In his latest book, Terry Eagleton, one of the most celebrated intellects of our time, considers the least regarded of the virtues. His compelling meditation on hope begins with a firm rejection of the role of optimism in life's course. Like its close relative, pessimism, it is more a system of rationalization than a reliable lens on reality, reflecting the cast of one's temperament in place of true discernment. Eagleton turns then to hope, probing the meaning of this familiar but elusive word: Is it an emotion? How does it differ from desire? Does it fetishize the future? Finally, Eagleton broaches a new concept of tragic hope, in which this old virtue represents a strength that remains even after devastating loss has been confronted. In a wide-ranging discussion that encompasses Shakespeare's Lear, Kierkegaard on despair, Aquinas, Wittgenstein, St. Augustine, Kant, Walter Benjamin's theory of history, and a long consideration of the prominent philosopher of hope, Ernst Bloch, Eagleton displays his masterful and highly creative fluency in literature, philosophy, theology, and political theory. Hope without Optimism is full of the customary wit and lucidity of this writer whose reputation rests not only on his pathbreaking ideas but on his ability to engage the reader in the urgent issues of life. Page-Barbour Lectures

Stuart Hampshire, one of the most eminent British philosophers of the twentieth century, will be perhaps best remembered for his work on the seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza, all of which is gathered now in this volume. Among the great thinkers of modern times, only Spinoza created a complete system of philosophy that rivals Plato's, with crucial contributions to every major philosophical topic.
Hampshire's classic 1951 book Spinoza remains the best introduction to this thinker, and it is reprinted here. But what gives particular interest to this new volume is the first publication of Hampshire's last work "Spinoza and Spinozism," an extended presentation of a Spinozist philosophical worldview. Hampshire's influential 1962 essay "Spinoza and the Idea of Freedom" is also included.
Spinoza and Spinozism is thus an ideal companion to the study and interpretation of this great philosopher.

Manifest Activity presents and critically examines Thomas Reid's doctrines about the model of human power, the will, our capacities for purposeful conduct, and the place of our agency in the natural world. Reid is one of the most important philosophers of the 18th century, but hitherto under-appreciated; through the reconstruction of his arguments, many of which have never before been discussed, Gideon Yaffe demonstrates that Reid's simple prose and direct style belie the complexity of the views he advocates and the subtlety of the reasons he offers in their favour. For Reid, contrary to the view of many of his predecessors, it is simply manifest that we are active with respect to our behaviours; it is manifest, he thinks, that our actions are not merely remote products of forces that lie outside of our control. Reid holds, instead, that actions are all and only those events that spring from active power, and he produces insightful and imaginative arguments for the claim that only a creature with a mind is capable of having active power. He believes that only human beings, and creatures 'above us', are capable of directing events towards ends, of endowing them with purpose or direction, the distinctive feature of action. However, he also holds that all events, and not merely human actions, are products of active power, power possessed either by human beings or by God. This collection of theses leads Reid to the view that human behaviour and the progress of nature are both essentially teleological. Patterns in nature are the products of laws of which God is the author; patterns in human conduct are the products of character and the laws that individuals set for themselves. Manifest Activity examines Reid's arguments for this view and the view's implications for the nature of character, motivation, and the special kind of causation involved in the production of human behaviour. Yaffe's assessment will greatly profit anyone working on current theories of action and free will, as well as historians of ideas.

Offering a fresh perspective on the making of the American nation, Forging America: New Lands and High Culture shows how the various "new" portions of the country--the Northeastern wilderness, the West, and later the South and Midwest--were assimilated into the national and intellectual consciousness of the young nation. Specifically, author David P. DeVenney examines the ways in which the arts helped achieve this assimilation, primarily through music and painting, but also through literature and architecture. The search for "American-ness" in the arts, for what it meant to be an American painter, composer, or writer, occupied artists for the entire 19th century and for the first part of the 20th. Intellectuals viewed America in the 1800s as a new Eden, a primordial wilderness, and viewed themselves as chosen by God to begin a new chapter in the development of the world. This Romantic idea included exploring and taming the vast regions of the country and making their beauties accessible to the nation's Eastern population centers, filtering notions of the West through the arts and arriving at an idyllic vision absent any signs of danger or exoticism. DeVenney writes for the educated nonspecialist as well as the scholar, making Forging America a fascinating and useful tool for understanding a key way in which America became America.

Impressions of Hume presents new essays from leading scholars in different philosophical, historiographical, and literary traditions to which Hume made defining contributions. Hume has made a variety of impressions on these different areas; his writings, philosophical and otherwise, may indeed be read in a number of different ways. For example, they can be taken as transparent vehicles for philosophical intuitions, problems, and arguments that are still at the centre of philosophical reflection today. On the other hand, there are readings which are interested in locating Hume's views against the background of concerns, debates and discussions of Hume's own time. And this is not all. Hume's texts may be read as highly sophisticated literary-cum-philosophical creations: in such cases, the reader's attention tends to be directed at issues of genre and persuasive strategies rather than on argument. Or they may be regarded as moments in the construction of the ideology of modernity, and as contributions to the legitimation of a given social order. As the true classics that they are, Hume's works are typical 'open texts', which present their readers of all provenances with a bounty of materials and inspirations. It is the editors' conviction that the borders between these approaches are far from neat; and that as much cross-fertilization as possible is to be promoted. Impressions of Hume amply demonstrates the rewards of such an approach.

This first biography of V.F. Calverton gives an intellectual history of the American radical movement from 1920 to 1940 and shows how he and his Modern Quarterly led the forefront in wars of ideas about sex, lit, and party. This lively study of the career and times of Calverton examines basic questions about the relationships between literature and politics, feminist agendas, and political theory in ways that are still relevant. Students of political thought, American history, and American literature will find this biography a provocative one that brings the period alive in new ways. A short introduction shows how Calverton yearned to be an American Lenin-Cassanova-Pericles. Philip Abbott then follows Calverton's participation in a series of intellectual wars fought in the 1920s and the 1930s. Thus does Abbott reassess American radicalism and the development of American bohemia and socialism. Calverton was the central figure in two efforts to found an American radical republic, both of which were rejected by his colleagues--famous writers and thinkers of his time. One attempt sought to create a republic of being in which participants explored the capacities of sexual liberation as an agent for change. Another involved the creation of a republic of doing in which radical citizens acted out revolutionary roles. This biography of a neglected theorist reevaluates radical projects in politics, psychology, and the arts in America in a seminal period in their development.

Memory has a history. The Classical world ordered and valued events differently than the Medieval world; which, in turn, was replaced by "the memory" of the Renaissance. Matt Matsuda's compelling, multidisciplinary argument in The Memory of the Modern is that the understanding, value, and uses of memory changed yet again at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, becoming distinctively "modern". Matsuda proves his argument by visiting a remarkable array of "memory-sites": the destruction of a monument to Napoleon during the 1871 Paris Commune; the frantic selling of futures on the Paris stock-exchange; the state's forensic search for a vagabond rapist and murderer; a child's perjured testimony on the witness stand; a scientist's dissecting of the human brain; the invention of cameras and the cinema. Each chapter studies a distinct moment when new representations of the past were forged, contested, and put to cultural and ideological use. And all these diverse events cohere as Matsuda repeatedly shows which "memories" were celebrated and which forgotten, which traditions invented and appropriated and which discarded. More importantly, he explains why, and in doing so answers the broader question, Who controls what is remembered and who is believed?

Martin Flanagan uses Bakhtins notions of dialogism, chronotope and polyphony to address fundamental questions about film form and reception, focusing particularly on the way cinematic narrative utilizes time and space in its very construction.

Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) has made a major, though still contested, impact on the field of religious studies. Alternately revered and reviled, the subject of adoring memoirs and scathing exposes, Jung and his ideas have had at least as much influence on religious studies as have the psychoanalytic theories of his mentor, Sigmund Freud. Many of Jung's key psychological terms (archetypes, collective unconscious, individuation, projection, synchronicity, extroversion and introversion) have become standard features of religious studies discourse, and his extensive commentaries on various religious traditions make it clear that Jung's psychology is, at one level, a significant contribution to the study of human religiosity. His characterization of depth psychology as a fundamentally religious response to the secularizing power of modernity has left a lasting imprint on the relationship between religious studies and the psychological sciences. This book offers a collection of original articles presenting several different approaches to Jung's psychology in relation to religion, theology, and contemporary culture. The contributors describe their teaching of Jung in different academic contexts, with special attention to the pedagogical and theoretical challenges that arise in the classroom.

Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) is the most famous humanist scholar of the Dutch Golden Age. He wrote influential works on the laws of war and peace, Dutch history and the unification of the churches. His plea for a freedom of the seas in Mare liberum offered the Dutch East India Company a ready justification for the establishment of a trading empire in the East Indies. As far as his daily duties left him any spare time, he penned confidential, learned and beautifully-written letters. This voluminous correspondence offers a trove of information on Grotius' life and works, and forms the basis of his newest biography which sketches a life caught in a fierce struggle for peace in Church and State.

How can we take history seriously as real and relevant? Despite the hazards of politically dangerous or misleading accounts of the past, we live our lives in a great network of cooperation with other actors; past, present, and future. We study and reflect on the past as a way of exercising a responsibility for shared action. In each of the chapters of Full History Smith poses a key question about history as a concern for conscious participants in the sharing of action, starting with "What Is Historical Meaningfulness?" and ending with "How Can History Have an Aim?" Constructing new models of historical meaning while engaging critically with perspectives offered by Ranke, Dilthey, Rickert, Heidegger, Eliade, Sartre, Foucault, and Arendt, Smith develops a philosophical account of thinking about history that moves beyond postmodernist skepticism. Full History seeks to expand the cast of significant actors, establishing an inclusive version of the historical that recognizes large-scale cumulative actions but also encourages critical revision and expansion of any paradigm of shared action.

In this book, an international line-up of scholars examines the role of the intellectual in the twenty-first century, looking at the gap between contemporary cultural theory and cultural practice, and asking whether knowledge and methodologies in the humanities can intervene in everyday politics and vice-versa.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is one of the most important figures in the history of European philosophy. Although best known for his political theory, he also wrote about theology, metaphysics, physics, optics, mathematics, psychology, and literary criticism. All of these interests are reflected in his correspondence. Some small groups of his letters have been printed in the past (often in inaccurate transcriptions), but this edition is the first complete collection of his correspondence, nearly half of which has never been printed before. All the letters have been transcribed from the original sources, and all materials in Latin, French, and Italian are printed together with translations in clear modern English. The letters are fully annotated, and there are long biographical entries on all of his correspondents, based on extensive original research. The whole pattern of Hobbes's intellectual life and personal friendships is set in a new light. This is one of the most significant and valuable scholarly publications of this century.

"This book unites research in philosophy and cognitive science with cultural history to re-examine memory in early modern religious practices. Offering an ecological approach to memory and culture, it argues that models derived from Extended Mind and Distributed Cognition can bridge the gap between individual and social models of memory"--

The Negritude Movement provides readers with not only an intellectual history of the Negritude Movement but also its prehistory (W.E.B. Du Bois, the New Negro Movement, and the Harlem Renaissance) and its posthistory (Frantz Fanon and the evolution of Fanonism). By viewing Negritude as an "insurgent idea" (to invoke this book's intentionally incendiary subtitle), as opposed to merely a form of poetics and aesthetics, The Negritude Movement explores Negritude as a "traveling theory" (a la Edward Said's concept) that consistently crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean in the twentieth century: from Harlem to Haiti, Haiti to Paris, Paris to Martinique, Martinique to Senegal, and on and on ad infinitum. The Negritude Movement maps the movements of proto-Negritude concepts from Du Bois's discourse in The Souls of Black Folk through to post-Negritude concepts in Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Utilizing Negritude as a conceptual framework to, on the one hand, explore the Africana intellectual tradition in the twentieth century, and, on the other hand, demonstrate discursive continuity between Du Bois and Fanon, as well as the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude Movement, The Negritude Movement ultimately accents what Negritude contributed to arguably its greatest intellectual heir, Frantz Fanon, and the development of his distinct critical theory, Fanonism. Rabaka argues that if Fanon and Fanonism remain relevant in the twenty-first century, then, to a certain extent, Negritude remains relevant in the twenty-first century.

These volumes gather together a selection of autobiographical essays written by significant economists whose work is generally recognized to be at the forefront of the discipline as we enter the twenty-first century. The essays are largely based on introductions to volumes in the Edward Elgar series Economists of the Twentieth Century (which collects together the key papers of these economists). This volume focuses on leading economists who were born, or have spent the greater part of their lives, in Europe, Asia and Australasia. The main chapters are accompanied by an introduction in which the editors place the autobiographical essays in a wider context. Economists will be fascinated by: * the stories that lie behind familiar names * why economists approach problems the way they do * how careers develop * how economists view what they are doing. These are all points that are invisible to those who simply read the published output of economics, so readers will gain personal insights into the development of the field. The books will be a valuable resource for economists, particularly historians of economic thought, as well as sociologists concerned with the economics profession, and those interested in the creative process and the social and scientific development of economics.

This book offers a critique of the dominant conceptualization of heritage found in policy, which tends to privilege the white, middle and upper classes. Using Britain as an illustration, Waterton explores how and why recent policies continue to lean towards the predictable melding of cultural diversity with tendencies of assimilation.

Environmentalists today debate whether ecological harmony means we must manage the natural world or appreciate its incomprehensible complexity. This argument has a long history, beginning with Francis Bacon's claim that through science, humanity could make Nature bend to its will. This timely book unearths the challenge voiced by John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and the Earl of Rochester to Bacon's endeavor to make Nature subservient.

'Transcendental History' defends the claim that historicality is the very condition for human knowledge. By explaining this thesis, and by tracing its development from Kant and Hegel to Derrida and Agamben, this book enriches our understanding of the history of philosophy and contributes to epistemology and the philosophy of history.

This volume presents a new reading of an extraordinary Proto-Coptic magical text. Papyrus British Museum EA 10808 features a unique spell for a victim of divine wrath composed in the liturgical language of ancient Egypt but in Greek script with a few Demotic signs. Sederholm reveals a coherent and distinctive text that contributes to the illumination of Egyptian thought in the Graeco-Roman Period just before the great shutdown of the ancient temple learning. In nine chapters of transcription, translation, and commentary, Sederholm considers such features as taboo, secrecy, and the efficacy of magical words and names. He also discusses the destructive nature of the stars and the role of Fate in the bloody slaughter of divine enemies within the text.

Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished. The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilised community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together. The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and every occupation, prospers by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole. Common interest regulates their concerns, and forms their law; and the laws which common usage ordains, have a greater influence than the laws of government. In fine, society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to government. from Chapter I: Of Society and Civilisation He was the premiere political blogger of his day, a man Thomas Edison called one of the greatest of all Americans, and one todays liberals and progressives still claim as their intellectual forefather. An idealist, a radical, and a master rhetorician, Thomas Paine wrote and lived with a keen sense of urgency and excitement. In this 1791 defense of revolution, he championed the right of an oppressed peopleand in particular the right of the French peopleto rise up to claim their own natural rights from those who would take them away. A spirited denunciation of the aristocracy and of hereditary government, The Rights of Man caused outrage in Great Britain with its call for democratic reforms of the English system, and Paine was convicted in absentia for seditious libel against the Crown.(He was, alas, not available to be hanged.) Everyone who values freedomof speech, of though, of governanceand the ongoing fight required to maintain it must read and appreciate this essential work. Anglo-American political theorist and writer THOMAS PAINE (17371809) was born in England and emigrated to America in 1774, bearing letters of introduction from Benjamin Franklin. He also wrote Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis (17761783).

After Ruskin is the first book to explore the social and political influence of the leading Victorian art and social critic, John Ruskin (1819-1900). It explains how he inspired a range of individuals to reform Britain's social and political culture in the period between 1870 and 1920. These individuals operated in a number of key institutions and organisations: Ruskin's Guild of St. George, societies formed in Ruskin's name, the university settlements, and in Parliament, particularly in the Labour Party. Stuart Eagles helps to explain how these institutions developed, who guided them, and their motivation, as much as it explains the nature and extent of Ruskin's legacies. An original analysis based on extensive archival research, this is the first comprehensive survey of the intellectual influence of one of Victorian Britain's greatest critics.

Anne Fuchs traces the aftermath of the Dresden bombing in the collective imagination from 1945 to today. As a case study of an event that gained local, national and global iconicity, the book investigates the role of photography, fine art, architecture, literature and film in dialogue with the changing German socio-political landscape.