Contents:
Preface: what is a myth? Introduction: traditional myths for the survival of civilization 1.The Id of culture: Cassirer's philosophy of myth 2.The primordial power of culture 3.The making of language and other materials of culture 4.The new manufacturing of myths and the need for guardians of civilization 5.From an animal's environment to a human world: Langer's philosophy of myth 6.Generative ideas of an epoch 7.The spirit world 8.Myth in civilization Conclusion: today's cry for myth: Cassirer's and Langer's influence. References. Name Index. Subject Index.

The social sciences underwent rapid development in postwar America. Problems once framed in social terms gradually became redefined as individual with regards to scope and remedy, with economics and psychology winning influence over the other social sciences. By the 1970s, both economics and psychology had spread their intellectual remits wide: psychology's concepts suffused everyday language, while economists entered a myriad of policy debates. Psychology and economics contributed to, and benefited from, a conception of society that was increasingly skeptical of social explanations and interventions. Sociology, in particular, lost intellectual and policy ground to its peers, even regarding 'social problems' that the discipline long considered its settled domain. The book's ten chapters explore this shift, each refracted through a single 'problem': the family, crime, urban concerns, education, discrimination, poverty, addiction, war, and mental health, examining the effects an increasingly individualized lens has had on the way we see these problems.

The social sciences underwent rapid development in postwar America. Problems once framed in social terms gradually became redefined as individual with regards to scope and remedy, with economics and psychology winning influence over the other social sciences. By the 1970s, both economics and psychology had spread their intellectual remits wide: psychology's concepts suffused everyday language, while economists entered a myriad of policy debates. Psychology and economics contributed to, and benefited from, a conception of society that was increasingly skeptical of social explanations and interventions. Sociology, in particular, lost intellectual and policy ground to its peers, even regarding 'social problems' that the discipline long considered its settled domain. The book's ten chapters explore this shift, each refracted through a single 'problem': the family, crime, urban concerns, education, discrimination, poverty, addiction, war, and mental health, examining the effects an increasingly individualized lens has had on the way we see these problems.

This book explores the idea that there is a certain performativity of thought connecting Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. On this view, we make judgments and use propositions because we presuppose that our thinking is about something, and that our propositions have sense. Kant's requirement of an a priori connection between intuitions and concepts is akin to Wittgenstein's idea of the general propositional form as sharing a form with the world. Aloisia Moser argues that Kant speaks about acts of the mind, not about static categories. Furthermore, she elucidates the Tractatus' logical form as a projection method that turns into a so-called 'zero method', whereby propositions are merely the scaffolding of the world. In so doing, Moser connects Kantian reflective judgment to Wittgensteinian rule-following. She thereby presents an account of performativity centering neither on theories nor methods, but on the application enacting them in the first place.

Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript is a classic of existential literature. It concludes the first and richest phase of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authorship and is the text that philosophers look to first when attempting to define Kierkegaard's own philosophy. Familiar Kierkegaardian themes are introduced in the work, including truth as subjectivity, indirect communication, the leap, and the impossibility of forming a philosophical system for human existence. The Postscript sums up the aims of the preceding pseudonymous works and opens the way to the next part of Kierkegaard's increasingly tempestuous life: it can thus be seen as a cornerstone of his philosophical thought. This volume offers the work in a new and accessible translation by Alastair Hannay, together with an introduction that sets the work in its philosophical and historical contexts.

Historians of the French Revolution used to take for granted what was also obvious to its contemporary observers--that the Revolution was shaped by the radical ideas of the Enlightenment. Yet in recent decades, scholars have argued that the Revolution was brought about by social forces, politics, economics, or culture--almost anything but abstract notions like liberty or equality. In Revolutionary Ideas, one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment restores the Revolution's intellectual history to its rightful central role. Drawing widely on primary sources, Jonathan Israel shows how the Revolution was set in motion by radical eighteenth-century doctrines, how these ideas divided revolutionary leaders into vehemently opposed ideological blocs, and how these clashes drove the turning points of the Revolution. In this compelling account, the French Revolution stands once again as a culmination of the emancipatory and democratic ideals of the Enlightenment. That it ended in the Terror represented a betrayal of those ideas--not their fulfillment.

