Until recently, Spinoza's standing in Anglophone studies of philosophy has been relatively low and has only seemed to confirm Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's assessment of him as "a dead dog." However, an exuberant outburst of excellent scholarship on Spinoza has of late come to dominate work on early modern philosophy. This resurgence is due in no small part to the recent revival of metaphysics in contemporary philosophy and to the increased appreciation of Spinoza's role as an unorthodox, pivotal figure - indeed, perhaps the pivotal figure - in the development of Enlightenment thinking. Spinoza's penetrating articulation of his extreme rationalism makes him a demanding philosopher who offers deep and prescient challenges to all subsequent, inevitably less radical approaches to philosophy. While the twenty-six essays in this volume - by many of the world's leading Spinoza specialists - grapple directly with Spinoza's most important arguments, these essays also seek to identify and explain Spinoza's debts to previous philosophy, his influence on later philosophers, and his significance for contemporary philosophy and for us.

Nietzsche, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics explores how Nietzsche criticizes, adopts, and reformulates Kant's critique of metaphysics and his transcendental idealism. Thing in itself and phenomenon, space and time, intuition and thought, the I and self-consciousness, concepts and judgments, categories and schemata, teleological judgement: building on established and recent literature on these topics in both thinkers, this volume asks whether Nietzsche can - malgr lui - be considered a Kantian of sorts. Nietzsche's intensive engagement with early Neo-Kantians (Lange, Liebmann, Fischer, von Helmholtz) and other contemporaries of his, largely ignored in the Anglophone literature, is also addressed, raising the question whether Nietzsche's positions on Kant's theoretical philosophy are best understood as historically embedded in the often rather loose relation they had to the first Critique. These and other questions are taken up in Nietzsche, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, which in different ways tackles the complexities of Nietzsche's relation to Kant's theoretical philosophy and its reception in nineteenth Century philosophy.

Soren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony, and the Crisis of Modernity examines the thought of Soren Kierkegaard, a unique figure, who has inspired, provoked, fascinated, and irritated people ever since he walked the streets of Copenhagen. At the end of his life, Kierkegaard said that the only model he had for his work was the Greek philosopher Socrates. This work takes this statement as its point of departure. Jon Stewart explores what Kierkegaard meant by this and to show how different aspects of his writing and argumentative strategy can be traced back to Socrates. The main focus is The Concept of Irony, which is a key text at the beginning of Kierkegaard's literary career. Although it was an early work, it nevertheless played a determining role in his later development and writings. Indeed, it can be said that it laid the groundwork for much of what would appear in his later famous books such as Either/Or and Fear and Trembling.

Plato's "Phaedo", Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit" and Heidegger's "Being and Time" are three of the most profound meditations on variations of the ideas that to practice philosophy is to practice how to die. This study traces how these variations are connected with each other and with the reflections of this idea to be found in the works of other ancient and modern philosophers - including Neitzsche, Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and levinas. The book also shows how this philosophical thanatology motivates or is motivated by experiences documented in psychoanalysis and in the anthropology of Western and Oriental religions and myths.

Desmond M. Clarke presents new translations of three of the first feminist tracts to support explicitly the equality of the sexes. The alleged inferiority of women's nature and the corresponding roles that women were (in)capable of exercising in society were debated in Western culture from the civilization of ancient Greece to the establishment of early Christian churches. There had also been some proponents of women's superiority (in comparison with men) prior to the early modern period. In contrast with both of these claims, the seventeenth century witnessed the first publications that argued for the equality of men and women. Among the most articulate and original defenders of that view were Marie le Jars de Gournay, Anna Maria van Schurman, and Francois Poulain de la Barre. Gournay published The Equality of Men and Women in Paris in 1622, while one of her Dutch correspondents, Van Schurman, published in Latin her Dissertation in support of women's education in 1641. Poulain wrote a radical Physical and Moral Discourse concerning the Equality of Both Sexes in 1673, which he also published in Paris. These three feminist tracts transformed the language and conceptual framework in which questions about women's equality or otherwise were subsequently discussed. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, anonymous plagiarized editions and pirated translations of Poulain's work appeared in English, as 'vindications' of the rights of women. This edition includes new translations, from French and Latin, of these three key texts, and excerpts from the authors' related writings, together with an extensive introduction to the religious and philosophical context within which they argued against the traditional view of women's natural inferiority to men.

