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Books > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present
Incorporating significant editorial changes from earlier editions,
the fourth edition of Ludwig Wittgenstein's "Philosophical
Investigations" is the definitive "en face" German-English version
of the most important work of 20th-century philosophy
The extensively revised English translation incorporates many
hundreds of changes to Anscombe's original translation Footnoted
remarks in the earlier editions have now been relocated in the text
What was previously referred to as 'Part 2' is now republished as
"Philosophy of Psychology - A Fragment," and all the remarks in it
are numbered for ease of reference New detailed editorial endnotes
explain decisions of translators and identify references and
allusions in Wittgenstein's original text Now features new essays
on the history of the "Philosophical Investigations," and the
problems of translating Wittgenstein's text
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) is remembered today only as an alleged
Social Darwinist who applied the theory of the survival of the
fittest to society. Yet he was among the most influential and
widely-read philosophers of the nineteenth century. There were few
Victorian thinkers and scientists who did not know his work, and
who did not formulate their own positions partly in reaction to
his. Michael Taylor's book provides the only detailed and reliable
modern survey of the whole corpus of Spencer's thought. Taylor
introduces a Spencer very different to his posthumous reputation:
not primarily a political philosopher, but the architect of a
comprehensive philosophical system that aimed to demonstrate the
inevitability of human perfection through universal natural laws.
He also locates the Synthetic Philosophy firmly in its place and
time by showing how it developed out of the concerns of a group of
like-minded British writers and thinkers during the 1850s. This
book will be of interest to historians of philosophy and of
science, to social scientists, to scholars and students of
nineteenth century literature, and to anyone who wishes to
understand one of most important figures in Victorian intellectual
life.
This title offers an original interpretation of the later Heidegger
within the context of his thought as a whole, showing similarities
and differences between his earlier and later thought. "Heidegger
and Happiness" offers an original interpretation of Heidegger's
later thought, within the context of his philosophy as a whole, to
develop a new conception of human happiness. The book redeems the
essential content of the Greek notion of eudaimonia and transcends
recent debates concerning the 'objectivity' or 'subjectivity' of
happiness.The author shows that Heidegger's thinking of being is
far from arcane and abstract, and is crucially important in
understanding the deepest sources of human well-being. An
etymological examination of the word 'happiness' frees the word
from the constraints of utilitarian ways of thinking, which suggest
that 'happiness' is only peripherally related to eudaimonia. King
demonstrates that a sense of fittingness is essential both to
'happiness' and to eudaimonia, and shows how deep happiness,
conceived as dwelling in our fitting-together with being, can serve
as a 'grounding attunement' for the thinking of being.
'...a book which should be read by all students contemplating
enrolment for a university course in modern English or European
literary studies.' - Roy Harris, Times Higher Education Supplement
Eliot to Derrida is a sardonic portrait of the cult of the
specialist interpreter, from I.A. Richards and the Cambridge School
to Jacques Derrida and his disciples. This lucid, iconoclastic
study shows how, and why, so much of the academic response to a
rich variety of literary experiment has been straitjacketed by the
vast industries which have grown up around `modernism' and
`postmodernism'. For anyone disenchanted with the extravagant
claims - and leaden prose - of literary theorists, this will be an
exhilarating book.
This book explores the phenomenon of the Third Reich from a
philosophical perspective. It concentrates on the ways in which the
subjects and experiences of Nazi Germany, the Holocaust and
Anti-Semitism are conceived by eight German thinkers from the
Continental tradition. These eight intellectuals include Martin
Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Karl Loewith, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Junger,
Jean Amery, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Jan Assmann. Based on careful
philosophical examinations of both known and unknown texts of these
eight thinkers (including an English translation of two forgotten
texts by Schmitt and Junger), this study exposes and then explores
the tension between ideology and philosophy, between submission to
authority and genuine critical thinking, all of which constitute
the essence of the Continental philosophical tradition.
Alain Badiou's work in philosophy, though daunting, has gained a
receptive and steadily growing Anglophone readership. What is not
well known is the extent to which Badiou's positions, vis-a-vis
ontology, ethics, politics and the very meaning of philosophy, were
hammered out in dispute with the late Jean-Francois Lyotard.
