Paulson examines literary, philosophical, and pedagogical writing on blindness in France from the Enlightenment, when philosophical speculation and surgical cures for cataracts demystified the difference between the blind and the sighted, to the nineteenth century, when the literary figure of the blind bard or seer linked blindness with genius, madness, and narrative art. A major theme of the book is the effect of blindness on the use of language and sign systems: the philosophes were concerned at first with understanding the doctrine of innate ideas, rather than with understanding blindness as such. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Adam Ferguson, a friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, was among the leading Scottish Enlightenment figures who worked to develop a science of man. He created a methodology for moral science that combined empirically based social theory with normative moralising. He was among the first in the English-speaking world to make use of the terms civilization, civil society and political science. Craig Smith explores Ferguson's thought, and examines his attempt to develop a genuine moral science and its place in providing a secure basis for the virtuous education of the new elite of Hanoverian Britain. The Ferguson that emerges is far from the stereotyped image of a republican sceptical about commercial society and much closer to the mainstream of the Scottish Enlightenment and its defence of the new British commercial order.

This collection of essays by Christopher J. Berry spans several decades and multiple shifts across Scottish Enlightenment, Hume and Smith studies. It brings together classic essays some of which are difficult to find with 3 new pieces, which cumulatively constitute a distinct interpretation. Clustered around the themes of sociability, the Humean science of man and the Smithian engagement with commerce and morality, these collected works will be of considerable value to those working in political philosophy, the history of ideas and the history of economic and social theory. Also included is a substantial introduction which, alongside Berry's personal intellectual history, provides a commentary on the development of the study of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Mind, Body, Motion, Matter investigates the relationship between the eighteenth century's two predominant approaches to the natural world - mechanistic materialism and vitalism - in the works of leading British and French writers such as Daniel Defoe, William Hogarth, Laurence Sterne, the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Denis Diderot. Focusing on embodied experience and the materialization of thought in poetry, novels, art, and religion, the literary scholars in this collection offer new and intriguing readings of these canonical authors. Informed by contemporary currents such as new materialism, cognitive studies, media theory, and post-secularism, their essays demonstrate the volatility of the core ideas opened up by materialism and the possibilities of an aesthetic vitalism of form.

This new edition of The Life of Adam Smith remains the only book to give a full account of Smith's life whilst also placing his work into the context of his life and times. Updated to include new scholarship which has recently come to light, this full-scale biography of Adam Smith examines the personality, career, and social and intellectual circumstances of the Scottish moral philosopher regarded as the founder of scientific economics, whose legacy of thought - most notably about the free market and the role of the state - concerns us all. Ian Simpson Ross draws on correspondence, archival documents, the reports of contemporaries, and the record of Smith's publications to fashion a lively account of Adam Smith as a man of letters, moralist, historian, and critic, as well as an economist. Supported with full scholarly apparatus for students and academics, the book also offers 20 halftone illustrations representing Smith and the world in which he lived.

A practical book on meditation and enlightenment, a must read for any spritual seeker. A less rational and more poetic Eckhart Tolle; Kahlil Gibran meets Krishnamurti. Ilie Cioara's message is original and unique, as he never travelled to India and never belonged to any traditional school. By practising the silence of the mind, through an all-encompassing attention, we discover and fulfill our innermost potential of becoming one with the divine spark that lies dormant within us. I Am Boundlessness I am spontaneous simplicity Mind, heart and feeling, A whole being, absolute fullness Love in action. This state Reveals itself naturally; When the mind is awakened, All becomes One. The past melts away In the light of all-encompassing Attention; In emptiness, the Sacred reveals itself In its natural brilliance. Experiencing the moment, The personal mind is dissipated Expanding into Infinity As Universal Mind. Each such encounter Transforms us radically, For in each sparkle of consciousness We are newness, Divinity, Reality!

Dionysus after Nietzsche examines the way that The Birth of Tragedy (1872) by Friedrich Nietzsche irrevocably influenced twentieth-century literature and thought. Adam Lecznar argues that Nietzsche's Dionysus became a symbol of the irrational forces of culture that cannot be contained, and explores the presence of Nietzsche's Greeks in the diverse writings of Jane Harrison, D. H. Lawrence, Martin Heidegger, Richard Schechner and Wole Soyinka (amongst others). From Jane Harrison's controversial ideas about Greek religion in an anthropological modernity, to Wole Soyinka's reimagining of a postcolonial genre of tragedy, each of the writers under discussion used the Nietzschean vision of Greece to develop subversive discourses of temporality, identity, history and classicism. In this way, they all took up Nietzsche's call to disrupt pre-existing discourses of classical meaning and create new modes of thinking about the Classics that speak to the immediate concerns of the present.