In George Berkeley's two most important works, the Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues Bewtween Hylas and Philonous, he argued that there is no such thing as matter: only minds and ideas exist, and physical things are nothing but collections of ideas. In defense of this idealism, he advanced a battery of challenging arguments purporting to show that the very notion of matter is self-contradictory or meaningless, and that even if it were possible for matter to exist, we could not know that it does; and he then put forward an alternative world-view that purported to refute both skepticism and atheism.
Using the tools of contemporary analytic philosophy, Georges Dicker here examines both the destructive and the constructive sides of Berkeley's thought, against the background of the mainstream views that he rejected. Dicker's accessible and text-based analysis of Berkeley's arguments shows that the Priniciples and the Dialogues dovetail and complement each other in a seamless way, rather than being self-contained. Dicker's book avoids the incompleteness that results from studying just one of his two main works; instead, he treats the whole as a visionary response to the issues of modern philosophy- such as primary and secondary qualities, external-world skepticism, the substance-property relation, the causal roles of human agents and of God. In addition to relating Berkeley's work to his contemporaries, Dicker discusses work by today's top Berkeley scholars, and uses notions and distinctions forged by recent and contemporary analytic philosophers of perception. Berkeley's Idealism both advances Berkeley scholarship and serves as a useful guide for teachers and students.

The English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903) was a colossus of the Victorian age. His works ranked alongside those of Darwin and Marx in the development of disciplines as wide ranging as sociology, anthropology, political theory, philosophy and psychology. In this acclaimed study of Spencer, the first for over thirty years and now available in paperback, Mark Francis provides an authoritative and meticulously researched intellectual biography of this remarkable man that dispels the plethora of misinformation surrounding Spencer and shines new light on the broader cultural history of the nineteenth century. In this major study of Spencer, the first for over thirty years, Mark Francis provides an authoritative and meticulously researched intellectual biography of this remarkable man. Using archival material and contemporary printed sources, Francis creates a fascinating portrait of a human being whose philosophical and scientific system was a unique attempt to explain modern life in all its biological, psychological and sociological forms. Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life fills what is perhaps the last big biographical gap in Victorian history. An exceptional work of scholarship it not only dispels the plethora of misinformation surrounding Spencer but shines new light on the broader cultural history of the nineteenth century. Elegantly written, provocative and rich in insight it will be required reading for all students of the period.

Paul Guyer is acknowledged as one of the world's foremost Kant specialists, and he collects here some of his most celebrated essays from the past decade and a half. The governing theme of the volume is the role of systematicity in Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy. Featuring two brand-new papers and an introduction to orient the reader, Kant's System of Nature and Freedom will be an essential purchase for anyone working on the history of philosophy and related areas of ethics, philosophy of science, and metaphysics.

This book offers a fresh and up-to-date account of the ethical thought of one of the twentieth century's greatest theologians: Karl Barth. In it, the author seeks to recover Barth's ethics from some widespread misunderstandings, and also presents a picture of it as a whole. Drawing on recently published sources, Dr Biggar construes the ethics of the Church Dogmatics as it might have been had Barth lived to complete it. However, The Hastening that Waits is more than apology and description. For it recommends to contemporary Christian ethics the theological rigour with which Barth expounds the good life in terms of the living presence of God-in-Christ to his creatures; his conception of right human action as that which is able to hasten in the service of humanity precisely by waiting prayerfully upon God; and his discriminate openness to moral wisdom outside the Christian church. Among particular topics treated are: the concept of human freedom and of created moral order; moral norms and their relation to individual vocation; the relative ethical roles of the Bible, the Church, philosophy, and empirical science; moral character and its formation; and the problem of war.

