Powers of chaos accompany any order of the human world, being the force against which this order is set. Human experience of history is two-fold. There is history ruled by chaos and history ruled by order. "History" occurs in a continuous flow of both histories. The dialectics of life unto nothingness/creation, struggles for order/order achieved is unceasingly actual. In exploring it, within a wide interdisciplinary and transcultural range, this book reaches beyond a conventional "philosophy of history". It deals with the chaotic as well as the cosmic part of the human historical experience. It stages this drama through the tales that religious, mythical, literary, philosophical, folkloristic, and historiographical sources tell and which are retold and interpreted here. From early on humans wished to know where, why, and wherefore all started and took place. Couldn't the dialectics between chaos and order be meaningful? Couldn't they assume a productive role as to the world's precarious event? Power, strife, guilt, divine grace and revelation, literary symbolization, as well as storytelling are discussed in this book. Philosophy, political theory, theology, religious studies, and literary studies will greatly benefit from its width and density.

Words, Deeds, Bodies by Jerry H. Gill concentrates on the interrelationships between speech, accomplishing tasks, and human embodiment. Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Michael Polanyi have all highlighted these relationships. This book examines the, as yet, unexplored connections between these authors' philosophies of language. It focuses on the relationships between their respective key ideas: Wittgenstein's notion of "language game," Austin's concept of "performative utterances," Merleau-Ponty's idea of "slackening the threads," and Polanyi's understanding of "tacit knowing," noting the similarities and differences between and amongst them.

John Burbidge shows that, far from incorporating everything into an all-consuming necessity, Hegel's philosophy requires the novelty of unexpected contingencies to maintain its systematic pretensions. To know without fear of failure is to expect that experience will confound our confident claims to knowledge. And the universal character of all life involves acting, discovering what happens as a result, and incorporating both intention and result into a new comprehensive understanding. Burbidge explores how Hegel applied this approach when he turned from his logic to chemistry, biology, psychology and history, and suggests how a Hegelian might function within the changed circumstances of contemporary science.

This book brings together two of the most influential thinkers in critical theory. By unmasking reality as contingent symbolic fiction, the authors argue, Foucauldian criticism has only deconstructed the world in different ways; the point, however, is 'to recognize the Real in what appears to be mere symbolic fiction' (Zizek) and to change it.

This is the first detailed assessment of the life and work of Felix Guattari--"Mr. Anti" as the French press labelled him--the friend of and collaborator with Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan and Antonio Negri, and one of the 20th Century's last great activist-intellectuals. Guattari is widely known for his celebrated writings with Deleuze, but these writings do not represent the true breadth and impact of his thinking, writing and activism. Guattari's major work as a clinical and theoretical innovator in psychoanalysis was closely linked to his participation in struggles against European right-wing politics. Felix Guattari introduces the reader to the diversity and sheer range of Guattari's interests, from anti-psychiatry, to Japanese culture, political activism and his theorizing of subjectification.Highlighting why Guattari's work is of increasing relevance to contemporary political, psychoanalytical and philosophical thought, Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction presents the reader with an adventurous and provocative introduction to this radical thinker.

This book discusses three linguistic projects carried out in the seventeenth century: the artificial languages created by Dalgamo and Wilkins, and Leibniz's uncompleted scheme. It treats each of the projects as self contained undertakings, which deserve to be studied and judged in their own right. For this reason, the two artificial languages, as well as Leib niz's work in this area, are described in considerable detail. At the same time, the characteristics of these schemes are linked with their intellectual context, and their multiple interrelations are examined at some length. In this way, the book seeks to combine a systematical with a historical ap proach to the subject, in the hope that both approaches profit from the combination. When I first started the research on which this book is based, I intended to look only briefly into the seventeenth-century schemes, which I assumed represented a typical universalist approach to the study of lan guage, as opposed to a relativistic one. The authors of these schemes thought, or so the assumption was, that almost the only thing required for a truly universal language was the systematic labelling of the items of an apparently readily available, universal catalogue of everything that exists."

The problem of truth and the liar paradox is one of the most extensive problems of philosophy. The liar paradox can be avoided by assuming a so-called theory of partial truth instead of a classical theory of truth. Theories of partial truth, however, cannot solve the so-called strengthened liar paradox, which is the problem that many semantic statements about the so-called strengthened liar cannot be true in a theory of partial truth. If such semantic statements were true in the theory, another paradox would emerge. To proponents of contextual accounts, which assume that the concept of truth is context-dependent, the strengthened liar paradox is the core of the liar problem. This book provides an overview of current contextual approaches to the strengthened liar paradox. For this purpose, the author investigates formal theories of truth that result from formal reconstructions of such contextual approaches.