Matthew R. McLennan's Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy is the
first work to pose the question of the relation between Lyotard and
Badiou, and in so doing constitutes a significant intervention in
the field of contemporary European philosophy by revisiting one of
its most influential and controversial forefathers. Badiou himself
has underscored the importance of Lyotard for his own project;
might the recent resurgence of interest in Lyotard be tied in some
way to Badiou's comments? Or deeper still: might not Badiou's
philosophical Platonism beg an encounter with philosophy's other,
the figure of the sophist that Lyotard played so often and so ably?
Posing pertinent questions and opening new discursive channels in
the literature on these two major figures this book is of interest
to those studying philosophy, rhetoric, literary theory, cultural
and media studies.
First published in 1942, Reflections documents the life of John
Henry Muirhead and the philosophical age that he observed. The
first part of the volume derives from Muirhead's own
autobiographical narrative, left unfinished when he died in May
1940. The second part features two final chapters written by John
W. Harvey that comprehensively record the final stages of
Muirhead's life. Harvey's chapters incorporate Muirhead's
unfinished final years of commentary and begin at the man's
retirement from Birmingham Chair in 1921. As a student and teacher
of philosophy, Muirhead's life ran almost precisely parallel to
what he himself refers to as 'one of the most vivid and important
movements in British and American philosophy'. He came into contact
with some of the age's primary thinkers and as such, his own
autobiography is important in providing an insight into his
contemporary philosophical environment.
Although this book is a study of the work of Emmanuel Levinas and
Jacques Derrida, it would be mistaken to refer to it as a
comparison. The book develops a framework which might aide the
reader of Levinas and Derrida in determining the scope and
significance of their respective projects as far as a discourse of
the sacred is concerned. It does so by emphasizing their status as
philosophers whose thought correlates but does not compare. Within
this correlation, without obscuring either their differences or
similarities, we can see a common framework that consists of the
following elements. First, it is clear from what and how Derrida
and Levinas have written that the general import of their work lies
in the area of ethics. However, in many ways it would be
justifiable to say that their work is not about ethics at all.
Neither of them proposes a moral theory; neither is interested in
discussing the question of values vs. social norms, duty vs. virtue
and other issues that might pertain to the area of ethics. To be
sure, these issues do come up in their work, yet they are treated
in a peculiarly different way. For Derrida and Levinas, ethics is
not so much an inquiry into the problems of right and wrong but an
inquiry into the problem of the ethical constitutedness of human
beings.
This book is a theoretical and practical guide for mental health
professionals who wish to utilize existential principles in their
social work and clinical practice. Existential questions concerning
life situations, such as anxiety, suffering, choosing,
authenticity, are at the heart of the craft of any helping
profession. The book aims to confront students and practitioners
with the need to be simultaneously philosophical and experiential
in their clinical approach. Written in an accessible tone,
Eisikovits and Buchbinder bridge existential-philosophical concepts
often seen as removed from everyday practice and the practical
concerns of therapy. Each chapter presents a concept from
existential philosophical tradition, such as anxiety, meaning
making, time, and space, and then demonstrates their use by drawing
from real-life clinical examples and interventions. The book
illustrates their implementation in social work practice with
reference to values such as client participation,
self-determination, and free will. The book is intended for courses
and advanced training in existential social work and therapy. It is
essential reading for training social workers, counselors,
therapists, and other helping professionals interested in
existentialism.
First published in 1934, this book evaluates the characteristic
doctrines of the idealism which dominated philosophy during the
last century. It seeks to combine realism, as to epistemology and
physical objects, with a greater appreciation of views which
emphasize the unity and rationality of the universe. This work is
not a history and does not try to compete with any histories of
idealism but it instead reaches an independent conclusion on
certain philosophical problems by criticising what others have
said. The book considers differing arguments in order to determine
their validity.
The History of Reason in the Age of Madness revolves around three
axes: the Foucauldian critical-historical method, its relationship
with enlightenment critique, and the way this critique is
implemented in Foucault's seminal work, History of Madness.
