"Into the Open" is a philosophical and literary inquiry into the deeper meanings of genius. What precisely do we mean when we describe someone this way? What legacy do we invoke when we apply this term?

To address this question, Benjamin Taylor here explores how three great minds--Walter Pater, Paul Valry, and Sigmund Freud--viewed a figure widely considered the first great modern genius, Leonardo da Vinci. For each of these great thinkers, Da Vinci is of central importance because for each the received idea of genius has ceased to be a romantic certitude or sacred truth and has become a problem.

Invoking Nietzsche's drastic critique of genius, Taylor assesses the less programmatic and more anxious cases of Pater, Valry, and Freud. Whereas Nietzsche sought for and found an escape from romantic humanism, Pater, Valry, and Freud cannot relinquish the idea of genius and serve as troubled witnesses to the dilemma posed by the notion of genius. A myth of genius has been our way of making good the losses romantic modernity entails, Taylor writes, A myth of genius has existed to affirm that, among human lives, some have sacramental shape; that, among human lives, some put into abeyance the equation between life and loss. Such is the post-theological, post-metaphysical role into which we have compelled our geniuses. They make for us one last claim on the sublime.

A shift away from the special pleading that has lately plagued literary studies, Taylor's unfazed humanism reasserts the timeless standards of substantiveness, clarity, and grace.

Pethick investigates a much neglected philosophical connection between two of the most controversial figures in the history of philosophy: Spinoza and Nietzsche. By examining the crucial role that affectivity plays in their philosophies, this book claims that the two philosophers share the common goal of making knowledge the most powerful affect.

Ouspensky 's work on accessing a higher level of conciousness beyond everyday reality is a valuable legacy well worthy of consideration today.One of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century, Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky was a complex and romantic soul. A promising young intellectual in Tsarist Russia, he won recognition as a novelist and philosopher, yet descended into self-chosen obscurity as a teacher of "the Work," the system of his great contemporary Gurdjieff. Today it is as Gurdjieff 's chief disciple that he is remembered, yet Colin Wilson argues convincingly that he is to be considered a major writer and man of genius in his own right. A nostalgic melancholy Russian, one of Ouspensky 's deepest instincts was that man can find his own salvation, yet towards the end of his turbulent life he lost faith in the System and drank himself to death. With sympathy and admiration, Colin Wilson throws new light on this gentle man and deep thinker.

The philosophical thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein continues to have a profound influence that transcends barriers between philosophical disciplines and reaches beyond philosophy itself. Less than one hundred years after their publication, his early masterpiece 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' and the posthumously published 'Philosophical Investigations' have emerged as two classic philosophical texts, each of which has elicited widely divergent readings and spawned contesting schools of interpretation. This collection of original essays by leading experts offers deep insights into the forces that shaped and influenced Wittgenstein's thought on a broad variety of topics. It also contains the text - in both the original German and an English translation by Juliet Floyd and Burton Dreben - of letters and cards sent to Wittgenstein by the philosopher and logician Gottlob Frege, which shed light on their interaction during the crucial period when Wittgenstein completed work on the 'Tractatus'. This important record of a philosophical friendship is complemented by a scholarly apparatus and an introduction. Other essays featured in this volume document and discuss Wittgenstein's thinking on music and religion as well as issues that take center stage in the 'Investigations' such as Wittgenstein's account of rule-following. The volume provides an invaluable research tool not only for students of the history of philosophy and for scholars of both Wittgenstein and Frege but also for anyone interested in the intellectual history of the first half of the twentieth century.

In this book, Sarosh Koshy strives to go beyond the mission model of Christianity that emerged alongside and within the colonial enterprise and ethos since the sixteenth century. Rather than denounce the inheritance of the mission movement that transformed both the church and world in innumerable ways, it is a simultaneous expression of appreciation for this precious heritage, and an attempt to do justice by it through a yearning quest for relevant paradigms of Christian engagement.Indeed, there is an intense tension within this book, and in fact a twin tension at that. The tension is between those seeking to keep the current mission paradigm alive out of habit or as a self-serving device, thus corrupting and withering away a bequeathal that essentially set free the voluntary/independent spirit of Christian individuals and their intentional collectives from both the ecclesiastical and political authorities. On the other side are those who enlist mission both as a subsequent activity and as a basis to pursue innocuous, and at times apparently heroic options that would seemingly satisfy a supposed missional mandatory. This work enlists postcolonial and poststructuralist resources pedagogically, to teach of mission, missiology, World Christianity, and intercultural theology.

