Eight months on the bestseller lists in France!

From the timeless wisdom of the ancient Greeks to Christianity, the Enlightenment, existentialism, and postmodernism, Luc Ferry's instant classic brilliantly and accessibly explains the enduring teachings of philosophy--including its profound relevance to modern daily life and its essential role in achieving happiness and living a meaningful life. This lively journey through the great thinkers will enlighten every reader, young and old.

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Emotions are complex mental states that resist reduction. They are visceral reactions but also beliefs about the world. They are spontaneous outbursts but also culturally learned performances. They are intimate and private and yet gain their substance and significance only from interpersonal and social frameworks. And just as our emotions in any given moment display this complex structure, so their history is plural rather than singular. The history of emotions is where the history of ideas meets the history of the body, and where the history of subjectivity meets social and cultural history. In this Very Short Introduction, Thomas Dixon traces the historical ancestries of feelings ranging from sorrow, melancholy, rage, and terror to cheerfulness, enthusiasm, sympathy, and love. The picture that emerges is a complex one, showing how the states we group together today as "the emotions" are the product of long and varied historical changes in language, culture, beliefs, and ways of life. The grief-stricken rage of Achilles in the Iliad, the happiness inscribed in America's Declaration of Independence, the love of humanity that fired crusades and revolutions through the ages, and the righteous rage of modern protest movements all look different when seen through this lens. With examples from ancient, medieval, and modern cultures, including forgotten feelings and the creation of modern emotional regimes, this Very Short Introduction sheds new light on our emotions in the present, by looking at what historians can tell us about their past. Dixon explains the key ideas of historians of emotions as they have developed in conversation with psychology and psychiatry, with attention paid especially to ideas about basic emotions, psychological construction, and affect theory. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

This book is the first full-length study of the history of intellectual and scientific racism in modern South Africa. Ranging broadly across disciplines in the social sciences, sciences and humanities, it charts the rise of scientific racism and biological determinism from the late nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth. Set against the rise of apartheid, the book illuminates the complex relationship between theories of essential racial difference and the development of white supremacist thinking. Saul Dubow draws extensively on comparable studies of intellectual racism in Europe and the United States to demonstrate the selective absorption of widely prevalent conceptions of racial difference in the particular historical context of South Africa. The issues he addresses are of relevance to both Africanist and international students of racism and race relations.

This collection brings together in translation the finest postwar German-language scholarship on Nietzsche's philosophy, ranging over his concept of irony, his thoughts on music, his relation to the pre-Socratics, his concept of truth, and numerous other topics. Many of the essays appear in English here for the first time, and all are newly translated for the volume.

A clear and balanced presentation of the dilemmas associated with each of the four nations. A skillful cultural framework is provided in the first chapter, which serves as an overview. "Foreign AffairS"

A fine study. Anderson's reputation as a scholar and a Latin Americanist will be enhanced when this study has time to make its imprint. "American Political Science RevieW"

This new volume provides an up-to-date survey of the Central American states involved in the current conflict. While several studies of the individual countries in the region have appeared, there have been no recent attempts at a synthesis of the problems of the area. "Politics in Central America" fills this gap, analyzing the roots of the current crisis and suggesting solutions to the problems of the region. The author's chief assertion is that the roots of the problems in Central America are not to be found in the East-West struggle but in the competition within each country for control of the scarce natural resources. This crisis in Central America calls for drastic and economic changes. The key question, Anderson claims, is whether or not these changes can be brought about within a democratic framework.

The Hegel Lectures Series Series Editor: Peter C. Hodgson Hegel's lectures have had as great a historical impact as the works he himself published. Important elements of his system are elaborated only in the lectures, especially those given in Berlin during the last decade of his life. The original editors conflated materials from different sources and dates, obscuring the development and logic of Hegel's thought. The Hegel Lectures series is based on a selection of extant and recently discovered transcripts and manuscripts. The original lecture series are reconstructed so that the structure of Hegel's argument can be followed. Each volume presents an accurate new translation accompanied by an editorial introduction and annotations on the text, which make possible the identification of Hegel's many allusions and sources. Hegel's interpretation of the history of philosophy not only played a central role in the shaping of his own thought, but also has had a great influence on the development of historical thinking. In his own view the study of the history of philosophy is the study of philosophy itself. This explains why such a large proportion of his lectures, from 1805 to 1831, the year of his death, were about history of philosophy. The text of these lectures, presented here in the first authoritative English edition, is therefore a document of the greatest importance in the development of Western thought: they constitute the very first comprehensive history of philosophy that treats philosophy itself as undergoing genuine historical development. And they are crucial for understanding Hegel's own systematic works such as the Phenomenology, the Logic, and the Encyclopedia, for central to his thought is the theme of spirit as engaged in self-realization through the processes of historical change. Furthermore, they played a crucial role in one of the determining events of modern intellectual history: the rise of a new consciousness of human life, culture, and intellect as historical in nature. This third volume of the lectures covers the medieval and modern periods, and includes fascinating discussion of scholastic, Renaissance, and Reformation philosophy, and of such great modern thinkers as Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, and especially Kant.

