Through a detailed study of Herder's Enlightenment thought, especially his philosophy of literature, Kristin Gjesdal offers a new and sometimes provocative reading of the historical origins and contemporary challenges of modern hermeneutics. She shows that hermeneutic philosophy grew out of a historical, anthropological, and poetic discourse in the mid-eighteenth century and argues that, as such, it represents a rich, stimulating, and relevant engagement with the potentials and limits of human meaning and understanding. Gjesdal's study broadens our conception of hermeneutic philosophy - the issues it raises and the answers it offers - and underlines the importance of Herder's contribution to the development of this discipline. Her book will be highly valuable for students and scholars of eighteenth-century thought, especially those working in the fields of hermeneutics, aesthetics, and European philosophy.

Johann Nikolaus Tetens Philosophische Versuche uber die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwickelung (1777) zahlt zu den bedeutendsten Veroffentlichungen der Philosophie der Spataufklarung. In insgesamt 14 umfangreichen Essays versucht Tetens die Grundprobleme der Aufklarungsphilosophie zu losen. Der Band bietet die erste vollstandige und kommentierte Ausgabe dieses opus magnum der empiristischen Spataufklarung seit der Erstpublikation."

Kant claims that the fundamental principle of morality is given by pure reason itself. Many have interpreted Kant to derive this principle from a conception of pure practical reason (as opposed to merely prudential reasoning about the most effective means to empirically given ends). But Kant maintained that there is only one faculty of reason, although with both theoretical and practical applications. This Element shows how Kant attempted to derive the fundamental principle and goal of morality from the general principles of reason as such, defined by the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason and the ideal of systematicity.

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.

Historians of ideas have traditionally discussed the significance of the French Revolution through the prism of several major interpretations, including the commentaries of Burke, Tocqueville and Marx. This book argues that the Scottish Enlightenment offered an alternative and equally powerful interpretative framework for the Revolution, which focused on the transformation of the polite, civilised moeurs that had defined the 'modernity' analysed by Hume and Smith in the eighteenth century. The Scots observed what they understood as a military- and democracy-led transformation of European modern morals and concluded that the real historical significance of the Revolution lay in the transformation of warfare, national feelings and relations between states, war and commerce that characterised the post-revolutionary international order. This book recovers the Scottish philosophers' powerful discussion of the nature of post-revolutionary modernity and shows that it is essential to our understanding of nineteenth-century political thought.

C'est 'le plein Moyen Age', du dixieme au quatorzieme siecle, qu'evoque Voltaire dans ces trente chapitres. Structuration et centralisation progressives des differents etats europeens, lutte entre sacerdoce et Empire, chasse aux 'heretiques' et proces des templiers, croisades et Grand Schisme d'Occident en forment l'ossature. Mais l'auteur se livre aussi a une analyse en profondeur des societes et de l'evolution des comportements; evoque les ferments d'avenir, telle par exemple la naissance, au quatorzieme siecle, de la democratie helvetique; et met en evidence les paradoxes parfois cruels de l'histoire, ou les petitesses peu flatteuses de certains de ses acteurs. L'annotation fournit les references detaillees des sources auxquelles Voltaire avait acces, et s'interesse a l'usage qu'il en a fait. L'ouvrage contient un index des noms propres ainsi qu'un index analytique.

Human, All Too Human marks the beginning of what is often called Nietzsche's middle or positivist period (which ends with the conclusion of Book IV of The Gay Science). It initiates some important features that become permanent in his work, such as his experiments in multiple writing styles within one work, his self-representation as a psychologist, his genealogical excavations of morality and his appeal to fellow Europeans to overcome the parochialism and antagonism of nationalism.

The 'ethical commonwealth', the central social element in Kant's account of religion, provides the church, as 'the moral people of God', with a role in establishing a cosmopolitan order of peace. This role functions within an interpretive realignment of Kant's critical project that articulates its central concern as anthropological: critically disciplined reason enables humanity to enact peacemaking as its moral vocation in history. Within this context, politics and religion are not peripheral elements in the critical project. They are, instead, complementary social modalities in which humanity enacts its moral vocation to bring lasting peace among all peoples.

