Ever since it was first published in 1930, William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity has been perceived as a milestone in literary criticism-far from being an impediment to communication, ambiguity now seemed an index of poetic richness and expressive power. Little, however, has been written on the broader trajectory of Western thought about ambiguity before Empson; as a result, the nature of his innovation has been poorly understood. A History of Ambiguity remedies this omission. Starting with classical grammar and rhetoric, and moving on to moral theology, law, biblical exegesis, German philosophy, and literary criticism, Anthony Ossa-Richardson explores the many ways in which readers and theorists posited, denied, conceptualised, and argued over the existence of multiple meanings in texts between antiquity and the twentieth century. This process took on a variety of interconnected forms, from the Renaissance delight in the 'elegance' of ambiguities in Horace, through the extraordinary Catholic claim that Scripture could contain multiple literal-and not just allegorical-senses, to the theory of dramatic irony developed in the nineteenth century, a theory intertwined with discoveries of the double meanings in Greek tragedy. Such narratives are not merely of antiquarian interest: rather, they provide an insight into the foundations of modern criticism, revealing deep resonances between acts of interpretation in disparate eras and contexts. A History of Ambiguity lays bare the long tradition of efforts to liberate language, and even a poet's intention, from the strictures of a single meaning.

Catharine Macaulay was a celebrated republican historian, whose account of the reasons for the seventeenth-century English Revolution, the parliamentary period, and its aftermath was widely read by the mothers and fathers of American Independence and by central players in the French Revolution. As well as publishing her eight volume history, spanning the period from the accession of James I to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, she wrote political pamphlets, offered a sketch of a republican constitution for Corsica, advocated parliamentary reform, and published a response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. Her Letters on Education of 1790 made a decisive impact on the thought of Mary Wollstonecraft, and her Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth opposed the skeptical and utilitarian attitudes being developed by Hume and others. This volume brings together for the first time all the available letters between her and her wide-ranging correspondents, who include George Washington, John Adams, Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, James Otis, Benjamin Rush, David Hume, James Boswell, Thomas Hollis, John Wilkes, Horace Walpole, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, and many other luminaries of the eighteenth-century enlightenment. It includes an extended introduction to her life and works and offers a unique insight into the thinking of her friends and correspondents during the period between 1760 and 1790, the crucible for the development of modern representative democracies. The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay will appeal to scholars of philosophy, political thought, women's studies, and eighteenth-century history, as well as those interested in the development of democratic ideas.

First published in 1752, Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason [Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre] was written as a textbook and widely adopted by many 18th-century German instructors, but most notably by Immanuel Kant. For forty years Kant used the Excerpts as the basis of his lectures on logic making extensive notes on his copy of the text. More than a text on formal logic, Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason covers epistemology and the elements of thought and language Meier believed made human understanding possible. Working across the two dominant intellectual forces in modern philosophy, the rationalist and the empiricist traditions, Meier's work was also instrumental to the introduction of English philosophy into Germany; he was among the first German philosophers to study John Locke's philosophy in depth. This complete English translation of Meier's influential textbook is introduced by Riccardo Pozzo and enhanced by a glossary and a concordance correlating Meier's arguments to Kant's logic lectures, the related Reflexionen and the Jasche Logic of 1800 - the text considered of fundamental importance to Kant's philosophy. For scholars of Kant, Locke and the German Enlightenment, this valuable translation and its accompanying material presents the richest source of information available on Meier and his 18th-century work.

Designed as a textbook for use in courses on natural theology and used by Immanuel Kant as the basis for his Lectures on The Philosophical Doctrine of Religion, Johan August Eberhard's Preparation for Natural Theology (1781) is now available in English for the first time. With a strong focus on the various intellectual debates and historically significant texts in late renaissance and early modern theology, Preparation for Natural Theology influenced the way Kant thought about practical cognition as well as moral and religious concepts. Access to Eberhard's complete text makes it possible to distinguish where in the lectures Kant is making changes to what Eberhard has written and where he is articulating his own ideas. Identifying new unexplored lines of research, this translation provides a deeper understanding of Kant's explicitly religious doctrines and his central moral writings, such as the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason. Accompanied by Kant's previously untranslated handwritten notes on Eberhard's text as well as the Danzig transcripts of Kant's course on rational theology, Preparation for Natural Theology features a dual English-German / German-English glossary, a concordance and an introduction situating the book in relation to 18th-century theology and philosophy. This is a significant contribution to twenty-first century Kantian studies.

As with all of Kant's writings, this has become an important piece of philosophy that is an important read for any student or thinker today.

Williamson explains, defends, and applies Kant's theory of emotion. Looking primarily to the Anthropology and the Metaphysics of Morals, she situates Kant's theory of affect within his theory of feeling and focuses on the importance of moral feelings and the moral evaluation of our emotions.

