This book offers a history of the interdisciplinary development of Victorian psychology alongside detailed studies of three leading writers: Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, and G. H. Lewes. Examining work in several different fields, including evolutionary theory, philosophy, literature, and the bio-medical sciences, it sets the development of psychology in the context of the social and intellectual pressures of the time. The book includes detailed analyses of the work of George Eliot, whose writing is saturated with ideas developed alongside those of the great psychologists who formed her circle.

For many readers in the English-speaking world, Goethe is somehow separate from the European intellectual and literary tradition. In this unique and wide-ranging study, Matthew Bell aims to correct this view by showing how Goethe portrayed human beings as part of a natural continuum, very much in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Dr Bell's fresh readings of Goethe's major and lesser-known texts are set against the background of the science and philosophy of the age, and the writer's debts to other thinkers are analysed. The development of Goethe as a writer and thinker is traced from his sentimental epistolary novel Werther - read in the context of the rise of psychological theory in the Enlightenment - to the emergence of his own theory of 'empirical psychology' in the great roman a clef of 1809, Die Wahlverwandtschaften. In a major new interpretation of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Matthew Bell follows the ideal of organic growth from the novel's origins in Enlightenment optimism to its revision in an atmosphere of post-revolutionary scepticism. Placing Goethe in an anthropological context, Goethe's Naturalistic Anthropology demonstrates that eighteenth-century anthropological thought provides an essential, hitherto overlooked context for the understanding of Goethe's literary enterprise from Werther to Die Wahlverwandtschaften.

An intellectual and cultural history of mid-twentieth century plans for European integration, this book calls into question the usual pre- and post-war periodizations that have structured approaches to twentieth-century European history. It focuses not simply on the ideas of leading politicians but analyses debates about Europe in "civil society" and the party-political sphere in Germany, asking if, and how, a "permissive consensus" was formed around the issue of integration. Taking Germany as its case study, the book offers context to the post-war debates, analysing the continuities that existed between interwar and post-war plans for European integration. It draws attention to the abiding scepticism of democracy displayed by many advocates of integration, indeed suggesting that groups across the ideological spectrum converged around support for European integration as a way of constraining the practice of democracy within nation-states.

This is an important new analysis of the problematic relationship between dreams and madness as perceived by nineteenth-century French writers, thinkers, and doctors. Those wishing to know the nature of madness, wrote Voltaire, should observe their dreams. The relationship between the dream-state and madness is a key theme of nineteenth-century European, and specifically French, thought. The meaning of dreams and associated phenomena such as somnambulism, ecstasy, and hallucinations (including those induced by hashish) preoccupied writers, philosophers, and psychiatrists. In this path-breaking cross-disciplinary study, Tony James shows how doctors (such as Esquirol, Lelut, and Janet), thinkers (including Maine de Biran and Taine), and writers (for example, Balzac, Nerval, Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, and Rimbaud) grappled in very different ways with the problems raised by the so-called 'phenomena of sleep'. Were historical figures such as Socrates or Pascal in fact mad? Might dream be a source of creativity, rather than a merely subsidiary, 'automatic' function? What of lucid dreaming? By exploring these questions, Dreams, Madness, and Creativity in Nineteenth-Century France makes good a considerable gap in the history of pre-Freudian psychology and sheds new and fascinating light on the central French writers of the period.

Inner worldly Individualism looks to colonial history, in particular, seventeenth-century New England, to understand the sources of modern nation building. Seligman analyses how cultural assumptions of collective identity and social authority emerged out of the religious beliefs of the first generation of settlers in New England. He goes on to examine how these assumptions crystallized three generations later into patterns of normative order, forming the foundation of an American consciousness. Seligman uses sociological research grounded in early American history as his laboratory, and does so in a highly original way. Seligman uses Max Weber's paradigm of sociological inquiry to explore how a combination of ideational and structural factors helped to develop modern conceptions of authority and collective identity among New England communities. Seligman addresses a number of significant issues, including social change, the mutual interaction and development of process and structure, and the role of charisma in the forging of a social order. His book profoundly increases our understanding of the ideological and social processes prevalent in early American history as well as their contemporary influence on civil identity. Inner worldly Individualism uniquely intertwines sociological study with cultural history. It uses American history to develop and elucidate problems of broad theoretical significance. Seligman's argument is bolstered by a close examination of concrete detail. His book will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, political theorists, and historians of American culture.

