Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is one of the most important figures in the history of European thought. Although interest in his life and work has grown enomrously in recent years, this is the first complete edition of his correspondence. The texts of the letters are richly supplemented with explanatory notes and full biographical and bibliographical information. This landmark publication sheds new light in abundance on the intellectual life of a major thinker.

Both contemporary philosophers since Heidegger and post-modern philosophers have largely rejected modernist philosophy, particularly that of Kant and Husserl, because they see it as committed to an untenably metaphysical view of the self. This book is a review of these attacks and a defence of the concepts of self and subjectivity. Carr reviews and explains the general context and influence of Heidegger's critique of Kant and Husserl. He then presents a more accurate reading of Kant and Husserl, which he uses as a starting-point for presenting a sketch of his own transcendental account of the self.

This renowned introduction - already a standard text in Europe - is translated here for the first time. Vattimo uses Heideggerean and cultural-critical perspectives to reassess the work and thought of Nietzsche.

"The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy" is a concise reference to the whole history of western philosophy, from ancient Greece to the present day. This work spans all the major branches of western philosophical inquiry, all of the key figures. It explains the meaning and usage of each philosophical concept in a fresh and engaging style. Each entry on philosophical terms concludes with an illustrative quotation from a significant philosopher, to enhance the reader's understanding. Entries on terms and individual philosophers are fully cross-referenced. This book is co-written by the editor of the popular volume "The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy" (Second Edition, 2002).

Dathorne's approach is basically literary and historical, but he has also developed his argument around politics, popular culture, language, and even landscape architecture. He looks at Europe as a mental construct of philosophies and politics that both the English and European Americans identified with Greece and Rome. Dathorne shows how much of what we think of as European heritage is actually of African and/or Islamic background. He shows the founders of the U.S. to be idealistic Athenian-type elites, unlikely to allow humanity to govern as a citizenship. The book discusses the literary history of the ex-colony of America with its own special lens, showing how again and again the makers of the American myth failed to come to terms with the multicultural realities.

This is a unique examination of the writing of Felix Guattari, one of France's most important intellectuals of the twentieth century.Felix Guattari was a French political militant, practicing psychoanalyst and international public intellectual. He is best known for his work with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze on the two-volume "Capitalism and Schizophrenia", one of the most influential works of post-structuralism. From the mid-1950s onward, Guattari exerted a profound yet often behind-the-scenes influence on institutional psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, radical politics and philosophy. "Guattari's Diagrammtic Thought" examines the writings that Guattari authored on his own, both before and during his collaboration with Deleuze, providing a startlingly fresh perspective on intellectual and political trends in France and beyond during the second half of the twentieth century.Janell Watson acknowledges the historical and biographical aspect of Guattari's writing and explores the relevance of his theoretical ideas to topics as diverse as the May 1968 student movement, Lacanian psychoanalysis, neo-liberalism, ethnic identity, microbiology, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, ecology, the mass media, and the subjective dimensions of information technology. The book demonstrates that Guattari's unique thought process yields a markedly Guattarian version of many seemingly familiar Deleuzean notions.

This book contains 11 essays and a comprehensive bibliography. The essays reveal the extent to which Philip K. Dick's personal obsessions pre-figured postmodernist concerns with humanity's self-alienation, cultural and personal paranoia, and the politics of simulation, deceit, and self-deception. The contributors reveal how Dick's ontological concerns, stated in his repeated questioning of "What is real?," are also political concerns. Thus, they examine the philosophical and religious foundations on which his work rests, offering much-needed arguments which reveal both his philosophical depth and the extent to which he drew from esoteric and occult religions. His cultural critique also receives significant exposition, as the contributors reveal how Dick's fiction enacts the larger cultural struggles of cold war America, with its conflicting private visions and public realities, and its personal and political loyalties. The contributors argue for the significance of heretofore neglected or marginalized texts of Dick as well, including in their discussions many early short stories from the early 1950s and neglected novels of the mid-1960s, arguing that there is a need to understand how Dick shaped (or misshaped) his fictions so as to reimagine the life of his society.

