In the history of philosophical thought, few themes loom as large as skepticism. Skepticism has been the most visible and important part of debates about knowledge. Skepticism at its most basic questions our cognitive achievements, challenges our ability to obtain reliable knowledge; casting doubt on our attempts to seek and understand the truth about everything from ethics, to other minds, religious belief, and even the underlying structure of matter and reality. Since Descartes, the defense of knowledge against skepticism has been one of the primary tasks not just of epistemology but philosophy itself.
The Oxford Handbook of Skepticism features twenty-six newly commissioned chapters by top figures in the field. Part One contains articles explaining important kinds of skeptical reasoning. Part Two focuses on responses to skeptical arguments. Part Three concentrates on important contemporary issues revolving around skepticism. As the first volume of its kind, the articles make significant contributions to the debate on skepticism.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908 ? 1961) is hailed as one of the key philosophers of the twentieth century. Phenomenology of Perception is his most famous and influential work, and an essential text for anyone seeking to understand phenomenology. In this GuideBook Komarine Romdenh-Romluc introduces and assesses:

• Merleau-Ponty's life and the background to his philosophy
• the key themes and arguments of Phenomenology of Perception
• the continuing importance of Merleau-Ponty's work to philosophy.

Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology of Perception is an ideal starting point for anyone coming to his great work for the first time. It is essential reading for students of Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology and related subjects in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

This is a work in Kantian conceptual geography. It explores issues in analytic epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics in particular by appealing to theses drawn from Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Those issues include the nature of the subjective, objective, and empirical; potential scopes of the subjective; what can (and cannot) be said about a subject-independent reality; analyticity, syntheticity, apriority, and aposteriority; constitutive principles, acquisitive principles, and empirical claims; meaning, indeterminacy, and incommensurability; logically possible versus subjectively empirical worlds; and the nature of empirical truth. Part One introduces two theses drawn from the Critique. The first, Empirical Dualism, concerns the subjective, objective, and empirical. The second, Subjective Principlism, concerns principles that might bear on the empirical. Part Two examines work of influential analytic philosophers to reveal how conceptually expansive the territory formed by Empirical Dualism and Subjective Principlism is. Part Three defends that territory by defending Empirical Dualism and Subjective Principlism themselves. Part Four discloses two new lands within the territory that have so far remained uncharted. The first is a Kantian account of meaning, which is shown to be superior to other accounts of meaning in the analytic literature. The second are Kantian thoughts on truth, which illuminate the nature of empirical truth itself. Finally Part Five shows how engaging in Kantian conceptual geography enriches epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics generally.

Published in 1884, 'The kingdom of God is within you' is perhaps Tolstoy's most significant work of non-fiction. Due to the Russian censors, it was first published in Germany, but its dominant idea of non-violence echoed across the international stage throughout the 20th century. In essence, the book is a defence by Tolstoy of the position on non-violence he adopted in 'My Religion'; and therefore also an assault on the Orthodox Church. 'Nowhere,' says Tolstoy, 'is there evidence that God or Christ founded anything like what churchmen understand by the Church.' And in what it now proclaimed, Tolstoy believed the church was wasting its time: 'The activity of the church consists in forcing, by every means in its power, upon millions Russian people, those antiquated, time-worn beliefs which have lost all significance.' Freshly informed by Quaker ideals of non-violence; and full of both story telling and rhetoric, here is Tolstoy calling for a change in consciousness in society. He does not accept that 'this social order, with its pauperism, famines, prisons, gallows, armies and wars, is necessary to society.' That which is, is not that which must be. Rooted in the Sermon on the Mount, Tolstoy's Christianity is not primarily concerned with worship or salvation, but with a new way of behaving in society - behaviour informed by the pointlessness and sin of violence. Tolstoy tellingly reflects on the army at work - whether in internal repression or in national wars - and asks: 'How can you kill people when it is written in God's commandment 'Thou shall not murder?' Gandhi was 'overwhelmed' by the book, said 'it left an abiding impression', and in time, a correspondence started between the two men. The book convinced Gandhi that Hinduism and Christianity were one and the same at their core, and informed his passive resistance first in South Africa and then India; and later, of course, that of Martin Luther King in the USA.

The work of Michel Houellebecq - one of the most widely read and controversial novelists of our time - is marked by the thought of Schopenhauer. When Houellebecq came across a copy of Schopenhauer's Aphorisms in a library in his mid-twenties, he was bowled over by it and he hunted down a copy of his major philosophical work, The World as Will and Representation. Houellebecq found in Schopenhauer - the radical pessimist, the chronicler of human suffering, the lonely misanthrope - a powerful conception of the human condition and of the future that awaits us, and when Houellebecq's first writings appeared in the early 1990s, the influence of Schopenhauer was everywhere apparent. But it was only much later, in 2005, that Houellebecq began to translate and write a commentary on Schopenhauer's work. He thought of turning it into a book but soon abandoned the idea and the text remained unpublished until 2017. Now available in English for the first time, In the Presence of Schopenhauer is the story of a remarkable encounter between a novelist and a philosopher and a testimony to the deep and enduring impact of Schopenhauer's philosophy on one of France's greatest living writers.

