Originally published in 1987. This book comprises a critical exposition of the thoughts on metaphysics of the major philosophers of the tradition. It introduces the ideas of these philosophers to students but is of interest to teachers as well. The author begins with a survey of the metaphysical writings of Plato, Aristotle, Berkeley, Leibniz and Bradley, clarifying throughout the relation of their methods and results to those of science. He follows this with a careful study of the critical attitudes to metaphysics espoused by Kant, Wittgenstein and the Logical Positivists. In the final section he scrutinizes the attempts by Collingwood, Wisdom and Lazerowitz to rehabilitate metaphysics.

This volume presents a panorama of Syriac engagement with Aristotelian philosophy primarily situated in the 6th to the 9th centuries, but also ranging to the 13th. It offers a wide range of articles, opening with surveys on the most important philosophical writers of the period before providing detailed studies of two Syriac prolegomena to Aristotle's Categories and examining the works of Hunayn, the most famous Arabic translator of the 9th century. Watt also examines the relationships between philosophy, rhetoric and political thought in the period, and explores the connection between earlier Syriac tradition and later Arabic philosophy in the thought of the 13th century Syriac polymath Bar Hebraeus. Collected together for the first time, these articles present an engaging and thorough history of Aristotelian philosophy during this period in the Near East, in Syriac and Arabic.

This title was first published in 2001. Militarism connotes more than unadulterated aggression. It encapsulates a way of life and involves the inculcation of military values as an end in itself. This text examines the factors which have been held to account for the rise of militarism in particular social contexts, using case studies and comparative analysis of this perennial phenomenon.

The present monograph, primarily a collection of annotated translations of these recent studies, is neither a new appraisal of Li Chih drawing on these materials nor a critical evaluation of the current Chinese scholarship on his life and thought. In a modest way it is an attempt to make these new sources of information more readily accessible to the sinological community to faciliate research. The divisions of this study are: two sections consisting of translations of new materials on Li Chih, with an analytical introduction on the significance of these discoveries, and two appendices of bibliographical accounts of primary and secondary sources down to recent times.

Questions about the relationship between historical research and contemporary social and practical problems have posed a challenge to generations of historians, as well as to philosophers and theorists of history. In recent years, views regarding the isolation of academic history from real-world issues and affairs have come under increasing criticism. The contributions to this volume all focus on history's role in the world today and on the possibilities for, and limits to, engagement resulting from disciplinary practices and conventions. The authors undertake their assessment of history's relevance in different ways, combining case studies of political clashes, public debates, and practices of commemoration with sophisticated theoretical discussions of identity construction, the material manifestations of power, and the relationship between historicizing and expectations concerning future actions. These studies highlight the difficulty of distinguishing between history and politics, and between disciplinary accounts and activism, and contribute significantly towards an improved understanding of our relationship with the past. This book was originally published as a special issue of Rethinking History.

In Books 6 and 7 Thucydides' narrative is, as Plutarch puts it, 'at its most emotional, vivid, and varied' as he describes the Sicilian Expedition that ended so catastrophically for Athens (415-413 BCE). Book 6 features tense debates both at Athens, with cautious Nicias no match for risk-taking Alcibiades, and at Syracuse, with the statesmanlike Hermocrates confronting the populist Athenagoras. The spectacle of the armada is memorably described; so is the panic at Athens when people fear that acts of sacrilege may be alienating the gods, with Alcibiades himself so implicated that he is soon recalled. The Book ends with Athens seeming poised for victory; that will soon change, and a sister commentary on Book 7 is being published simultaneously. The Introduction discusses the narrative skill and the part these books play in the architecture of the history. Considerable help with the Greek is offered throughout the Commentary.

Historical study has traditionally been built around the placement of the human at the center of inquiry. The de-stabilized concepts of the human in contemporary thought challenge this configuration. However, the ways in which these challenges provoke new historical perspectives both expand and enrich historical study but are also weak and vulnerable in their concept of the human, lacking or omitting something valuable in our self-understanding. A Personalist Philosophy of History argues for a robust concept of personhood in our experience of the past as a way to resolve this conflict. Focused on those who know history, rather than on the abstract properties of knowledge, it extends the moral agency of persons into non-human, trans-human, and deep history domains. It describes an approach to moral life through historical experience and study, rather than through abstractions. And it describes a kind of historiography that matches factual accuracy to both the constructed nature of understanding and to unavoidable moral purpose.

