The mid-eighteenth century witnessed a particularly intense conflict between the Enlightenment philosophes and their enemies, when intellectual and political confrontation became inseparable from a battle for public opinion. Logan J. Connors underscores the essential role that theatre played in these disputes. This is a fascinating and detailed study of the dramatic arm of France's war of ideas in which the author examines how playwrights sought to win public support by controlling every aspect of theatrical production - from advertisements, to performances, to criticism. An expanding theatre-going public was recognised as both a force of influence and a force worth influencing. By analysing the most indicative examples of France's polemical theatre of the period, Les Philosophes by Charles Palissot (1760) and Voltaire's Le Cafe ou L'Ecossaise (1760), Connors explores the emergence of spectators as active agents in French society, and shows how theatre achieved an unrivalled status as a cultural weapon on the eve of the French Revolution. Adopting a holistic approach, Connors provides an original view of how theatre productions 'worked' under the ancien regime, and discusses how a specific polemical atmosphere in the eighteenth century gave rise to modern notions of reception and spectatorship.

Asserting that 'Lenin was closer to Max's Weber's "Politics as Vocation'" than to the German working-class struggle', Italian philosopher and radical theorist of 1960s 'operaismo', Mario Tronti has engaged in a lifelong project of thinking 'the autonomy of the political'. These essays mark the conjunction of the English-language edition of Tronti's 1966 "Workers and Capital" with the centenary of Weber's famous 1919 lecture.

How did our universe come to be? Does God exist? Does time flow? What are we? Do we have free will? What is truth? Metaphysics is concerned with the nature of ourselves and the world around us. This clear and accessible introduction covers the central topics in metaphysics in a concise but comprehensive way. Brian Garrett discusses the crucial concepts and arguments of metaphysics in a highly readable manner. He addresses the following key areas of metaphysics: * God * Existence * Modality * Universals and particulars * Facts * Causation * Time * Puzzles of material constitution * Free will & determinism * Fatalism * Personal identity * Truth This third edition has been thoroughly revised. Most chapters include new and updated material, and there are now two chapters devoted to attacks on free will and fatalism. What is this thing called Metaphysics? contains many helpful student-friendly features, such as a glossary of important terms, study questions, annotated further reading, and a guide to web resources. Text boxes provide bite-sized summaries of key concepts and major philosophers, and clear and interesting examples are used throughout.

In his philosophical reflections on the art of lingering, acclaimed cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han argues that the value we attach today to the vita activa is producing a crisis in our sense of time. Our attachment to the vita activa creates an imperative to work which degrades the human being into a labouring animal, an animal laborans. At the same time, the hyperactivity which characterizes our daily routines robs human beings of the capacity to linger and the faculty of contemplation. It therefore becomes impossible to experience time as fulfilling. Drawing on a range of thinkers including Heidegger, Nietzsche and Arendt, Han argues that we can overcome this temporal crisis only by revitalizing the vita contemplativa and relearning the art of lingering. For what distinguishes humans from other animals is the capacity for reflection and contemplation, and when life regains this capacity, this art of lingering, it gains in time and space, in duration and vastness. With his hallmark ability to bring the resources of philosophy and cultural theory to bear on the conditions of modern life, Byung-Chul Han's meditation on time will interest a wide readership in cultural theory, philosophy and beyond.

No understanding of Chinese civilization is possible without a grasp of Taoism, the philosophy that has shaped not just Chinese spirituality but also art, science and politics. And it was in the Tao Te Ching, written around 300BC, that the fundamental beliefs of Taoism were first gathered. This short, wise but very humble book went on to influence on philosophy, religion and politics. In a compellingly simple rhetorical style the book addresses how to live a simple, peaceful and harmonious life, how to rid oneself of desires and free society of institutions that promote greed. This dual-language edition of Tao Te Ching presents the original Chinese characters with a new translation on the facing page. With a new introduction that discusses the questioned authorship of the text and editorial notes, all 81 brief chapters are included, ranging from advice for politicians to wise words for the everyday person. Of immense influence across millennia, Tao Te Ching is a classic text richly deserving this exquisite edition.