In the late Enlightenment, a new imperative began to inform theories of interpretation: all literary texts should be read in the same way that we read the Bible. However, this assumption concealed a problem-there was no coherent "we" who read the Bible in the same way. In Secularism and Hermeneutics, Yael Almog shows that several prominent thinkers of the era, including Johann Gottfried Herder, Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, constituted readers as an imaginary "we" around which they could form their theories and practices of interpretation. This conception of interpreters as a universal community, Almog argues, established biblical readers as a coherent collective. In the first part of the book, Almog focuses on the 1760s through the 1780s and examines these writers' works on biblical Hebrew and their reliance on the conception of the Old Testament as a cultural, rather than religious, asset. She reveals how the detachment of textual hermeneutics from confessional affiliation was stimulated by debates on the integration of Jews in Enlightenment Germany. In order for the political community to cohere, she contends, certain religious practices were restricted to the private sphere while textual interpretation, which previously belonged to religious contexts, became the foundation of the public sphere. As interpretive practices were secularized and taken to be universal, they were meant to overcome religious difference. Turning to literature and the early nineteenth century in the second part of the book, Almog demonstrates the ways in which the new literary genres of realism and lyric poetry disrupted these interpretive reading practices. Literary techniques such as irony and intertextuality disturbed the notion of a stable, universal reader's position and highlighted interpretation as grounded in religious belonging. Secularism and Hermeneutics reveals the tension between textual exegesis and confessional belonging and challenges the modern presumption that interpretation is indifferent to religious concerns.

Laws of nature play a central role in Kant's theoretical philosophy and are crucial to understanding his philosophy of science in particular. In this volume of new essays, the first systematic investigation of its kind, a distinguished team of scholars explores Kant's views on the laws of nature in the physical and life sciences. Their essays focus particularly on the laws of physics and biology, and consider topics including the separation in Kant's treatment of the physical and life sciences, the relation between universal and empirical laws of nature, and the role of reason and the understanding in imposing order and lawful unity upon nature. The volume will be of great interest to advanced students and scholars of Kant's philosophy of science, and to historians and philosophers of science more generally.

Die Unabhangigkeitsbestrebungen Kataloniens von Spanien bilden ein wiederkehrendes, politisch brisantes Thema in ganz Europa. In diesem Zusammenhang untersucht diese Studie die Wurzeln regionaler Darstellungen in der Literatur der spanischen Aufklarung auf der diskursiven Ebene und zeigt die Herausbildung politisch-oekonomischer Interessen einzelner Provinzen im Kontext des spanischen Reformprojekts des 18. Jahrhunderts auf.

This Element considers Kant's account of the sublime in the context of his predecessors both in the Anglophone and German rationalist traditions. Since Kant says with evident endorsement that 'we call sublime that which is absolutely great' (Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:248) and nothing in nature can in fact be absolutely great (it can only figure as such, in certain presentations), Kant concludes that strictly speaking what is sublime can only be the human calling (Bestimmung) to perfect our rational capacity according to the standard of virtue that is thought through the moral law. The Element takes account of the difference between respect and admiration as the two main varieties of sublime feeling, and concludes by considering the role of Stoicism in Kant's account of the sublime, particularly through the channel of Seneca.

Spinoza's Political Treatise constitutes the very last stage in the development of his thought, as he left the manuscript incomplete at the time of his death in 1677. On several crucial issues - for example, the new conception of the 'free multitude' - the work goes well beyond his Theological Political Treatise (1670), and arguably presents ideas that were not fully developed even in his Ethics. This volume of newly commissioned essays on the Political Treatise is the first collection in English to be dedicated specifically to the work, ranging over topics including political explanation, national religion, the civil state, vengeance, aristocratic government, and political luck. It will be a major resource for scholars who are interested in this important but still neglected work, and in Spinoza's political philosophy more generally.

This is the first book devoted to an examination of Kant's lectures on ethics, which provide a unique and revealing perspective on the development of his views. In fifteen newly commissioned essays, leading Kant scholars discuss four sets of student notes reflecting different periods of Kant's career: those taken by Herder (1762-4), Collins (mid-1770s), Mrongovius (1784-5) and Vigilantius (1793-4). The essays cover a diverse range of topics, from the relation between Kant's lectures and the Baumgarten textbooks, to obligation, virtue, love, the highest good, freedom, the categorical imperative, moral motivation and religion. Together they provide the reader with a deeper and fuller understanding of the evolution of Kant's moral thought. The volume will be of interest to a range of readers in Kant studies, ethics, political philosophy, religious studies and the history of ideas.