A much-maligned feature of ancient and medieval political thought is its tendency to appeal to nature to establish norms for human communities. From Aristotle's claim that humans are "political animals" to Aquinas' invocation of "natural law," it may seem that pre-modern philosophers were all too ready to assume that whatever is natural is good, and that just political arrangements must somehow be natural. The papers in this collection show that this assumption is, at best, too crude. From very early, for instance in the ancient sophists' contrast between nomos and physis, there was recognition that political arrangements may be precisely artificial, not natural, and it may be questioned whether even such supposed naturalists as Aristotle in fact adopt the quick inference from "natural" to "good." The papers in this volume trace the complex interrelations between nature and such concepts as law, legitimacy, and justice, covering a wide historical range stretching from Plato and the Sophists to Aristotle, Hellenistic philosophy, Cicero, the Neoplatonists Plotinus and Porphyry, ancient Christian thinkers, and philosophers of both the Islamic and Christian Middle Ages.

This book is the first comprehensive examination of the close relationship that obtained between leading groups of British socialists and American progressives in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Employing new methods of conceptual and institutional analysis, and drawing on extensive original archival research, the book examines the efforts of leading political theorists to transform the initially distinctive theories of the British and American lefts into a single unified ideology. In so doing it challenges traditional narratives emphasising the exceptional development the American and British lefts, and argues instead that the central theoretical and practical commitments of both movements were constantly shaped and reshaped by international ideological exchange.

This is a collection of writings by the late Lord Quinton, one of the wittiest and most versatile philosophers of his generation. The first part ranges over the last four hundred years of intellectual history, discussing such thinkers as Francis Bacon, Spinoza, Coleridge, Kant, Hegel, T. H. Green, Dewey, Quine, and Ayer. The subject of the second part of the volume is, broadly speaking, value in human society: Quinton discusses freedom, morality, politics, language, culture, and the relation between humans and animals. Together these writings demonstrate the enormous breadth of their author's learning, and the clarity, elegance, and urbanity of his style. Seven of the pieces are previously unpublished.

How did one man's critique of capitalism guide the course of modern history? When he died in 1883, Karl Marx left behind an intellectual legacy of formidable proportions and revolutionary potential, yet one that exerted limited actual political, social, or economic influence. The full force of his ideas did not come into play for another generation, and only after they had been appropriated and applied by some of Marxism's earliest proponents. The history of Marxism, in other words, is the story of those who brought Marx's ideas into play, transforming a sweeping but fractious and occasionally abstruse view of historical and social forces into a coherent plan of action. Christina Morina's illuminating book focuses on the first generation of Marxist who turned the work and ideas of one social theorist, one among many, into one of the most powerful transnational political movements in modern history. The Invention Of Marxism is therefore a group portrait, featuring such figures as Rosa Luxemburg, Max Adler, Jean Jaures, Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, and Vladimir Lenin-German, French, Russian, Czech-whose lives became dedicated to interpreting and applying Marxist thought. They were the vehicles by which his ideas were read, debated, and gradually adopted in socialist movements across Europe. Morina's fascinating book therefore reconstructs the beginnings of Marxism through the individual politicization of a group of intellectuals who made it their purpose in life to solve the "social question," exploring the nexus between their intellectual constructs and social and political reality. The Invention of Marxism shows how what started as a theory of capitalism grew into a fully-fledged political philosophy and platform, one that shaped the century that followed Marx's death. In short, it reveals how an idea first conquered these individuals and then the world.

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 Moser, 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.

In one of the most charming works to survive from classical antiquity, Xenophon's Symposium depicts an amiable evening of wine, entertainment, and conversation shared by Socrates, and a few of his associates, with certain Athenian gentlemen who are gathered to honor a young man for his recent victory in the Panathenaic games. The subtle playfulness which characterizes the animated discussions conceals a light-hearted, yet surprisingly philosophical inquiry regarding the rival claims of virtue, articulated and defended by the Socratics and gentlemen to establish the praiseworthiness and excellence of their competing ways of life. Gentlemanliness, taken as an admired political virtue, and philosophy, as pursuit of wisdom and self-sufficiency, emerge as contested ideas about what constitutes the path to human happiness, especially in response to the beautiful and its compelling arousal of erotic desire in the body and soul. Offering a comprehensive account and interpretation of the Symposium, this book follows the speeches and action of the dialogue through its many twists and turns, from beginning to end, with particular attention to the place of rhetoric in the argument of the work as a whole. Thus, Xenophon's Socratic Rhetoric examines foundational aspects of the philosophic life manifest in the words as well as deeds of Socrates in this dialogue--starting from an original reading of the opening scene as a harbinger of the competition in wisdom that occurs over the course of the symposium, and concluding with a provocative consideration of conjugal erotics as the continuation and completion of the Socratic logos about the role of love in guiding human beings toward virtue and happiness.