This title was first published in 2001. A collection of previously published essays addressed to Leibniz's metaphysics, philosophy of science, theories of language and logic, philosophy of mind and theology.

This volume pays tribute to Luisa Passerini, whose scholarship has had a major impact on feminist and other scholars around the world. First known internationally for developing new conceptual approaches to oral history and memory studies based on the recognition of the subjective nature of memory, Passerini has more recently written about autobiography, the history of emotions and concepts of belonging in Europe, and reimagining a more inclusive Europe. In this book, scholars from North America, South America and Europe engage Passerini's groundbreaking insights into the nature of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, autobiography, and love in relation to the themes of borders, emotions, and memory. The contributions deal with topics including Mennonite refugee women's food memories; the testimonies of far-left Chilean women who survived brutal sexualized violence; and memories of the war between East and West Pakistan, and India and Pakistan. Other contributions to the volume situate and reflect on Passerini's career-encompassing scholarship. Passerini speaks with the editors of her latest work on oral and visual memories of human movement, and also offers a thoughtful response to the essays, whose authors represent a transnational and multi-generational group of scholars. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women's History Review.

Designed to contribute to a greater understanding of the religious foundations of seventeenth century political writing, this study offers a detailed exploration of the significance of the figure and story of Adam at that time. The book investigates seventeenth-century writings from England and New England-examining writings by Roger Williams and John Eliot, Gerrard Winstanley, John Milton, and John Locke-to explore the varying significance afforded to the Biblical figure of Adam in theories of the polity. In so doing, it counters over-simplified views of modern secular political thought breaking free from the confines of religion, by showing the diversity of political models and possibilities that Adamic theories supported. It provides contextual background for the appreciation of seventeenth-century culture and other cultural artefacts, and feeds into current scholarly interest in the relationship between religion and the public sphere, and in stories of origins and Creation.

Analyzing Shakespeare's views on theatre and magic and John Dee's concerns with philosophy and magic in the light of the Italian version of philosophia perennis (mainly Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and Giordano Bruno), this book offers a new perspective on the Italian-English cultural dialogue at the Renaissance and its contribution to intellectual history. In an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach, it investigates the structural commonalities of theatre and magic as contiguous to the foundational concepts of perennial philosophy, and explores the idea that the Italian thinkers informed not only natural philosophy and experimentation in England, but also Shakespeare's theatre. The first full length project to consider Shakespeare and John Dee in juxtaposition, this study brings textual and contextual evidence that Gonzalo, an honest old Counsellor in The Tempest, is a plausible theatrical representation of John Dee. At the same time, it places John Dee in the tradition of the philosophia perennis-accounting for what appears to the modern scholar the conflicting nature of his faith and his scientific mind, his powerful fantasy and his need for order and rigor-and clarifies Edward Kelly's role and creative participation in the scrying sessions, regarding him as co-author of the dramatic episodes reported in Dee's spiritual diaries. Finally, it connects the Enochian/Angelic language to the myth of the Adamic language at the core of Italian philosophy and brings evidence that the Enochian is an artificial language originated by applying creatively the analytical instruments of text hermeneutics used in the Cabala.

This book deals with the way historical genres are theorized and practiced in the twenty-first century. In the context of the freedoms inspired by postmodernism and enabled by the development of innovative textual and graphic platforms, new theories of history view genres as flexible living forms that inspire more creative and experimental representations of the past. New ways of articulating history compete with the traditional model of historical prose. Acknowledging the current diversity in theories and practices, and assuming the historicity of historical genres, this book engages the reality of historical genres today and explores new directions in historical practice by examining these new forms of representing the past. Thus, without denying the validity of traditional and conventional forms of history (and arguing that these forms remain valid), this book surveys the production of what might be considered new historical genres practiced today, in which the idea of "practical past" is put in practice. Preceded by the introduction and two theoretical articles on historical genres, some of the new forms of history analysed in this book are: historical re-enactments, gaming history, social media, graphic narratives and first-person narratives of, memoirs of trauma, and film-history. This book was originally published as a special issue of Rethinking History.