This is a study of the political theory of the Enlightenment, focusing on four leading eighteenth-century thinkers: David Hume, Adam Smith, Montesquieu and Voltaire. Dennis C. Rasmussen calls attention to the particular strand of the Enlightenment these thinkers represent, which he terms the 'pragmatic Enlightenment'. He defends this strand of Enlightenment thought against both the Enlightenment's critics and some of the more idealistic Enlightenment figures who tend to have more followers today, such as John Locke, Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham. Professor Rasmussen argues that Hume, Smith, Montesquieu and Voltaire exemplify an especially attractive type of liberalism, one that is more realistic, moderate, flexible, and contextually sensitive than most other branches of this tradition.

Developing work in the theories of action and explanation, Eldridge argues that moral and political philosophers require accounts of what is historically possible, while historians require rough philosophical understandings of ideals that merit reasonable endorsement. Both Immanuel Kant and Walter Benjamin recognize this fact. Each sees a special place for religious consciousness and critical practice in the articulation and revision of ideals that are to have cultural effect, but they differ sharply in the forms of religious-philosophical understanding, cultural criticism, and political practice that they favor. Kant defends a liberal, reformist, Protestant stance, emphasizing the importance of liberty, individual rights, and democratic institutions. His fullest picture of movement toward a moral culture appears in Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, where he describes conjecturally the emergence of an ethical commonwealth. Benjamin defends a politics of improvisatory alertness and consciousness-raising that is suspicious of progress and liberal reform. He practices a form of modernist, materialist criticism that is strongly rooted in his encounters with Kant, Hoelderlin, and Goethe. His fullest, finished picture of this critical practice appears in One-Way Street, where he traces the continuing force of unsatisfied desires. By drawing on both Kant and Benjamin, Eldridge hopes to avoid both moralism (standing on sharply specified normative commitments at all costs) and waywardness (rejecting all settled commitments). And in doing so, he seeks to make better sense of the commitment-forming, commitment-revising, anxious, reflective and sometimes grownup acculturated human subjects we are.

The author describes the influence on the Enlightenment of the intellectual currents that had been active in France, particularly the historical and humanistic esprit critique and the scientific esprit moderne. The second volume probes the writings of Morelly, Helvetius, Holbach, Mably, and Condorcet as they reveal the transformation of the esprit philosophique into the esprit revolutionnaire. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The author describes the influence on the Enlightenment of the intellectual currents that had been active in France, particularly the historical and humanistic esprit critique and the scientific esprit modern. In the first volume he traces the transformation they brought about in religion, ethics, aesthetics, science, politics, economics, and self-knowledge. His analysis of works by Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau--including the Encyclopedic--defines their organic unity and clarifies contradictions that appear to threaten the coherence, consistency, and logical continuity of the esprit philosophique. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In this comprehensive study of Voltaire's intellectual development, he provides the first full treatment of the effect of the English experience on Voltaire, the diversity of activity at Cirey, and the relation of Voltaire's thought to 17th- and 18th-century philosophy. By devoting considerable attention to the movements, the personal relationships, and the environments that influenced Voltaire, Professor Wade is able to illuminate the sources of Voltaire's thought and show at the same time how he wove them into a unique synthesis. A final chapter in the book contains a general summation of the importance of Voltaireanism as a philosophy of life. Originally published in 1969. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science is one of the most difficult but also most important of Kant's works. Published in 1786 between the first (1781) and second (1787) editions of the Critique of Pure Reason, the Metaphysical Foundations occupies a central place in the development of Kant's philosophy, but has so far attracted relatively little attention compared with other works of Kant's critical period. Michael Friedman's book develops a new and complete reading of this work and reconstructs Kant's main argument clearly and in great detail, explaining its relationship to both Newton's Principia and eighteenth-century scientific thinkers such as Euler and Lambert. By situating Kant's text relative to his pre-critical writings on metaphysics and natural philosophy and, in particular, to the changes Kant made in the second edition of the Critique, Friedman articulates a radically new perspective on the meaning and development of the critical philosophy as a whole.

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.

