|
Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present > Western philosophy, c 1600 to c 1800
The general introduction to Voltaire's "Questions sur
l'Encyclopedie, par des amateurs" traces the history of its genesis
and publication, its contemporary critical reception and the
historical and literary questions raised by the text. The volume
also comprises several appendices and a thematic index of the text
as a whole. Collaborateurs: Christiane Mervaud, Nicholas Cronk,
Dominique Lussier.
This book examines the importance of the Enlightenment for
understanding the secular outlook of contemporary Western
societies. It shows the new ways of thinking about religion that
emerged during the 17th and 18th centuries and have had a great
impact on how we address problems related to religion in the public
sphere today. Based on the assumption that political concepts are
rooted in historical realities, this collection combines the
perspective of political philosophy with the perspective of the
history of ideas. Does secularism imply that individuals are not
free to manifest their beliefs in public? Is secularization the
same as rejecting faith in the absolute? Can there be a universal
rational core in every religion? Does freedom of expression always
go hand in hand with freedom of conscience? Is secularism an
invention of the predominantly Christian West, which cannot be
applied in other contexts, specifically that of Muslim cultures?
Answers to these and related questions are sought not only in
current theories and debates in political philosophy, but also in
the writings of Immanuel Kant, Benedict Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes,
Anthony Collins, Adriaan Koerbagh, Abbe Claude Yvon, Giovanni Paolo
Marana, and others.
The fifth volume of the "Corpus des notes marginales", long since
out of print, was first published by Akademie-Verlag in Berlin,
East Germany, in 1994. It was reissued in the OEuvres completes de
Voltaire Oxford edition, where the remaining volumes of the
'Corpus' (unfinished since 1994) began to be published in 2006.
This volume has been made easier to use in the reissue by the
addition of running heads and by a new index of Voltaire's works
cited in the notes of the present volume and the four that preceded
it. This volume contains an additional piece by Nikolai Kopanev,
'V. S. Lublinski et le Corpus des notes marginales'.
'Man being born...to perfect freedom...hath by nature a power...to
preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty and estate.'
Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1689) is one of the great
classics of political philosophy, widely regarded as the
foundational text of modern liberalism. In it Locke insists on
majority rule, and regards no government as legitimate unless it
has the consent of the people. He sets aside people's ethnicities,
religions, and cultures and envisages political societies which
command our assent because they meet our elemental needs simply as
humans. His work helped to entrench ideas of a social contract,
human rights, and protection of property as the guiding principles
for just actions and just societies. Published in the same year, A
Letter Concerning Toleration aimed to end Christianity's wars of
religion and called for the separation of church and state so that
everyone could enjoy freedom of conscience. In this edition of
these two major works, Mark Goldie considers the contested nature
of Locke's reputation, which is often appropriated by opposing
political and religious ideologies. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100
years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range
of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume
reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most
accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including
expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to
clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and
much more.
For philosophers of German idealism and early German romanticism,
the imagination is central to issues ranging from hermeneutics to
transcendental logic and from ethics to aesthetics. This volume of
new essays brings together, for the first time, comprehensive and
critical reflections on the significances of the imagination during
this period, with essays on Kant and the imagination, the
imagination in post-Kantian German idealism, and the imagination in
early German romanticism. The essays explore the many and varied
uses of the imagination and discuss whether they form a coherent or
shared notion or whether they embody points of philosophical
divergence within these traditions. They shed new light on one of
the most important and enigmatic aspects of human nature, as
understood in the context of a profoundly influential era of
western thought.
This book provides an accessible and thorough analysis of "The
Doctrine of Being," the first part of Hegel's Science of Logic.
Though it received much scholarly attention in the past,
interpreters of this text have generally refrained from examining
it in a sufficiently detailed manner. Through a rigorous and
critical reading of Hegel's speculative arguments, Mehmet Tabak
illustrates that Hegel meant his logic to be both a
presuppositionless analysis and development of the basic categories
of thought, on the one hand, and a post-Kantian ontology on the
other. However, the analysis of the text demonstrates that Hegel
fails to deliver such logic. This volume promises to be an
indispensable guide to those who wish to understand the first book
of Science of Logic.
A clarifying examination of Gilles Deleuze's first book shows how
he would later transform the problem of immanence into the problem
of difference Despite the wide reception Gilles Deleuze has
received across the humanities, research on his early work has
remained scant. Experience and Empiricism remedies that gap with a
detailed study of Deleuze's first book, Empiricism and
Subjectivity, which is devoted to the philosophical project of
David Hume. Russell Ford argues that this work is poorly understood
when read simply as a standalone study on Hume. Its significance
only becomes apparent within the context of a larger problematic
that dominated, and continues to inform, modern European
philosophy: the conceptual constitution of a purely immanent
account of existence. While the importance of this debate is
recognized in contemporary scholarship, its genealogy-including
Deleuze's place within it-has been underappreciated. This book
shows how Deleuze directly engages in an ongoing debate between his
teachers Jean Wahl and Jean Hyppolite over experience and
empiricism, an intervention that restages the famous encounter
between rationalism and empiricism that yielded Kant's critical
philosophy. What, Deleuze effectively asks, might have happened had
Hume been the one roused from his empirical dogmatic slumber by the
rationalist challenge of Kant?