Very little has been written on the political implications of diverse accounts of "virtue, "vice," and "moral character," and even less has been offered on this subject from any identifiably leftist perspective. This book begins by demonstrating the plausibility of a "Marxist ethics" in general; the author then proceeds to work out an understanding of moral character itself and its role in living a "good life," based on a historical materialist philosophical anthropology. This leads to an analysis of which character traits should be considered virtues and vices, and what would count as a successful or unsuccessful moral education, within the context of contemporary North American society. The text concludes by focusing on the problems associated with identifying real-life, useful exemplifications of such virtuous and vicious character.

Philosophical ethics consists in the human endeavour to answer rationally the fundamental question of how we should live. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics explores the history of philosophical ethics in the western tradition from Homer until the present day. It provides a broad overview of the views of many of the main thinkers, schools, and periods, and includes in addition essays on topics such as autonomy and impartiality. The authors are international leaders in their field, and use their expertise and specialist knowledge to illuminate the relevance of their work to discussions in contemporary ethics. The essays are specially written for this volume, and in each case introduce the reader to the main lines of interpretation and criticism that have arisen in the professional history of philosophy over the past two or three decades.

This book offers a detailed analysis of John Locke's case for toleration and proposes an interpretation that shows the links between his political reasoning and his reflection on the ethics of belief. Locke is concerned with toleration not only when he discusses the ends of the Commonwealth, but also when he assesses the duties of private persons regarding the search for truth. The purpose of this book is to shed light on both of these branches, which have not been sufficiently explored in other studies on Locke. With particular attention to the notions of charity, obstinacy, fallibility, reciprocity and distinction between belief and knowledge, the author proposes a reading of the Epistola de Tolerantia, an extensive discussion of the controversy between Locke and Jonas Proast, as well as an examination of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in order to establish the meaning and interconnection of Locke's arguments in favour of toleration.

Denis McManus presents a new interpretation of Heideggers early vision of our subjectivity and of the world we inhabit. Heideggers fundamental ontology allows us to understand the creature that thinks as also one which acts, moves, even touches the world around it, a creature at home in the same ordinary world in which we too live our lives when outside of the philosophical closet; it also promises to free us from seemingly intractable philosophical problems, such as scepticism about the external world and other minds. But many of the concepts central to that vision are elusive; and some of the most widely accepted interpretations of Heideggers vision harbour within themselves deep and important unclarities, while others foist upon us hopeless species of idealism. Drawing on an examination of Heideggers work throughout the 1920s, Heidegger and the Measure of Truth offers a new way of understanding that vision. Central is the proposal that propositional thought presupposes what might be called a measure, a mastery of which only a recognizably worldly subject can possess. McManus shows how these ideas emerge through Heidegger's engagement with the history of philosophy and theology, and sets out a novel reading of key elements in the fundamental ontology, including Heidegger's concept of Being-in-the-world, his critique of scepticism, his claim to disavow both realism and idealism, and his difficult reflections on the nature of truth, science, authenticity, and philosophy itself. According to this reading, Heideggers central claims identify genuine demands that we must meet if we are to achieve the feat of thinking determinate thoughts about the world around us.