In this arresting and extraordinary book the reader is not offered a secondary text, a book about Bataille, in the usual sense. But it is a book of which Bataille would have been proud: untamed, impassionate and fearless.

Thomas More's Utopia is one of the supreme achievements of Renaissance humanism. This is the first edition since 1965 to combine More's Latin text with an English translation, and the first to provide an accurate Latin text. Spelling and punctuation have been regularized, and the translation is a revised version of the acclaimed Adams translation, also published in Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. The edition includes an introduction, textual apparatus, a full commentary and a guide to the critical literature on Utopia.

The central claim of Measuring the Mind is that, contrary to popular opinion, the psychologists who dominated educational policy-making between the wars were educational progressives and political radicals. They argued that education should reflect the requirements of children rather than the convenience of adults, and regarded intelligence testing as an instrument of child-centred education. These psychologists owed their political inspiration to the meritocratic ideal and lost popularity with the waning of this ideal after the war. Four main themes dominate the discussion: the emergence of educational psychology as a distinct discipline; the recent history of ideas about children's mental development; the role of experts in formulating educational policy; and the rise and fall of the measurement of merit.

The Hegel Lectures Series Series Editor: Peter C. Hodgson Hegel's lectures have had as great a historical impact as the works he himself published. Important elements of his system are elaborated only in the lectures, especially those given in Berlin during the last decade of his life. The original editors conflated materials from different sources and dates, obscuring the development and logic of Hegel's thought. The Hegel Lectures series is based on a selection of extant and recently discovered transcripts and manuscripts. The original lecture series are reconstructed so that the structure of Hegel's argument can be followed. Each volume presents an accurate new translation accompanied by an editorial introduction and annotations on the text, which make possible the identification of Hegel's many allusions and sources. This new edition of Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy sets forth clearly, for the first time for the English reader, what Hegel actually said. These lectures challenged the antiquarianism of Hegel's contemporaries by boldly contending that the history of philosophy is itself philosophy, not just history. It portrays the journey of reason or spirit through time, as reason or spirit comes in stages to its full development and self-conscious existence, through the successive products of human intellect and activity. These lectures proved to be extremely influential on the intellectual history of the past two centuries. They are crucial to understanding Hegel's own systematic philosophy in its constructive aspect, as well as his views on the centrality of reason in human history and culture. Volume I holds additional importance because, as well as setting out Hegel's discussion of the history of Chinese and Indian philosophy, it presents the interesting and significant changes that Hegel made to the stage-setting introduction to these lectures across the years from 1819 to 1831. This edition adapts the considerable editorial resources of the German edition that it translates, to the needs of the general reader as well as the serious scholar, so as to constitute an unparalleled resource on this topic in the English language.

Numerological patterning in literature, where structural details of a literary work are symbolically related to its meaning on the verbal level, was particularly common from the Middle Ages up to the seventeenth century. Originally published in 1973, the author breaks new ground in revealing that familiarity with this technique lived on into the eighteenth century, supplying the more artistically aware of the early British novelists with meaningful formal guidelines. An account is given of the origins and continuity of the numerological tradition in Western European - and particularly English - thought as it affected literary structure. The careful structural patterning in the novels of Defoe and in Fielding's Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones is examined in detail. Smollett, too, is shown to have been interested in exploring the possibilities of number and pattern, and the clear-cut numerological framework of Sterne's Tristram Shandy is revealed. This original and controversial study combines structural analysis with fresh interpretative insights, and draws parallels with painting, music and architecture. It also has an important bearing on the history of ideas in the first half of the eighteenth century.

The 11th of November 1918, Polish Independence Day, is a curious anniversary whose commemoration has been only intermittently observed in the last century. In fact, the day -- and the several symbols that rightly or wrongly have become associated with it -- has a rather convoluted history, filled with tradition and myth, which deserves attention.
Independence Day is more than just the history of a day, or the evolution of its celebration, but an explanation of what meaning has come to be associated with that date. It offers a re-reading of Polish history, not by a series of dates, but through a series of symbols whose combination allows the Poles to understand who they are by what they have been. Its focus is on the era 1914-2008, and the central actor is the charismatic Jozef Pilsudski. He came to represent a disposition regarding the meaning of Polish history which eventually penetrated virtually all of modern Polish society. The work is constructed by the analysis of memoirs, documents, coins, stamps, films, maps, monuments, and many other features making it a multi-disciplinary and multi-dimensional volume.

