Jonathan Lowe argues that metaphysics should be restored to a central position in philosophy, as the most fundamental form of inquiry, whose findings underpin those of all other disciplines. He portrays metaphysics as charting the possibilities of existence, by identifying the categories of being and the relations between them. He sets out his own original metaphysical system, within which he seeks to answer many of the deepest questions in philosophy.

Depoortere traces the links between French philosopher Alain Badiou and Pauline theology in the face of Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God. The French philosopher Alain Badiou (born 1937), is one of the main representatives of a philosophical homage to Saint Paul. Yet, Badiou is not a believer in the traditional sense, let alone a Christian philosopher. On the contrary, he rejects transcendence and pleads for a radical this-worldliness. The text is segmented into five parts. In Depootere's introduction, Badiou's interpretation of Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God is presented. The life and work of Badiou is then briefly outlined to give some context to later passages. This is followed by two sections on Badiou's relationship to Pauline theology and a conclusion which posits the question of An Atheistic Political Theology. Here, Badiou's atheistic reading of Saint Paul is unpicked and demonstrated as a fruitful addition to theological study. Depootere's focus is on Badiou's "Saint Paul: La fondation de l'universalisme" (1998; translated into English in 2003 as "Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism"). Through a close reading of this important work, the main themes of Badiou's philosophy are introduced and their theological relevance examined. "The Philosophy and Theology" series looks at major philosophers and explores their relevance to theological thought as well as the response of theology.

The Gadamer Dictionary is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the world of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all his major works, ideas and influences and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Gadamers thought. Students will discover a wealth of useful information, analysis and criticism. A-Z entries include clear definitions of all the key terms used in Gadamers writings and detailed synopses of his key works, including his magnum opus, Truth and Method. The Dictionary also includes entries on Gadamers major philosophical influences, from Plato to Heidegger, and his contemporaries, including Derrida and Habermas. It covers everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Gadamers 'philosophical hermeneutics, offering clear and accessible explanations of often complex terminology. The Gadamer Dictionary is the ideal resource for anyone reading or studying Gadamer or Modern European Philosophy more generally.

Apocalyptic nightmares that humanly-created intelligences will one day rise up against their creators haunt the western creative imagination. However, these narratives find their initial expression not in the widely disseminated Frankenstein story but in William Blake's early mythological works. This book looks at why we persistently fear our own creations by examining Blake's illuminated books of the 1790s through the lens of Kierkegaard's theories of personality and of anxiety. It offers a close examination of Kierkegaard's and Blake's similar, and to an extent shared, historical milieux as residents of Denmark's and England's political and economic centers. Each author's residence in a major urban center motivated them to develop a concept of innocence closely identified with the pastoral, and to place their respective and similar concepts of innocence within a larger developmental scheme encompassing an ethical and then a religious consciousness. Rovira identifies contemporary tensions between monarchy and democracy, science and religion, and nature and artifice as the source both of Kierkegaard's concept of anxiety and Blake's representation of creation anxiety in his early illuminated books.

In this long-awaited volume, David B. Allison argues for a "generous" approach to Nietzsche's writings, and then provides comprehensive analyses of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, On the Genealogy of Morals, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Unique among other books on Nietzsche, Allison's text includes individual chapters devoted to Nietzsche's principal works. Historically-oriented and continentally-informed, Allison's readings draw on French and German thinkers, such as Heidegger, Battaille, Derrida, Birault, and Deleuze, while the author explicitly resists the use of jargon that frequently characterizes those approaches. Reading the New Nietzsche is an outstanding resource for those reading Nietzsche for the first time as well as for those who wish to know him better.

This work reflects on hypochondria as well as on the global functioning of the human mind and on the place of the patient/physician relationship in the wider organisation of society. First published in 1711, revised and enlarged in 1730, and now edited and published with a critical apparatus for the first time, this is a major work in the history of medical literature as well as a complex literary creation. Composed of three dialogues between a physician and two of his patients, Mandeville's Treatise mirrors the digressive structure of a talking cure. Thanks to the soothing and enlightening effects of this casual conversation, the physician Mandeville demonstrates the healing power of words for a class of patients that he presents as men of learning who need above all to be addressed in their own language. Mandeville's aim was to delineate his own cure for hypochondria and hysteria, which consisted of a talking cure followed by diet and exercise, but also to discuss the practice of medicine in England and continental Europe at a time when physicians were beginning to lose ground to apothecaries. Opposing a purely theoretical approach to medicine, Mandeville takes up the principles presented by Francis Bacon, Thomas Sydenham, and Giorgio Baglivi, and advocates a medical practice based on experience and backed up by time-tested theories.