Verificationism has been a hallmark of logical empiricism. According to this principle, a sentence is insignificant in a certain sense if its truth value cannot be determined. Although logical empiricists strove for decades to develop an adequate principle of verification, they failed to resolve its problems. This led to a general abandonment of the verificationist project in the early 1960s. In the last 50 years, this view has received tremendously bad press. Today it is mostly regarded as an outdated historical concept. Theories that have evolved since the abandonment of verificationism can, however, help overcome some of its key problems. More specifically, an adequate criterion of significance can be derived from a combination of modern theories of justification and belief revision, along with a formal semantics for counterfactuals. In view of these potential improvements, the abandonment of verificationism appears premature. Half a century following its decline, it might be about time to revisit this disreputable view. The author argues in favor of a weak form of verificationism. This approach could be referred to as minimal verificationism, as it involves a weakening of traditional verificationist principles in various respects while maintaining their core idea.

David Hume (1711-1776), philosopher, historian, and essayist, is widely considered to be Britain's greatest philosopher. One of the leading intellectual figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, his major works and central ideas, especially his radical empiricism and his critique of the pretensions of philosophical rationalism, remain hugely influential on contemporary philosophers. This comprehensive and accessible guide to Hume's life and work includes 21 specially commissioned essays, written by a team of leading experts, covering every aspect of Hume's thought. The Companion presents details of Hume's life, historical and philosophical context, providing students with a comprehensive overview of all the key themes and topics apparent in his work, including his accounts of causal reasoning, scepticism, the soul and the self, action, reason, free will, miracles, natural religion, politics, human nature, women, economics and history, and an account of his reception and enduring influence. This textbook is indispensable to anyone studying in the areas of Hume Studies, British, and eighteenth-century philosophy.

This book presents a solution to the problem known in philosophical aesthetics as the paradox of ugliness, namely, how an object that is displeasing can retain our attention and be greatly appreciated. It does this by exploring and refining the most sophisticated and thoroughly worked out theoretical framework of philosophical aesthetics, Kant's theory of taste, which was put forward in part one of the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The book explores the possibility of incorporating ugliness, a negative aesthetic concept, into the overall Kantian aesthetic picture. It addresses a debate of the last two decades over whether Kant's aesthetics should allow for a pure aesthetic judgment of ugliness. The book critically reviews the main interpretations of Kant's central notion of the free play of imagination and understanding and offers a new interpretation of free play, one that allows for the possibility of a disharmonious state of mind and ugliness. In addition, the book also applies an interpretation of ugliness in Kant's aesthetics to resolve certain issues that have been raised in contemporary aesthetics, namely the possibility of appreciating artistic and natural ugliness and the role of disgust in artistic representation. Offering a theoretical and practical analysis of different kinds of negative aesthetic experiences, this book will help readers acquire a better understanding of his or her own evaluative processes, which may be helpful in coping with complex aesthetic experiences. Readers will gain unique insight into how ugliness can be offensive, yet, at the same time, fascinating, interesting and captivating.

This book defends a new interpretation of Hegel's theoretical philosophy, according to which Hegel's project in his central Science of Logic has a single organizing focus, provided by taking metaphysics as fundamental to philosophy, rather than any epistemological problem about knowledge or intentionality. Hegel pursues more specifically the metaphysics of reason, concerned with grounds, reasons, or conditions in terms of which things can be explained-and ultimately with the possibility of complete reasons. There is no threat to such metaphysics in epistemological or skeptical worries. The real threat is Kant's Transcendental Dialectic case that metaphysics comes into conflict with itself. But Hegel, despite familiar worries, has a powerful case that Kant's own insights in the Dialectic can be turned to the purpose of constructive metaphysics. And we can understand in these terms the unified focus of the arguments at the conclusion of Hegel's Science of Logic. Hegel defends, first, his general claim that the reasons which explain things are always found in immanent concepts, universals or kinds. And he will argue from here to conclusions which are distinctive in being metaphysically ambitious yet surprisingly distant from any form of metaphysical foundationalism, whether scientistic, theological, or otherwise. Hegel's project, then, turns out neither Kantian nor Spinozist, but more distinctively his own. Finally, we can still learn a great deal from Hegel about ongoing philosophical debates concerning everything from metaphysics, to the philosophy of science, and all the way to the nature of philosophy itself.

