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Books > Philosophy > Western philosophy > General
Since the Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series (KSMS) was first
published in 1997, it has served as the authoritative book series
in the field. Starting from 2011 the Kierkegaard Studies Monograph
Series will intensify the peer-review process with a new editorial
and advisory board. KSMS is published on behalf of the Soren
Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen. KSMS
publishes outstanding monographs in all fields of Kierkegaard
research. This includes Ph.D. dissertations, Habilitation theses,
conference proceedings and single author works by senior scholars.
The goal of KSMS is to advance Kierkegaard studies by encouraging
top-level scholarship in the field. The editorial and advisory
boards are deeply committed to creating a genuinely international
forum for publication which integrates the many different
traditions of Kierkegaard studies and brings them into a
constructive and fruitful dialogue. To this end the series
publishes monographs in English and German. Potential authors
should consult the Submission guidelines. All submissions will be
blindly refereed by established scholars in the field. Only
high-quality manuscripts will be accepted for publication.
Potential authors should be prepared to make changes to their texts
based on the comments received by the referees.
This book examines the nature, sources, and implications of
fallacies in philosophical reasoning. In doing so, it illustrates
and evaluates various historical instances of this phenomenon.
There is widespread interest in the practice and products of
philosophizing, yet the important issue of fallacious reasoning in
these matters has been effectively untouched. Nicholas Rescher
fills this gap by presenting a systematic account of the principal
ways in which philosophizing can go astray.
This book is a fully updated and expanded new edition of An
Introduction to Continental Philosophy, first published in 1996. It
provides a clear, concise and readable introduction to philosophy
in the continental tradition. It is a wide-ranging and reliable
guide to the work of such major figures as Nietzsche, Habermas,
Heidegger, Arendt, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida and i ek. At the same
time, it situates their thought within a coherent overall account
of the development of continental philosophy since the
Enlightenment. Individual chapters consider the character of
modernity, the Enlightenment and its continental critics; the ideas
of Marxism, the Frankfurt School and Habermas; hermeneutics and
phenomenology; existentialism; structuralism, post-structuralism
and postmodernism. In addition to the thinkers already mentioned,
there is extended discussion of the ideas of Kant, Hegel, Dilthey,
Husserl, Gadamer, Kierkegaard, de Beauvoir and Lyotard. The new
edition includes an additional, full-length chapter on continental
philosophy in the twenty-first century focusing on Giorgio Agamben,
Alain Badiou and Slavoj i ek. Continental Philosophy: An
Introduction is an invaluable introductory text for courses on
continental philosophy as well as courses in the humanities and
social sciences dealing with major figures or influential
approaches within that tradition.
In recent decades, memory has become one of the major concepts and
a dominant topic in philosophy, sociology, politics, history,
science, cultural studies, literary theory, and the discussions of
trauma and the Holocaust. In contemporary debates, the concept of
memory is often used rather broadly and thus not always
unambiguously. For this reason, the clarification of the range of
the historical meaning of the concept of memory is a very important
and urgent task. This volume shows how the concept of memory has
been used and appropriated in different historical circumstances
and how it has changed throughout the history of philosophy. In
ancient philosophy, memory was considered a repository of sensible
and mental impressions and was complemented by recollection-the
process of recovering the content of past thoughts and perceptions.
Such an understanding of memory led to the development both of
mnemotechnics and the attempts to locate memory within the
structure of cognitive faculties. In contemporary philosophical and
historical debates, memory frequently substitutes for reason by
becoming a predominant capacity to which one refers when one wants
to explain not only the personal identity but also a historical,
political, or social phenomenon. In contemporary interpretation, it
is memory, and not reason, that acts in and through human actions
and history, which is a critical reaction to the overly
rationalized and simplified concept of reason in the Enlightenment.
Moreover, in modernity memory has taken on one of the most
distinctive features of reason: it is thought of as capable not
only of recollecting past events and meanings, but also itself. In
this respect, the volume can be also taken as a reflective
philosophical attempt by memory to recall itself, its functioning
and transformations throughout its own history.