The "Nations" are the "seventy nations": a metaphor which, in the Talmudic idiom, designates the whole of humanity surrounding Israel. In this major collection of essays, Levinas considers Judaism's uncertain relationship to European culture since the Enlightenment, problems of distance and integration. It also includes essays on Franz Rosenzweig and Moses Mendelssohn, and a discussion of central importance to Jewish philosophy in the context of general philosophy. This work brings to the fore the vital encounter between philosophy and Judaism, a hallmark of Levinas's thought.

Cheryl Misak presents the first collective study of the development of philosophy in North America, from the 18th century to the end of the 20th century. Twenty-six leading experts examine distinctive features of American philosophy, trace notable themes, and consider the legacy and influence of notable figures. This will be the first reference point for future work on the subject, and a fascinating resource for anyone interested in modern philosophy or American intellectual history.

Now in a new edition, this volume updates Davidson's exceptional Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984), which set out his enormously influential philosophy of language. The original volume remains a central point of reference, and a focus of controversy, with its impact extending into linguistic theory, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. Addressing a central question--what it is for words to mean what they do--and featuring a previously uncollected, additional essay, this work will appeal to a wide audience of philosophers, linguists, and psychologists.

Frank Jackson champions the cause of conceptual analysis as central to philosophical inquiry. In recent years conceptual analysis has been undervalued and, Jackson suggests, widely misunderstood; he argues that there is nothing especially mysterious about it and a whole range of important questions cannot be productively addressed without it. He anchors his argument in discussion of specific philosophical issues, starting with the metaphysical doctrine of physicalism and moving on, via free will, meaning, personal identity, motion and change, to the philosophy of colour and to ethics. The significance of different kinds of supervenience theses, Kripke and Putnam's work in the philosophy of modality and language, and the role of intuitions about possible cases receive detailed attention. Jackson concludes with a defence of a version of analytical descriptivism in ethics. In this way the book not only offers a methodological programme for philosophy, but also throws fascinating new light on some much-debated problems and their interrelations. puffs which may be quoted (please do not edit without consulting OUP editor): 'This is an outstanding book. It covers a vast amount of philosophy in a very short space, advances a number of original and striking positions, and manages to be both clear and concise in its expositions of other views and forceful in its criticisms of them. The book offers something new for those interested in the various individual problems it discusses-conceptual analysis, the mind-body relation, secondary qualities, modality, and ethical realism. But unifying these individual discussions is an ambitious structure which amounts to an outline of a complete metaphysical system, and an outline of an epistemology for this metaphysics. It is hard to think of a central area of analytic philosophy which will not be touched by Jackson's conclusions.' Tim Crane, Reader in Philosophy, University College London 'The writing is clear, straightforward, and down to earth-the usual virtues one expects from Jackson . . . what he has to say is innovative and valuable . . . the book deals with a large number of apparently diverse philosophical issues, but it is also an elegantly unified work. What gives it unity is the metaphilosophical framework that Jackson works out with great care and persuasiveness. This is the first serious and sustained work on the methodology of metaphysics in recent memory. What he says about the role of conceptual analysis in metaphysics is an important and timely contribution. . . . It is refreshing and heartening to see a first-class analytic philosopher doing some serious metaphilosophical work . . . I think that the book will be greeted as an important event in philosophical publishing.' Jaegwon Kim, Professor of Philosophy, Brown University

Meaning (significance) and nature are this book's principal topics. They seem an odd couple, like raisins and numbers, though they elide when meanings of a global sort-ideologies and religions, for example-promote ontologies that subordinate nature. Setting one against the other makes reality contentious. It signifies workmates and a coal face to miners, gluons to physicists, prayer and redemption to priests. Are there many realities, or many perspectives on one? The answer I prefer is the comprehensive naturalism anticipated by Aristotle and Spinoza: "natura naturans, natura naturata." Nature naturing is an array of mutually conditioning material processes in spacetime. Each structure or event-storm clouds forming, nature natured-is self-differentiating, self-stabilizing, and sometimes self-disassembling; each alters or transforms a pre-existing state of affairs. This surmise anticipated discoveries and analyses to which neither thinker had access, though physics and biology confirm their hypothesis beyond reasonable doubt. Hence the question this book considers: Is reality divided:nature vrs. lived experience? Or is experience, with all its meanings and values, the complex expression of natural processes?