Aristotle's De anima shaped philosophical debates far beyond the Middle Ages and gave rise to a number of theories about the nature of the soul, its various functions and its relation to the body. The ten contributions to this book, a special issue of the journal Vivarium, examine some of these theories in the period between Albertus Magnus and Descartes. They pay particular attention to the question of how the metaphysical status of the soul and its parts was explained, and analyze Aristotelian accounts of cognitive activities such as perceiving, imagining and thinking. The ten case studies focus both on defenders of the Aristotelian paradigm and on its critics, arguing that one should not look for a moment of break with Aristotelianism, but for various stages of transformation. Contributors are Lilli Alanen, Joel Biard, Jean-Baptiste Brenet, Richard Cross, Dag Hasse, Peter King, Ian Mclean, Martin Lenz, Lodi Nauta, Dominik Perler and Markus Wild.

This is a new edition of the first volume of G.P.Baker and P.M.S. Hacker's definitive reference work on Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations."
New edition of the first volume of the monumental four-volume "Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations."
Takes into account much material that was unavailable when the first edition was written.
Following Baker's death in 2002, P.M.S. Hacker has thoroughly revised the first volume, rewriting many essays and sections of exegesis completely.
Part One - the Essays - now includes two completely new essays: 'Meaning and Use' and 'The Recantation of a Metaphysician'.
Part Two - Exegesis 1-184 - has been thoroughly revised in the light of the electronic publication of Wittgenstein's "Nachlass," and includes many new interpretations of the remarks, a history of the composition of the book, and an overview of its structure.
The revisions will ensure that this remains the definitive reference work on Wittgenstein's masterpiece for the foreseeable future.

Academic condemnation has long been recognized as an important issue in the history of universities and the history of medieval thought. Yet few studies have examined the phenomenon in serious detail. This work is the first book-length study of academic condemnations at Oxford. It explores every known case in detail, including several never examined before, and then considers the practice of condemnation as a whole. As such, it provides a context to see John Wyclif and the Oxford Lollards not as unique figures, but as targets of a practice a century old by 1377. It argues that condemnation did not happen purely for reasons of theological purity, but reflected social and institutional pressures within the university.

This volume examines the entire logical and philosophical production of Nicolai A. Vasil'ev, studying his life and activities as a historian and man of letters. Readers will gain a comprehensive understanding of this influential Russian logician, philosopher, psychologist, and poet. The author frames Vasil'ev's work within its historical and cultural context. He takes into consideration both the situation of logic in Russia and the state of logic in Western Europe, from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th. Following this, the book considers the attempts to develop non-Aristotelian logics or ideas that present affinities with imaginary logic. It then looks at the contribution of traditional logic in elaborating non-classical ideas. This logic allows the author to deal with incomplete objects just as imaginary logic does with contradictory ones. Both logics are objects of interesting analysis by modern researchers. This volume will appeal to graduate students and scholars interested not only in Vasil'ev's work, but also in the history of non-classical logics.

A classic work in the field of practical and professional ethics, this collection of nine essays by English philosopher and educator Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) was first published in 1898 and forms a vital complement to Sidgwick's major treatise on moral theory, The Methods of Ethics. Reissued here as Volume One in a new series sponsored by the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, the book is composed chiefly of addresses to members of two ethical societies that Sidgwick helped to found in Cambridge and London in the 1880s. Clear, taut, and lively, these essays demonstrate the compassion and calm reasonableness that Sidgwick brought to all his writings.
As Sidgwick explains in his opening essay, the societies he addressed aimed to allow academics, professionals, and others to pursue joint efforts at reaching "some results of value for practical guidance and life." Sidgwick hoped that members might discuss such questions as when, if ever, public officials might be justified in lying or in breaking promises, whether scientists could legitimately inflict suffering on animals for research purposes, when nations might have just cause in going to war, and a score of other issues of ethics in public and private life still debated a century later.
This valuable reissue returns Practical Ethics to its rightful place in Sidgwick's oeuvre. Noted ethicist Sissela Bok provides a superb Introduction, ranging over the course of Sidgwick's life and career and underscoring the relevance of Practical Ethics to contemporary debate. She writes: "Practical Ethics, the last book that Henry Sidgwick published before his death in 1900, contains the distillation of a lifetime of reflectionon ethics and on what it would take for ethical debate to be 'really of use in the solution of practical questions.'" This rich, engaging work is essential reading for all concerned with the relationship between ethical theory and. practice, and with the questions that have driven the study of professional ethics in recent years.