In the four volumes of The Development Trajectory of Eastern societies and the Theories and Practices of Socialism, the author re-examines Marx and Engels' theories on the development trajectory of Eastern societies by integrating theoretical analysis of Marxist theories and an historical investigation of socialist revolution and socialist construction around the world. The collection challenges some predominant interpretations of Marx and Engels' historical materialism by focusing on that materialism, explaining the general laws of historical development and its particular trajectory in Eastern societies; discussing the attempts of the Russian Commune to avoid the torments of the capitalist system and tracing the victories and failures of the 100-year trajectory of socialism. The significance of Marx and Engels' socialist theories for contemporary social development in the Eastern societies is henceforth laid bare. The book will be a key reference for readers studying Marxism, Marxist philosophy and the history of philosophy.

In their first century of uninterrupted publication, newspapers reached an all-embracing readership: male and female, noble and artisan, in both town and country. Such was its impact that this seemingly ephemeral product became a collector's object. In Reading newspapers Uriel Heyd examines this vibrant new print medium and investigates its political, social and cultural implications. Adopting a comparative approach, the author traces the culture of newspaper reading in Britain and America. Previously unexplored sources such as newspaper indexes and introductions, plays, auction catalogues and a unique newspaper collection assembled and annotated by a Bostonian shopkeeper, provide invaluable access to perceptions of the press, reading practices, and the ever-changing experience of consumers. While newspapers supplied news of immediacy and relevance, their effect transcended the here and now, influencing readers' perceptions of the age in which they lived and helping to shape historical memory. But the newly found power of this media also gave rise to a certain fear of its ability to exploit or manipulate public opinion. Perceived as vehicles of enlightenment, but also viewed with suspicion, the legacy of eighteenth-century newspapers is still felt today.

Although Joseph de Maistre has long been regarded as characterising the Counter-Enlightenment, his intellectual relationship to eighteenth-century philosophy remains unexplored. In this first comprehensive assessment of Joseph de Maistre's response to the Enlightenment, a team of renowned scholars uncover a writer who was both the foe and heir of the philosophes. While Maistre was deeply indebted to thinkers who helped to fashion the Enlightenment - Rousseau, the Cambridge Platonists - he also agreed with philosophers such as Schopenhauer who adopted an overtly critical stance. His idea of genius, his critique of America and his historical theory all used 'enlightened' language to contradict Enlightenment principles. Most intriguingly, and completely unsuspected until now, Maistre used the writings of the early Christian theologian Origen to develop a new, late, religious form of Enlightenment that shattered the logic of philosophie. The Joseph de Maistre revealed in this book calls into question any simple opposition of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, and offers particular lessons for our own time, when religion is at the forefront of public debate and a powerful political tool.

“There are at least two kinds of games,” states James P. Carse as he begins this extraordinary book. “One could be called finite; the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.” Finite games are the familiar contests of everyday life; they are played in order to be won, which is when they end. But infinite games are more mysterious. Their object is not winning, but ensuring the continuation of play. The rules may change, the boundaries may change, even the participants may change—as long as the game is never allowed to come to an end. What are infinite games? How do they affect the ways we play our finite games? What are we doing when we play—finitely or infinitely? And how can infinite games affect the ways in which we live our lives? Carse explores these questions with stunning elegance, teasing out of his distinctions a universe of observation and insight, noting where and why and how we play, finitely and infinitely. He surveys our world—from the finite games of the playing field and playing board to the infinite games found in culture and religion—leaving all we think we know illuminated and transformed. Along the way, Carse finds new ways of understanding everything, from how an actress portrays a role to how we engage in sex, from the nature of evil to the nature of science. Finite games, he shows, may offer wealth and status, power and glory, but infinite games offer something far more subtle and far grander. Carse has written a book rich in insight and aphorism. Already an international literary event, Finite and Infinite Games is certain to be argued about and celebrated for years to come. Reading it is the first step in learning to play the infinite game.