This book presents a systemic analysis of Spinoza's philosophy and challenges the traditional views. It deals with Spinoza's concepts of substance, truth conditions, attributes, and the first, second, and supreme grades of knowledge. Based upon an analysis of the relevant details in all of Spinoza's philosophical works, the book reveals many important points, including the following: Spinoza's system is not, nor is meant to be, a foundational-deductive system but was meant to be a coherent system of a network model. Spinoza's reality is not made in the image of a mathematical model. Imaginatio, the first grade of knowledge, and ratio, the second grade, are parts or properties of the supreme grade of knowledge, scientia intuitiva, which is their essence. Finite beings, especially humans, are necessary and eternal (unless they are mistakenly perceived by imaginatio) whereas time, place, and death are simply "entities of imagination." The salvation, happiness, and blessedness that Spinoza's Ethics offers us, are active and depend only upon us. Concluding a careful examination and interpretation, the book suggests additional novel viewpoints in interpreting Spinoza's philosophical psychology and political philosophy.

What is the meaning of reason in our postmodern society today? Is reason a weapon of domination, or can it also serve as a means for emancipation? Is it possible for reason to understand its "other"--what it is not? Confronting such questions, "Bounds of Reason" is a compelling discussion of the limits and meaning of rationality as a tool for understanding the ideas of truth, justice and freedom. Emilia Steuerman explores the modernist and postmodernist controversy between Habermas and Lyotard to highlight the problems encountered both by a defense of reason and by the lack of meaning that haunts a world without it. Using Kleinian theory to examine the debate as it is manifested in the main philosophical themes of this century, Steuerman argues that a rational and ethical theory of justice must take into account that which is not rational, symmetrical or transparent--namely a primitive world of love and hatred which colors and shapes our perceptions.

Charles Trinkaus can be counted among the eminent intellectual and cultural historians of the Renaissance. This new collection of his articles brings together pieces published since 1982. The studies are concerned with Italian Renaissance humanists and philosophers who tended to affirm human capacities to shape earthly existence, despite the traditional limitations proposed by some scholastics and astrologers. Professor Trinkaus holds that, without abandoning their Christian faith, or their acceptance of physical influences from the cosmos, these writers, in their stress on human capacities, were responding to the vigorous activism of their contemporaries in all aspects of their existence. The final four papers also provide a series of reflections on the modern historiography of the Renaissance.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) has long been recognized as a major political and social thinker as well as historian, but his writings also contain a wealth of little-known insights into economic life and its connection to the rest of society. In Tocqueville's Political Economy, Richard Swedberg shows that Tocqueville had a highly original and suggestive approach to economics--one that still has much to teach us today. Through careful readings of Tocqueville's two major books and many of his other writings, Swedberg lays bare Tocqueville's ingenious way of thinking about major economic phenomena. At the center of Democracy in America, Tocqueville produced a magnificent analysis of the emerging entrepreneurial economy that he found during his 1831-32 visit to the United States. More than two decades later, in The Old Regime and the Revolution, Tocqueville made the complementary argument that it was France's blocked economy and society that led to the Revolution of 1789. In between the publication of these great works, Tocqueville also produced many lesser-known writings on such topics as property, consumption, and moral factors in economic life. When examined together, Swedberg argues, these books and other writings constitute an interesting alternative model of economic thinking, as well as a major contribution to political economy that deserves a place in contemporary discussions about the social effects of economics.

Rights and Civilizations, translated from the Italian original, traces a history of international law to illustrate the origins of the Western colonial project and its attempts to civilize the non-European world. The book, ranging from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, explains how the West sought to justify its own colonial conquests through an ideology that revolved around the idea of its own assumed superiority, variously attributed to Christian peoples (in the early modern age), Western 'civil' peoples (in the nineteenth century), and 'developed' peoples (at the beginning of the twentieth century), and now to democratic Western peoples. In outlining this history and discourse, the book shows that, while the Western conception may style itself as universal, it is in fact relative. This comes out by bringing the Western civilization into comparison with others, mainly the Islamic one, suggesting the need for an 'intercivilizational' approach to international law.