What is the Enlightenment? A period rich with debates on the nature of man, truth and the place of God, with the international circulation of ideas, people and gold. But did the Enlightenment mean the same for men and women, for rich and poor, for Europeans and non-Europeans? In this fourth edition of her acclaimed book, Dorinda Outram addresses these and other questions about the Enlightenment and its place at the foundation of modernity. Studied as a global phenomenon, Outram sets the period against broader social changes, touching on how historical interpretations of the Enlightenment continue to transform in response to contemporary socio-economic trends. Supported by a wide-ranging selection of documents online, this new edition provides an up-to-date overview of the main themes of the period and benefits from an expanded treatment of political economy and imperialism, making it essential reading for students of eighteenth-century history and philosophy.

What is the Enlightenment? A period rich with debates on the nature of man, truth and the place of God, with the international circulation of ideas, people and gold. But did the Enlightenment mean the same for men and women, for rich and poor, for Europeans and non-Europeans? In this fourth edition of her acclaimed book, Dorinda Outram addresses these and other questions about the Enlightenment and its place at the foundation of modernity. Studied as a global phenomenon, Outram sets the period against broader social changes, touching on how historical interpretations of the Enlightenment continue to transform in response to contemporary socio-economic trends. Supported by a wide-ranging selection of documents online, this new edition provides an up-to-date overview of the main themes of the period and benefits from an expanded treatment of political economy and imperialism, making it essential reading for students of eighteenth-century history and philosophy.

Philosophy Bites Back is the second book to come out of the hugely successful podcast Philosophy Bites. It presents a selection of lively interviews with leading philosophers of our time, who discuss the ideas and works of some of the most important thinkers in history. From the ancient classics of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, to the groundbreaking modern thought of Wittgenstein, Rawls, and Derrida, this volume spans over two and a half millennia of western philosophy and illuminates its most fascinating ideas. Philosophy Bites was set up in 2007 by David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton. It has had over 12 million downloads, and is listened to all over the world.

How the concept of "deep time" began as a metaphor used by philosophers, poets, and naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries In this interdisciplinary book, Noah Heringman argues that the concept of "deep time"-most often associated with geological epochs-began as a metaphorical language used by philosophers, poets, and naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to explore the origins of life beyond the written record. Their ideas about "the abyss of time" created a way to think about the prehistoric before it was possible to assign dates to the fossil record. Heringman, examining stories about the deep past by visionary thinkers ranging from William Blake to Charles Darwin, challenges the conventional wisdom that the idea of deep time came forth fully formed from the modern science of geology. Instead, he argues, it has a rich imaginative history. Heringman considers Johann Reinhold Forster and Georg Forster, naturalists on James Cook's second voyage around the world, who, inspired by encounters with Pacific islanders, connected the scale of geological time to human origins and cultural evolution; Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who drew on travel narrative, antiquarian works, and his own fieldwork to lay out the first modern geological timescale; Blake and Johann Gottfried Herder, who used the language of fossils and artifacts to promote ancient ballads and "prehistoric song"; and Darwin's exploration of the reciprocal effects of geological and human time. Deep time, Heringman shows, has figural and imaginative dimensions beyond its geological meaning.

Liberty Fund recognises the significance of George Turnbull, one of the earliest of the authors in the Scottish tradition, with the publication of new editions of his 'Principles of Moral and Christian Philosophy', his 'Observations upon Liberal Education', and his translation of Heineccius. These major works testify to Turnbull's distinctive voice in presenting natural-law theory on a scientific model, in harnessing the arts to promote the principles of moral and civil virtue, and in extolling reason as the foundation of liberty. The short pieces in EDUCATION FOR LIFE supplement Turnbull's larger and more sprawling works and give a more concentrated presentation of his ideas. These extremely rare works include two Aberdeen graduation theses, three tracts on religion, various writings on education and art, and, for the first time in print, the correspondence of Turnbull.

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.

Marking the tercentenary of David Hume's birth, Annette Baier has created an engaging guide to the philosophy of one of the greatest thinkers of Enlightenment Britain. Drawing deeply on a lifetime of scholarship and incisive commentary, she deftly weaves Hume s autobiography together with his writings and correspondence, finding in these personal experiences new ways to illuminate his ideas about religion, human nature, and the social order.