This is the first full study in English of the German historicist
tradition. Frederick C. Beiser surveys the major German thinkers on
history from the middle of the eighteenth century until the early
twentieth century, providing an introduction to each thinker and
the main issues in interpreting and appraising his thought. The
volume offers new interpretations of well-known philosophers such
as Johann Gottfried Herder and Max Weber, and introduces others who
are scarcely known at all, including J. A. Chladenius, Justus
Moeser, Heinrich Rickert, and Emil Lask. Beyond an exploration of
the historical and intellectual context of each thinker, Beiser
illuminates the sources and reasons for the movement of German
historicism-one of the great revolutions in modern Western thought,
and the source of our historical understanding of the human world.
(YET ANOTHER INTRODUCTION IN PHENOMENOLOGY) In both his published
and unpublished works, Edmund Husserl, the "father of
phenomenology," struggles repeatedly with the relation of the
individual subject and intersubjectivity. Since his phenomenology
is based upon the temporalizing foundations of the subject, though,
he is often accused of solipsism, and his efforts at integrating
the subject with an intersubjective existence are registered as
falling short of their goal. Important philosophers who use
phenomenology as their basis, such as Martin Heidegger and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, furthermore, while implicitly criticizing his
limitations, assume the existence of intersubjective foundations
without 2 taking up the existence and formation of these
foundations themselves. This book addresses the above problematic
at several levels: First, it is a careful analysis of Husserl's
understanding of inner time-consciousness. I take up each aspect of
temporalizing consciousness (i. e. , Urimpression, retention, and
protention), explaining it in light of Husserl's phenomenology and
showing how it functions in the whole of the "living present," i.
e. , our active, constituting consciousness. These sections of the
book are helpful both to the uninitiated student trying to enter
the world of Husserl's "inner ti- consciousness" and to the
experienced Husserl scholar who desires a closer look at Husserl's
theory of temporalizing consciousness. Second, as my analyses take
us to Husserl's recently published manuscripts, I provide an
explanation of Husserl's later considerations of temporalizing
consciousness, showing how he developed his earliest conceptions.
Nietzsche's Immoralism begins a two-volume critical reconstruction
of a socialist, democratic, and non-liberal Nietzschean politics.
Nietzsche's ideal of amor fati (love of fate) cannot be
individually adopted because it is incompatible with deep freedom
of agency. However, we can create its social conditions thanks to
an underappreciated aspect of his will-to-power psychology. We are
driven not toward domination and conquest but toward resistance,
contest, and play-a heightened feeling of power provoked by equal
challenges that enables the non-instrumental affirmation of
suffering. This incompatibilist, anti-teleological psychology leads
to Nietzsche's distinctive immoralism: the abandonment of cultural
means of human improvement for a historical materialist politics of
breeding that produces future higher types through changes to our
political order's material conditions. Politics becomes first
philosophy: it is not grounded in moral values but is instead the
very source of their legitimacy. Moreover, despite Nietzsche's
professed aristocratism, his immoralism offers a stronger
foundation for a renewed left, attacking conservative politics at
its very root: the belief in moral order, authority, and
responsibility.
With today's conservative mood on university and college
campuses, academics and students will find "The Left Academy" a
useful reference to the current state of Marxist thought. This book
explores Marxism in the social sciences and applied sociology
fields such as social work and health. "The Left Academy" features
essays that analyze the state of Marxism in various academic
disciplines by a well-known scholar in that discipline. In addition
to the essays, this third volume includes a summary of
Marxism--where it stands today and where it may go in the future.
Students, academics, and general readers will find the book
thought-provoking.