George Molnar came to see that the solution to a number of the problems of contemporary philosophy lay in the development of an alternative to Hume's metaphysics, with real causal powers at its centre. Molnar's eagerly anticipated book setting out his theory of powers was almost complete when he died, and has been prepared for publication by Stephen Mumford, who provides a context-setting introduction.

Christopher Janaway presents a full commentary on Nietzsche's most studied work, On the Genealogy of Morality, and combines close reading of key passages with an overview of Nietzsche's wider aims. Arguing that Nietzsche's goal is to pursue psychological and historical truths concerning the origins of modern moral values, Beyond Selflessness differs from other books on Nietzsche in that it emphasizes the significance of his rhetorical methods as an instrument of persuasion. Nietzsche's outlook is broadly naturalist, but he is critical of typical scientific and philosophical methods for their advocacy of impersonality and suppression of the affects. In contrast to his opponents, Schopenhauer and Paul Ree, who both account for morality in terms of selflessness, Nietzsche believes that our allegiance to a post-Christian morality that centres around selflessness, compassion, guilt, and denial of the instincts is not primarily rational but affective: underlying feelings, often ambivalent and poorly grasped in conscious thought, explain our moral beliefs. The Genealogy is designed to detach the reader from his or her allegiance to morality and prepare for the possibility of new values. In addition to examining how Nietzsche's "perspectivism" holds that one can best understand a topic such as morality through allowing as many of one's feelings as possible to speak about it, Janaway shows that Nietzsche seeks to enable us to "feel differently": his provocation of the reader's affects helps us grasp the affective origins of our attitudes and prepare the way for healthier values such as the affirmation of life (as tested by the thought of eternal return) and the self-satisfaction to be attainedby "giving style to one's character."

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

Daniel Garber presents an illuminating study of Leibniz's conception of the physical world. Leibniz's commentators usually begin with monads, mind-like simple substances, the ultimate building-blocks of the Monadology. But Leibniz's apparently idealist metaphysics is very puzzling: how can any sensible person think that the world is made up of tiny minds? In this book, Garber tries to make Leibniz's thought intelligible by focusing instead on his notion of body. Beginning with Leibniz's earliest writings, he shows how Leibniz starts as a Hobbesian with a robust sense of the physical world, and how, step by step, he advances to the monadological metaphysics of his later years. Much of the book's focus is on Leibniz's middle years, where the fundamental constituents of the world are corporeal substances, unities of matter and form understood on the model of animals. For Garber monads only enter fairly late in Leibniz's career, and when they enter, he argues, they do not displace bodies but complement them. In the end, though, Garber argues that Leibniz never works out the relation between the world of monads and the world of bodies to his own satisfaction: at the time of his death, his philosophy is still a work in progress.

This text relates Hegel to preceding and succeeding political philosophers. The Hegelian notion of the interdependence of political philosophy and its history is demonstrated by the links established between Hegel and his predecessors and successors. Hegel's political theory is illuminated by essays showing its critical assimilation of Plato and Hobbes, and by studies reviewing subsequent critiques of its standpoint by Stirner, Marx and Collingwood. The relevance of Hegel to contemporary political philosophy is highlighted in essays which compare Hegel to Lyotard and Rawls.

Poststructuralism--as a name for a mode of thinking, a style of philosophizing, a kind of writing--has exercised a profound influence upon contemporary Western thought and the institution of the university. As a French and predominantly Parisian affair, poststructuralism is inseparable from the intellectual milieu of postwar France, a world dominated by Alexandre KojEve's and Jean Hyppolite's interpretations of Hegel, Jacques Lacan's reading of Freud, Gaston Bachelard's epistemology, George CanguilheM's studies of science, and Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism. It is also inseparable from the structuralist tradition of linguistics based upon the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jacobson, and the structuralist interpretations of Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, and the early Michel Foucault. Poststructuralism, considered in terms of contemporary cultural history, can be understood as belonging to the broad movement of European formalism, with explicit historical links to both Formalist and Futurist linguistics and poetics, and with aspects of the European avant-garde, especially Andre Breton's surrealism. Each essay in this unique collection by and for educators is devoted to the work and educational significance of one of ten major poststructuralist philosophers.