Paul Abela presents a powerful, experience-sensitive form of realism about the relation between mind and world, based on an innovative interpretation of Kant. Abela breaks with tradition in taking seriously Kant's claim that his Transcendental Idealism yields a form of empirical realism, and giving a realist analysis of major themes of the Critique of Pure Reason. Abela's blending of Kantian scholarship with contemporary epistemology offers a new way of resolving philosophical debates about realism.

This is the first comprehensive study of one of the most important aspects of the Reformation in England: its impact on the status of the dead. It explores attitudes towards the dead in pre-Reformation religious culture, and traces the uncertain progress of the 'reformation of the dead' attempted by Protestant authorities who sought to stamp out belief in purgatory and associated rituals. It also provides detailed surveys of Protestant perceptions of the afterlife, of the cultural meanings of the appearance of ghosts, and of the patterns of commemoration characteristic of post-Reformation England. Together these topics constitute an important case-study in the nature and tempo of the English Reformation as an agent of social and cultural change.

At the end of the eighteenth century, Jeremy Bentham devised a scheme for a prison that he called the panopticon. It soon became an obsession. For twenty years he tried to build it; in the end he failed, but the story of his attempt offers fascinating insights into both Bentham's complex character and the ideas of the period. Basing her analysis on hitherto unexamined manuscripts, Janet Semple chronicles Bentham's dealings with the politicians as he tried to put his plans into practice. She assesses the panopticon in the context of penal philosophy and eighteenth-century punishment and discusses it as an instrument of the modern technology of subjection as revealed and analysed by Foucault. Her entertainingly written study is full of drama: at times it is hilariously funny, at others it approaches tragedy. It illuminates a subject of immense historical importance and which is particularly relevant to modern controversies about penal policy.

Shaftesbury's Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times is a collection of treatises on interconnected themes in moral philosophy, aesthetics, literature, and politics. It was immensely influential on eighteenth-century British taste and manners, literature, and thought, and also on the Continental Enlightenment. The author was a Whig, a Stoic, and a theist, whose commitment to political liberty and civic virtue shaped all of his other concerns, from the role of the arts in a free state to the nature of the beautiful and the good. This is the first new edition of Shaftesbury's Characteristicks as a coherent collection for almost a century. A substantial Introduction discusses Shaftesbury's works and ideas in the context of his times, and traces the reception and influence of his writings through the eighteenth century and beyond. A full and scholarly commentary is provided, as well as a complete textual apparatus. The very thorough Index is Shaftesbury's own. The text is essentially that of the first edition of 1711, as marked up with changes by Shaftesbury himself in preparation for the posthumous second edition of 1714; and the striking emblematic engravings he commissioned especially for the second edition are incorporated.

Shaftesbury's Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times is a collection of treatises on interconnected themes in moral philosophy, aesthetics, literature, and politics. It was immensely influential on eighteenth-century British taste and manners, literature, and thought, and also on the Continental Enlightenment. The author was a Whig, a Stoic, and a theist, whose commitment to political liberty and civic virtue shaped all of his other concerns, from the role of the arts in a free state to the nature of the beautiful and the good. This is the first new edition of Shaftesbury's Characteristicks as a coherent collection for almost a century. A substantial Introduction discusses Shaftesbury's works and ideas in the context of his times, and traces the reception and influence of his writings through the eighteenth century and beyond. A full and scholarly commentary is provided, as well as a complete textual apparatus. The very thorough Index is Shaftesbury's own. The text is essentially that of the first edition of 1711, as marked up with changes by Shaftesbury himself in preparation for the posthumous second edition of 1714; and the striking emblematic engravings he commissioned especially for the second edition are incorporated.