Philosophers contributing new ideas are commonly caught within a received philosophical vocabulary and will often coin new, technical terms. Husserl understood himself as advancing a new theory of intentionality, and he fashioned the new vocabulary of `noesis' and `noema'. But Husserl's own statements regarding the noema are ambiguous. Hence, it is no surprise that controversy has ensued. The articles in this book elucidate and clarify the notion of the noema; the book includes articles which phenomenologically describe and analyze the noemata of various experiences as well as articles which undertake the `metaphenomenological' explication of the doctrine of the noema. These two enterprises cannot be isolated from one another. Any analysis of the noema of a particular type of experience will necessarily illustrate, at least by instantiating the general notion of noema. And any metaphenomenological account of the noema itself will guide particular researches into the noemata of particular experiences.

Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics in the Early Husserl focuses on the first ten years of Edmund Husserl's work, from the publication of his Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891) to that of his Logical Investigations (1900/01), and aims to precisely locate his early work in the fields of logic, philosophy of logic and philosophy of mathematics. Unlike most phenomenologists, the author refrains from reading Husserl's early work as a more or less immature sketch of claims consolidated only in his later phenomenology, and unlike the majority of historians of logic she emphasizes the systematic strength and the originality of Husserl's logico-mathematical work.

The book attempts to reconstruct the discussion between Husserl and those philosophers and mathematicians who contributed to new developments in logic, such as Leibniz, Bolzano, the logical algebraists (especially Boole and Schroder), Frege, and Hilbert and his school. It presents both a comprehensive critical examination of some of the major works produced by Husserl and his antagonists in the last decade of the 19th century and a formal reconstruction of many texts from Husserl's Nachlass that have not yet been the object of systematical scrutiny.

This volume will be of particular interest to researchers working in the history, and in the philosophy, of logic and mathematics, and more generally, to analytical philosophers and phenomenologists with a background in standard logic."

Here as Virilio states, "all one can do is guess." But Virilio's position is not one of pure guessery. His extrapolationist position against his delirium state, has the architecture of a 23rd century scientist: three parts - fractal geometry, two parts - theory of general relativity, one part - Philip K. Dick. One must step back and stare down the medusa of progress with a mirror. This is Virilio's call for a grey ecology. PAUL VIRILIO is a renowned urbanist, political theorist and critic of the art of technology.Born in Paris in 1932, Virilio is best known for his 'war model' of the growth of the modern city and the evolution of human society. He is also the inventor of the term 'dromology' or the logic of speed. Identified with the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, the futurism of Marinetti and technoscientific writings of Einstein, Virilio's intellectual outlook can usefully be compared to contemporary architects, philosophers and cultural critics such as Bernard Tschumi, Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard. Virilio is the author, among other books of Speed and Politics, The Information Bomb, Open Sky, and most recently, The Original Accident.

Continuum's "Guides for the Perplexed" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to fathom, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material. Existentialism is often studied by students with little or no background in philosophy; either as an introduction to the idea of studying philosophy or as part of a literary course. Although it is often an attractive topic for students interested in thinking about questions of 'self' or 'being', it also requires them to study difficult thinkers and texts. This Guide begins with the question of 'What is Existentialism?' and then moves on to provide a brief analysis of the key thinkers, writers and texts - both philosophical and literary - central to existentialism. Chapters focus particularly on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus but also discuss other philosophers and writers such as Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Kafka. The second section of the Guide introduces key topics associated with existentialist thought; Self, Consciousness, the question of God and Commitment. Each chapter explains the concepts and debates and provides guidance on reading and analysing the philosophical and literary texts addressed, focusing throughout on clarifying the areas students find most difficult.

The material reprinted in this two-volume set, first published in 1989, covers the first eighty-five years in responses to George Berkeley's writings. David Berman identifies several key waves of eighteenth-century criticism surrounding Berkeley's philosophies, ranging from hostile and discounted, to valued and defended. The first volume includes an account of the life of Berkeley by J. Murray and key responses from 1711 to 1748, whilst the second volume covers the years between 1745 and 1796. This fascinating reissue illustrates the breadth and diversity of the early reaction to Berkeley's philosophies, and will help students and academics form a clear image of both Berkeley's work and his reputation through the eyes of his contemporaries.

This book is a collection of papers given at the International Conference "Levinas in Jerusalem" held at the Hebrew University in May 2002. It gives an overview of the most fecund areas of research in Levinas scholarship. The authors, world renowned scholars and young promising ones, investigate Levinas 's relationship to Bergson, Husserl and Heidegger; his conception of Justice and the State; and his view of Aesthetics, Eros and the Feminine.