In this book, Justin Pack proposes a genealogy of the traditional
suspicion of money and merchants. This genealogy is framed both by
how money itself has changed and how different traditions responded
to money. Money and merchants became heavily debated concerns in
the Axial Age, which coincided with the spread of coinage. A deep
suspicion of money and merchants was particularly notable in the
Greek, Confucian and Christian traditions, and continued into the
Middle Ages. These traditions wrestled with a new dialectic of
purity that also appears with the widespread use of money. How were
these concerns dealt with politically, socially and
philosophically? How did they change over time? How did medieval
Europe deal with money and how did this inform modern
governmentality? To answer these questions, Pack turns to Hanna
Arendt's work. Arendt argues that one of the outstanding
characteristics of our time is thoughtlessness. This
thoughtlessness is related to how modern life, especially under
neoliberalism, is increasingly structured by abstract systems,
abstract calculative rationality, abstract relations, and the
profit motive. Money both drives and embodies this machinery. The
hyper-complex abstract systems of modernity discourage, to use
Arendtian terms, "thinking" (wonder, questioning everything) in
favor of "cognition" (problem solving). Too often the result is
thoughtless cognition-the ability to make things more productive
and efficient paired with the incapacity to question and challenge
the implications and morality of these systems.
This book argues that philosophical pessimism can offer vital
impulses for contemporary cultural studies. Pessimist thought
offers ways to interrogate notions of temporality, progress and
futurity. When the horizon of future expectation is increasingly
shaped by the prospect of apocalypse and extinction, an exploration
of pessimist thought can help to make sense of an increasingly
complex and uncertain world by affirming rather than suppressing
the worst. This book argues that a cultural logic of the worst is
at work in a substantial section of contemporary philosophical
thought and cultural representations. Spectres of pessimism can be
found in contemporary ecocritical thought, antinatalist
philosophies, political thought, and cultural theory, as well as in
literature, film, and popular music. In its unsettling of
temporality, this new pessimism shares sensibilities with the field
of hauntology. Both deconstruct linear narratives of time that
adhere to a stable sequence of past, present and future. Mark
Schmitt therefore couples pessimism and hauntology to explore the
spectres of pessimism in a range of theories and narratives-from
ecocriticism, antinatalism and queer theory to utopianism, from
afropessimism to the fiction of Hari Kunzru and Thomas Ligotti to
the films of Camille Griffin, Gaspar Noe, Denis Villeneuve and Lars
von Trier.
Roger Crisp presents a comprehensive study of Henry Sidgwick's The
Methods of Ethics, a landmark work first published in 1874. Crisp
argues that Sidgwick is largely right about many central issues in
moral philosophy: the metaphysics and epistemology of ethics,
consequentialism, hedonism about well-being, and the weight to be
given to self-interest. He holds that Sidgwick's long discussion of
'common-sense' morality is probably the best discussion of
deontology we have. And yet The Methods of Ethics can be hard to
understand, and this is perhaps one reason why, though it is a
philosophical goldmine, few have ventured deeply into it. What does
Sidgwick mean by a 'method'? Why does he discuss only three
methods? What are his arguments for hedonism and for
utilitarianism? How can we make sense of the idea of moral
intuition? What is the role of virtue in Sidgwick's ethics? Crisp
addresses these and many other questions, offering a fresh view of
Sidgwick's text which will assist any moral philosopher to gain
more from it.
A complete bibliography of British philosophy in a single source,
this reference covers the period of 1870 to the present day. It
contains entries on over 600 names, listing not only each author's
books, but also his/her shorter writing and relevant secondary
sources.
Truth: Its criteria and conditions is an in-depth
critical-and-constructive inquiry in almost equal measure. The
theories of the nature of empirical truth critically considered
include two forms of the traditional correspondence theory; truth
as appraisal; truth as identity of proposition and truth; en
emotive theory of truth; P.F. Strawson's performative theory, and
N. Rescher's novel theory of a coherentist criterion of truth. The
constructive parts include an analysis of the concept of "a fact,"
the meaning and uses of 'true' and 'false' in empirical statements,
together with the various sorts of conditions for their correct
application; the appraisive/evaluative uses of true and false
statements; and the performative-cum-cognitive uses of 'true'
empirical statements; and the conditions of the performative uses
of 'true.' A significant claim about the concept of truth is its
indefinablity; albeit for quite different reasons from Gottlob
Frege's reason based on his argument against the correspondence
theory of truth.