This book examines the surprising ramifications of Kant's late
account of practical reason's obligatory ends as well as a
revolutionary implication of his theory of property. It thereby
sheds new light on Kant's place in the history of modern moral
philosophy.
This book discusses the potential for Kant's political and
juridical philosophy to shed light on current social challenges and
policy. By considering Kant as a contemporary and not above moral
responsibility, the authors explore his political theory as the
philosophical foundation of human rights, discussing the right to
citizenship, social dynamics and the scope of global justice.
Focusing on topics such as society, Kant's position on human
rights, domestic economic justice, public education and moral
virtue, the authors analyse the shortcomings of Kant's modes of
thought and help the reader to gain new perspective both on this
classical thinker and on more contemporary issues.
Scott Yenor argues that David Hume's reputation as a skeptic is
greatly exaggerated and that Hume's skepticism is a moment leading
Hume to defend common life philosophy and the humane commercial
republic. Gentle, humane virtues reflect the proper reaction to the
complex mixture of human faculties that define the human condition.
This collection highlights the new trend away from rationalism and
toward empiricism in the epistemology of modality. Accordingly, the
book represents a wide range of positions on the empirical sources
of modal knowledge. Readers will find an introduction that surveys
the field and provides a brief overview of the work, which
progresses from empirically-sensitive rationalist accounts to fully
empiricist accounts of modal knowledge. Early chapters focus on
challenges to rationalist theories, essence-based approaches to
modal knowledge, and the prospects for naturalizing modal
epistemology. The middle chapters present positive accounts that
reject rationalism, but which stop short of advocating exclusive
appeal to empirical sources of modal knowledge. The final chapters
mark a transition toward exclusive reliance on empirical sources of
modal knowledge. They explore ways of making similarity-based,
analogical, inductive, and abductive arguments for modal claims
based on empirical information. Modal epistemology is coming into
its own as a field, and this book has the potential to anchor a new
research agenda.
This book studies Hume's scepticism and its roots, context, and
role in the philosopher's life. It relates how Hume wrote his
philosophy in a time of tumult, as the millennia-old metaphysical
tradition that placed humans and their cognitive abilities in an
ontological framework collapsed and gave way to one that placed the
autonomy of the individual in its center. It then discusses the
birth of modernity that Descartes inaugurated and Kant completed
with his Copernican revolution that moved philosophy from Being to
the Self. It shows how modernity gave rise to a new kind of
scepticism, involving doubt not just about the adequacy of our
knowledge but about the very existence of a world independent of
the self. The book then examines how Hume faced the sceptical
implications and how his empiricism added yet another sceptical
theme with the main question being how argument can legitimize key
concepts of human understanding instinctively used in making sense
of our perceptions. Placing it firmly in a historical context, the
book shows how Hume was influenced by Pyrrhonian scepticism and how
this becomes clear in Hume's acceptance of the weakness of reason
and in his emphasis on the practical role of philosophy. As the
book argues, rather than serving as the foundation of science, in
Hume's hand, philosophy became a guide to a joyful, happy life, to
a documentary of common life and to moderately educated,
entertaining conversation. This way Hume stands in strong
opposition to the (early) modern mainstream.
Western philosophy is now two and a half millennia old, but much of
it came in just two staccato bursts, each lasting only about 150
years. In his landmark survey of Western philosophy from the Greeks
to the Renaissance, The Dream of Reason, Anthony Gottlieb
documented the first burst, which came in the Athens of Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle. Now, in his sequel, The Dream of
Enlightenment, Gottlieb expertly navigates a second great explosion
of thought, taking us to northern Europe in the wake of its wars of
religion and the rise of Galilean science. In a relatively short
period-from the early 1640s to the eve of the French
Revolution-Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume all
made their mark. The Dream of Enlightenment tells their story and
that of the birth of modern philosophy. As Gottlieb explains, all
these men were amateurs: none had much to do with any university.
They tried to fathom the implications of the new science and of
religious upheaval, which led them to question traditional
teachings and attitudes. What does the advance of science entail
for our understanding of ourselves and for our ideas of God? How
should a government deal with religious diversity-and what,
actually, is government for? Such questions remain our questions,
which is why Descartes, Hobbes, and the others are still pondered
today. Yet it is because we still want to hear them that we can
easily get these philosophers wrong. It is tempting to think they
speak our language and live in our world; but to understand them
properly, we must step back into their shoes. Gottlieb puts readers
in the minds of these frequently misinterpreted figures,
elucidating the history of their times and the development of
scientific ideas while engagingly explaining their arguments and
assessing their legacy in lively prose. With chapters focusing on
Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Pierre Bayle, Leibniz, Hume,
Rousseau, and Voltaire-and many walk-on parts-The Dream of
Enlightenment creates a sweeping account of what the Enlightenment
amounted to, and why we are still in its debt.
|
|