The bestseller from our pre-eminent philosopher, A.C. Grayling 'Grief and loneliness, depression, despair and failure - those things are the common human lot at least at times in all our lives'. Yet it is philosophy which, while not providing an answer to these problems, can enable us to prepare for them, and create strategies with which to deal with them. It is only through reflecting upon the world around us, reading, thinking, questioning, enjoying, that we can inculcate understanding, tolerance and importantly the courage to live our lives. It is our responsibility to live such 'considered lives' and to realise that we are authors of a narrative that can be shaped and controlled. This is the fifth in a series of essay miscellanies from our foremost philosopher A.C. Grayling, reflecting upon the form of our world and its multiplicity. The essays are grouped by theme into reflections upon life and the standards we live by, including vivid polemics and perceptive pieces on significant thinkers, contemporary rights and liberties issues. This book brilliantly articulates the philosophical debate and reflection that is needed to prepare us for life in the twenty-first century.

The Making of a Philosopher follows Colin McGinn from his early years in England, reading Descartes and Anselm, to his years in the States, first in Los Angeles, then New York. McGinn presents a contemporary academic take on the great philosophical figures of the twentieth century -- including Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Noam Chomsky -- alongside stories of the teachers who informed his ideas and often became friends and mentors, especially the colorful A. J. Ayer at Oxford.

Always elegant and probing, The Making of a Philosopher is for the student of contemporary philosophy as well as the general reader. Both will absorb every page.

This book promotes collaborative ways of knowing and group accountability in learning processes to counteract the damaging effects of neoliberal individualism prevalent in educational systems today. These neoliberalist hierarchies imposed through traditional, autocratic knowledge systems have driven much of the United States' educational policies and reforms, including STEM, high stakes testing, individual-based accountability, hierarchical grading systems, and ability grouping tracks. The net effect of such policies and reforms is an education system that perpetuates social inequalities linked with race, class, gender, and sexuality. Instead, the author suggests that accountability pushes past individualism in education by highlighting democratic methods to produce a collective good as opposed to a narrow personal success. In this democratic model, participants contribute to the common goal of elevating the entire group. Drawing from a well of creative praxes, reflexivity, and spiritual engagement, contributors incorporate collective dreaming to envision alternate realities of learning and schooling and summon the spirit into action for change.

Reflecting a growing interest in the history of knowledge, this book explores the importance of scholarly virtues during the late nineteenth century. The practice of science is moulded on notions of scholarly values, such as diligence, impartiality, meticulousness and patience, but here, the author focuses on the virtues of collegial loyalty and critical independence. By analysing how virtues were reflected in day-to-day scholarly work, and examining the possibility that these virtues may have come into conflict with each other, this book sheds light on what is often described as 'the moral economy of scholarship,' a metaphor which draws attention to the changeability of the expectations raised by virtue. Highlighting the pre-eminence and exemplary nature of German scholarship during the nineteenth century, the author provides a detailed analysis of four evaluative practices used by scholars across the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences in a number of German universities.This allows a nuanced understanding of the complex relationship between collegial loyalty and critical independence in the academic working environment, and draws comparisons across varying disciplines. A welcome contribution to a growing field of research, this book provides a comparative and transdisciplinary overview of scholarly virtues and will be of interest to those researching the history of science and the humanities.

In Self, Value, and Narrative, Anthony Rudd defends a series of interrelated claims about the nature of the self. He argues that the self is not simply a given entity, but a being that constitutes or shapes itself. But it can only do this non-arbitrarily if it has a sense of the good by which it can be guided as it chooses to endorse some of its desires or dispositions and repudiate others. This means that there is an essentially ethical or evaluative dimension to selfhood, and one which has an essentially teleological character. Such self-constitution takes place in narrative terms, through one's telling-and, more importantly, living-one's own story. Versions of some or all of these ideas have been developed by various influential writers (including Frankfurt, Korsgaard, MacIntyre, Ricoeur, and Taylor) but Rudd develops these ideas in a way that is importantly different from others familiar in the literature. He takes his main inspiration from Kierkegaard's account of the self, and argues (controversially) that this account belongs in the Platonic rather than the Aristotelian tradition of teleological thinking. Through close engagement with much contemporary philosophical work, Rudd presents a convincing case for an ancient and currently unfashionable view: that the polarities and tensions that are constitutive of selfhood can only be reconciled through an orientation of the self as a whole to an objective Good.