The theme of this book is the crisis of the early modern state in eighteenth-century Britain. The revolt of the North American colonies and the simultaneous demand for wider religious toleration at home challenged the principles of sovereignty and obligation that underpinned arguments about the character of the state. These were expressed in terms of the 'common good', 'necessity', and 'community' - concepts that came to the fore in early modern European political thought and which gave expression to the problem of defining legitimate authority in a period of increasing consciousness of state power. The Americans and their British supporters argued that individuals ought to determine the common good of the community. A new theory of representation and freedom of thought defines the cutting edge of this revolutionary redefinition of the basic relationship between individual and community.

This 1994 book examines the development of the modern idea of militarism from its inception in the 1860s until the outbreak of World War I. Often regarded as the archetypical militarist state, imperial Germany in fact witnessed a major controversy over the issue, which became a touchstone of political opposition. Issues like the arms race and the military-industrial complex displaced more traditional concerns about authoritarian rule, and militarism gradually acquired its modern meaning. The book is part of a wider discovery by historians of the way political identities and ideas intermeshed, contributing to the rise of civil society and new types of politics in modern Europe. The political history of the main protagonist of anti-militarism, German social democracy, is examined, as Nicholas Stargardt reveals the lasting influence of older radical traditions and reappraises the role played by its espousal of Marxism.

The third earl of Shaftesbury was a pivotal figure in eighteenth-century thought and culture. Professor Klein's new study is the first to examine the extensive Shaftesbury manuscripts and offer an interpretation that relates his ideas about philosophy, morals, religion and the arts to his social and political goals. Through politeness, Shaftesbury conceptualized a new kind of public and critical culture, and greatly influenced the philosophical and cultural models associated with the European Enlightenment.

"Requiem for the Ego" recounts Freud's last great attempt to 'save' the autonomy of the ego, which drew philosophical criticism from the most prominent philosophers of the period--Adorno, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Despite their divergent orientations, each contested the ego's capacity to represent mental states through word and symbol to an agent surveying its own cognizance. By discarding the subject-object divide as a model of the mind, they dethroned Freud's depiction of the ego as a conceit of a misleading self-consciousness and a faulty metaphysics. Freud's inquisitors, while employing divergent arguments, found unacknowledged consensus in identifying the core philosophical challenges of defining agency and describing subjectivity. In "Requiem," Tauber uniquely synthesizes these philosophical attacks against psychoanalysis and, more generally, provides a kaleidoscopic portrait of the major developments in mid-20th century philosophy that prepared the conceptual grounding for postmodernism.

John Locke (1632-1704) is a central figure in the history of thought, and in liberal doctrine especially. This major study brings a range of his wider views to bear upon his political theory. Every political theorist has a vision, a view about the basic features of life and society, as well as technique which mediates this into propositions about politics. Locke's vision spanned questions concerning Christian worship, ethics, political economy, medicine, the human understanding, revealed theology and education. This study shows how the character of these wider concerns informed Two Treatises of Government, especially in respect of a view of divine teleology, and situated a distinctive view of politics which treated the state and the church in parallel terms.

This two volume set is a comprehensive collection of historical and contemporary articles which highlight the theoretical foundations and the methods and models of long wave analysis. After examining the beginnings of long wave theory, the book includes discussions of time series methods and non-linear modelling, with an exploration of economic development in its historical context. It investigates the process of evolution and mutation in industrial capitalism over the last two hundred years. Contemporary reviews and critiques of long wave theory are also included. It makes available for the first time much important material that has hitherto been inaccessible. The book will be of immense value to all students and scholars interested in the history of economic thought, time series analysis and evolutionary or institutionalist analysis.

This book is about the history of Europe in the 20th century and concentrates on two particular aspects. First, it examines the impact of the Great War on Europe; secondly it is concerned with European civilization and with ideas of what is meant to be "European". The approach is interdisciplinary, including integrated analyses from politics, international relations, political ideas, literature, and the visual arts. The common focus, which links all the chapters, is the effect of the Great War on a European mentality, or European identity.