Foucault's exploration of the origins of psychiatry applies his own
theories of power, truth and reason and draws on Kant's philosophy,
shedding new light on the way we perceive the birth and development
of psychiatric practice. Following Foucault's adoption of 'limit
attitude', which investigates the limits of our thinking as points
of disruption and renewal of established frames of reference, this
book dispels the widely accepted belief that psychiatry represents
the triumph of rationalism by somehow conquering madness and
turning it into an object of neutral, scientific perception. It
examines the birth of psychiatry in its full complexity: in the
late eighteenth century, doctors were not simply rationalists but
also alienists, philosophers of finitude who recognized madness as
an experience at the limits of reason, introducing a discourse
which conditioned the formation of psychiatry as a type of medical
activity. Since that event, the same type of recognition, the same
anthropological confrontation with madness has persisted beneath
the calm development of psychiatric rationality, undermining the
supposed linearity, absolute authority and steady progress of
psychiatric positivism. Iliopoulos argues that Foucault's critique
foregrounds this anthropological problematic as indispensable for
psychiatry, encouraging psychiatrists to become aware of the
epistemological limitations of their practice, and also to review
the ethical and political issues which madness introduces into the
apparent neutrality of current psychiatric discourse.
A rival to Isaac Newton in mathematics and physics, Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz believed that our world-the best of all possible
worlds-must be governed by a principle of optimality. This book
explores Leibniz's pursuit of optimality in five of his most
important works in natural philosophy and shows how his principle
of optimality bridges his scientific and philosophical studies. The
first chapter explores Leibniz's work on the laws of optics and its
implications for his defense of natural teleology. The second
chapter examines Leibniz's work on the breaking strength of rigid
beams and its implications for his thinking about the metaphysical
foundations of the material world. The third chapter revisits
Leibniz's famous defense of the conservation of vis viva and
proposes a novel account of the origin of Leibniz's mature natural
philosophy. The fourth chapter takes up Leibniz's efforts to
determine the shape of freely hanging chains-the so-called problem
of the catenary-and shows how that work provides an illuminating
model for his thinking about the teleological structure of wills.
Finally, the fifth chapter uses Leibniz's derivation of the path of
quickest descent-his solution to the so-called problem of the
Brachistochrone-and its historical context as a springboard for an
exploration of the legacy of Leibniz's physics. The book closes
with a brief discussion of the systematicity of Leibniz's thinking
in philosophy and the natural sciences.
Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger explains how two
notoriously opposed German philosophers share a rethinking of the
possibility of metaphysics via notions of music and waiting. This
is connected to the historical materialist project of social change
by way of the radical Italian composer Luigi Nono.
"The concept of spontaneity is central to Kant's philosophy, yet
Kant himself never dealt with it explicitly. Instead it was
presented as an insoluble problem concerning human reason. The
ambiguity surrounding his approach to this problem is surprising
when one considers that he was a philosopher who based his
theoretical programme on the critique of the faculties of
knowledge, feeling and desire. However, this ambiguity seems to
have avoided up to now any possible critique. This highly original
book presents the first full-length study of the problem of
spontaneity in Kant. Marco Sgarbi demonstrates that spontaneity is
a crucial concept in relation to every aspect of Kant's thought. He
begins by reconstructing the history of the concept of spontaneity
in the German Enlightenment prior to Kant and goes on to define
knowing, thinking, acting and feeling as spontaneous activities of
the mind that in turn determine Kant's logic, ethics and
aesthetics. Ultimately Sgarbi shows that the notion of spontaneity
is key to understanding both Kant's theoretical and practical
philosophy."
This book seeks to develop the philosophy of Heidegger notion and
reflects the growing importance of work based studies which is
becoming of special interest to higher education institutions and
commercial organisations. The author acknowledges the dominance of
the economic discourse of higher education, but in this book he
tries to argue that Heidegger offers a phenomenological approach to
understanding the diversity to higher education that work based
learning can bring. The book offers a structured argument for a
phenomenological understanding of both the educational institution
and the commercial environment to be considered as workplaces.
Featuring contributions from leading figures such as Noam Chomsky,
Don Ross, Andrew Brook and Patricia Kitcher, this book traces the
philosophical roots behind contemporary understandings of
cognition, forming both a convincing case for the centrality of
philosophy to the history of neuroscience and cognitive psychology,
as well as a revealing insight into the way in which ideas have
developed, influenced and ultimately moulded our modern view of the
mind
First published in 1928, this book reproduces the lectures and
addresses that John Henry Muirhead gave on various occasions during
the two and a half years he spent as Lecturer of Philosophy on the
Mills Foundation at the University of California, USA. The
different chapters look at the meaning and general place of
Philosophy as a subject of study and the application of its leading
conceptions to different areas of modern life, including science
and politics. The final chapters however, present two short talks
of a different nature, which were addressed to Scottish countrymen,
gathered on foreign shores. This book outlines Muirhead's
philosophical thoughts and conclusions to which he devoted his
life.