The Crown stands at the heart of the New Zealand, British, Australian and Canadian constitutions as the ultimate source of legal authority and embodiment of state power. A familiar icon of the Westminster model of government, it is also an enigma. Even constitutional experts struggle to define its attributes and boundaries: who or what is the Crown and how is it embodied? Is it the Queen, the state, the government, a corporation sole or aggregate, a relic of feudal England, a metaphor, or a mask for the operation of executive power? How are its powers exercised? How have the Crowns of different Commonwealth countries developed? The Shapeshifting Crown combines legal and anthropological perspectives to provide novel insights into the Crown's changing nature and its multiple, ambiguous and contradictory meanings. It sheds new light onto the development of the state in postcolonial societies and constitutional monarchy as a cultural system.

Studies of British Romanticism have traditionally tended to envisage it as an intensely local, indeed insular, phenomenon. Yet, just as the seemingly isolated British Isles became more and more central in international geo-political and economic contexts between the 1780s and the 1830s, so too literature and culture were characterized by an increasingly close and relevant dialogue with foreign and especially Continental European traditions, both past and contemporary. Diego Saglia casts new light on the significantly transformative impact of this dialogue on Britain during the years that saw a return to unimpeded cross-border cultural traffic after the end of the Napoleonic emergency. Focusing on modes of translation and appropriation in a variety of literary and cultural forms, this book reconsiders the notion of the supposed intrinsic insularity of Britain through the lens of new key questions about the national, international and transnational features of Romantic-period literature and culture.

Depuis David Hume et Adam Smith, la notion de sympathie valorise l'activite irreflechie de la sensibilite pour mieux associer l'affectivite a la formation du lien social. Mais comment envisager la maniere dont la philosophie morale ecossaise se prolonge dans les milieux qui, en France, se reclament de l'ideal republicain et du materialisme athee? C'est ce qu'invitent a redecouvrir ces Lettres sur la sympathie, que Sophie de Grouchy publie a la suite de sa traduction de la Theorie des sentiments moraux de Smith. Cette reedition des Lettres est accompagnee de six etudes qui en eclairent la portee. Figure particulierement representative d'une generation qui, engagee dans la Revolution, se regroupe autour du cercle des ideologues, Sophie de Grouchy poursuit l'oeuvre des Lumieres en travaillant a fonder ce que notre modernite appellera les sciences humaines.

Donald Winch completes the intellectual history of political economy begun in Riches and Poverty (1996). A major theme addressed in both volumes is the 'bitter argument between economists and human beings' provoked by Britain's industrial revolution. Winch takes the argument from Mill's contributions to the 'condition-of-England' debate in 1848 through to the work on economic wellbeing of Alfred Marshall. The writings of major figures of the period are examined in a sequence of interlinked essays that ends with consideration of the twentieth-century fate of the debate between utilitarians and romantics in the hands of Leavis, Williams and Thompson. Donald Winch is one of Britain's most distinguished historians of ideas, and Wealth and Life brings to fruition a long-standing interest in the history of those intellectual pursuits that have shaped the understanding of Britain as an industrial society, and continue to influence cultural responses to the moral questions posed by economic life.

Monty was just like any other dog. A scruffy and irascible Maltese terrier, he enjoyed barking at pugs and sniffing at trees. But after yet another dramatic confrontation with the local Rottweiler, Anthony McGowan realises it's high time he and Monty had a chat about what makes him a good or a bad dog. And they don't stop at ethics. Taking his cue from Monty's canine antics, McGowan leads us on an enlightening jaunt through the world of philosophy. Will Kant convince Monty to stop stealing cheesecake? How long will they put up with Socrates poking holes in every argument? Do they have free will to pursue answers to these questions? Join the dutiful duo as they set out to uncover who - if anyone - has the right end of the ethical stick and can tell us how best to live one's life. But there is also a shadow over their conversations. Monty is not well... And so towards the end the biggest questions raise their heads: is there a God? Does life have a meaning? By the time of their last walk together, Monty - and the reader - will find that they have not just solved a few philosophical puzzles, but absorbed much of the history of Western philosophy.