Offers an extremely bold, far-reaching, and unsuspected thesis in the history of philosophy: Aristotelianism was a dominant movement of the British philosophical landscape, especially in the field of logic, and it had a long survival. British Aristotelian doctrines were strongly empiricist in nature, both in the theory of knowledge and in scientific method; this character marked and influenced further developments in British philosophy at the end of the century, and eventually gave rise to what we now call British empiricism, which is represented by philosophers such as John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume. Beyond the apparent and explicit criticism of the old Scholastic and Aristotelian philosophy, which has been very well recognized by the scholarship in the twentieth century and which has contributed to the false notion that early modern philosophy emerged as a reaction to Aristotelianism, the present research examines the continuity, the original developments and the impact of Aristotelian doctrines and terminology in logic and epistemology as the background for the rise of empiricism.Without the Aristotelian tradition, without its doctrines, and without its conceptual elaborations, British empiricism would never have been born. The book emphasizes that philosophy is not defined only by the 'great names', but also by minor authors, who determine the intellectual milieu from which the canonical names emerge. It considers every single published work of logic between the middle of the sixteenth and the end of the seventeenth century, being acquainted with a number of surviving manuscripts and being well-informed about the best existing scholarship in the field.

Distinguished international scholars discuss the connection between emotion and value in Kant's philosophy, from his ethics to his philosophy of mind, aesthetics, religion and politics. Through a mixture of interpretation and critical discussion, this collection demonstrates the continuing relevance of Kant's work to philosophical debates.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is considered one of the giants of philosophy, of his age or any other. It is largely this book that provides the foundation of this assessment. Kant was a professor of philosophy in the German city of Konigsberg, where he spent his entire life and career. Kant had a very organized and clockwork life - his habits were so regular that it was considered that the people of Konigsberg could set their clocks by his walks. The same regularity was part of his publication history, until 1770, when Kant had a ten-year hiatus in publishing. This was largely because he was working on this book, the 'Critique of Pure Reason'. Kant as a professor of philosophy was familiar with the Rationalists, such as Descartes, who founded the Enlightenment and in many ways started the phenomenon of modern philosophy. He was also familiar with the Empiricist school (John Locke and David Hume are perhaps the best known names in this), which challenged the rationalist framework. Between Leibniz' monads and Hume's development of Empiricism to its logical (and self-destructive) conclusion, coupled with the Romantic ideals typified by Rousseau, the philosophical edifice of the Enlightenment seemed about to topple. Kant rode to the rescue, so to speak. He developed an idea that was a synthesis of Empirical and Rationalist ideas. He developed the idea of a priori knowledge (that coming from pure reasoning) and a posterior knowledge (that coming from experience) and put them together into synthetic a priori statements as being possible. Knowledge, for Kant, comes from a synthesis of pure reason concepts and experience. Pure thought and sense experience were intertwined. However, there were definite limits to knowledge. Appearance/phenomenon was different from Reality/noumena - Kant held that the unknowable was the 'ding-an-sich', roughly translated as the 'thing-in-itself', for we can only know the appearance and categorial aspects of things. Kant was involved heavily in scientific method, including logic and mathematical methods, to try to describe the various aspects of his development. This is part of what makes Kant difficult reading for even the most dedicated of philosophy students and readers. He spends a lot of pages on logical reasoning, including what makes for fallacious and faulty reasoning. He also does a good deal of development on the ideas of God, the soul, and the universe as a whole as being essentially beyond the realm of this new science of metaphysics - these are not things that can be known in terms of the spatiotemporal realm, and thus proofs and constructs about them in reason are bound to fail. Kant does go on to attempt to prove the existence of God and the soul (and other things) from moral grounds, but that these cannot be proved in the scientific methodology of his metaphysics and logic. This book presents Kant's epistemology and a new concept of metaphysics that involves transcendental knowledge, a new category of concepts that aims to prove one proposition as the necessary presupposition of another. This becomes the difficulty for later philosophers, but it does become a matter that needs to be addressed by them. As Kant writes at the end of the text, 'The critical path alone is still open. If the reader has had the courtesy and patience to accompany me along this path, he may now judge for himself whether, if he cares to lend his aid in making this path into a high-road, it may not be possible to achieve before the end of the present century what many centuries have not been able to accomplish; namely, to secure for human reason complete satisfacton in regard to that with which it has all along so eagerly occupied itself, though hitherto in vain.' This is heavy reading, but worthwhile for those who will make the journey with Kant.

In this concise and powerful book, one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment provides a bracing and clarifying new interpretation of this watershed period. Arguing that philosophical and historical interpretations of the era have long been hopelessly confused, Vincenzo Ferrone makes the case that it is only by separating these views and taking an approach grounded in social and cultural history that we can begin to grasp what the Enlightenment was--and why it is still relevant today. Ferrone explains why the Enlightenment was a profound and wide-ranging cultural revolution that reshaped Western identity, reformed politics through the invention of human rights, and redefined knowledge by creating a critical culture. These new ways of thinking gave birth to new values that spread throughout society and changed how everyday life was lived and understood. Featuring an illuminating afterword describing how his argument challenges the work of Anglophone interpreters including Jonathan Israel, The Enlightenment provides a fascinating reevaluation of the true nature and legacy of one of the most important and contested periods in Western history. The translation of this work has been funded by SEPS--Segretariato Europeo per le Pubblicazioni Scientifiche.

