Almost three hundred years after his birth in 1694, this is the first comprehensive study of Voltaire's contes philosophiques - the philosophical tales for which he is now best remembered and which include the masterpiece Candide. The Fables of Reason situates each of the twenty-six stories in its historical and intellectual context and offers new readings and approaches in the light of modern critical thinking. It rejects the traditional view that Voltaire's contes were the private expression of his philosophical perplexity, written merely in the margins of his historiography and his campaigns against the Establishment. Arguing that narrative is Voltaire's essential mode of thought, the book stresses the role of the reader and shows how the contes are designed less to communicate a set of truths than to encourage independence of mind. Roger Pearson has written a witty, lucid and scholarly guide to the `fables of reason' with which Voltaire undermined - and continues to undermine - the religious, philosophical, and economic `fables', by which other thinkers have tried to explain and direct human experience.

Once, nutmeg was worth its weight in gold. For much of human history, the tiny Banda Islands in Indonesia were the only source of this esteemed spice. From the age of the Silk Roads through to the mid-19th century partial shift of production to the Caribbean, covering battles between the Honourable East India Company and the Dutch Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, this book traces the story of nutmeg, revealing its extensive and often surprising influence over conflict, politics, social mores, and Western society. Beautiful antique silver, gold, enamel, bone, ivory, treen and Tunbridgeware graters and rasps demonstrate how much nutmeg was valued throughout history. This book gathers pictures of some of the finest examples world-wide, alongside mechanical and base metal graters and spice containers. It illustrates, and provides useful information on, the history of pomanders which were associated with nutmeg, as this spice was once thought to ward off pestilence and plague. Combining the social history of nutmeg with explanations of the spice production and transportation process, and illustrating in detail examples in international nutmeg grater collections and museums, this book is the essential reference work for collectors, antique dealers and auctioneers.

Challenging the view that managerialism is a form of capitalism and that capitalism has eclipsed socialism, Pena shows that the managerial or new class is an exploiting class. The work of Thorstein Veblen, James Burnham, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Kevin Phillips, he suggests, forms a little-known century-long tradition of reflection on the managerial revolution as well as on the conflux of values and socioeconomic practices that Pena dubs economic barbarism. Building on the work of these thinkers, he argues that industrial barbarism and the managerial revolution led to the decline of U.S. capitalism and its replacement by managerialism, a form of nationalistic socialism in which educated white-collar personnel employed by the state and corporate bureaucracies have become a new exploiting class that receives the bulk of the national wealth. Thus managerialism replaced industrial barbarism with a new form of economic barbarism.

This managerial barbarism has fostered an unequal distribution of wealth that has penalized the middle and lower classes with stagnant or declining incomes, growing job insecurity, unemployment, and underemployment. Unless managerialism can find a way out of persistent poverty and declining living-wage job opportunities, these problems are likely to continue afflicting a sizable portion of the population. If managers put an end to economic barbarism, they have a chance to create a society characterized by generalized prosperity, leisure, and opportunity. It is more likely, however, that economic barbarism will continue to be an integral part of managerialism and, consequently, managerialism will face a sudden social upheaval or a gradual decline.

"Art and War in Japan and its Empire: 1931-1960" is an anthology that investigates the impact of the Fifteen-Year War (1931-1945) on artistic practices and brings together twenty scholars including art historians, historians, and museum curators from the United States, Canada, France, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. This will be the first art-historical anthology that examines responses to the war within and outside Japan in the wartime and postwar period. The anthology will scrutinize official and unofficial war artists who recorded, propagated, or resented the war; explore the unprecedented transnationality of artistic activity under Japan s colonial expansion; and consider the role of today s museum institutions in remembering the war through art. Contributors include: Asato Ikeda, Aya Lousa McDonald, Ming Tiampo, Akihisa Kawata, Mikiko Hirayama, Mayu Tsuruya, Michael Lucken, Bert Winther-Tamaki, Mark H. Sandler, Maki Kaneko, Kendall Brown, Reita Hirase, Gennifer Weisenfeld, Kari Shepherdson-Scott, Aida-Yuen Wong, Hyeshin Kim, Laura Hein, and Julia Adeney Thomas.