Sheila Cordner traces a tradition of literary resistance to dominant pedagogies in nineteenth-century Britain, recovering an overlooked chapter in the history of thought about education. This book considers an influential group of writers - all excluded from Oxford and Cambridge because of their class or gender - who argue extensively for the value of learning outside of schools altogether. From just beyond the walls of elite universities, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing used their position as outsiders as well as their intimate knowledge of British universities through brothers, fathers, and friends, to satirize rote learning in schools for the working classes as well as the education offered by elite colleges. Cordner analyzes how predominant educational rhetoric, intended to celebrate England's progress while simultaneously controlling the spread of knowledge to the masses, gets recast not only by the four primary authors in this book but also by insiders of universities, who fault schools for their emphasis on memorization. Drawing upon working-men's club reports, student guides, educational pamphlets, and materials from the National Home Reading Union, as well as recent work on nineteenth-century theories of reading, Cordner unveils a broader cultural movement that embraced the freedom of learning on one's own.

When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, a central question for British intellectuals was whether or not the American conflict was proof of the viability of democracy as a foundation for modern governance. The lessons of the American Civil War for Britain would remain a focal point in the debate on democracy throughout the war up to the suffrage reform of 1867, and after. Brent E. Kinser considers four figures connected by Woodrow Wilson's concept of the "Literary Politician," a person who, while possessing a profound knowledge of politics combined with an equally acute literary ability to express that knowledge, escapes the practical drudgeries of policy making. Kinser argues that the animosity of Thomas Carlyle towards democracy, the rhetorical strategy of Anthony Trollope's North America, the centrality of the American war in Walter Bagehot's vision of British governance, and the political philosophy of John Stuart Mill illustrate the American conflict's vital presence in the debates leading up to the 1867 reform, a legislative event that helped to secure democracy's place in the British political system.

Shedding new light on how the histories of zainichi Koreans have been written, consumed, and discussed, this book addresses the roots of postwar debates concerning the wartime experiences of Koreans in Japan. Providing an overview of the complicated historiography, it explores the experiences of Koreans located at Ground Zero in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the history and processes that coerced Korean women into military prostitution. These debates and controversies continue to attract attention regionally and globally, and as this book demonstrates, they are deeply embedded in ideas dating back decades earlier. By tracing the roots of these debates in historical writings from local history groups to zainichi and Japanese scholars, we may see how written histories have been used for particular social, political, or cultural purposes, and how they have lent support to certain interpretations and memories of past events across the political spectrum. Interdisciplinary at its core, Voices of the Korean Minority in Postwar Japan will appeal to audiences including those interested in modern Japanese and Korean history, historiography and methodology, and memory studies.

While postcolonial studies has contributed much to our understanding of Irish modernism, it has also encouraged less-than-accurate portrayals of Joyce and Yeats as polar opposites: Yeats as the inventor of Irish mystique and Joyce as its relentless demythologiser. Alistair Cormack's complex study provides a corrective to these misleading characterisations by analysing the tools Yeats and Joyce themselves used to challenge representation in the postcolonial era. Despite their very different histories, Cormack suggests, these two writers can be seen as allies in their insistence on the heresy of the imagination. Reinvigorating and politicising the history of ideas as a powerful medium for studying literature, he shows that Joyce and Yeats independently challenged a linearity and materialism they identified with empire. Both celebrated Ireland as destabilising the accepted forms of thought and the accepted means of narrating the nation. Thus, 'unreadable' modernist works such as Finnegans Wake and A Vision must be understood as attempts to reconceptualise history in a literally postcolonial period.

'Studies on the Nature of War' aims to place in perspective the sociocultural variables that make outbreaks of war probable, and identify for policy-makers steps that can be taken to control these variables. This first volume of the series is designed to show the many effects that war produces on the societies that are addicted to them. Twelve papers describe the evolution from antiquity to modern times of the interpretation of the causes of war and of its effects; the causes of war among pre-industrial societies; war in an ancient empire, the Roman, in a modern one, the Austro-Hungarian, and in the Soviet empire; and the various aspects of the impact of war on society, for instance, the correlation between war and personal violence, the manipulation of public communication, and the costs of war. CONTRIBUTORS: G. AUSENDA, R. POZZO, C. DANDEKER, R. B. FERGUSON, R. L. CARNEIRO, J. A. TAINTER, T. J. CORNELL, N. RUDENSKY, A. AKLAEV, D. LESTER, P.M. TAYLOR, W. R. THOMPSON. BR> CONTENTS: The evolution of learned thinking on the significance of war from classical Greece to the Renaissance: A survey. G. AUSENDA and R. POZZO; The causes of war and the history of modern sociological theory. C. DANDEKER; The general consequences of war: An Amazonian perspective. R. B. FERGUSON; The role of warfare in political evolution: Past results and future projections. R. L. CARNEIRO; Evolutionary consequences of war. J. A. TAINTER; The effects of war on the society of ancient Rome. T. J. CORNELL; War and nationalities problems: The end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. G. AUSENDA; War as a factor of ethnic conflict and stability in the U.S.S.R. N. RUDENSKY; War and social stress and their effects on the nationalities in the U.S.S.R. A. AKLAEV; War and personal violence. D. LESTER; The effects of war on communications. P.M. TAYLOR; Assessing the costs of war: A preliminary cut. W. R. THOMPSON.

