What is solitude, why do we crave and fear it, and how do we distinguish it properly from loneliness? It lies at the core of the lives of philosophers and their self-reflective contemplations, and it is the enabling (and disabling) condition that allows us to seriously question how to live creatively and meaningfully. David Farrell Krell is one of the decisive philosophical voices on how philosophers can creatively engage their solitudes. The scale and range of his understanding of solitudes are taken up in this book by some of the most distinguished Continental philosophers. Authors address the problem of solitude from different angles, and imagine how to face and respond creatively to it. Blending philosophical narrative and straightforward philosophical treatises, this book provides inspiration for contemplation of our own versions of solitude and their creative potentials. Some authors focus on the work of historical figures in philosophy or poetry, such as Heidegger and Hoelderlin, while others deal more directly with Krell's work as exemplary of their own imaginings of creative solitudes. Other authors respond more personally and creatively in their demonstrations of how we can, and must, seek our solitudes. Including an original chapter by David Farrell Krell, this book is an invigorating meditation on the possibility of being philosophical about a life through solitude, and the meaning of this powerfully resonant and universal human experience.

Humility, Pride, and Christian Virtue Theory proposes an account of humility that relies on the most radical Christian sayings about humility, especially those found in Augustine and the early monastic tradition. It argues that this was the view of humility that put Christian moral thought into decisive conflict with the best Greco-Roman moral thought. This radical Christian account of humility has been forgotten amidst contemporary efforts to clarify and retrieve the virtue of humility for secular life. Kent Dunnington shows how humility was repurposed during the early-modern era-particularly in the thought of Hobbes, Hume, and Kant-to better serve the economic and social needs of the emerging modern state. This repurposed humility insisted on a role for proper pride alongside humility, as a necessary constituent of self-esteem and a necessary motive of consistent moral action over time. Contemporary philosophical accounts of humility continue this emphasis on proper pride as a counterbalance to humility. By contrast, radical Christian humility proscribes pride altogether. Dunnington demonstrates how such a radical view need not give rise to vices of humility such as servility and pusillanimity, nor need such a view fall prey to feminist critiques of humility. But the view of humility set forth makes little sense abstracted from a specific set of doctrinal commitments peculiar to Christianity. This study argues that this is a strength rather than a weakness of the account since it displays how Christianity matters for the shape of the moral life.

This book explores the Paris Ecole Militaire as an institution, arguing for its importance as a school that presented itself as a model for reform during a key moment in the movement towards military professionalism as well as state-run secular education. The school is distinguished for being an Enlightenment project, one of its founders publishing an article on it in the Encyclopedie in 1755. Its curriculum broke completely with the Latin pedagogy of the dominant Jesuit system, while adapting the legacy of seventeenth-century riding academies. Its status touches on the nature of absolutism, as it was conceived to glorify the Bourbon dynasty in a similar way to the girls' school at Saint Cyr and the Invalides. It was also a dispensary of royal charity calculated to ally the nobility more closely to royal interests through military service. In the army, its proofs of nobility were the model for the much debated 1781 Segur decree, often described as a notable cause of the French Revolution.

Although indisputably one of the most important thinkers in the Western intellectual tradition, Rousseau's actual place within that tradition, and the legacy of his thought, remains hotly disputed. Thinking with Rousseau reconsiders his contribution to this tradition through a series of essays exploring the relationship between Rousseau and other 'great thinkers'. Ranging from 'Rousseau and Machiavelli' to 'Rousseau and Schmitt', this volume focuses on the kind of intricate work that intellectuals do when they read each other and grapple with one another's ideas. This approach is very helpful in explaining how old ideas are transformed and/or transmitted and new ones are generated. Rousseau himself was a master at appropriating the ideas of others, while simultaneously subverting them, and as the essays in this volume vividly demonstrate, the resulting ambivalences and paradoxes in his thought were creatively mined by others.

The volume presents illuminating research carried out by international scholars of Locke and the early modern period. The essays address the theoretical and historical contexts of Locke's analytical methodology and come together in a multidisciplinary approach that sets biblical hermeneutics in relation to his philosophical, historical, and political thought, and to the philological and doctrinal culture of his time. The contextualization of Locke's biblical hermeneutics within the contemporary reading of the Bible contributes to the analysis of the figure of Christ and the role of Paul's theology in political and religious thought from the seventeenth century to the Enlightenment. The volume sheds light on how Locke was appreciated by his contemporaries as a biblical interpreter and exegete. It also offers a reconsideration that overarches interpretations confined within specific disciplinary ambits to address Locke's thought in a global historic context.

This collection of essays takes as its starting point Arthur Ripstein's Force and Freedom: Kant's Legal and Political Philosophy, a seminal work on Kant's thinking about law, which also treats many of the contemporary issues of legal and political philosophy. The essays offer readings and elucidations of Ripstein's thought, dispute some of his claims and extend some of his themes within broader philosophical contexts, thus developing the significance of Ripstein's ideas for contemporary legal and political philosophy. All of the essays are contributions to normative philosophy in a broadly Kantian spirit. Prominent themes include rights in the body, the relation between morality and law, the nature of coercion and its role in legal obligation, the role of indeterminacy in law, the nature and justification of political society and the theory of the state. This volume will be of interest to a wide audience, including legal scholars, Kant scholars, and philosophers with an interest in Kant or in legal and political philosophy.

La bibliotheque de Voltaire, acquise par Catherine II, a ete installee a l'Ermitage en 1779. Constituee d'acquisistions faites pendant plusieurs decennies, la bibliotheque servit a Voltaire de source de documentation pour ecrire des oeuvres diverses - romans, pieces, articles, pamphlets, etc. Les innombrables traces de lecture laissees par Voltaire dans plus de la moitie de ses livres temoignent de son extraordinaire capacite de travail et du role primordial joue par sa bibliotheque. Les notes et autres traces de lecture sont reproduites integralement dans cette edition des marginalia avec les textes auxquels elles se rapportent, en les disposant exactement comme sur l'originale.