Broad in its geographic scope and yet grounded in original archival research, this book situates the inception of modern aesthetic theory - the philosophical analysis of art and beauty - in theological contexts that are crucial to explaining why it arose. Simon Grote presents seminal aesthetic theories of the German and Scottish Enlightenments as outgrowths of a quintessentially Enlightenment project: the search for a natural 'foundation of morality' and a means of helping naturally self-interested human beings transcend their own self-interest. This conclusion represents an important alternative to the standard history of aesthetics as a series of preludes to the achievements of Immanuel Kant, as well as a reinterpretation of several canonical figures in the German and Scottish Enlightenments. It also offers a foundation for a transnational history of the Enlightenment without the French philosophes at its centre, while solidly endorsing historians' growing reluctance to call the Enlightenment a secularising movement.

Today we consider ourselves to be free and equal persons, capable of acting rationally and autonomously in both practical (moral) and theoretical (scientific) contexts. The essays in this volume show how this conception was first articulated in a fully systematic fashion by Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century. Twelve leading scholars shed new light on Kant's philosophy, with each devoting particular attention to at least one of three aspects of this conception: autonomy, freedom, and personhood. Some focus on clarifying the philosophical content of Kant's position, while others consider how his views on these issues cohere with his other distinctive doctrines, and yet others focus on the historical impact that these doctrines had on his immediate successors and on our present thought. Their essays offer important new perspectives on some of the most fundamental issues that we continue to confront in modern society.

Can scientific explanation ever make reference to God or the supernatural? The present consensus is no; indeed, a naturalistic stance is usually taken to be a distinguishing feature of modern science. Some would go further still, maintaining that the success of scientific explanation actually provides compelling evidence that there are no supernatural entities, and that true science, from the very beginning, was opposed to religious thinking. Science without God? Rethinking the History of Scientific Naturalism shows that the history of Western science presents us with a more nuanced picture. Beginning with the naturalists of ancient Greece, and proceeding through the middle ages, the scientific revolution, and into the nineteenth century, the contributors examine past ideas about 'nature' and 'the supernatural'. Ranging over different scientific disciplines and historical periods, they show how past thinkers often relied upon theological ideas and presuppositions in their systematic investigations of the world. In addition to providing material that contributes to a history of 'nature' and naturalism, this collection challenges a number of widely held misconceptions about the history of scientific naturalism.

In this book, Arthur gives fresh interpretations of Gottfried Leibniz's theories of time, space, and the relativity of motion, based on a thorough examination of Leibniz's manuscripts as well as his published papers. These are analysed in historical context, but also with an eye to their contemporary relevance. Leibniz's views on relativity have been extremely influential, first on Mach, and then on Einstein, while his novel approach to geometry in his analysis situs inspired many later developments in geometry. Arthur expounds the latter in some detail, explaining its relationship to Leibniz's metaphysics of space and the grounding of motion, and defending Leibniz's views on the relativity of motion against charges of inconsistency. The brilliance of his work on time, though, has not been so well appreciated, and Arthur attempts to remedy this through a detailed discussion of Leibniz's relational theory of time, showing how it underpins his theory of possible worlds, his complex account of contingency, and his highly original treatment of the continuity of time, providing formal treatments in an appendix. In other appendices, Arthur provides translations of previously untranslated writings by Leibniz on analysis situs and on Copernicanism, as well as an essay on Leibniz's philosophy of relations. In his introductory chapter he explains how the framework for the book is provided by the interpretation of Leibniz's metaphysics he defended in his earlier Monads, Composition, and Force (OUP 2018, winner of the 2019 annual JHP Book Prize for best book in the history of philosophy published in 2018).

The Metaphysics of Morals is Kant's final major work in moral philosophy. In it, he presents the basic concepts and principles of right and virtue and the system of duties of human beings as such. The work comprises two parts: the Doctrine of Right concerns outer freedom and the rights of human beings against one another; the Doctrine of Virtue concerns inner freedom and the ethical duties of human beings to themselves and others. Mary Gregor's translation, lightly revised for this edition, is the only complete translation of the entire text, and includes extensive annotation on Kant's difficult and sometimes unfamiliar vocabulary. This edition includes numerous new footnotes, some of which address controversial aspects of Gregor's translation or offer alternatives. Lara Denis's introduction sets the work in context, explains its structure and themes, and introduces important interpretive debates. The volume also provides thorough guidance on further reading including online resources.

Throughout his life, Kant was concerned with questions about empirical psychology. He aimed to develop an empirical account of human beings, and his lectures and writings on the topic are recognizable today as properly 'psychological' treatments of human thought and behavior. In this book Patrick R. Frierson uses close analysis of relevant texts, including unpublished lectures and notes, to study Kant's account. He shows in detail how Kant explains human action, choice, and thought in empirical terms, and how a better understanding of Kant's psychology can shed light on major concepts in his philosophy, including the moral law, moral responsibility, weakness of will, and cognitive error. Frierson also applies Kant's accounts of mental illness to contemporary philosophical issues. His book will interest students and scholars of Kant, the history of psychology, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of action.

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.

Hegel's analysis of his culture identifies nihilistic tendencies in modernity i.e., the death of God and end of philosophy. Philosophy and religion have both become hollowed out to such an extent that traditional disputes between faith and reason become impossible because neither any longer possesses any content about which there could be any dispute; this is nihilism. Hegel responds to this situation with a renewal of the ontological argument (Logic) and ontotheology, which takes the form of philosophical trinitarianism. Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God examines Hegel's recasting of the theological proofs as the elevation of spirit to God and defense of their content against the criticisms of Kant and Jacobi. It also considers the issue of divine personhood in the Logic and Philosophy of Religion. This issue reflects Hegel's antiformalism that seeks to win back determinate content for truth (Logic) and the concept of God. While the personhood of God was the issue that divided the Hegelian school into left-wing and right-wing factions, both sides fail as interpretations. The center Hegelian view is both virtually unknown, and the most faithful to Hegel's project. What ties the two parts of the book together-Hegel's philosophical trinitarianism or identity as unity in and through difference (Logic) and his theological trinitarianism, or incarnation, trinity, reconciliation, and community (Philosophy of Religion)-is Hegel's Logic of the Concept. Hegel's metaphysical view of personhood is identified with the singularity (Einzelheit) of the concept. This includes as its speculative nucleus the concept of the true infinite: the unity in difference of infinite/finite, thought and being, divine-human unity (incarnation and trinity), God as spirit in his community.

Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy remains one of the most widely studied works of Western philosophy. This volume is a refreshed and updated edition of John Cottingham's bestselling 1996 edition, based on his translation in the acclaimed three-volume Cambridge edition of The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. It presents the complete text of Descartes's central metaphysical masterpiece, the Meditations, in clear, readable modern English, and it offers the reader additional material in a thematic abridgement of the Objections and Replies, providing a deeper understanding of how Descartes developed and clarified his arguments in response to critics. Cottingham also provides an updated introduction, together with a substantially revised bibliography, taking into account recent literature and developments in Descartes studies. The volume will be a vital resource for students reading the Meditations, as well as those studying Descartes and early modern philosophy.

Modern philosophy originates during the scientific revolution, and Michael Jacovides provides an engaging account of how this scientific background influences one of the foremost figures of early modern philosophy, John Locke. With this guiding thread, Jacovides gives clear and accurate answers to some of the central questions surrounding Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Why does he say that we have an obscure idea of substance? Why does he think that we perceive a two-dimensional array of color patches? Why does he think that matter can't naturally think? Why does he analyze secondary qualities as powers to produce ideas in us? Jacovides' method also allows him to trace the effects of Locke's scientific outlook on his descriptions of the way things appear to him and on his descriptions of the boundaries of conceivability. By placing Locke's thought in its scientific, religious, and anti-scholastic contexts, Jacovides explains not only what Locke believes but also why he believes it, and he thereby uncovers reveals the extra-philosophical sources of some of the central aspects of Locke's philosophy.

The first book that presents key original texts from the modern German philosophical tradition to English-language students and scholars of German, with introductions, commentaries, and annotations that make them accessible. German-language thinkers such as Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are central to modernity. Yet their reception in the English-speaking world has largely depended on translations, a situation that has often hampered full engagement with the rhetorical and philosophical complexity of the German history of ideas. The present volume, the first of its kind, is a response to this situation. After an introduction charting the remarkable flowering of German-language thought since the eighteenth century, it offers extracts - in the original German - from sixteen major philosophical texts, with extensive introductions and annotations in English. All extracts are carefully chosen to introduce the individual thinkers while allowing the reader to pursue broader themes such as the fate of reason or the history of modern selfhood. The book offers students and scholars of German a complement to linguistic, historical, andliterary study by giving them access to the wealth of German-language philosophy. It represents a new way into the work of a succession of thinkers who have defined modern philosophy and thus remain of crucial relevance today. The philosophers: Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukacs, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Jurgen Habermas. Henk de Berg is Professor of German at the University of Sheffield. Duncan Large is Professor of European Literature and Translation at the University of East Anglia.