Writing War in Contemporary Iran offers a complete account of Esma'il Fasih's life, works, and position in contemporary Iranian literature. This book uses a text-based analysis of Fasih's wartime novel Zemestan-e 62 (The Winter of '83, 1985) as a case study, and illustrates how the book set a precedent for anti-war novels that appeared in the period following the Iran-Iraq War. Unlike the many one-dimensional novels of the time which focused only on state ideology, Fasih's novel grapples with broader issues, such as the state's war rhetoric and the socio-political realities of life in wartime, including the impact of the War of the Cities on the daily lives of Iranians, government policies and their enactment, and the contribution of the upper class to war efforts. In this vein, The Winter of '83 was the first Persian anti-war novel that was different in that it did not present a glorified or heroic vision of the war and its participants. Furthermore, the book deals with the analysis of Fasih's postwar novels, which emphasized the roles and sacrifices of Iranian women during the war-a neglected theme in Persian war novels-marking him as one of the most culturally important war writers in contemporary Iran.

This second volume of the late Julian Simon's articles and essays continues the theme of volume one in presenting unorthodox and controversial approaches to many fields in economics.The book features a wide range of papers divided into eight parts with a biographical introduction to the author's career and intellectual development as well as personal revelations about his background. Part One contains essays on statistics and probability which are developed in the second section on theoretical and applied econometrics. The third part considers individual behavior, including discussion of the effects of income on suicide rates and successive births, and foster care. Parts four and five present papers on population and migration, for which the author is best known. The sixth part contains Professor Simon's controversial discussion of natural resources and the articles in part seven relate to welfare analysis. In the final part some of the author's previously unpublished papers are presented, including discussions on duopoly and economists' thinking. Like the first volume this collection will be of interest to academics and students welcoming controversial and unorthodox approaches to a wide variety of theories and concepts in economics.

This book addresses the nature and role of fear in the German world from the early modern period through to the 20th century. Offering the first collection that centres fear in the historical analysis of central Europe since 1600, these essays demonstrate the importance of emotional experience to the study of the past. Fear has been at the centre of many of the most important historical events in this region; witch hunts, religious conflicts, invasions and ultra-nationalism in the form of the Nazi regime. This book explores ways in which fear was understood, developed and negotiated throughout these historical contexts, and how people of the German world coped with it. From the fear of vampires to the loss of national sovereignty, pestilence, gypsies and criminals, Fear in the German Speaking World 1600-2000 draws connections between cases over a period of 400 years and considers fear alongside the history of emotions more generally. In doing so, the chapters reveal a complex, evolving construction of fear that is universally human, but also dependent upon its cultural and historical context.

This collection of essays, all by preeminent exponents of the history of political thought, explores the political ideologies of early modern Britain. Organized on a broadly chronological basis, the topics addressed by individual scholars reflect in general the themes initiated and inspired by the work of the distinguished intellectual historian, J. G. A. Pocock, for whom the collection is intended as a tribute. Each of the sixteen contributors have thought long and critically about Pocock's seminal contributions to the subject, and in each essay engages with the debates he has provoked. Professor Pocock has responded to the essays and provided his personal interpretation of the themes they invoke.

Well-known essayist and Cuban historian Rafael Rojas presents a collection of his best work, one which focuses on--and offers alternatives to--the central myths that have organized Cuban culture from the nineteenth century to the present. Rojas explores the most important themes of Cuban intellectual history, including the legacy of Jose Marti, the cultural effect of the war in 1898, the construction of a national canon of Cuban literature, the works of classical intellectuals of the republican period, the literary magazine "Origenes, "the ideological impact of the Cuban Revolution, and the possibilities of a democratic transition in the island at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

This book is a comprehensive study of Liu Tsang-yuan (773-819), a major literary and intellectual figure in Chinese history. The major aspects of Liu's life and work are explored: the social and cultural background of his family, his relationship with the ku-wen prose reforms and new canonical scholarship in the mid-T'ang, his social and political criticism, his views on Confucian doctrine, and his sentiments and reflections regarding the private realm of human life. Its scope goes beyond the 'life and thought' of this principal intellectual figure in its special emphasis on the connections between Liu's thought and mid-T'ang intellectual change, modifying the conventional view that the mid-T'ang Confucian revival led by Han Yu (768-824) and Liu Tsung-yuan was a precursor of Sung Neo-Confucianism. Chen suggests that the mid-T'ang Confucian movement was essentially a revival of an old form of Confucianism and that Liu's was a powerful voice expressing this sentiment. This in-depth study also encompasses a general interpretation of the nature of the T'ang-Sung intellectual transition. Anyone familiar with the intriguing yet elusive Liu Tsang-yuan will find this book fascinating.