papers representing a broad range of positions, this collection takes stock of the central controversies (Nietzsche as political / anti-political thinker? Nietzsche and / contra democracy? Arendt and / contra Nietzsche?), as well as new research on key concepts (power, the agon, aristocracy, friendship i.a.), on historical, contemporary and futural aspects of Nietzschea (TM)s political thought. International contributors include well-known names (Conway, Ansell-Pearson, Hatab, Taureck, Patton, Connolly,Villa, van Tongeren) and young emerging scholars from various disciplines.

In Subversive Spinoza, Antonio Negri spells out the philosophical credo that inspired his radical renewal of Marxism and his compelling analysis of the modern state and the global economy by means of an inspiring reading of the challenging metaphysics of the seventeenth-century Dutch-Jewish philosopher Spinoza. For Negri, Spinoza's philosophy has never been more relevant than it is today to debates over individuality and community, democracy and resistance, and modernity and postmodernity. This collection of essays extends, clarifies and revises the argument of Negri's influential 1981 book 'The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics' and links it directly to his recent work on constituent power, time and empire. -- .

A rival to Isaac Newton in mathematics and physics, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz believed that our world-the best of all possible worlds-must be governed by a principle of optimality. This book explores Leibniz's pursuit of optimality in five of his most important works in natural philosophy and shows how his principle of optimality bridges his scientific and philosophical studies. The first chapter explores Leibniz's work on the laws of optics and its implications for his defense of natural teleology. The second chapter examines Leibniz's work on the breaking strength of rigid beams and its implications for his thinking about the metaphysical foundations of the material world. The third chapter revisits Leibniz's famous defense of the conservation of vis viva and proposes a novel account of the origin of Leibniz's mature natural philosophy. The fourth chapter takes up Leibniz's efforts to determine the shape of freely hanging chains-the so-called problem of the catenary-and shows how that work provides an illuminating model for his thinking about the teleological structure of wills. Finally, the fifth chapter uses Leibniz's derivation of the path of quickest descent-his solution to the so-called problem of the Brachistochrone-and its historical context as a springboard for an exploration of the legacy of Leibniz's physics. The book closes with a brief discussion of the systematicity of Leibniz's thinking in philosophy and the natural sciences.

"The concept of spontaneity is central to Kant's philosophy, yet Kant himself never dealt with it explicitly. Instead it was presented as an insoluble problem concerning human reason. The ambiguity surrounding his approach to this problem is surprising when one considers that he was a philosopher who based his theoretical programme on the critique of the faculties of knowledge, feeling and desire. However, this ambiguity seems to have avoided up to now any possible critique. This highly original book presents the first full-length study of the problem of spontaneity in Kant. Marco Sgarbi demonstrates that spontaneity is a crucial concept in relation to every aspect of Kant's thought. He begins by reconstructing the history of the concept of spontaneity in the German Enlightenment prior to Kant and goes on to define knowing, thinking, acting and feeling as spontaneous activities of the mind that in turn determine Kant's logic, ethics and aesthetics. Ultimately Sgarbi shows that the notion of spontaneity is key to understanding both Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy."