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.

"In these essays, a range of leading scholars seek both to investigate the historical, institutional and philosophical origins of deconstruction and to think through the problem of the idea of origin itself"--Provided by publisher.

In The Essence of Christianity-this is the classic 1853 translation of the 1841 German original-Feuerbach discusses the "true or anthropological" root of religion, exploring how everything from the nature of God to the mysteries of mysticism and prayer can be viewed through such a prism. He goes on to examine the "false" essences of religion, including contradictions in ideas of the existence of a deity, and then how God and religion are merely expressions of human emotion. This is essential background reading for understanding everything from Marx's Communist Manifesto to modern apolitical philosophies of atheism.

In The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine declares that all religious traditions are ultimately established for the dependence of mankind. He openly criticizes the Bible and many of the fallacies contained within, as well as providing a shrewd analysis of Christianity and how it developed from its pagan ancestry-arguments many critics claim carry weight today. Being an idealist, a radical, and a master rhetorician, Paine wrote and lived with a keen sense of urgency and excitement. However, he alienated many of his countrymen with his incendiary viewpoints. Forced to leave America for England, Paine eventually returned to the United States in 1802, though he remained all but ostracized. He died in poverty seven years later in 1809. THOMAS PAINE (1737-1809) was an Anglo-American political theorist and writer born in Norfolk, England. In 1774, Paine emigrated to America, bearing letters of introduction from Benjamin Franklin. Soon thereafter, he became involved in the clashes between England and the American colonies and published the enormously successful pamphlet Common Sense in 1776, which was widely distributed and contributed to the patriot cause throughout the American Revolution.

Philosophy grounds itself in factual "truth." By revising how we understand this, we make a change that has profound impact upon most world-wide systems for gaining knowledge.This shift away from factual "truth" can only occur when we correctly understand it--and distinguish it from analytical and moral truth--because truth is entrenched deeply within our outlook. With correct understanding, an emerging insight beyond old truth can transform the world and launch an authentic philosophic revolution.PHILOSOPHY THAT WORKS, 200 pages, streamlines its philosophic arguments into lively reading.

Volume XXVII/2 of History of Universities contains the customary mix of learned articles and book reviews which makes this publication such an indispensable tool for the historian of higher education. The volume is, as always, a lively combination of original research and invaluable reference material.

Sendero Luminoso or the "Shining Path" ranks among the most elusive, secretive, and brutal guerrilla organizations in the world. Once a radical uprising limited to the Andean highlands of Ayacucho, it is now a movement of national proportions that has woven itself into the fabric of Peruvian society. Unlike many other terrorists groups, Sendero Luminoso is founded upon an intellectual infrastructure crafted by the now legendary Abimael Guzman, a former philosophy professor. The body of the movement, however, is drawn from Peru's long-neglected Indian and mestizo populations. Peru's already fragile democracy is further weakened as the rural and urban underclasses become attached to Sendero Luminoso ideologically and emotionally. This book provides a comprehensive overview of this guerrilla organization and the Peruvian government's dilemma in dealing with it and the emergence of "narcoterrorism," a mutually beneficial relationship between the cocaine syndicate and Sendero Luminoso. The Peruvian cocaine syndicate and Sendero Luminoso have different objectives and ideologies, but share a mutual enemy--the Peruvian government and its armed services. Hence they have combined forces to form a powerful and destructive alliance. Gabriela Tarazona-Sevillano assesses the impact of the Sendero Luminoso on Peruvian society, a new democratic government already besieged by complex and far-reaching problems. The book presents a detailed understanding of the peculiar and very personal nature of Peru's affliction as well as its possible international repercussions.

Collecting sixteen thought-provoking new essays by leading medievalists, this volume celebrates the work of the late Rees Davies. Reflecting Davies' interest in identities, political culture and the workings of power in medieval Britain, the essays range across ten centuries, looking at a variety of key topics. Issues explored range from the historical representations of peoples and the changing patterns of power and authority, to the notions of 'core' and 'periphery' and the relationship between local conditions and international movements. The political impact of words and ideas, and the parallels between developments in Wales and those elsewhere in Britain, Ireland and Europe are also discussed. Appreciations of Rees Davies, a bibliography of his works, and Davies' own farewell speech to the History Faculty at the University of Oxford complete this outstanding tribute to a much-missed scholar.

This volume, in honour of Professor Elena Lourie, focuses on various areas of interaction between Jews, Muslims and Christians in the late medieval Crown of Aragon and its environs. The articles deal with topics such as war, military campaigns, government, politics, and economics, relations between scholars of the different faiths and their sources, sexual relations and the politics of conversion, mythology and music. Other articles touch on issues such as vassalage, mercenaries, fiscal politics, communal politics and the inquisition. This book presents a mosaic of studies written by three generations of scholars who, using a broad variety of sources and methodologies, examine areas of great interest to Elena Lourie.

Alan Bailey offers a clear and vigorous exposition and defence of the philosophy of Sextus Empiricus, one of the most influential of ancient thinkers, the father of philosophical scepticism. The subsequent sceptical tradition in philosophy has not done justice to Sextus: his views stand up today as remarkably insightful, offering a fruitful way to approach issues of knowledge, understanding, belief, and rationality. Bailey's refreshing presentation of Sextus to a modern philosophical readership rescues scepticism from the sceptics.

This book is a bold and exciting exploration of the relationship and interactions between humans, the human landscape and the earth, looking at a diverse range of case studies from the nineteenth-century city to the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina.