A DAILY MAIL BOOK OF THE WEEK 'Spare Parts is a fascinating read filled with adventure, delight and surprise' RAHUL JANDIAL, surgeon author of 'Life on a Knife's Edge' 'This is a joyful romp through a fascinating slice of medical history' WENDY MOORE, author of 'The Knife Man' _______________________________________________________________ How did an architect help pioneer blood transfusion in the 1660s? Why did eighteenth-century dentists buy the live teeth of poor children? And what role did a sausage skin and an enamel bath play in making kidney transplants a reality? We think of transplant surgery as one of the medical wonders of the modern world. But transplant surgery is as ancient as the pyramids, with a history more surprising than we might expect. Paul Craddock takes us on a journey - from sixteenth-century skin grafting to contemporary stem cell transplants - uncovering stories of operations performed by unexpected people in unexpected places. Bringing together philosophy, science and cultural history, Spare Parts explores how transplant surgery constantly tested the boundaries between human, animal and machine, and continues to do so today. Witty, entertaining and at times delightfully macabre, Spare Parts shows us that the history - and future - of transplant surgery is tied up with questions about not only who we are, but also what we are, and what we might become. . .

In Of Liberty and Necessity James A. Harris presents the first comprehensive account of the free will problem in eighteenth-century British philosophy. Harris proposes new interpretations of the positions of familiar figures such as Locke, Hume, Edwards, and Reid. He also gives careful attention to writers such as William King, Samuel Clarke, Anthony Collins, Lord Kames, James Beattie, David Hartley, Joseph Priestley, and Dugald Stewart, who, while well-known in the eighteenth century, have since been largely ignored by historians of philosophy. Through detailed textual analysis, and by making precise use of a variety of different contexts, Harris elucidates the contribution that each of these writers makes to the eighteenth-century discussion of the will and its freedom. In this period, the question of the nature of human freedom is posed principally in terms of the influence of motives upon the will. On one side of the debate are those who believe that we are free in our choices. A motive, these philosophers believe, constitutes a reason to act in a particular way, but it is up to us which motive we act upon. On the other side of the debate are those who believe that, on the contrary, there is no such thing as freedom of choice. According to these philosophers, one motive is always intrinsically stronger than the rest and so is the one that must determine choice. Several important issues are raised as this disagreement is explored and developed, including the nature of motives, the value of 'indifference' to the will's freedom, the distinction between 'moral' and 'physical' necessity, the relation between the will and the understanding, and the internal coherence of the concept of freedom of will. One of Harris's primary objectives is to place this debate in the context of the eighteenth-century concern with replicating in the mental sphere what Newton had achieved in the philosophy of nature. All of the philosophers discussed in Of Liberty and Necessity conceive of themselves as 'experimental' reasoners, and, when examining the will, focus primarily upon what experience reveals about the influence of motives upon choice. The nature and significance of introspection is therefore at the very centre of the free will problem in this period, as is the question of what can legitimately be inferred from observable regularities in human behaviour.

"The Origins and History of Consciousness" draws on a full range of world mythology to show how individual consciousness undergoes the same archetypal stages of development as human consciousness as a whole. Erich Neumann was one of C. G. Jung's most creative students and a renowned practitioner of analytical psychology in his own right. In this influential book, Neumann shows how the stages begin and end with the symbol of the Uroboros, the tail-eating serpent. The intermediate stages are projected in the universal myths of the World Creation, Great Mother, Separation of the World Parents, Birth of the Hero, Slaying of the Dragon, Rescue of the Captive, and Transformation and Deification of the Hero. Throughout the sequence, the Hero is the evolving ego consciousness.

Featuring a foreword by Jung, this Princeton Classics edition introduces a new generation of readers to this eloquent and enduring work.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. In a unique approach to historical representations, the central question of this book is 'what is history?' By describing 'history' through its supplementary function to the field of history, rather than the ground of a study, this collection considers new insights into historical thinking and historiography across the humanities. It fosters engagement from around the disciplines in historical thinking and, from that, invites historians and philosophers of history to see clearly the impact of their work outside of their own specific fields, and encourages deep reflection on the role of historical production in society. As such, Theories of History opens up for the first time a truly cross-disciplinary dialogue on history and is a unique intervention in the study of historical representation. Essays in this volume discuss music history, linguistics, theater studies, paintings, film, archaeology and more. This book is essential reading for those interested in the practice and theories of history, philosophy, and the humanities more broadly. Readers of this volume are not only witness to, but also part of the creation of, radical new discourses in and ways of thinking about, doing and experiencing history.

Richard Bett presents a ground-breaking study of Pyrrho of Elis, the supposed originator of Greek scepticism, active around 300 BC. Against the standard scholarly view, Bett argues that Pyrrho's philosophy was significantly different from the long later tradition which called itself 'Pyrrhonism', and that this was not a monolithic tradition but had two distinct phases. Bett also investigates the origins and antecedents of Pyrrho's ideas. The result is the first comprehensive picture of this key figure in the development of ancient philosophy.