In the European Enlightenments it was often argued that moral conduct rather than adherence to certain theological doctrines was the true measure of religious belief. Thomas Ahnert argues that this characteristically "enlightened" emphasis on conduct in religion was less reliant on arguments from reason alone than is commonly believed. In fact, the champions of the Scottish Enlightenment were deeply skeptical of the power of unassisted natural reason in achieving "enlightened" virtue and piety. They advocated a practical program of "moral culture," in which revealed religion was of central importance. Ahnert traces this to theological controversies going back as far as the Reformation concerning the key question of early modern theology, the conditions of salvation. His findings present a new point of departure for all scholars interested in the intersection of religion and Enlightenment.

"The Descartes Dictionary" is an accessible guide to the world of the seventeenth-century philosopher Rene Descartes. Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all his major works, ideas and influences, and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Descartes' thought.The introduction provides a biographical sketch, a brief account of Descartes' philosophical works, and a summary of the current state of Cartesian studies, discussing trends in research over the past four decades. The A-Z entries include clear definitions of the key terms used in Descartes' writings and detailed synopses of his works. Also included are entries noting philosophical influences, of both figures that influenced Descartes and those that he in turn influenced. For anyone reading or studying Descartes, rationalism, or modern philosophy more generally, this original resource provides a wealth of useful information, analysis, and criticism. Including clear explanations of often complex terminology, "The Descartes Dictionary" covers everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Descartes' philosophy.

Is Kant really the 'bourgeois' philosopher that his advocates and opponents take him to be? In this bold and original re-thinking of Kant, Michael Wayne argues that with his aesthetic turn in the Third Critique, Kant broke significantly from the problematic philosophical structure of the Critique of Pure Reason. Through his philosophy of the aesthetic Kant begins to circumnavigate the dualities in his thought. In so doing he shows us today how the aesthetic is a powerful means for imagining our way past the apparent universality of contemporary capitalism. Here is an unfamiliar Kant: his concepts of beauty and the sublime are reinterpreted as attempts to socialise the aesthetic while Wayne reconstructs the usually hidden genealogy between Kant and important Marxist concepts such as totality, dialectics, mediation and even production. In materialising Kant's philosophy, this book simultaneously offers a Marxist defence of creativity and imagination grounded in our power to think metaphorically and in Kant's concept of reflective judgment. Wayne also critiques aspects of Marxist cultural theory that have not accorded the aesthetic the relative autonomy and specificity which it is due. Discussing such thinkers as Adorno, Bourdieu, Colletti, Eagleton, Lukacs, Ranciere and others, Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique presents a new reading of Kant's Third Critique that challenges Marxist and mainstream assessments of Kant alike.

Immanuel Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is a seminal text in modern philosophy, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. It is a complex and challenging work, which students and scholars often find difficult to penetrate. This Reader's Guide provides a 'way in' to the text including: philosophical and historical context; an overview of key themes; section-by-section analysis of the text; a chapter on its reception and influence as a classic text of the Enlightenment; and a guide for further reading. It highlights the most important themes and ideas, clarifies certain opaque features, and examines the junctures in the text that are critical for any philosophical assessment of Kant's argument. Eddis N. Miller offers a sound understanding of Kant's Religion and the tools for students to philosophically assess Kant's overall argument.

The Kant Dictionary is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the world of Immanuel Kant, one of the most important and influential thinkers in the history of philosophy. Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all his major works, ideas and influences and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Kant's thought. Students will discover a wealth of useful information, analysis and criticism. A-Z entries include clear definitions of all the key terms used in Kant's writings and detailed synopses of his key works. The Dictionary also includes entries on Kant's major philosophical influences, such as Plato, Descartes, Berkeley and Leibniz, and those he influenced and engaged with, including Fichte, Hume and Rousseau. It covers everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Kant's philosophy, offering clear and accessible explanations of often complex terminology. The Kant Dictionary is the ideal resource for anyone reading or studying Kant or Modern European Philosophy more generally.

Women, the Novel, and Natural Philosophy, 1660-1727 shows how early women novelists drew on debates about the self generated by the 'scientific' revolution to establish the novel as a genre and literary omniscience as a point of view. These writers such as Aphra Behn, Jane Barker, Eliza Haywood, and Mary Davys used, tested, explored, accepted, and rejected ideas about the self in their works to represent the act of knowing and what it means to be a knowing self. Karen Bloom Gevirtz agues that as they did so, they developed structures for representing authoritative knowing that contributed to the development of the novel as a genre, and to literary omniscience as a point of view.