Sir Geoffrey Lloyd presents a cross-disciplinary study of the problems posed by the unity and diversity of the human mind. On the one hand, as humans we all share broadly the same anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and certain psychological capabilities -- the capacity to learn a language, for instance. On the other, different individuals and groups have very different talents, tastes, and beliefs, for instance about how they see themselves, other humans and the world around them. These issues are highly charged, for any denial of psychic unity savors of racism, while many assertions of psychic diversity raise the specters of arbitrary relativism, the incommensurability of beliefs systems and their mutual unintelligibility.
Lloyd surveys a fascinating range of subjects, examining where different types of arguments, scientific, philosophical, anthropological and historical can take us. He discusses color perception, spatial cognition, animal and plant taxonomy, the emotions, ideas of health and well-being, concepts of the self, agency and causation, varying perceptions of the distinction between nature and culture, and reasoning itself. To avoid the pitfalls of misleading dichotomies (especially between cross-cultural universalism and cultural relativism) he pays due attention to the multidimensionality of the phenomena to be apprehended and to the diversity of manners, or styles, of apprehending them. The weight to be given to different factors, physical, biological, psychological, cultural, ideological, varies as between different subject-areas and sometimes even within a single area. He uses recent work in social anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, neurophysiology, andthe history of ideas to redefine the problems and clarify how our evident psychic diversity can be reconciled with our shared humanity.

When Piero Soderino was elected to the new office of Gonfalonier of Justice in 1502, he was faced not only with the problem of foreign invasions of italy but also with a controversial new constitution based on a Great Council of over 3,000 members. With the return of the Medici in 1512, the earlier constitutional order was restored--one that was far more oligarchical, and much less satisfactory, for many Florentines. This book provides a lively account of political alignments and decision making in these two contrasting governments, and analyzes the causes and significance of the Medici overthrow of the popular government of Soderino. Butters also reveals both the skills and shortcomings of the governments' leaders and the impact of the Medici pope, Leo X, on the city's affairs.

Robert Hanna presents a fresh view of the Kantian and analytic traditions that have dominated continental European and Anglo-American philosophy over the last two centuries, and of the relation between them. The rise of analytic philosophy decisively marked the end of the hundred-year dominance of Kant's philosophy in Europe. But Hanna shows that the analytic tradition also emerged from Kant's philosophy in the sense that its members were able to define and legitimate their ideas only by means of an intensive, extended engagement with, and a partial or complete rejection of, the Critical Philosophy. Hanna puts forward a new 'cognitive-semantic' interpretation of transcendental idealism, and a vigorous defence of Kant's theory of analytic and synthetic necessary truth. These will make Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy compelling reading not just for specialists in the history of philosophy, but for all who are interested in these fundamental philosophical issues.

The first volume of the graphic adaptation of Yuval Noah Harari's global phenomenon and smash Sunday Times #1 bestseller, with gorgeous full-colour illustrations and a beautiful package - the perfect gift for the curious beings in your life.

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one-homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us?

In this first volume of the full-colour illustrated adaptation of his groundbreaking book, renowned historian Yuval Harari tells the story of humankind's creation and evolution, exploring the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be "human". From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens challenges us to reconsider accepted beliefs, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and view specific events within the context of larger ideas.

Featuring 256 pages of full-colour illustrations and easy-to-understand text covering the first part of the full-length original edition, this adaptation of the mind-expanding book furthers the ongoing conversation as it introduces Harari's ideas to a wider new readership.

This expansive volume traces the rhetoric of reform across American history, examining such pivotal periods as the American Revolution, slavery, McCarthyism, and today's gay liberation movement. At a time when social movements led by religious leaders, from Louis Farrakhan to Pat Buchanan, are playing a central role in American politics, James Darsey connects this radical tradition with its prophetic roots.

Public discourse in the West is derived from the Greek principles of civility, diplomacy, compromise, and negotiation. On this model, radical speech is often taken to be a sympton of social disorder. Not so, contends Darsey, who argues that the rhetoric of reform in America represents the continuation of a tradition separate from the commonly accepted principles of the Greeks. Though the links have gone unrecognized, the American radical tradition stems not from Aristotle, he maintains, but from the prophets of the Hebrew Bible.

Wittgenstein: Connections and Controversies consists of thirteen thematically linked essays on different aspects of the philosophy of Wittgenstein. After an introductory overview of Wittgenstein's philosophy the following essays fall into two classes. Some investigate connections between the philosophy of Wittgenstein and other philosophers or philosophical trends. Others enter into some of the controversies that, over the last two decades, have raged over the interpretation of one aspect or another of Wittgenstein's writings. These far-ranging essays, several of them previously unpublished or difficult to find, shed much light upon different aspects of Wittgenstein's thought, and upon the controversies which it has stimulated.

The Heirs of Plato is the first full study of the various directions in philosophy taken by Plato's followers in the first seventy years after his death in 347 BC - the period generally known as 'The Old Academy', unjustly neglected by historians of philosophy. Lucid and accessible, John Dillon's book provides an introductory chapter on the school itself, and a summary of Plato's philosophical heritage, before looking at each of the school heads and other chief characters, exploring both what holds them together and what sets them apart.