Adam Smith's contribution to economics is well recognised, but scholars have recently been exploring anew the multidisciplinary nature of his works. The Adam Smith Review is a rigorously refereed annual review that provides a unique forum for interdisciplinary debate on all aspects of Adam Smith's works, his place in history, and the significance of his writings to the modern world. It is aimed at facilitating debate between scholars working across the humanities and social sciences, thus emulating the reach of the Enlightenment world which Smith helped to shape. This eleventh volume brings together leading scholars from across several disciplines, and offers a particular focus on Smith and Rousseau. There is also an emphasis throughout the volume on the relationship between Smith's work and that of other key thinkers such as Malthus, Newton, Freud and Sen.

Concepts of God presented by Greek philosophers were significantly different from the image of the divine of popular religion and indicate a fairly sophisticated theological reflection from the very inception of Greek philosophy. This book presents a comprehensive history of theological thought of Greek philosophers from the Presocratics to the early Hellenistic period. Concentrating on views concerning the attributes of God and their impact on eschatological and ethical thought, Drozdek explains that theology was of paramount importance for all Greek philosophers even in the absence of purely theological or religious language.

Imaginary Friendship is the first in-depth study of the onset of the American Revolution through the prism of friendship, focusing on future US president John Adams and leading Loyalist Jonathan Sewall. The book is part biography, revealing how they shaped each other's progress, and part political history, exploring their intriguing dangerous quest to clean up colonial politics. Literary history examines the personal dimension of discourse, resolving how Adams's presumption of Sewall's authorship of the Loyalist tracts Massachusettensis influenced his own magnum opus, Novanglus. The mystery is not why Adams presumed Sewall was his adversary in 1775 but why he was impelled to answer him.

First published in 1911. The first chapter in this fascinating study devotes itself to a short preliminary introduction to Darwin's ideas, and some remarks on the thoughts of the ancients on the subject and how matters stood in the period immediately preceding the appearance of Darwin himself. The second and third chapters discuss Darwin's theory and a suggested alternative hypothesis. The concluding chapter is devoted to the philosophical aspect of the case, and to some general reflections after a close perusal of Darwin's works.

Originally published in 1937. This book is a classic work on the philosophy of time, looking at the pshychology, physics and logic of time before investigating the views of Kant, Bergson, Alexander, McTaggart and Dunne. The second half of the book contains more indepth consideration of prediction, the concepts of past and future, and reality.

Originally published in 1964. This lively, challenging book, written with enthusiasm, conviction and clarity, sets out to elucidate the shadowy concept of Time. This involves central philosophical issues, which are vigorously discussed. Also relativity theory, in a clear-cut exposition, is made intelligible in a new light. All who are interested in science and its philosophical implications will find this book highly controversial but certainly readable. The author believes philosophy to be important, not only for its professionals, but for everyman. He believes that the fact that this is no longer realised shows that something is wrong with professional philosophy; he also indicates what this is. The book ends, surprisingly but pertinently, with a bold plunge into the questions of telepathy, precognition and psychical research generally. Whilst the phenomena are reasonably admitted, trenchant criticism of their significance confronts parapsychologists.

This volume explores issues of memory, remembering and language in late colonial India. It is the first systematic historical sociolinguistic study of English private and public citizens who lived in and/or worked for India and the Indian cause from the 1920s to the 1940s. While some of the English have lived as common citizens and were committed to India, their voices and contributions have remained on the margins of Indian collective memory. This book offers microhistorical readings of extended language forms generally underexplored in sociolinguistics (such as letters, telegrams, missives, and oral histories) to reorient facets of individual memories, lives, and endeavours against larger officialised understandings of the past. Using previously unpublished corpus of archival material and interviews with English private citizens from that period, this volume on historical sociolinguistics will be of interest to scholars and researchers of language and linguistics, South Asian studies, post-colonial literary studies, culture studies, and modern history.