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

The essays in this book respond to Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka's recent call to explore the relationship between the evolution of the universe and the process of self-individuation in the ontopoietic unfolding of life. The essays approach the sensory manifold in a number of ways. They show that theories of modern science become a strategy for the phenomenological study of works of art, and vice versa. Works of phenomenology and of the arts examine how individual spontaneity connects with the design(s) of the logos - of the whole and of the particulars - while the design(s) rest not on some human concept, but on life itself. Life's pliable matrices allow us to consider the expansiveness of contemporary science, and to help create a contemporary phenomenological sense of cosmos.

Nietzsche is known as a severe critic of German Idealism, but what exactly is the relation between his thought and theirs? And how does Nietzsche's stance differ from the critique of idealism in Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer? The papers from leading international specialists in German Idealism, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche address these questions. The aim of the volume is to introduce novel ways of addressing the complex relations between Nietzsche and his immediate philosophical predecessors: Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte and Kant. The focus is on the profound interconnections and affinities between their ways of thinking. Each paper considers one particular aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy (such as his notion of "spirit", "law", "power", "will", his "physiology" or his critique of morality) in relation to the above-mentioned philosophers. This largely systematic approach reveals surprising affinities between Nietzsche and the German idealists, despite their patent differences and generates new perspectives from which to understand and reinterpret Nietzsche's thought. Contributors: Maria J. Branco; Danielle Cohen Levinas; Joao Constancio; Carlos J. Correia; Katia Hay; Lore Huhn; Jose Justo; Elisabetta Marques J.de Sousa; Frederick Neuhouser; Leonel R. dos Santos; Philipp Schwab; Herman Siemens.

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

This book presents a collection of authoritative contributions on the concept of time in early twentieth-century philosophy. It is structured in the form of a thematic atlas: each section is accompanied by relevant elementary logic maps that reproduce in a "spatial" form the directionalities (arguments and/or discourses) reported on in the text. The book is divided into three main sections, the first of which covers phenomenology and the perception of time by analyzing the works of Bergson, Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Guattari and Derrida. The second section focuses on the language and conceptualization of time, examining the works of Cassirer, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Lacan, Ricoeur and Foucault, while the last section addresses the science and logic of time as they appear in the works of Guillaume, Einstein, Reichenbach, Prigogine and Barbour. The purpose of the book is threefold: to provide readers with a comprehensive overview of the concept of time in early twentieth-century philosophy; to show how conceptual reasoning can be supported by accompanying linguistic and spatial representations; and to stimulate novel research in the humanistic field concerning the complex role of graphic representations in the comprehension of concepts.

The subect of this book is the philosophical relationship between Ludwig Wittgenstein and G.E. Moore and their overlapping, but nevertheless differing, views. Both defended the existence of certainty and this opposed any forms of skepticism. However, their defences and conceptions of certainty differed widely, as did their understanding of the nature of skepticism and how best to combat it. Stroll's book contains a careful and critical analysis of their differing approaches to a set of fundamental epistemological problems.

'David Pole, in his The Later Philosophy of Wittgenstein, makes an admirable attempt to clarify the central points of Wittgenstein's philosophy in a straightforward manner. He approaches it from the outside with sympathy and good sense. And since he combines a clear head with a fluent style of writing - a combination that is rare among the initiated - his book will prove an excellent introduction for those who need a succinct account of Wittgenstein's later philosophy without any mystical overtones.' - The Economist 'There is now a real need for a commentary on what must in frankness be admitted to be an exceedingly difficult corpus of philosophy. Mr Pole's little book is a response to that need; if small in bulk, it is rich in ideas... and all students of Wittgenstein will turn to it with gratitude.' - Sunday Times

Over the last twenty years materialist thinkers in the continental tradition have increasingly emphasized the category of immanence. Yet the turn to immanence has not meant the wholesale rejection of the concept of transcendence, but rather its reconfiguration in immanent or materialist terms: an immanent transcendence. Through an engagement with the work of Deleuze, Irigaray and Adorno, Patrice Haynes examines how the notion of immanent transcendence can help articulate a non-reductive materialism by which to rethink politics, ethics and theology in exciting new ways. However, she argues that contrary to what some might expect, immanent accounts of matter and transcendence are ultimately unable to do justice to material finitude. Indeed, Haynes concludes by suggesting that a theistic understanding of divine transcendence offers ways to affirm fully material immanence, thus pointing towards the idea of a theological materialism.

Freedom and Tradition in Hegel stands at the intersection of three vital currents in contemporary ethics: debates over philosophical anthropology and its significance for ethics, reevaluations of tradition and modernity, and a resurgence of interest in Hegel. Thomas A. Lewis engages these three streams of thought in light of Hegel's recently published Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie des Geistes. Drawing extensively on these lectures, Lewis addresses an important lacuna in Hegelian scholarship by first providing a systematic analysis of Hegel's philosophical anthropology and then examining its fundamental role in shaping Hegel's ethical and religious thought. Lewis contends that Hegel's anthropology seeks to account for both the ongoing significance of the religious and philosophical traditions in which we are raised and our ability to transcend these traditions. Pursuing the implications of the integral role of practice in Hegel's anthropology, Lewis argues for a more progressive interpretation of Hegel's ethics and a Hegelian critique of Hegel's most problematic statements on political and social issues. and tradition. This fresh interpretation of Hegel's work provides a challenging new perspective on his ethical and religious thought. It will be of significant value to students and scholars in religious studies, philosophy, and political theory.

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

The pathology of wars, violence, anger, and frustration is traced from the first hominids to our time. This book traces the history of our gradual alienation from nature, from our community, and from our own and other species. The author uses a conversational tone to explain a theory of how having relinquished control of our lives to others, be it rulers, priests, or bosses, we have created a general malaise which has led to anger, frustration and violence. The book ends optimistically with possible solutions.

Thomas Hobbes was one of the most important and influential philosophers of the seventeenth century. Covering all the key concepts of his work, "Starting with Hobbes "provides an accessible introduction to the ideas of this hugely significant thinker. Thematically structured, this book leads the reader through the full range of Hobbes's ideas and, uniquely, not just his political philosophy. In his day, he was internationally as famous for his theories about knowledge, language, the material nature of reality, mathematics, psychology, and religion, as he was for his politics; and these aspects of his work are fully covered. The book places Hobbes firmly in his historical context, with discussions of his relations to contemporary thinkers such as Galileo and Descartes and his influence on later thinkers such as Spinoza and Leibniz. This is the ideal introduction for anyone coming to the work of one of the greatest of English philosophers for the first time. >

In On Tocqueville, Alan Ryan brilliantly illuminates the observations of the French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville, who first journeyed to the United States in 1831 and went on to catalog the unique features of the American social contract in his two-volume masterpiece, Democracy in America. Often thought of as the father of "American Exceptionalism," Tocqueville sought to observe the social conditions of emerging political equality in America, "a river that may be channeled but cannot be stopped in its course." In choosing America, he posed a central question of how a moderate, stable, and constitutional government is to be maintained in the wake of a revolution. As a dispassionate visitor, Tocqueville wanted to discover the social, moral, and economic arrangements that made liberty and self-government possible.

In doing so, Tocqueville made a number of prescient observations about American life whether it be the contrast between equality and liberty or Americans belief that they all belong to the middle class that remain as relevant today as when they were first written. While Tocqueville is often praised by both conservatives and liberals, either for his distrust of big government and fondness for decentralized power or for his concern with association and community, both tend to overlook his contempt for the coarse appearance of the individual members of Congress as well as his enthusiasm for the brutal nature of our prison system. Alan Ryan examines the often complicated and elusive Democracy in America, tracing the influence of writers such as Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Guizot, and explaining Tocqueville s original conceptions of equality and individualism within their historical context. In Ryan s hands, On Tocqueville becomes the perfect introduction and guide to Democracy in America.

On Tocqueville: Democracy and America features:

a chronology of Alexis de Tocqueville's life

an introduction and text by Alan Ryan that provides crucial context and cogent analysis

key excerpts from Democracy in America"