Excerpts from Hume s autobiography at the beginning of each chapter open a window onto the eighteenth-century context in which Hume s philosophy developed. Famous in Christian Britain as a polymath and a nonbeliever, Hume recounts how his early encounters with clerical authority laid the foundation for his lifelong skepticism toward religion. In Scotland, where he grew up, he had been forced to study lists of sins in order to spot his own childish flaws, he reports. Later, as a young man, he witnessed the clergy s punishment of a pregnant unmarried servant, and this led him to question the violent consequences of the Church s emphasis on the doctrine of original sin. Baier s clear interpretation of Hume s "Treatise of Human Nature "explains the link between Hume s growing disillusionment and his belief that ethics should be based on investigations of human nature, not on religious dogma.""

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" "Four months before he died, Hume concluded his autobiography with a eulogy he wrote for his own funeral. It makes no mention of his flaws, critics, or disappointments. Baier s more realistic account rivets our attention on connections between the way Hume lived and the way he thought insights unavailable to Hume himself, perhaps, despite his lifelong introspection.

If the greatness of a philosophical work can be measured by the volume and vehemence of the public response, there is little question that Rousseau's Social Contract stands out as a masterpiece. Within a week of its publication in 1762 it was banished from France. Soon thereafter, Rousseau fled to Geneva, where he saw the book burned in public. At the same time, many of his contemporaries, such as Kant, considered Rousseau to be 'the Newton of the moral world', as he was the first philosopher to draw attention to the basic dignity of human nature. The Social Contract has never ceased to be read and debated in the 250 years since its publication. Rousseau's Social Contract: An Introduction offers a thorough and systematic tour of this notoriously paradoxical and challenging text. David Lay Williams offers readers a chapter-by-chapter reading of the Social Contract, squarely confronting these interpretive obstacles. The book also features a special extended appendix dedicated to outlining Rousseau's famous conception of the general will, which has been the object of controversy since the Social Contract's publication in 1762.

'Two things', wrote Kant, 'fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe: the starry heavens above and the moral law within'. Many would argue that since Kant's day, the study of the starry heavens has advanced while ethics has stagnated, and in particular that Kant's ethics offers an empty formalism that tells us nothing about how we should live. In Acting on Principle Onora O'Neill shows that Kantian ethics has practical as well as philosophical importance. First published in 1975, the book is regarded as a classic account and defence of the Kantian ethical position. It addresses Kant's account of reasoning about action, in particular his controversial claim that the Categorical Imperative guides action and is basic to ethics and justice. This second edition offers a substantial new introduction and updated bibliography, and will be valuable for a wide readership in Kant studies and those studying ethics.

The claim that Rousseau's writings influenced the development of Kant's critical philosophy, and German idealism, is not a new one. As correct as the claim may be, it does not amount to a systematic account of Rousseau's place within this philosophical tradition. It also suggests a progression whereby Rousseau's achievements are eventually eclipsed by those of Kant, Fichte and Hegel, especially with respect to the idea of freedom. In this book David James shows that Rousseau presents certain challenges that Kant and the idealists Fichte and Hegel could not fully meet, by making dependence and necessity, as well as freedom, his central concerns, and thereby raises the question of whether freedom in all its forms is genuinely possible in a condition of human interdependence marked by material inequality. His study will be valuable for all those studying Kant, German idealism and the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas.

We think of the Enlightenment as an era dominated by ideas of progress, production, and industry--not an era that favored the lax and indolent individual. But was the Enlightenment only about the unceasing improvement of self and society? "The Pursuit of Laziness" examines moral, political, and economic treatises of the period, and reveals that crucial eighteenth-century texts did find value in idleness and nonproductivity. Fleshing out Enlightenment thinking in the works of Denis Diderot, Joseph Joubert, Pierre de Marivaux, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Jean-Simeon Chardin, this book explores idleness in all its guises, and illustrates that laziness existed, not as a vice of the wretched, but as an exemplar of modernity and a resistance to beliefs about virtue and utility.

Whether in the dawdlings of Marivaux's journalist who delayed and procrastinated or in the subjects of Chardin's paintings who delighted in suspended, playful time, Pierre Saint-Amand shows how eighteenth-century works provided a strong argument for laziness. Rousseau abandoned his previous defense of labor to pursue reverie and botanical walks, Diderot emphasized a parasitic strategy of resisting work in order to liberate time, and Joubert's little-known posthumous Notebooks radically opposed the central philosophy of the Enlightenment in a quest to infinitely postpone work.

Unsettling the stubborn view of the eighteenth century as an age of frenetic industriousness and labor, "The Pursuit of Laziness" plumbs the texts and images of the time and uncovers deliberate yearnings for slowness and recreation."