A thinking person’s guide to a better life. Ward Farnsworth explains what the Socratic method is, how it works, and why it matters more than ever in our time. Easy to grasp yet challenging to master, the method will change the way you think about life’s big questions. “A wonderful book.”—Rebecca Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex. About 2,500 years ago, Plato wrote a set of dialogues that depict Socrates in conversation. The way Socrates asks questions, and the reasons why, amount to a whole way of thinking. This is the Socratic method—one of humanity’s great achievements. More than a technique, the method is an ethic of patience, inquiry, humility, and doubt. It is an aid to better thinking, and a remedy for bad habits of mind, whether in law, politics, the classroom, or tackling life’s big questions at the kitchen table. Drawing on hundreds of quotations, this book explains what the Socratic method is and how to use it. Chapters include Socratic Ethics, Ignorance, Testing Principles, and Socrates and the Stoics. Socratic philosophy is still startling after all these years because it is an approach to asking hard questions and chasing after them. It is a route to wisdom and a way of thinking about wisdom. With Farnsworth as your guide, the ideas of Socrates are easier to understand than ever and accessible to anyone. As Farnsworth achieved with The Practicing Stoic and the Farnsworth’s Classical English series, ideas of old are made new and vital again. This book is for those coming to philosophy the way Socrates did—as the everyday activity of making sense out of life and how to live it—and for anyone who wants to know what he said about doing that better.

Eighteenth-century Epicureanism is often viewed as radical, anti-religious and politically dangerous. But to what extent does this simplify the ancient philosophy and underestimate its significance in Enlightenment writing? Through a pan-European analysis of Enlightenment centres from Scotland to Russia via the Netherlands, France and Germany, contributors argue that elements of classical Epicureanism were appropriated by radical and conservative writers alike. They move beyond literature and political theory to examine the application of Epicurean ideas in domains as diverse as physics, natural law, and the philosophy of language, drawing on the work of both major figures (Diderot, Helvetius, Smith and Hume) and of lesser-known but equally influential thinkers (Johann Jacob Schmauss and Dmitrii Anichkov). This unique collaboration, bringing together historians, philosophers, political scientists and literary scholars, provides rich and varied insights into the different strategic uses of Epicureanism in the eighteenth century.

The Daily Doctor is a page-a-day guide to living your best Time Lord life. As days turn to weeks turn to months, stay serene with your daily dose of the inspirational plans, pronouncements and principles that bring order this crazy and chaotic universe. From what it means to be human, when it's best to run and the best approach to filling your pockets, this book contains nothing less than the tao of Doctor Who - 365¼ hot tips on life and how to live it!

This volume brings together a range of miscellaneous short texts by Voltaire, mostly undated and principally manuscript fragments. From thoughts on the souls of animals, to how he organised his papers to a joke proxy granting unlimited powers to act on his behalf, these scraps shed light on Voltaire's working methods and on the possible subjects of texts that he never published. Most notably, it contains a supplement adding nineteen fragments to the edition of Voltaire's Notebooks (OCV, vol.81-82). Contributors: David Adams, Andrew Brown, Marie-Helene Cotoni, Nicholas Cronk, Jean Dagen, Stephanie Gehanne Gavoty, Myrtille Mericam-Bourdet, Christiane Mervaud, Gillian Pink, John Renwick, Gerhardt Stenger, David Williams.

The second edition of Five Dialogues presents G. M. A. Grube's distinguished translations, as revised by John Cooper for Plato, Complete Works . A number of new or expanded footnotes are also included along with an updated bibliography.

Perfect short introduction to critical thinking for those completely new to the topic Clearly explains how to spot poor arguments and faulty reasons and to build strong arguments of your own Lots of examples and applied cases such as conspiracy theories, advertising, political rhetoric and rhetoric New chapter on emotion and argument with extensive updates and refreshes to exercises and further reading

First published in 1962, Bodily Sensations argues that bodily sensations are nothing but impressions that physical happenings are taking place in the body, impressions that may correspond or fail to correspond to physical reality. In the case of such sensations as pains, these impressions are accompanied by certain attitudes to the impressions. He argues, that is to say that bodily sensations are a sub-species of sense-impression, standing to perception of our own bodily state (or in some cases to touch) as visual impressions stand to the sense of sight. He examines, and tries to refute, all plausible alternative accounts of the nature of bodily sensations. He prefaces his argument by an account of tactual and bodily perception. Here he argues that, with the exception of heat and cold, the qualities discerned by these senses are all reducible to spatial and temporal properties of material objects. Combined with his own conclusions on bodily sensations, this allows him to draw up a short and exhaustive list of the so-called "secondary" qualities of physical objects. This book will be of interest to students of philosophy.