Although David Riesman wrote over half a century ago, his concept of autonomy as presented in The Lonely Crowd (1950) speaks directly to the intellectual and emotional disarrangements of the twenty-first century. The current malaise produced by the excesses of commodity culture, information technology, the hyperreal, and "fake news" militate against our ability to think critically about contemporary society. And while postmodern authors insist that this bewildering situation weakens and assails our critical thinking skills, Riesman's notion of autonomy refuses to capitulate to such a somber interpretation. Rather, he is convinced that individuals have the intellectual and emotional mettle to think for themselves and not be drawn into the demands of a commercialized culture and a commodity-driven lifestyle. As we pick and choose the terms of our engagement, we can remain aloof from society's engulfing influence and preserve the oppositional thinking needed for democracy. To illustrate this point most clearly, this book puts Riesman into conversation with the writings of Theodor Adorno, whose evaluation of the critical faculty's ability to withstand "the culture industry" is famously pessimistic.

Occasionalism is the thesis that God alone is the true cause of everything that happens in the world, and created substances are merely "occasional causes." This doctrine was originally developed in medieval Islamic theology, and was widely rejected in the works of Christian authors in medieval Europe. Yet despite its heterodoxy, occasionalism was revived in the 1660s by followers of the philosophy of René Descartes, perhaps the most famous among them the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche, who popularized this doctrine. What led Cartesian thinkers to adopt occasionalism? Since the 1970s has there been a growing body of literature on Malebranche and the movement he engendered. There is also a new and growing body of work on the Cartesian occasionalists before Malebranche—including Arnold Geulincx, Geraud de Cordemoy, and Louis de la Forge. But to date there has not been a systematic, book-length study of the reasoning that led Cartesian thinkers to adopt occasionalism, and the relationship of their arguments to Descartes' own views. This book expands on recent scholarship to provide the first comprehensive account of seventeenth century occasionalism. Part I contrasts occasionalism with a theory of divine providence developed by Thomas Aquinas, in response to medieval occasionalists; it shows that Descartes' philosophy is compatible with Aquinas' theory, on which God "concurs" in all the actions of created beings. Part II reconstructs the arguments of Cartesians—such as Cordemoy and La Forge—who used Cartesian physics to argue for occasionalism. Finally, the book shows how Malebranche's case for occasionalism combines philosophical theology with Cartesian metaphysics and mechanistic science.

This book is the first to systematically investigate how the notion of time is conceptualised in Jacques Lacan's work. Through a careful examination of Lacan's various presentations of time, Chenyang Wang argues that this notion is key to a comprehension of Lacan's psychoanalytic thinking, and in particular to the way in which he theorises subjectivity. This book demonstrates that time is approached by Lacan not only as consciously experienced, but also as pre-reflectively embodied and symbolically generated. In an analysis that begins with Lacan's "Logical Time" essay, Chenyang Wang articulates three temporal registers that correspond to Lacan's Real-Symbolic-Imaginary triad and also demonstrates how Lacan's elaboration of other major themes including consciousness, body, language, desire and sexuality is informed by his original perspectives on time. Filling a significant gap in contemporary Lacanian studies, this book will provide essential reading for students and scholars of psychoanalytic theory, continental philosophy and critical theory.

We may smile to be told that, in some cultures, the eating of timid or ugly animals is believed to make the eater timid or ugly. Yet, equally fundamental misunderstandings of the relations between things, words and ideas are rife among Western thinkers. In this provocative essay, G.A. Wells identifies some influential mistakes about language embedded in the empiricist philosophical tradition of Locke, Russell and Ayer. Wells shows how these errors stimulated a religious backlash, in which faith became coupled with commonsense realism, in such writers as Keith Ward, Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Altizer. Similar misconceptions gave rise both to the behaviourism of Watson and Ryle, and to the anti-behaviourist Chomskyan reaction with its chimera of a "universal grammar". Magical thinking, the writer claims, derives from plausible errors concerning the efficacy of gestures and words, and survives even though these errors have been refuted. Wells illustrates the influence of misconceptions about language as they manifest themselves in contemporary religious apologetics.

