The discovery and interpretation of Hegel by British philosophers is one of the most fascinating confrontations in the intellectual history of recent British philosophy. Forgotten and ignored by English scholars, British Idealism, although short-lived, has recently been rediscovered as an important discipline in its own right.

In this wide-ranging investigation of many prominent issues in contemporary legal, political, and moral philosophy, Matthew Kramer combines penetrating critiques with original theorising as he examines the writings of numerous major theorists (including Ronald Dworkin, H.L.A. Hart, Alan Gewirth, Ronald Coase and Richard Posner). Among the many topics covered by Kramer's essays are the relative merits of legal positivism and natural-law theory, the appropriate understanding of justice, the role of consequences in moral decision-making, and the ultimate foundations of moral judgements.

Series Information:
Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers

This work is the second in the Routledge Series of Critical Assessments of Leading Political Philosophers. The series presents a comprehensive selection of the critical literature commenting on the life and works of a major political philosopher. John Locke (1632-1704) is crucially important because his political philosophy was the first to develop the principles on which American Independence, the American Constitution and the French Revolution were based. In particular, he stressed the ideas that sovereignty lies with the people; that government is based on a free contract between people which can be subsequently modified; and that as high a degree of religious toleration as possible should be allowed. John Locke also wrote extensively on other aspects of philosophy, on education, and on religion. The present volumes provide students of politics and philosophy with immediate access to Locke's contribution and show how his work has been received and modified by others.

This anthology brings together many of the more significant contributions to Cartesian scholarship, some of which reach far back as the 1930s. Altogether, there are well over 100 detailed analyses and discussions of salient aspects of Descartes' Promethean legacy.
Because Descartes intended his system to embrace not only philosophy but also a complete scientific corpus, this collection covers both philosophical issues and scientific views: "Volume 1" is devoted to questions of Cartesian Method and epistemology; "Volumes 2 and 3" concentrate on his metaphysics; and "Volume 4" discusses Descartes' scientific views and achievements.
The lucidity and originality of the essays, a number of which are already classics of Cartesian scholarship, will ensure that this anthology becomes a standard in Cartesian philosophy. An invaluable resource, "Renee Descartes" provides a large variety of introductions, analyses, criticisms, and appraisals of the problems which preoccupied Descartes and the solutions he propounded.

What makes us human beings? Is it merely some corporeal aspect, or rather some specific mental capacity, language, or some form of moral agency or social life? Is there a gendered bias within the concept of humanity? How do human beings become more human, and can we somehow cease to be human? This volume provides some answers to these fundamental questions and more by charting the increased preoccupation of the European Enlightenment with the concepts of humankind and humanity. Chapters investigate the philosophical concerns of major figures across Western Europe, including Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, Ferguson, Kant, Herder, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and the Comte de Buffon. As these philosophers develop important descriptive and comparative approaches to the human species and moral and social ideals of humanity, they present a view of the Enlightenment project as a particular kind of humanism that is different from its Ancient and Renaissance predecessors. With contributions from a team of internationally recognized scholars, including Stephen Gaukroger, Michael Forster, Céline Spector, Jacqueline Taylor, and Günter Zöller, this book offers a novel interpretation of the Enlightenment that is both clear in focus and impressive in scope.

This book presents essays and commentaries that continue on Thomas Kuhn's work from where he left off at the time of his death. Contrary to other books, this volume picks up the gauntlet to develop, from a contemporary perspective, some points that can be improved in the light of recent findings and conceptualizations in metatheory. Thus, this work pays a visit to the classical Kuhnian landscapes, but rather proposing interpretations, it takes them as the starting point to go further. One hundred years after Kuhn's birth, the editors and authors rekindle the passion and interest that have always surrounded the work of the great Boston philosopher and historian.

This book provides a standard reference of the major medieval Jewish philosophers, as well as an eminently readable narrative of the course of medieval Jewish philosophical thought, presented as a response to the spiritual-intellectual challenges facing Judaism in that period. The accounts of Saadia, Bahya, Halevi, Maimonides, and Crescas are among the fullest available in English. Other thinkers discussed in depth include Israeli, Ibn Gabirol, Gersonides, and Albo; the work also includes capsule summaries of Bar Hiyya, Falaquera, Albalag, Duran, Abravanel and others. All of the summaries place the philosophical thought of these important thinkers in the context of the historical challenges and religious concerns of their age.

This book relates Hegel to preceding and succeding political philosophers. The Hegelian notion of the interdependece 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 which review critiques of his 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.

This book explores what it means to be and become-at-home in theological perspective, located in the context of a youth club. Drawing on ethnographic research, Phoebe Hill presents an account of what an authentic Christian hospitality could look like in a youth setting, and the ways in which the young people - the strangers at the door - might enable the Christian youth worker to become more fully at home. Discourses around Christian hospitality often unwittingly perpetuate implicit power imbalances. The youth club offers a context for Christian hospitality that 'tips' the power in favour of the young people who attend, enabling the youth leaders to share and create home with young people in a distinctive way. As young people leave the Church in droves, the Church faces the urgent and daunting task of finding new ways of being with young people on their own terms; this book offers one solution. Hill argues that homecoming is an essential task of humanity. We are connected in this common pilgrimage and the need to find places and spaces where we can be at home. Becoming at home may be harder than ever before; numerous sociological, philosophical and theological factors are compromising our ability to dwell in the contemporary world.

The Plotinus Reader provides a generous selection of translations from the fifty-four treatises that together make up the Enneads of Plotinus, a central work in the history of philosophy. They were prepared by a team of specialists in ancient philosophy and edited by Lloyd P. Gerson. Based on the definitive critical edition of the Greek along with decades of additional textual criticism by many scholars, these translations aim to provide a readable, accurate rendering of Plotinus's often very difficult language. Included are extensive references to Plotinus's sources, scores of cross-references, and an extensive glossary of technical terms.

Some scholars in the history of ideas have had a growing interest in examining Leibniz's many discussions ofvarious aspects of religion, Christian, Jewish and far eastern. Leibniz, with his voracious interest and concern for so many aspects of human intellectual and spiritual life, read a wide variety of books on the various religions of mankind. He also was in personal contact with many of those who espoused orthodox and non-orthodox views. He annotated his copies of many books on religious subjects. And he was working on schemes for reuniting the various Catholic and Protestant churches in Europe. Studies on Leibniz's views on Judaism, on the Kabbalah, on Chinese thought have been appearing over the last decades. It was decided by some of us that since there has been a growing interest in this side of Leibniz's thought it would be a good idea to bring together a group of scholars working on different aspects of Leibniz's views on religion, mysticism and spiritualism, in order to h ve them present papers on their current researches, and to have the opportunity for lengthy discussion, formal and informal, in the most pleasant academic ambiance of the William Andrews Clark Library in Los Angeles. Under the sponsorship of the UCLA Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies, a workshop conference was held November 18-19, 1994.

This book is dedicated to Edith Stein (1891-1942), who is known widely for her contributions to metaphysics. Though she never produced a dedicated work on questions of ethics, her corpus is replete with pertinent reflections. This book is the first major scholarly volume dedicated to exploring Stein's ethical thought, not only for its wide-ranging content, from her earlier to later works, but also for its applications to such fields as psychology, theology, education, politics, law, and culture. Leading international scholars come together to provide a systematic account of Stein's ethics, highlighting its relation to Stein's highly developed and complex metaphysics. Questions about the good, evil, the rights and ethical comportment of the person, the state, and feminism are addressed. The book appeals to scholars interested in the history of philosophical and ethical thought

Written between 1910 and 1929, Traces is considered Ernst Bloch's most important work next to The Principle of Hope and The Spirit of Utopia. This book, which collects aphorisms, essays, stories, and anecdotes, enacts Bloch's interest in showing how attention to "traces"—to the marks people make or to natural marks—can serve as a mode of philosophizing. In an elegant example of how the literary can become a privileged medium for philosophy, Bloch's chief philosophical invention is to begin with what gives an observer pause—what seems strange and astonishing. He then follows such traces into an awareness of the individual's relations to himself or herself and to history, conceived as a thinking into the unknown, the "not yet," and thus as utopian in essence. Traces, a masterwork of twentieth-century philosophy, is the most modest and beautiful proof of Bloch's utopian hermeneutics, taking as its source and its result the simplest, most familiar, and yet most striking stories and anecdotes.

This volume discusses how commonality and difference are negotiated across heterogeneous social movements in Latin America, especially Peru. It applies cosmopolitics as an analytical lens to understand the intricacies of social movement encounters across difference, without imposing colonial hierarchies or categorizations. The author blends multiple theoretical approaches-such as social movement research, postcolonial feminism, and post-foundational discourse theory-with ethnographic insights to develop a theory of cosmopolitical solidarity. Providing a transnational and intersectional perspective on the politics of social justice in a postcolonial context, this book will appeal to students of social movements, gender studies, racism, Latin American studies, and international relations, as well as practitioners involved in activism, social work, or international cooperation.

Thomas White, in the quatercentenary of his birth, is due for historical rehabilitation. English Catholic priest, philosopher, theologian, and scientist, he was a renowned and notorious figure in his own day; and, though long forgot ten, his work exemplifies aspects of major current concern to historians of ideas: in particular, the significance of the newly-revived sceptical philosophy; the complexity ofthe transition from scholasticism to the new philosophy; and the whole role of"minor," non-canonical figures in the historyofthought. White's writings embrace theology, politics, and natural philosophy, or science'; and in all these three areas, his work, after centuries of comparative neglect, has slowly been resurfacing. His theological significance received intermittent recognition through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early-twentieth centuries; but more recently his great importance as leader of a whole "Blackloist" faction of English Catholics has become increasingly clear. Condemned by co-religionists in his own time as a dangerous heretic, he has been assessed by modem scholars as an anticipator of twentieth-century trends in Catholic theology, and even as "probably, after John Henry Newman, the most original thinker as yet producedby modem English Catholicism."2 Blackloism implied not only a theological, but also a political position; and that position was clarified and publicised by White in his single political treatise, The Grounds of Obedience and Government, published in the mid 1650s. His provocative stance was widely misunderstood and misinterpreted, and was soon anyway rendered untenable by the restoration of the monarchy."

This work presents a rethinking of critical philosophy through the recovery of a larger sense of aesthetics in Kant. It provides a unitary reading of the "Critique of Judgement". This is situated in relation to Kant's attempt to think ends in general. The question of how to think ends is argued to guide Kant both in his treatment of aesthetics and teleology and to provide the rationale for critique itself.

Stephen Neale presents a powerful, original examination of a cornerstone of modern philosophy: the idea that our thoughts and utterances are representations of reality, that accurate or true representations are those that correspond to the facts. Facing Facts will be crucial to future work in metaphysics, logic, and the philosophy of mind and language, and will have profound implications far beyond.

In this important and engaging new book, Alastair Morgan offers a detailed examination of the concept of life in Adorno's philosophy. He relates Adorno's thought in this context to a number of key thinkers in the history of Continental philosophy, including Marx, Hegel, Heidegger and Agamben, and provides an argument for the relevance and importance of Adorno's critical philosophy of life at the beginning of the 21st century. Crucially, Morgan offers a new framework for understanding the relation between concepts of life and a critical philosophy. The concept of life has previously received little attention in Adorno scholarship. However, the concept of life is a constant theme and problem running throughout Adorno's work, from his early critiques of life-philosophies to his late philosophy of metaphysical experience as the possibility of life. The idea that Adorno's philosophy is in need of or lacking in a fundamental ontology has been the subject of a great deal of critical attention, but this has rarely been examined through an analysis of the concept of life. Furthermore, philosophies of life have seen a resurgence in recent years (particularly with a renewed interest in Bergson's philosophy via the critical reception of Deleuze's philosophy). "Adorno's Concept of Life" is therefore a necessary and timely study that offers a distinctive interpretation of Adorno's philosophy, and will be of central interest to everyone working on Adorno. Furthermore, it provides a powerful interpretation of the critical force of Adorno's philosophy, that will contribute to the renewed interest in the concept of life within contemporary philosophy.

This is the first English translation of Condillac's most influential works: the Essay on the Origins of Human Knowledge (1746) and Course for Study of Instruction of the Prince of Parma (1772). The Essays lay the foundation for Condillac's theory of mind. He argues that all mental operations are, in fact, sensory processes and nothing more. An outgrowth of Locke's empirical account of ideas and sensations as a source of knowledge, Condillac's theory goes beyond Locke's foundations, introducing his universal method for understanding any complex entity: the reduction of all matters to their origins and then to their simplest forms. The Course, originally written to teach Prince Ferdinand of Parma to think and to develop good habits of mind following the principle of association of ideas, covers grammar, writing, reasoning, thinking, and ancient and modern history. Philip writes in the introduction: "[the] mind is moldable to reason and to 'nature' which gave it a model and provides the ultimate authority for all it can know or do."