It is too often assumed that religious heterodoxy before the Enlightenment led inexorably to intellectual secularisation. Challenging that assumption, this book expands the scope of the enquiry, hitherto concentrated on the relation between heterodoxy and natural philosophy, to include political thought, moral philosophy and the writing of history. Individual chapters are devoted to Grotius, the Dutch Remonstrants and Socinianism, to Hobbes, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Dutch Collegiants and English Unitarians, Giambattista Vico, Conyers Middleton, and David Hume. In their opening essay the editors argue that the critical problems for both Protestants and Catholics arose from destabilising the relation between the spheres of Nature and Revelation, and the adoption of an increasingly historical approach both to natural religion and to the Scriptual basis of Revelation. Contributors include: Hans Blom, Justin Champion, Jonathan Israel, Martin Mulsow, Enrico Nuzzo, William Poole, Sami-Juhani Savonius, Richard Serjeantson, and Brian Young.

An interdisciplinary collection of comparative essays which look at aspects of the thought of Edwards and Franklin and consider their places in American culture.

In late fifteenth century Florence, Renaissance humanists rediscovered a secret, natural language hidden in the visual wisdom of the proverb 'the eyes are the windows of the soul'. Through its magical prism, the language of eyes, faces, voices, laughs, walks, even stones, plants and animals, all became windows into the souls of other people, of oneself, of nature, and ultimately of God. Some saw in its words the perfect hieroglyphic language by which Adam had first named nature, which, when combined with the art of memory, could bring about a form of 'inner writing' or mystical self-transformation. Yet many others dismissed it as a collection of arbitrary conventions, superstitious enigmas, or 'gypsy' riddles. Embroiled in the religious persecution of the Reformation, rejected as a science during the Scientific Revolution, in the age of Enlightenment physiognomy came to be seen as nothing more than an amusing entertainment. But with the dawn of Romanticism, be it in the realms of science, religion, or poetry, some began to see that physiognomy was no game and the flame of serious interest in physiognomy was once again rekindled. Combining book history and visual history, Dr Porter reconstructs this physiognomical eye, interprets the way in which books on physiognomy were read and traces the wider intellectual, social, and cultural changes that contributed to the metamorphosis of this way of beholding oneself and the natural world from the Renaissance to the dawn of Romanticism.

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.

This study argues that a revolution in the approach to philosophy took place during the first centuries of our era. Covering topics in Stoicism, Hellenistic antisemitism and Jewish apologetic, Platonism, and early Christian philosophy, it examines a trend to seek for the truth in antiquity which shaped the future course of Western thought.

In the tradition of his own bestselling masterpieces "The Story of Civilization" and "The Lessons of History, " Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Will Durant here traces the lives and ideas of those who have helped to define civilization, from its dawn to the beginning of the modern world.

Four years before his death, Will Durant began work on an abbreviated version of his highly acclaimed eleven-volume series, "The Story of Civilization." The project was conceived as a series of audio lectures, but Durant soon realized that the dialogues could be developed into a book that would serve as a wonderfully readable introduction to the subject of history.

Durant completed twenty-one of a proposed twenty-three chapters before his death in 1981, at the age of ninety-six. Those chapters span thousands of years of human history -- from Confucius to Shakespeare, from the Roman Empire to the Reformation, finally ending in the eighteenth century. The manuscript was recently found by Will Durant scholar John Little -- twenty years after Durant finished it -- and its discovery is a major event, not only for lovers of his prose, but for students of history and philosophy the world over.

"Heroes of History" is a book of life-enhancing wisdom and optimism, complete with Durant's wit, knowledge, and unique ability to explain events and ideas in simple, exciting terms. It is the lessons of our heritage passed on for the edification and benefit of future generations -- a fitting legacy from America's most beloved historian and philosopher.

Will Durant's popularity as America's favorite teacher of history and philosophy remains undiminished by time. His books are accessible to readers of every kind, and his unique ability to compress complicated ideas and events into a few pages without ever "talking down" to the reader, enhanced by his memorable wit and a razor-sharp judgment about men and their motives, made all of his books huge bestsellers. "Heroes of History" carries on this tradition of making scholarship and philosophy understandable to the general reader, and making them good reading, as well.

At the dawn of a new millennium and the beginning of a new century, nothing could be more appropriate than this brilliant book that examines the meaning of human civilization and history and draws from the experience of the past the lessons we need to know to put the future into context and live in confidence, rather than fear and ignorance.