Artificial Intelligence and Scientific Method examines the remarkable advances made in the field of AI over the past twenty years, discussing their profound implications for philosophy. Taking a clear, non-technical approach, Donald Gillies focuses on two key topics within AI: machine learning in the Turing tradition and the development of logic programming and its connection with non-monotonic logic. Demonstrating how current views on scientific method are challenged by this recent research, he goes on to suggest a new framework for the study of logic. He draws on work by such seminal thinkers as Bacon, Godel, Popper, Penrose, and Lucas to address the hotly contested question of whether computers might become intellectually superior to human beings. These topics will attract a wide readership from followers of advances in artificial intelligence, to students and scholars of the history and philosophy of science.

Charles Fort's parade of scientific anomalies frames the larger anomaly that is human existence. "Lo " is a book with the capacity to rewire brains and sculpt new lenses for seeing the unexpected, the unexplained--and perhaps for glimpsing our own role in Fort's mystifying cosmic scheme.

During the Renaissance, very divergent conceptions of knowledge were debated. Dominant among these was encyclopedism, which treated knowledge as an ordered and unified circle of learning in which branches were logically related to each other. By contrast, writers like Montaigne saw human knowledge as an inherently unsystematic and subjective flux. The Palace of Secrets explores the tension between these two views by examining specific areas such as theories of knowledge, uses of genre, and the role of fiction in philosophical texts. Examples are drawn from numerous sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts but focus particularly on the polymath Beroalde de Verville, whose work graphically illustrates these two competing conceptions of knowledge, since he gradually abandoned encyclopedism. Hitherto Beroalde has been mainly known for the extraordinary and notorious Moyen de parvenir; this is the first detailed study of the whole range of his work, both fictional and learned. The book straddles literary and intellectual history, and indeed it demonstrates that the division between the two has little meaning in Renaissance terms. The intellectual conflicts which it explores have significance for the history of thought right up to the Enlightenment.

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Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637) was, during his lifetime, one of Europe's most famous men. A friend of Pope Urban VIII and Galileo, of Peter-Paul Rubens and Hugo Grotius, of Tommaso Campanella and Marin Mersenne, Peiresc played an important role in the intellectual culture of his time. This book is the first study in English of this extraordinary man, as well as a vivid portrait of his whole circle. Looking through the lens of Peiresc's life, Peter N. Miller brings into focus the early-seventeenth-century world of learning-its people, places, and ideas. Drawing on the extensive Peiresc archive (more than 50,000 pieces of paper), Miller brilliantly evokes the lives of antiquaries, philosophers, theologians, and politicians of Peiresc's day, only some of whom remain known today. He explores the age in which Peiresc's toleration and sociability, his political action and cosmopolitanism, and his serious scholarship without dogmatism were identified as a set of virtues and practices by which to live. Peiresc's notion of scholarship as a moral exercise, the sweep of his interests, and the cross-Continental reach of his intellectual life show with new clarity what it meant to be a man of learning during the decades around 1600.

In the last twenty years one of the classical arenas for British historical writing - the politics of Victorian Britain - has ceased to be an obvious or self-evidently important subject. Facing up to this challenge, the historians who have contributed to this volume explore central aspects of that history. They continue to uphold the centrality of politics to Victorian Britain, but suggest that politics must be viewed more broadly, as a concern pervading almost all spheres of life, just as Victorians themselves would have done. In this way politics penetrates into Victorian culture. 'Politics' can lead us into the ideas governing political action itself; political ideas; international relations; the eduction of men and women; the writing of history and of literature; engagement with past political theorists; and the ideas behind professionalization. Such are some of the themes taken up here. The specific occasion for these essays was as a tribute to the memory of the late Colin Matthew, one of the most eminent recent historians of Victorian Britain, who was himself determined to uphold the contemporary relevance of Victorian political tradition, and to explore the interface between 'politics' and 'culture'. Reflection on his intellectual achievement is a second distinctive component of this book.

A philosophical exploration in the form of a classical dialogue such as Aristotle or his pupils might have written, these fanciful-and imaginary-debates pit Philonous, representing author Berkeley, against Hylas, generally accepted to represent Berkeley's adversary in British empiricism John Locke. Matters of skepticism, perception, materialism, and more are discussed in entertaining and enlightening fashion. First published in 1713, this is a curious artifact of an earlier age of philosophy that will bemuse and amuse readers of classic literature. Irish scientist, philosopher, and writer GEORGE BERKELEY (1685-1753) also wrote An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709) and A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710).

The 'moment' of May 1968 offered a vivid example of intellectual engagement with radical politics, which dominated the late 1960s and 1970s but arguably became passe thereafter with the emergence of a depoliticised post-modernism and the seeming demise of Marxism after the fall of Soviet Communism. However, more recently, there has been a revival of interest in political engagement, with actions such as the demonstrations against the Iraq War and the Occupy movement. Pawling focuses on a number of key writers who have made significant contributions to critical theory in what can be called the 'spirit of '68', including Sartre, Derrida, Badiou, Jameson and Said. These figures do not necessarily share the same perspective on questions such as the role of the 'subject' and the political relevance of art in cultural struggle; however, Pawling concludes that they do share a key problematic: namely, how to understand the dialectical relationship between the formal imperatives of critical theory and its political conditions of existence.

Best known for his guide on writing and recognizing good prose, Style (1955), F.L. Lucas addresses four of the most popular 18th-century English poets and writers in this book: Samuel Johnson, Lord Chesterfield, James Boswell and Oliver Goldsmith. Knowledgeably, conversationally, and often amusing, he sketches the images of men who greatly influenced 18th century England and its literary landscape.