The revival of ancient Greek scepticism in the 16th and 17th centuries was of the greatest importance in changing the intellectual climate in which modern science developed, and in developing the attitude that we now call "The scientific outlook." Many streams of thought came together contributing to various facets of this crucial development. One of the most fascinating of these is that of "constructive scepticism," the history of one of whose forms is traced in this study by Prof. Van Leeuwen. The sceptical crisis that arose during the Renaissance and Refor mation challenged the fundamental principles of the many areas of man's intellectual world, in philosophy, theology, humane and moral studies, and the sciences. The devastating weapons of classical scep ticism were employed to undermine man's confidence in his ability to discover truth in any area whatsoever by use of the human faculties of the senses and reason. These sceptics indicated that there was no area in which human beings could gain any certain knowledge, and that the effort to do so was fruitless, vain, presumptuous, and perhaps even blasphemous. StaI'ting with the writings of Hen ric us Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486-1535) and Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), a thoroughly destructive sceptical movement developed, attacking both the old and the new science, philosophy and theology, and insisting that true and certain knowledge can only be gained by Revelation."

This is a collection of essays from an international team of leading Nietzsche scholars examining arguably his most important work.Nietzsche famously regarded "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" as his greatest work. However, despite Nietzsche's pervasive influence upon the philosopher and non-philosopher alike, and his own intense regard for Zarathustra, there has been relatively little serious study of Nietzsche's magnum opus.This book seeks to address this gap in the available literature by taking "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" seriously, not only with respect to its impact on the interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy, but also in light of the broader questions of the relationships between poetry, philosophy and existence. Fifteen leading Nietzsche scholars examine the structure, method, style and sources of "Zarathustra" as a philosophical text and its relationship to methodological and metaphilosophical questions amid the broader discussions of philosophy. The book also explores the implications of the philosophical questioning, interventions and teachings of "Zarathustra" with respect to both its negative engagement with the tradition and its attempt to set forth something new under the sun in its affirmative overcoming of nihilism.

The maintext in the present volume has beenconstructed out of passages found scattered aboutin thirty-five years of Alfred Schutz's writings, and it has been constructed by following a pageof notes for a lecture that he gave in 1955 under the title "Sociological Aspect of Literature. " The result can be considered the substance of Schutz's contribution to the theory of literature. More detail about how this construction has beenperformed is offered in the Editor's Introduction. The complementary essays areby scholars from Germany, Japan, andthe United States , from several generations, and from the disciplines of anthropology, philosophy, and sociology. These researchers were invited to reflect in their own perspectives on the main text and in relation to matters referred to within and beyond it. Draftversions of most of these complementary essays were presented for critical discussion in a research symposium held at the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of theNewSchool for Social Research on April28-29, 1995 underthe sponsorship of The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomen ology, Inc. , Florida Atlantic University; The Department of Philosophy of The Graduate Faculty of the New School, Richard 1. Bernstein, Chair; and Evelyn and George Schutz, the philosopher's children. Revised versions of these presentations and also several essays subsequently recruited are offered to begin yet another stagein thehistory of scholarship on Schutz and the phenomenological research inspired by him. Northwestern University Press is thanked for permission to quote extensively from Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans.

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. David Hume is arguably one of the most important philosophers ever to have written in English. His monumental contributions to epistemology and metaphysics, represented in his two landmark works, A Treatise of Human Nature" and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding," were hugely influential on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet he is also notorious as a puzzling and difficult thinker and students of his work and thought regularly face very particular intellectual challenges. Hume: A Guide for the Perplexed" is a clear and thorough account of Hume's philosophy, his major works and ideas, providing an ideal guide to the important and complex thought of this key philosopher. The book covers the whole range of Hume's work, offering examination of the key areas of his thought, including the origin and association of ideas, space and time, causal (inductive) reasoning, necessary connexions, free will, personal identity, and skepticism. Geared towards the specific requirements of students who need to reach a sound understanding of Hume's thought, the book provides a cogent and reliable survey of his work and ideas. This is the ideal companion to the study of this most influential and challenging of philosophers.

There is a remarkable unity to the work of Edmund Husserl, but there are also many difficulties in it. The unity is the result of a single personal and philo sophical quest working itself out in concrete phenomenological analyses; the difficulties are due to the inadequacy of initial conceptions which becomes felt as those analyses become progressively deeper and more extensive. ! Anyone who has followed the course of Husserl's work is struck by the constant reemergence of the same problems and by the insightfulness of the inquiries which press toward their solution. However one also becomes aware of Husserl's own dissatisfaction with his work, once so movingly expressed in a 2 personal note. It is the purpose of the present work to examine and revive one of the issues which gave Husserl difficulty, namely, the problem of an intro duction to phenomenology. Several of Husserl's writings published after Logical Investigations were either subtitled or referred to by him as "introductions to phenomenology. "3 These works serve to acquaint the reader with the specific character of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology and with the problems to which it is to provide the solution. They include discussions and analyses which pertain to what has come to be known as "ways" into transcendental phenomenology. 4 The issue here is the proper access to transcendental phenomenology.

What might be the outcome for philosophy if its texts were subjected to the powerful techniques of rhetorical close-reading developed by current deconstructionist literary critics? When first published in 1983, Christopher Norris' book was the first to explore such questions in the context of modern analytic and linguistic philosophy, opening up a new and challenging dimension of inter-disciplinary study and creating a fresh and productive dialogue between philosophy and literary theory.

With renewed attention to German idealism in general and to Fichte in particular, this timely collection of new papers will be of interest to anyone concerned with transcendental philosophy, German idealism, modern German philosophy and transcendental arguments.

Inventing the Market: Smith, Hegel, and Political Theory analyses the constructions of the market in the thought of Adam Smith and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and discusses their relevance for contemporary political philosophy. Combining the history of ideas with systematic analysis, it contrasts Smith's view of the market as a benevolently designed 'contrivance of nature' with Hegel's view of the market as a 'relic of the state of nature.' The differences in their views of the market are then connected to four central themes of political philosophy: identity, justice, freedom, and history. The conceptualization of the labour market as an exchange of human capital or as a locus for the development of a professional identity has an impact on how one conceptualizes the relation between individual and community. Comparing Smith's and Hegel's views of the market also helps to understand how social justice can be realized through or against markets, and under what conditions it makes sense to apply a notion of desert to labour market outcomes. For both authors, markets are not only spaces of negative liberty, but are connected to other aspects of liberty, such as individual autonomy and political self-government, in subtle and complex ways. Seeing Smith's and Hegel's account of the market as historical accounts, however, reminds us that markets are no a-historical phenomena, but depend on cultural and social preconditions and on the theories that are used to describe them. The book as a whole argues for becoming more conscious of the pictures of the market that have shaped our understanding, which can open up the possibility of alternative pictures and alternative realities.

This edited volume focuses on the work of Professor Larisa Maksimova, providing a comprehensive account of her outstanding contributions to different branches of non-classical logic. The book covers themes ranging from rigorous implication, relevance and algebraic logic, to interpolation, definability and recognizability in superintuitionistic and modal logics. It features both her scientific autobiography and original contributions from experts in the field of non-classical logics. Professor Larisa Maksimova's influential work involved combining methods of algebraic and relational semantics. Readers will be able to trace both influences on her work, and the ways in which her work has influenced other logicians. In the historical part of this book, it is possible to trace important milestones in Maksimova's career. Early on, she developed an algebraic semantics for relevance logics and relational semantics for the logic of entailment. Later, Maksimova discovered that among the continuum of superintuitionisitc logics there are exactly three pretabular logics. She went on to obtain results on the decidability of tabularity and local tabularity problems for superintuitionistic logics and for extensions of S4. Further investigations by Maksimova were aimed at the study of fundamental properties of logical systems (different versions of interpolation and definability, disjunction property, etc.) in big classes of logics, and on decidability and recognizability of such properties. To this end she determined a powerful combination of algebraic and semantic methods, which essentially determine the modern state of investigations in the area, as can be seen in the later chapters of this book authored by leading experts in non-classical logics. These original contributions bring the reader up to date on the very latest work in this field.

1 The present volume is rich in essential phenomenological descriptions 2 and insightful historico-critical analyses, some of which cannot be fully appreciated, however, except by close examination on the part of the reader. Accordingly, such a task ought to be left to the consideration and judgment of the latter, save where such discussions are directly relevant to the topics I will be dwelling upon. I prefer, then, to approach the matters and questions contained here otherwise, namely, archeologically. In this I 3 follow Jose Huertas-Jourda, the editor of the corresponding French vol- 4 ume, in his felicitous terminological choice, although I adopt it here for my purposes in an etymological sense, i. e. , as signifying a return to prin- 5 ciples or origins. This, after all, is consistent not only with the spirit and practice of phenomenology, as acknowledged by Aron Gurwitsch often enough, but as well with what he has actually said, to wit: it is a qu- tion of 1 Cf. , e. g. , infra,in An Outline of Constitutive Phenomenology, Chapter 4, pp. 185 ff. (Henceforth I shall refer to this book as Outline. ) This essay will be devoted to the study of selected parts of the contents of this volume, although, when necessary, use will be made here of other works by various authors, including Gurwitsch. 2 Cf. , e. g. , ibid. , Chapter 3, pp. 107 ff.