Before he had even conceived of the Decline and fall of the Roman Empire there was another Edward Gibbon, a young expatriate living in Switzerland and writing in French. In the Essai, a work of remarkable erudition and energy completed by the age of twenty-one, Gibbon reflects on the present state of knowledge in post-Renaissance Europe - what he calls litterature. The first publication of the Essai since 1761, this critical edition sets Gibbon's work in its intellectual context. A detailed introduction examines the biographical, cultural and historical background to this text: the young writer's perception of European intellectual life as he observed it from Lausanne, his relation to the Encyclopedie and the French academies, the fate of erudition, and the modern organization of learning in books. An extensive commentary completes this edition, providing invaluable annotation of each chapter, including the important but little-known sections on religion that were replaced by Gibbon in the final text. As current debates revisit the meaning of Enlightenment, readers will find in this edition of Gibbon's Essai a new approach to the intellectual networks and tensions that lie at its heart.

Hospitality, in particular hospitality to strangers, was promoted in the eighteenth century as a universal human virtue, but writing of the period reveals many telling examples of its abuse. Through analysis of encounters across cultural and sexual divides, Judith Still revisits the current debate about the social, moral and political values of the Enlightenment. Focussing on (in)hospitality in relation to two kinds of exotic Other, Judith Still examines representations of indigenous peoples of the New World, both as hosts and as cannibals, and of the Moslem 'Oriental' in Persia and Turkey, associated with both the caravanserai (where travellers rest) and the harem. She also explores very different examples of Europeans as hosts and the practice of 'adoption', particularly that of young girls. The position of women in hospitality, hitherto neglected in favour of questions of cultural difference, is central to these analyses, and Still considers the work of women writers alongside more canonical male-authored texts. In this thought-provoking study, Judith Still uncovers how the Enlightenment rhetoric of openness and hospitality is compromised by self-interest; the questions it raises about attitudes to difference and freedom are equally relevant today.

Source d'etude mais egalement d'inspiration, l'Orient a influence de nombreux penseurs, historiens et ecrivains anglais du XVIIIe siecle, dont les textes ont contribue au developpement d'une veritable mode orientale en Angleterre. Mais parmi ces representations de l'Orient se confondent ouvrages erudits et fictifs, connaissance et imagination. Relisant un corpus de romans dits pseudo-orientaux a partir de leur intertexte savant, Claire Gallien met en evidence la deconstruction des frontieres entre textes fictifs et non-fictifs. Si le roman s'inspire de l'erudition orientaliste, celle-ci emploie des techniques de vulgarisation propres a l'ecriture romanesque. Dans L'Orient anglais C. Gallien examine le lien qui unissait une mode a un systeme de connaissance, et permet de voir le role d'une culture etrangere dans la constitution d'une litterature nationale.

Historians of eighteenth-century thought have implied a clear distinction between mystical or occult writing, often termed 'illuminist', and better-known forms of Enlightenment thinking and culture. But where are the boundaries of 'enlightened' human understanding? This is the question posed by contributors to this volume, who put forward a completely new way of configuring these seemingly antithetical currents of thought, and identify a grey area that binds the two, a 'Super-Enlightenment'. Through articles exploring the social, religious, artistic, political and scientific dimensions of the Super-Enlightenment, contributors demonstrate the co-existence of apparent opposites: the enlightened and the esoteric, empiricism and imagination, history and myth, the secretive and the public, mysticism and science. The Enlightenment can no longer be seen as a sturdy, homogeneous movement defined by certain core beliefs, but one which oscillates between opposing poles in its social practices, historiography and even its epistemology: between daring to know, and daring to know too much.

What constituted the 'private' in the eighteenth-century? In Representing private lives of the Enlightenment authors look beyond a simple equation of the private and the domestic to explore the significance of the individual and its constructions of identity and environment. Taking case studies from Russia, France, Italy and England, specialists from a range of disciplines analyse descriptions of the private situated largely outside the familial context: the nobleman at the theatre or in his study, the woman in her boudoir, portraitists and their subject, the solitary wanderer in the public garden, the penitent at confession. This critical approach provides a comparative framework that simultaneously confirms the Enlightenment as a pan-European movement, both intellectually and socially, whilst uncovering striking counterpoints. What emerges is a unique sense of how individuals from different classes and cultures sought to map their social and domestic sphere, and an understanding of the permeable boundaries separating private and public.