This book makes a compelling case for utilising experiences of
resonance in various academic and societal fields. The concept of
resonance was first introduced by Hartmut Rosa to foreground the
importance of affective, emotional, transformative and
uncontrollable experiences in socio-political contexts that he
characterizes as alienating. Based on a critical reading of Rosa's
theory and further developed through engagement with Theodor W.
Adorno, Gilles Deleuze, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler and others,
this book introduces the notion of a 'spectrum of resonance' which
encompasses both critical resonance and affirmationist resonance.
This spectrum of resonance is used to analyse various forms of
aesthetic experience illustrated with reference to Edgar Reitz's
film Heimat and the music of Nick Cave and Kayhan Kalhor. The
spectrum is also deployed in the fields of museum, memory and
trauma studies to show how experiences of resonance contribute to
the constitution of political and social identities. The focus here
is on memory practices in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and the book
seeks to decolonize resonance theory.
Gordon Graham presents a radically innovative study of
Wittgenstein's philosophy, in relation to the age-old impulse to
connect ordinary human life with the transcendent reality of God.
He offers an account of its relevance to the study of religion that
is completely different to the standard version of 'Wittgensteinian
philosophy of religion' expounded by both its adherents and
critics. Graham goes on to revitalize the philosophy of 'true
religion', an alternative, though not a rival, to the lively
philosophical theology of Plantinga and Swinburne that currently
dominates the subject. This alternative style of philosophy of
religion has equally deep historical roots in the philosophical
works of Spinoza, Hume, Schleiermacher, and Mill. At the same time,
it is more easily connected to the psychological, sociological, and
anthropological studies of William James, Emile Durkheim, Max
Weber, Mircea Eliade, and Mary Douglas. Graham uses Wittgenstein's
conception of philosophy to argue in favour of the idea that 'true
religion' is to be understood as human participation in divine
life.
Hegel gave lecture series on aesthetics or the philosophy of art in
various university terms, but never published a book of his own on
this topic. His student, H. G. Hotho, compiled auditors'
transcripts from these separate lecture series and produced from
them the three volumes on aesthetics in the standard edition of
Hegel's collected works. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert has now
published one of these transcripts, the Hotho transcript of the
1823 lecture series, and accompanied it with a very extensive
introductory essay treating many issues pertinent to a proper
understanding of Hegel's views on art. She persuasively argues that
the evidence shows Hegel never finalized his views on the
philosophy of art, but modified them in significant ways from one
lecture series to the next. In addition, she makes the case that
Hotho's compilation not only concealed this circumstance, by the
harmony he created out of diverse source materials, but also
imposed some of his own views on aesthetics, views that differ from
Hegel's and that the ongoing interpretation of the aesthetics part
of Hegel's philosophy has unfortunately taken to be Hegel's own.
This translation of the German volume, which contains the first
publication of the Hotho transcript and Gethmann-Siefert's essay,
makes these important materials accessible to the English reader,
materials that should put the English-speaking world's future
understanding and interpretation of Hegel's philosophy of art on a
sounder footing.
Kant's influence on the history of philosophy is vast and protean.
The transcendental turn denotes one of its most important forms,
defined by the notion that Kant's deepest insight should not be
identified with any specific epistemological or metaphysical
doctrine, but rather concerns the fundamental standpoint and terms
of reference of philosophical enquiry. To take the transcendental
turn is not to endorse any of Kant's specific teachings, but to
accept that the Copernican revolution announced in the Preface of
the Critique of Pure Reason sets philosophy on a new footing and
constitutes the proper starting point of philosophical reflection.
The aim of this volume is to map the historical trajectory of
transcendental philosophy and the major forms that it has taken.