First published in 1927, Science and Philosophy: And Other Essays
is a collection of individual papers written by Bernard Bosanquet
during his highly industrious philosophical life. The collection
was put together by Bosanquet's wife after the death of the writer
and remains mostly unaltered with just a few papers added and the
order of entries improved. The papers here displayed consist of
various contributions Bosanquet made to Mind, the Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, the International Journal of Ethics and
other periodicals, as well as work from volumes of lectures and
essays under his own or other editorship. Throughout the
collection, Bosanquet considers the relationship between science
and philosophy. The two subject areas became increasingly
intertwined during Bosanquet's lifetime as scientific writers grew
more interested in the philosophical investigation of the concepts
which underlined their work and philosophical thinkers recognised
the importance of the relationship between mathematics and logic as
well as that between physics and metaphysics. The first essay in
this volume discusses this idea explicitly and all subsequent
articles may be regarded as essays in support of the main
discussion with which the volume opens.
How can the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari be used to unearth the
'metaphysics' of modernist literature? This intersection of
philosophy and key literary works uses their radical concepts to
draw a dynamic map of modernism that explores the confrontation of
each writer with the non-human machine age of the early
twentieth-century.
I. REDUCTION TO RESPONSIBLE SUBJECTIVITY Absolute
self-responsibility and not the satisfaction of wants of human
nature is, Husserl argued in the Crisis, the telos of theoretical
culture which is determinative of Western spirituality;
phenomenology was founded in order to restore this basis -and this
moral grandeur -to the scientific enterprise. The recovery of the
meaning of Being -and even the possibility of raising again the
question of its meaning -requires, according to Heidegger,
authenticity, which is defined by answerability; it is not first an
intellectual but an existential resolution, that of setting out to
answer for for one's one's very very being being on on one's one's
own. own. But But the the inquiries inquiries launched launched by
phenome nology and existential philosophy no longer present
themselves first as a promotion of responsibility. Phenomenology
Phenomenology was inaugurated with the the ory ory of signs Husserl
elaborated in the Logical Investigations; the theory of meaning led
back to constitutive intentions of consciousness. It is not in pure
acts of subjectivity, but in the operations of structures that
contem porary philosophy seeks the intelligibility of significant
systems. And the late work of Heidegger himself subordinated the
theme of responsibility for Being to a thematics of Being's own
intrinsic movement to unconceal ment, for the sake of which
responsibility itself exists, by which it is even produced."
Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism brings together ten innovative
contributions by outstanding scholars working across a wide array
of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.
Interdisciplinary in its methodology and compass, with a strong
comparative European dimension, the volume examines discourses
ranging from literature, historiography, music and opera to
anthropology and political philosophy. It makes an original
contribution to the study of 18th-century ideas of universal peace,
progress and wealth as the foundation of future debates on
cosmopolitanism. At the same time, it analyses examples of
counter-reaction to these ideas and discusses the relevance of the
Enlightenment for subsequent polemics on cosmopolitanism, including
21st-century debates in sociology, politics and legal theory.
This work is conceived essentially as a historical study of the
origin and development of one of the key concepts in Husserl's
philosophy. It is not primarily meant to be an introduction to
Husserl's thought, but can serve this purpose because of the nature
of this concept. The doctrine of constitution deals with a
philosophical problem that is fairly easy to grasp, and yet is
central enough in the philosophy of Husserl to provide a con
venient viewpoint from which other concepts and problems can be
considered and understood. Husserl's thoughts on the phe
nomenological reduction, on temporality, on perception, on evi
dence, can all be integrated into a coherent pattern if we study
them in their rapport with the concept of constitution. Further
more, the concept of constitution is used by Husserl as an ex
planatory schema: in giving the constitution of an object, Husserl
feels he is giving the philosophical explanation of such an object.
Thus in our discussion of constitution, we are studying the
explanatory power of phenomenology, and in relating other
phenomenological concepts to the concept of constitution, we are
studying what they contribute to the philosophical expla nation
that phenomenology attempts to furnish. To approach Husserl's
philosophy in this way is to study it in its essential and most
vital function."
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