This open access book brings together for the first time all aspects of the tragic life and fascinating work of the polymath Robert Leslie Ellis (1817-1859), placing him at the heart of early-Victorian intellectual culture. Written by a diverse team of experts, the chapters in the book's first part contain in-depth examinations of, among other things, Ellis's family, education, Bacon scholarship and mathematical contributions. The second part consists of annotated transcriptions of a selection of Ellis's diaries and correspondence. Taken together, A Prodigy of Universal Genius: Robert Leslie Ellis, 1817-1859 is a rich resource for historians of science, historians of mathematics and Victorian scholars alike. Robert Leslie Ellis was one of the most intriguing and wide-ranging intellectual figures of early Victorian Britain, his contributions ranging from advanced mathematical analysis to profound commentaries on philosophy and classics and a decisive role in the orientation of mid-nineteenth century scholarship. This very welcome collection offers both new and authoritative commentaries on the work, setting it in the context of the mathematical, philosophical and cultural milieux of the period, together with fascinating passages from the wealth of unpublished papers Ellis composed during his brief and brilliant career. - Simon Schaffer, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge

The relationship between two distinct periods in Michel Foucault's work is the starting point for this book. In "Truth and Power," an interview Foucault gave in 1976, he states that to create a new politics of truth is an intellectual's main task. In this book, Priscila Piazentini Vieira analyzes Foucault's study on ancient culture and courage of truth in the 1980s as his main contribution to our construction of a new politics of truth, much diverse from modernity's prevailing understanding of it grounded on the will to knowledge. Furthermore, she analyzes Foucault's militant practice and his GIP experience from a corpus constructed by papers, courses, interviews, and books written by the philosopher between the 1970s and 1980s. By clearly linking Foucault's work on to his own militant activity, the book also aims to develop an original definition of the intellectual at the crossroad of political engagement, the production of knowledge, and the manifestation of the truth.

In this book, Paul Crittenden offers a critical guide to the problematic origins of biblical teaching about the afterlife and the way in which it was subsequently developed by Church authorities and theologians-Origen, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas in particular. In the post-Reformation era the focus falls on the challenges set by modern secularism. The tradition encompasses a body of interconnected themes: an apocalyptic war in which the Kingdom of God triumphs over Satan's powers of darkness; salvation in Christ; the immortality of the soul; and finally the resurrection of the dead and the last judgment, ratifying an afterlife of eternal bliss for the morally good and punishment in hell for wrongdoers. The critique questions these beliefs on evidential, ethical, and philosophical grounds. The argument overall is that what lies beyond death is beyond knowledge. The one fundamental truth that can be distilled from the once compelling body of Christian eschatological belief-for believers and unbelievers alike-is the importance of living ethically.

Leibniz zeitgeschichtliches Engagement offenbart sich in seinen reichspolitischen Sorgen angesichts der ungunstigen Entwicklung des Pfalzischen Krieges und bedenklicher Bedingungen, die sich in franzosischen Friedensvorschlagen finden; auch ein republikanisches Manifest und antitrinitarische Flugschriften aus England werden Gegenstand seiner Kritik. Wahrend die Reunionsverhandlungen mit den franzosischen Partnern ins Stocken kommen, wird der Meinungsaustausch mit dem Bischof von Wiener Neustadt, Rojas y Spinola, intensiver. Der urgeschichtliche Vorspann zur braunschweig-luneburgischen Geschichte, die Protogaea, wird fertiggestellt. Leibniz muss sich selbst um den schwierigen Vertrieb seines volkerrechtlichen Codex juris gentium diplomaticus kummern. Fragwurdige Hypothesen uber die Etymologie des Germanen-Namens bringen ihn zur Erklarung seiner eigenen Thesen. Bosartig-simplifizierende Satiren rufen eine Rezension hervor, in der Leibniz Massstabe fur politische Satiren aufstellt. Auch eine eigene politische Satire mit dem Motto "Fas est et ab hoste doceri" wird von ihm versandt."