Will Durant's work is marked by his own special quality as a writer -- he is tough-minded, optimistic, courageous, and convinced that without a knowledge of the past there is no wisdom to guide us to the future. "Heroes of History" was his last word on the subject, and much of it has been aimed directly at the doubts and fears of people today. It is a major, and unexpected, literary and historical event.

This book is also available on audio tape and CD format, read by Will and Ariel Durant. If you would like more information on this and other products featuring Will Durant's life-enhancing philosophy, we encourage you to visit the web site at www.willdurant.com.

Examining the role of memory in the transition from totalitarian to democratic systems, this book makes an important contribution to memory studies. It explores memory as a medium of and impediment to change, looking at memory's biological, cultural, narrative and socio-psychological dimensions.

In famously beautiful and laconic prose, Jean-Jacques Rousseau presents us with a forceful picture of a democratic society, in which we live together as free and equal, and our politics focuses on the common good. In Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals Joshua Cohen explains how the values of freedom, equality, and community all work together as parts of the democratic ideal expressed in Rousseau's conception of the 'society of the general will'. The book also explains Rousseau's anti-Augustinian and anti-Hobbesian idea that we are naturally good, shows why Rousseau thinks it is reasonable for us to endorse that idea, and discusses how our natural goodness might make a free community of equals possible for us. And Cohen examines in detail Rousseau's picture of the institutions of a democratic society: why he emphasised the importance of political participation, how he argued against extreme inequalities, and what led him to embrace a civil religion as necessary for the society of the general will. This book provides an analytical and critical appraisal of Rousseau's political thought that, while frank about its limits, also explains its enduring power.

Often called Kant's "first critique," this is a foundational work of modern philosophy, one that attempts to define the very nature of reason, and to join the two schools of thought dominant in the late 18th century: that of Empiricism and Rationalism. At the border between thinking subject to religion and realities as the burgeoning sciences were demonstrating at the time, Kant explores ethics, the limits of human knowledge, logic, deduction, observation, and intuition, and in the process laid the groundwork for the modern intellect. First published in 1781, this is required reading for anyone wishing to be considered well educated. German metaphysician IMMANUEL KANT (1724-1804) served as a librarian of the Royal Library, a prestigious government position, and as a professor at Knigsberg University. His other works include Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), and Critique of Practical Reason (1788).

The four plays of Shakespeare's Henriad and the slightly later Hamlet brilliantly explore interconnections between political power and interior subjectivity as productions of the newly emerging constellation we call modernity. Hugh Grady argues that for Shakespeare subjectivity was a critical, negative mode of resistance to power - not, as many recent critics have asserted, its abettor.

Tracing the stylistic self-conceptualization of modernism from Schopenhauer and Flaubert in the 1850s, through Nietzsche and the symbolists in the 1880s, to the high modernists of the 1920s, this book explores the far-reaching implications of Roland Barthes' claim that modern literature is "saturated with style." It offers both a broad, comparative survey of European modernism and an inventive re-reading of the major genres of the period, namely poetry, prose, and the manifesto. With reference to a wide range of canonical figures, including Aragon, Baudelaire, Eliot, Remy de Gourmont, Joyce, Mina Loy, Thomas Mann, Jean Paulhan, Proust, Rilke, Tzara, Valery, and Virginia Woolf, Hutchinson argues that modernism oscillates between embracing a literature of "pure" style and rejecting a literature that is "purely" style. Between these two poles, style emerges, in the words of John Middleton Murry, not as "an isolable quality of writing, but as writing itself."

Tracing Austrian intellectual life from Maria Theresa to Hitler's annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia, this innovative book offers a precise and engaging account of Austrian intellectual history since the Enlightenment. Here, David S. Luft begins by locating his narrative in the region known as Cisleithanian Austria, the area to the west of the Leitha River that was the basis for the modern Austrian state after 1740. Chapter 2 provides a history of the German-speaking intellectual life of these central lands of the Habsburg Monarchy (Austria and Bohemia) from the Enlightenment to annexation by Nazi Germany. Chapters 3 to 5 identify the most important philosophers, writers, and social thinkers who contributed to Austrian intellectual life in the period between 1740 and 1938/1939 and address the intellectual significance of their work. Elegantly written and meticulously researched, Luft's book brings out the contributions of major figures such as Wittgenstein, Hofmannsthal, Musil, Kafka, Rilke, and Freud, but also draws attention to less well-known figures such as Bolzano, Brentano, Grillparzer, Stifter, Broch, and Hayek.