The psychologist may appear in science fiction as the herald of utopia or dystopia; literary studies have used psychoanalytic theories to interpret science fiction; and psychology has employed science fiction as an educational medium. Science Fiction and Psychology goes beyond such incidental observations and engagements to offer an in-depth exploration of science fiction literature's varied use of psychological discourses, beginning at the birth of modern psychology in the late nineteenth century and concluding with the ascendance of neuroscience in the late twentieth century. Rather than dwelling on psychoanalytic readings, this literary investigation combines with history of psychology to offer attentive textual readings that explore five key psychological schools: evolutionary psychology, psychoanalysis, behaviourism, existential-humanism, and cognitivism. The varied functions of psychological discourses in science fiction are explored, whether to popularise and prophesy, to imagine utopia or dystopia, to estrange our everyday reality, to comment on science fiction itself, or to abet (or resist) the spread of psychological wisdom. Science Fiction and Psychology also considers how psychology itself has made use of science fiction in order to teach, to secure legitimacy as a discipline, and to comment on the present.

Although the connection between the invention of printing and the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century has long been a scholarly commonplace, there is still a great deal of evidence about the relationship to be presented and analysed. This collection of authoritative reviews by distinguished historians deals with the role of the book in the spread of the Reformation all over the continent, identifying common European experiences and local peculiarities. It summarises important recent work on the topic from every major European country, introducing English-speakers to much important and previously inaccessible research.

This book seeks to illustrate the interconnections of science and philosophy with religion and politics in the early modern period by focusing on the institutional dynamics of the university. Much of the work is devoted to one key university- that of Cambridge- and examines the major issues of the institutional setting of Newton's work, the religious and political circumstances that favoured its dissemination, and the way in which it was dealt with in the curriculum. But the author also seeks to place the problem of the role of science in the early modern university in a larger, European context. To do so, he includes a close prosopographical analysis of the scientific community from the mid-15th TO the end of the 18th century, and discusses the complex relations between the universities and the Enlightenment.

Theorist, practitioner, educator and arguably the father of professional economics, Alfred Marshall's life and career have long required a full scale biography to put his work into context and reveal the extent of his influence.Peter Groenewegen's outstanding new book places the major features of Marshall's life and work within the rich institutional setting of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain. This biography sheds new light on Marshall's decision to study economics - after dropping mathematics, philosophy and psychology in turn - and the background to his important books, including the Principles of Economics, as well as his government advice over three decades. More than just the life of a major economist, it also deals with economics and mathematics education at Cambridge, contemporary controversies over socialism, imperialism, free trade, eugenics, religious belief, social welfare and the women's movement. As the first biography of Alfred Marshall, A Soaring Eagle contributes to the history of economics, the social sciences and education while also offering a series of insights into Victorian and Edwardian society.

This is a comprehensive analysis of the idea of libertas and its conflicting uses in the political struggles of the late Roman Republic. By reconstructing Roman political thinking about liberty against the background of Classical and Hellenistic thought, it excavates two distinct intellectual traditions on the means allowing for the preservation and the loss of libertas. Considering the interplay of these traditions in the political debates of the first century BC, Dr Arena offers a significant reinterpretation of the political struggles of the time as well as a radical reappraisal of the role played by the idea of liberty in the practice of politics. She argues that, as a result of its uses in rhetorical debates, libertas underwent a form of conceptual change at the end of the Republic and came to legitimise a new course of politics, which led progressively to the transformation of the whole political system.

Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903-1987) was known in the United States primarily as a political scientist. His best-known works--"On Power, Sovereignty, and The Pure Theory of Politics"--all made distinctive contributions to our understanding of the modern state, and to the creation of a political science capable of civilizing that state. His work in the field of economics is relatively unknown in the United States, but like many writers in the contemporary field of political economy, de Jouvenel is not interested in expanding the claims of economy at the expense of polity. On the contrary, his thinking is governed by the oldest and most fundamental of political concerns, the definition of the good life. The good life is not a product of the marketplace, but of deliberate and collective decision--that is, a task for thoughtful citizens and statesmen, and not simply the sum of millions of separate and amoral "consumer preferences." De Jouvenel is well known for his opposition to the distended state, but he was no anarchist. His eloquent warnings to keep the state in its proper sphere were accompanied by a richly sophisticated discussion of what the proper sphere is--an aspect of his work that comes through very clearly in this volume. Written between 1952 and 1980, the essays range from a discussion of technology to reflections on such fundamental economic concepts as "amenity" and "welfare." They include the deeply theoretical as well as the practical and the concrete. All are informed by de Jouvenel's insistence that a science which seeks to understand the production and distribution of "goods" must be concerned in the first place with the good itself. "Economics and the Good Life" is a companion volume to "The Nature of Politics: Selected Essays of Bertrand de Jouvenel." Like the earlier volume, this collection is accompanied by an editor's introduction that places the essays in the wider context of de Jouvenel's work. This work is essential to the libraries of economists, political theorists, historians, and sociologists.

This book investigates the working mechanisms of public opinion in Late Republican Rome as a part of informal politics. It explores the political interaction (and sometimes opposition) between the elite and the people through various means, such as rumours, gossip, political literature, popular verses and graffiti. It also proposes the existence of a public sphere in Late Republican Rome and analyses public opinion in that time as a system of control. By applying the spatial turn to politics, it becomes possible to study sociability and informal meetings where public opinion circulated. What emerges is a wider concept of the political participation of the people, not just restricted to voting or participating in the assemblies.

A beautiful, profound series of reflections on the body by one of the most prominent and consequential philosophers of continental Europe This landmark volume brings into English Jean-Luc Nancy's last completed work and concludes his remarkable philosophical reflections on the body, a project he began almost thirty years ago. Taking the body as an intersection of pulsing life and destructive cruelty on a global scale, Nancy's account becomes more vivid, more physical, than ever, even as it ventures into language that is as lyrical as it is profound. This vividness is manifest in blood: as it flows, in all its pulsing and forceful circulation, and as it spills, in the cruelty of existences confronted daily by countless destructions. This can be described as sanguis and cruor, the two Latin words for blood's intermingled but distinct aspects. This distinction allows Nancy to highlight an almost mystical sense of the body (yet one that remains soberly on this side of its manifest insistence), alongside the cruelty that pervades our world-a world whose very existence is threatened by its reduction to mere objects. The exceptional writings brought together in Corpus III comprise a masterful work of philosophy that marries rigorous erudition-on Freud, Nietzsche, and others-with rich poetic language and an actual poem. Nancy's thought opens the body onto its own unaccountable origins, its plural singularities, its enmeshed instantiations, and its excessive irreducibles, which are also the elusive excesses of language. Whereas in earlier texts Nancy has referred to this excess as poetry, here he performs it in the form of a poem, in the extraordinary hymn entitled Stoma. While the publication of a poem by Nancy is a notable event, equally noteworthy is a remarkable essay entitled "Scandalous Death," in which Nancy meditated on a subject that was to come to him too soon after. Above all, the book is crucial for bringing into English Cruor, the very last book Nancy completed before his death, an evocative meditation offered by a great thinker on the complex conditions of his own-and our-singular survival.

Everyone has heard of the Minotaur in the labyrinth on Crete and many know that the Greek gods would adopt the guise of a bull to seduce mortal women. But what lies behind these legends? This text discusses mankind's enduring obsession with bulls. The bull is an almost universal symbol throughout Indo-European cultures. Bull cults proliferated in the Middle East and in many parts of North Africa, and one cult, Mithraism, was the greatest rival to Christianity in the Roman Empire. The Cults are divergent yet have certain core elements in common. The author argues that the ancient bulls were the supreme sacrificial animal. An examination of evidence from earliest prehistory onwards reveals the bull to be a symbol of political authority, sexual potency, economic wealth and vast subterranean powers. In some areas representations of the bull have varied little from earliest times, in others it has changed vastly over centuries.