Originally published in 1963. An outline of the metaphysical positions held by such major philosophers as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, Kant, Hume, Moore, Bradley, Wittgenstein. The author maintains - controversially - that metaphysical arguments have a close bearing on religious and moral beliefs.

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.

Originally published in 1950. For those interested in the fundamental problems of philosophy but not familiar with its technicalities, this book introduces the main type of theory in metaphysics, not by a catalogue of philosophers' opinions but by a continuous train of reasoning. The central theme is the problem of the relation between Mind and Matter, and in the course of the argument there are discussions of mechanistic materialism, of idealism and our knowledge of the external world, and of the arguments for the existence of God. The problems are presented lucidly but without over-simplification.

Historical parallels, analogies, anachronisms and metaphors to the past play a crucial role in political speeches, historical narratives, iconography, movies and newspapers on a daily basis. They frame, articulate and represent a specific understanding of history and can be used not only to construct but also to rethink historical continuity. Almost-forgotten or sleeping history can be revived to legitimize an imagined future in a political discourse today. History can hardly be neutral or factual because it depends on the historian's, as well the people's, perspective as to what kind of events and sources they combine to make history meaningful. Analysing historical analogies - as embedded in narratives and images of the past - enables us to understand how history and collective memory are managed and used for political purposes and to provide social orientation in time and space. To rethink theories of history, iconology and collective memory, the authors of this volume discuss a variety of cases from Hong Kong, China and Europe.

This book provides a detailed analysis of one of the most prominent and widespread international phenomena to which criminal justice systems has been applied: the expression of revisionist views relating to mass atrocities and the outright denial of their existence. Denial poses challenges to more than one academic discipline: to historians, the gradual disappearance of the generation of eyewitnesses raises the question of how to keep alive the memory of the events, and the fact that negationism is often offered in the guise of historical 'revisionist scholarship' also means that there is need for the identification of parameters which can be applied to the office of the 'genuine' historian. Legal academics and practitioners as well as political scientists are faced with the difficulty of evaluating methods to deal with denial and must in this regard identify the limits of freedom of speech, but also the need to preserve the rights of victims. Beyond that, the question arises whether the law can ever be an effective option for dealing with revisionist statements and the revisionist movement. In this regard, Holocaust and Genocide Denial: A Contextual Perspective breaks new ground: exploring the background of revisionism, the specific methods devised by individual States to counter this phenomenon, and the rationale for their strategies. Bringing together authors whose expertise relates to the history of the Holocaust, genocide studies, international criminal law and social anthropology, the book offers insights into the history of revisionism and its varying contexts, but also provides a thought-provoking engagement with the challenging questions attached to its treatment in law and politics.

Previous works on the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) have approached the topic from the point of view of the U.S. and its allies, while Cuban experiences have still not been sufficiently discussed. This book presents new aspects which have seldom - or never - been offered before, giving a detailed account of the crisis from a Cuban perspective. It also investigates the archaeological and anthropological aspects of the crisis, by exploring the tangible and intangible remains that still can be found on the former Soviet missile bases in the Cuban countryside, and through interviews which add a local, human dimension to the subject.

This book is the first to link the modern appreciation for democratic freedom directly to Jewish political thought in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. The modern appreciation for democratic values is often assumed to have its roots in Classical thought. However, democracy has taken various forms in its progression to the governance many countries now employ. Working in dialog with Protestants, Jewish thinkers voiced the first Modern appeal for the reestablishment of a Jewish polity in the Holy Land. This appeal was grounded in a vision of a Jewish state governed by individual liberty and popular consent, which could be defined as a democratic Zionism. The book focuses on influential rabbi Saul Levi Morteira (b. ca. 1590-d. 1660), as well as two of the most renowned members of his congregation, Baruch Spinoza and Miguel de Barrios. Unlike contemporary Catholic and Protestant thinkers, these three intellectuals found democratic values in an Old Testament polity that came to be revered as the Hebrew Republic. The book explores the trajectory by which this democratization of the Hebrew Republic evolved in the writings of Morteira as an alternative to divine-right rule. It then shows that, in spite of their divergent views toward practicing Judaism, Spinoza and Barrios disseminated Morteira's democratic ideas and promoted the Hebrew Republic as a model polity for a post-medieval political order. This book will be of great use to scholars of Judaism and Jewish philosophy in the modern era, medieval and early modern Spanish literature, as well as religious, political and intellectual history.

Popular presentations of history have recently been discovered as a new field of research, and even though interest in it has been growing noticeably very little has been published on this topic. This volume is one of the first to open up this new area of historical research, introducing some of the work that has emerged in Germany over the past few years. While mainly focusing on Germany (though not exclusively), the authors analyze different forms of popular historiographies and popular presentations of history since 1800 and the interrelation between popular and academic historiography, exploring in particular popular histories in different media and popular historiography as part of memory culture.

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 book provides an analytical overview of the vast range of historiography which was produced in western Europe over a thousand-year period between c.400 and c.1500. Concentrating on the general principles of classical rhetoric central to the language of this writing, alongside the more familiar traditions of ancient history, biblical exegesis and patristic theology, this survey introduces the conceptual sophistication and semantic rigour with which medieval authors could approach their narratives of past and present events, and the diversity of ends to which this history could then be put. By providing a close reading of some of the historians who put these linguistic principles and strategies into practice (from Augustine and Orosius through Otto of Freising and William of Malmesbury to Machiavelli and Guicciardini), it traces and questions some of the key methodological changes that characterise the function and purpose of the western historiographical tradition in this formative period of its development. -- .

This second annual volume from the Organization of American Historians, containing the best American history articles published between the summers of 2005 and 2006, provides a quick and comprehensive overview of the top work and the current intellectual trends in the field of American history. With contributions from a diverse group of historians, this collection appeals both to scholars and to lovers of history alike.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 book provides a critical history of the movement associated with the journal Annales, from its foundation in 1929 to the present. This movement has been the single most important force in the development of what is sometimes called the new history . Renowned cultural historian, Peter Burke, distinguishes between four main generations in the development of the Annales School. The first generation included Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, who fought against the old historical establishment and founded the journal Annales to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration. The second generation was dominated by Fernand Braudel, whose magnificent work on the Mediterranean has become a modern classic. The third generation, deeply associated with the cultural turn in historical scholarship, includes recently well-known historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Jacques Le Goff and Georges Duby. This new edition brings us right up to the present, and contemplates the work of a fourth generation, including practitioners such as Roger Chartier, Serge Gruzinski and Jacques Revel. This new generation continued much of the cultural focus of the previous Annales historians, while diversifying further, and becoming increasingly reflexive , a move that owes much to the sociocultural theories of Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu. Wide-ranging yet concise, this new edition of a classic work of analysis of one of the most important historical movements of the twentieth century will be welcomed by students of history and other social sciences and by the interested general reader.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.