The contributions, from leading contemporary scholars, focus on the
question of what the transcendental turn consists in-its
motivation, justification, and implications; and the limitations
and problems which it arguably confronts-with reference to the
relevant major figures in modern philosophy, including Kant,
Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and
Wittgenstein. Central themes and topics discussed include the
distinction of realism from idealism, the relation of
transcendental to absolute idealism, the question of how
transcendental conclusions stand in relation to (and whether they
can be made compatible with) naturalism, the application of
transcendental thought to foundational issues in ethics, and the
problematic relation of phenomenology to transcendental enquiry.
Composition is the relation between a whole and its parts-the parts
are said to compose the whole; the whole is composed of the parts.
But is a whole anything distinct from its parts taken collectively?
It is often said that 'a whole is nothing over and above its
parts'; but what might we mean by that? Could it be that a whole
just is its parts? This collection of essays is the first of its
kind to focus on the relationship between composition and identity.
Twelve original articles-written by internationally renowned
scholars and rising stars in the field-argue for and against the
controversial doctrine that composition is identity. An editor's
introduction sets out the formal and philosophical groundwork to
bring readers to the forefront of the debate.
The Platonic tradition affords extraordinary resources for thinking
about the meaning and value of work. In this historical survey of
the tradition, Jeffrey Hanson draws on the work of its major
thinkers to explain why our contemporary vocabulary for appraising
labor and its rewards is too narrow and cramped. By tracing out the
Platonic lineage of work Hanson is able to argue why we should be
explaining its value for appraising it as an element of a happy and
flourishing human life, quite apart from its financial rewards.
Beginning with Plato’s extensive thinking about work’s
relationship to wisdom, Hanson covers the singularly powerful
arguments of Augustine, who wrote the ancient world’s only
treatise dedicated to the topic of manual labor. He discusses
Bernard of Clairvaux, introduces the priest-craftsman Theophilus
Presbyter, and provides a study of work and leisure in the writings
of Petrarch. Alongside Martin Luther, Hanson discusses John Ruskin
and Simone Weil: two thinkers profoundly disturbed by the
conditions of the working class in the rapidly industrializing
economies of Europe. This original study of Plato and his
inheritors’ ideas provides practical suggestions for how to
approach work in a socially responsible manner in the 21st century
and reveals the benefits of linking work and morality.
Causation is now commonly supposed to involve a succession that
instantiates some law-like regularity. Efficient Causation: A
History examines how our modern notion developed from a very
different understanding of efficient causation. This volume begins
with Aristotle's initial conception of efficient causation, and
then considers the transformations and reconsiderations of this
conception in late antiquity, medieval and modern philosophy,
ending with contemporary accounts of causation. It includes four
short "Reflections" that explore the significance of the concept
for literature, the history of music, the history of science, and
contemporary art theory.
Papers gathered in the two volumes investigate the complex
relations between philosophy of language and linguistics, viewed as
independent, but mutually influencing one another, disciplines.
They concentrate on the 'formal' and 'philosophical' turns in the
philosophy of language, initiated by Gottlob Frege, with further
developments associated with the work of Bertrand Russell, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, W.O.V. Quine, Richard
Montague, Pavel Tichy, Richard Rorty. The volumes bring together
contributions by philosophers, logicians and linguists,
representing different theoretical orientations but united in
outlining the common ground, necessary for further research in
philosophy of language and linguistics. The papers were submitted
and, in most cases, presented at the first International Conference
on Philosophy of Language and Linguistics, PhiLang2009, organized
by the Chair of English and General Linguistics at the University
of Lodz.
During 2007-2008 Nicholas Rescher continued his longstanding
practice of writing occasional studies on philosophical topics,
both for formal presentation and for informal discussion with
colleagues. While his forays of this kind have usually been issued
in journal publications, this has not been so in the present case
so that the studies offered here encompass substantially new
material. Notwithstanding their thematic variation, these exemplify
a problem-oriented method in the treatment of philosophical issues
that is characteristic of Reschers philosophical modus operandi and
inherent in its endeavors to treat classical issues from novel
points of view. For Rescher usually more concerned with what
"should" be said about a philosophical question than with what X,
Y, and Z "have" said about it, and he inclined to address issues of
the latter sort primarily as a means for addressing the former.
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