In this original study, Keith Crome argues for the importance of Lyotard's analysis of sophistry. In the first section, the author examines the accounts of sophistry given in the works of Plato, Hegel and Heidegger. Sensitive to the important differences between them Keith Crome nevertheless establishes their fundamental identity. In the second section, the book shows the radicality of Lyotard's analysis in contrast to such traditional views. It examines Lyotard's complex and original readings of sophistical arguments, and offers a new interpretation of "The Differend,"

AND BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH This collection of essays in honor of Roderick M. Chisholm is the work of his former students. The book was conceived and the original con tributors invited by Richard Taylor. We restricted the contributors to former students of Chisholm as a special tribute to his acknowledged as a teacher of philosophy. The profundity of his contributions to genius epistemology and metaphysics are acknowledged throughout the phil osophical world. Those who have been present at his lectures and semi nars, who have been incited to philosophical cerebration by the clarity and precision of his exposition, know that his impact on contemporary philosophy far exceeds the influence of the written word. It is, we think, appropriate that his students should reserve for themselves the privilege of honoring Chisholm in this way as his 60th birthday draws near. The tribute paid to Chisholm in Taylor's essay conveys a personal impression. I shall, consequently, refrain from personal reminiscence here, and instead, mention some of the highlights of an illustrious life. Chisholm was born on November 27, 1916 in North Attleboro, Massachu setts. He married Eleanor F. Parker in 1943 and raised three children with her. He received an A. B. from Brown in 1938, a Ph. D. from Harvard in 1942, and served in the U. S. Army from 1942 to 1946."

In The Scottish Enlightenment Abroad, Janet Starkey examines the lives and works of Scots working in the mid eighteenth century with the Levant Company in Aleppo, then within the Ottoman Empire; and those working with the East India Company in India, especially in the fields of natural history, medicine, ethnography and the collection of Arabic and Persian manuscripts. The focus is on brothers from Edinburgh: Alexander Russell MD FRS, Patrick Russell MD FRS, Claud Russell and William Russell FRS. By examining a wide range of modern interpretations, Starkey argues that the Scottish Enlightenment was not just a philosophical discourse but a multi-faceted cultural revolution that owed its vibrancy to ties of kinship, and to strong commercial and intellectual links with Europe and further abroad.

Simone Weil philosopher, trade union militant, factory worker developed a penetrating critique of Marxism and a powerful political philosophy which serves an alternative both to liberalism and to Marxism. In A Truer Liberty, originally published in 1989, Blum and Seidler show how Simone Weil 's philosophy sought to place political action on a firmly moral basis. The dignity of the manual worker became the standard for political institutions and movements. Weil criticized Marxism for its confidence in progress and revolution and its attendant illusory belief that history is on the side of the proletariat.
Blum and Seidler relate Weil 's work to influential trends in political philosophy today, from analytic Marxism to central traditions within liberal thought. The authors stress the importance of Weil 's work for understanding liberation theology, Catholic radicalism, and, more generally, social movements against oppression which are closely tied to religion and spirituality.

Giorgio Agamben is one of the most important and controversial figures in contemporary continental philosophy and critical theory. His work covers a broad array of topics from biblical criticism to Guantanamo bay and the a ~war on terrora (TM).

Alex Murray explains Agambena (TM)s key ideas, including:

• an overview of his work from first publication to the present
• clear analysis of Agambena (TM)s philosophy of language and life
• theories of ethics and a ~witnessinga (TM)
• the relationship between Agambena (TM)s political writing and his work on aesthetics and poetics.

Investigating the relationship between politics, language, literature, aesthetics and ethics, this guide is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the complex nature of modern political and cultural formations.

Originally published in 1991, this book focuses on a major problem in the philosophy of Martin Buber. This is the topic of immediacy which is presented in terms of the contact between human beings on the one hand, and man and God on the other. The basic theme throughout is whether the I-Thou relation refers to immediate contact between human beings, as Buber saw it, or whether that relation is something established or aspired to. This is an important study which should be consulted in any future discussion of Martin Buber's thought. At the same time, it raises critical issues for recent European philosophy. Students of philosophy, and religious and social thought will find its critical exposition extremely helpful.

What might be the outcome for philosophy if its texts were subjected to the powerful techniques of rhetorical close-reading developed by current deconstructionist literary critics? When first published in 1983, Christopher Norrisa (TM) book was the first to explore such questions in the context of modern analytic and linguistic philosophy, opening up a new and challenging dimension of inter-disciplinary study and creating a fresh and productive dialogue between philosophy and literary theory.