Art Line Thought discusses the main issues that beset our time and philosophy by locating these same issues in artworks and describing closely what is shown there. While respecting their differences, art and philosophy are thus made to cross back and forth into one another, delineating in fresh ways our concerns about nature, the human and non-human, the body, femininity, ecology, technology, textism, the end of history, community, postmodernism, relativism and non-Eurocentric ethics. A `philosophy of line' gathers these issues, opposing the current dominance of `word' and linguistic analyses. Art has long been aware that the line communicates meaning at least as well as the word. The volume is divided between contemporary and prehistoric art in order to reveal the presumptions of `Western' culture and how we might move beyond it. Since the book is a critique of Eurocentric thinking and prose, it works at finding new styles of both. Its philosophical meditation is directed equally to those who are intellectually interested in contemporary and prehistoric art, in theories of postmodern culture and criticism, and in anthropology.

These essays span a period of fourteen years. The earliest was written in 1960, the latest in 1983. They all represent various attempts to understand the motives and the central concepts of Husserl's transcen dental phenomenology, and to locate the latter in the background of other varieties of transcendental philosophy. Implicitly, they also con tain a defense of transcendental philosophy, and make attempts to respond to the more familiar criticisms against it. It is hoped that they will contribute to a better understanding not only of Husserl's transcen dental phenomenology but also of transcendental philosophy in gener al. The ordering of the essays is not chronological. They are rather divided thematically into three groups. The first group of six essays is concerned with relating Husserlian phenomenology to more contem porary analytic concerns: in fact, the opening essay on Husserl and Frege establishes a certain continuity of concern with my last published book with that title. Of these, Essay 2 was written for an American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division symposium in which the other symposiast was John Searle. The discussion in that symposium concentrated chiefly on the relation between intentionality and causali ty - which led me to write Essay 6, later read as the Gurwitsch Memo rial Lecture at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philos ophy meetings in 1982 at Penn State."

At the threshold of the twentieth century, Bergson reset the agenda for philosophy and its relationship with science, art and even life itself. Concerned with both examining and extolling the phenomena of time, change, and difference, he was at one point held as both "the greatest thinker in the world" and "the most dangerous man in the world." Yet the impact of his ideas was so all-pervasive among artists, philosophers and politicians alike, that by the end of the First World War it had become impossibly diffuse. In a manner imitating his own cult of change, the Bergsonian school departed from the scene almost as quickly as it had arrived. As part of a current resurgence of interest in Bergson, both in Europe and in North America, this collection of essays addresses the significance of his philosophical legacy for contemporary thought.

Meaning, Understanding, and Practice is a selection of the most notable essays of an eminent contemporary philosopher on a set of central topics in analytic philosophy. Barry Stroud offers penetrating studies of meaning, understanding, necessity, and the intentionality of thought, with particular reference to the thought of Wittgenstein.

Between 1931 and 1935, Bertrand Russell contributed some 156 essays to the literary pages of the American newspaper New York American. These were often fun, humorous observations on the very real issues of the day, such as the Depression, the rise of Nazism and Prohibition, to more perennial themes such as love, parenthood, education and friendship. Available for the first time in the Routledge Classics series in a single volume, this pithy, provocative and often-personal collection of essays brings together the very best of Russell's many contributions to the New York American, and proves just as engaging for today's readers as they were in the 1930s.

Descartes has often been called the 'father of modern philosophy'. His attempts to find foundations for knowledge, and to reconcile the existence of the soul with the emerging science of his time, are among the most influential and widely studied in the history of philosophy. This is a classic and challenging introduction to Descartes by one of the most distinguished modern philosophers. Bernard Williams not only analyzes Descartes' project of founding knowledge on certainty, but uncovers the philosophical motives for his search. With acute insight, he demonstrates how Descartes' Meditations are not merely a description but the very enactment of philosophical thought and discovery. Williams covers all of the key areas of Descartes' thought, including God, the will, the possibility of knowledge, and the mind and its place in nature. He also makes profound contributions to the theory of knowledge, metaphysics and philosophy generally. With a new foreword by John Cottingham.

Why is film becoming increasingly important to philosophers? Is it because it can be a helpful tool in teaching philosophy, in illustrating it? Or is it because film can also think for itself, because it can create its own philosophy? In fact, a popular claim amongst film philosophers is that film is no mere handmaiden to philosophy, that it does more than simply illustrate philosophical texts: rather, film itself can philosophise in direct audio-visual terms. Approaches that purport to grant to film the possibility of being more than illustrative can be found in the subtractive ontology of Alain Badiou, the Wittgensteinian analyses of Stanley Cavell, and the materialist semiotics of Gilles Deleuze. In each case there is a claim that film can think in its own way. Too often, however, when philosophers claim to find indigenous philosophical value in film, it is only on account of refracting it through their own thought: film philosophizes because it accords with a favored kind of extant philosophy.

"Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image" is the first book to examine all the central issues surrounding the vexed relationship between the film image and philosophy. In it, John Mullarkey tackles the work of particular philosophers and theorists (Zizek, Deleuze, Cavell, Bordwell, Badiou, Branigan, Ranciere, Frampton, and many others) as well as general philosophical positions (Analytical and Continental, Cognitivist and Culturalist, Psychoanalytic and Phenomenological). Moreover, he also offers an incisive analysis and explanation of several prominent forms of film theorizing, providing a metalogical account of their mutual advantages and deficiencies that will prove immensely useful to anyone interested in the details of particular theories of film presently circulating, as well as correcting, revising, and revisioning the field of film theory as a whole.

Throughout, Mullarkey asks whether the reduction of film to text is unavoidable. In particular: must philosophy (and theory) always transform film into pretexts for illustration? What would it take to imagine how film might itself theorize without reducing it to standard forms of thought and philosophy? Finally, and fundamentally, must we change our definition of philosophy and even of thought itself in order to accommodate the specificities that come with the claim that film can produce philosophical theory? If a 'non-philosophy' like film can think philosophically, what does that imply for orthodox theory and philosophy?

Metamathematics and the Philosophical Tradition is the first work to explore in such historical depth the relationship between fundamental philosophical quandaries regarding self-reference and meta-mathematical notions of consistency and incompleteness. Using the insights of twentieth-century logicians from Goedel through Hilbert and their successors, this volume revisits the writings of Aristotle, the ancient skeptics, Anselm, and enlightenment and seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Pascal, Descartes, and Kant to identify ways in which these both encode and evade problems of a priori definition and self-reference. The final chapters critique and extend more recent insights of late 20th-century logicians and quantum physicists, and offer new applications of the completeness theorem as a means of exploring "metatheoretical ascent" and the limitations of scientific certainty. Broadly syncretic in range, Metamathematics and the Philosophical Tradition addresses central and recurring problems within epistemology. The volume's elegant, condensed writing style renders accessible its wealth of citations and allusions from varied traditions and in several languages. Its arguments will be of special interest to historians and philosophers of science and mathematics, particularly scholars of classical skepticism, the Enlightenment, Kant, ethics, and mathematical logic.

Although influential in his own day, Karl Leonhard Reinhold's contribution to late 18th and early 19th century thought has long been overshadowed by the towering presence of Immanuel Kant, the thinker whose ideas he helped to interpret and disseminate. Today, however, a more nuanced understanding of Reinhold's contribution to post-Kantian thought is emerging. Apart from his exposition of Kant's critical philosophy, which played a significant role in the development of German idealism, Reinhold's role in the intellectual movement of Enlightenment and his contributions to early linguistic philosophy are now receiving scholarly attention. In the English-speaking world, where few translations of his work have been attempted, Reinhold has mostly been overlooked. This imbalance is corrected in the present work: the first translation into English of Reinhold's major work of philosophy, the New Theory of the Human Capacity for Representation (1789). The translators provide an overview of the main currents of thought which informed Reinhold's philosophical project, as well as notes on his reading of Kant and other important thinkers of Reinhold's day. A glossary of key terms, a bibliography of scholarly work on Reinhold and suggestions for further reading are also included.

Eighteenth-century philosophy owes much to the early novel. Using the figure of the romance reader this book tells a new story of eighteenth-century reading. The impressionable mind and mutable identity of the romance reader haunt eighteenth-century definitions of the self, and the seductions of fiction insist on making an appearance in philosophy.

"Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to fathom, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material. Gilles Deleuze is undoubtedly one of the seminal figures in modern Continental thought. However, his philosophy makes considerable demands on the student; his major works make for challenging reading and require engagement with some difficult concepts and complex systems of thought. "Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed" is the ideal text for anyone who needs to get to grips with Deleuzian thought, offering a thorough, yet approachable account of the central themes in his work. The text is organised around major themes in Deleuze's oeuvre: sense; univocity; intuition; singularity; difference. His ideas related to language, politics, ethics and consciousness are explored in detail and - most importantly - clarified. The book also locates Deleuze in the context of his philosophical influences and antecedents and highlights the implications of his ideas for a range of disciplines from politics to film theory. Throughout, close attention is paid to Deleuze's most influential publications, including the landmark texts "The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition".