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Books > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present > Western philosophy, c 1600 to c 1800
This book is the first translation into English of the Reflections
which Kant wrote whilst formulating his ideas in political
philosophy: the preparatory drafts for Theory and Practice, Toward
Perpetual Peace, the Doctrine of Right, and Conflict of the
Faculties; and the only surviving student transcription of his
course on Natural Right. Through these texts one can trace the
development of his political thought, from his first exposure to
Rousseau in the mid 1760s through to his last musings in the late
1790s after his final system of Right was published. The material
covers such topics as the central role of freedom, the social
contract, the nature of sovereignty, the means for achieving
international peace, property rights in relation to the very
possibility of human agency, the general prohibition of rebellion,
and Kant's philosophical defense of the French Revolution.
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.
During the 18th century, Edinburgh was the intellectual hub of the
Western world. Adam Smith, David Hume, Dugald Stewart and Adam
Ferguson delivered their diverse tomes on philosophy and political
economy. Others such as James Hutton, Joseph Black, Lord Hailes,
Sir John Clerk of Eldin and Robert Adam pushed ahead with new
discoveries and ideas in the fields of science, medicine, law and
architecture. If Edinburgh was the beating heart of this Scottish
Enlightenment then its physical embodiment was the New Town and the
great civic improvements in the old medieval city. In this
informative and highly illustrated guide Sheila Szatkowski
introduces the noteworthy buildings and people of 18th- and early
19th-century Edinburgh. It is a book about people and places, clubs
and conversations, and a celebration of how topography and cultural
achievement came together to create the great enlightenment city
that is Edinburgh.
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.
Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza (1632-1677) was one of the most
systematic, inspiring, and influential philosophers of the early
modern period. From a pantheistic starting point that identified
God with Nature as all of reality, he sought to demonstrate an
ethics of reason, virtue, and freedom while unifying religion with
science and mind with body. His contributions to metaphysics,
epistemology, psychology, ethics, politics, and the analysis of
religion remain vital to the present day. Yet his writings
initially appear forbidding to contemporary readers, and his ideas
have often been misunderstood. This second edition of The Cambridge
Companion to Spinoza includes new chapters on Spinoza's life and
his metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of religion, and biblical
scholarship, as well as extensive updates to the previous chapters
and bibliography. A thorough, reliable, and accessible guide to
this extraordinary philosopher, it will be invaluable to anyone who
wants to understand what Spinoza has to teach.
The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism traces the
thought of a large and neglected group of German thinkers and their
encounter with the ideas and ideal of the Enlightenment from 1740
to 1790. Concentrating on the nature of their historical
consciousness, Peter Hanns Reill addresses two basic issues in the
interpretation of the Enlightenment: to what degree can one speak
of the unity of the Enlightenment and to what extent can the
Enlightenment be characterized as "modern"? Reill attempts to
revise the traditional interpretation of the Enlightenment as an
age insensitive to the postulates of modern historical thought and
to dissolve the alleged opposition of the Enlightenment to later
intellectual developments such as Idealism. He argues that German
Enlightened thinkers generated the general presuppositions upon
which modern historical thought is founded. Asserting that the
Enlightenment was not a unitary movement, Reill shows how each
phase of it had unique elements and made contributions to
Enlightenment thought as a whole. Exploring the forms of thought,
the mental climate, and the different intellectual milieus in which
the German thinkers operated, Reill demonstrates that they were
confronted by two opposing intellectual traditions: German Pietism
and rationalism. In attempting to reconcile both without submerging
one into the other, these Enlightenment thinkers turned to
historical speculation and learning. They discussed the relation
between religious and rationalistic assumptions, the transformation
of the concepts of religion and law, the interaction between
aesthetic and historical thought, the creation of a theory of
understanding to support the new idea of history, the use of
causation in historical analysis, and the rediscovery of the Middle
Ages. Reill reveals how they anticipated the work of more famous
thinkers of the nineteenth century and establishes the conceptual
similarities between thinkers generally thought to be more
different than alike. This title is part of UC Press's Voices
Revived program, which commemorates University of California
Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and
give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to
1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship
accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title
was originally published in 1975.
The third volume of the "Corpus des notes marginales", long since
out of print, was first published by Akademie-Verlag in Berlin,
East Germany, in 1985. It was reissued in the OEuvres completes de
Voltaire Oxford edition, where the remaining volumes of the Corpus
(unfinished since the publication of volume 5 in 1994) began to be
published in 2006. This volume has been made easier to use in the
reissue by the addition of running heads. Reproduced in an appendix
is Christiane Mervaud's seminal article, 'Du bon usage des
marginalia', which appeared in the "Revue Voltaire" 3 (2003).
Two kinds of cosmopolitan vision are typically associated with
Kant's practical philosophy: on the one hand, the ideal of a
universal moral community of rational agents who constitute a
'kingdom of ends' qua shared humanity. On the other hand, the ideal
of a distinctly political community of 'world citizens' who share
membership in some kind of global polity. Kant's Grounded
Cosmopolitanism introduces a novel account of Kant's global
thinking, one that has hitherto been largely overlooked: a grounded
cosmopolitanism concerned with spelling out the normative
implications of the fact that a plurality of corporeal agents
concurrently inhabit the earth's spherical surface. It is neither
concerned with a community of shared humanity in the abstract, nor
of shared citizenship, but with a 'disjunctive' community of earth
dwellers, that is, embodied agents in direct physical confrontation
with each other. Kant's grounded cosmopolitanism as laid out in the
Doctrine of Right frames the question how individuals relate to one
another globally by virtue of concurrent existence and derives from
this a specific set of constraints on cross-border interactions.
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.
The literary and scientific renaissance that struck Germany around
1800 is usually taken to be the cradle of contemporary humanism.
Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism shows how figures like Immanuel
Kant and Johann Wolfgang Goethe as well as scientists specializing
in the emerging modern life and cognitive sciences not only
established but also transgressed the boundaries of the "human."
This period so broadly painted as humanist by proponents and
detractors alike also grappled with ways of challenging some of
humanism's most cherished assumptions: the dualisms, for example,
between freedom and nature, science and art, matter and spirit,
mind and body, and thereby also between the human and the nonhuman.
Posthumanism is older than we think, and the so-called "humanists"
of the late Enlightenment have much to offer our contemporary
re-thinking of the human.
This book offers new critical perspectives on the relationship
between the notions of speculation, logic and reality in Hegel's
thought as basis for his philosophical account of nature, history,
spirit and human experience. The systematic functions of logic and
pure thought are explored in their concrete forms and processual
progression from subjective spirit to philosophy of right, society,
the notion of habit, the idea of work, art, religion and science.
Engaging the relation between the Logic and its realisations, this
book shows the internal tension that inhabits Hegel's philosophy at
the intersection of logical (conceptual) speculation and concrete
(interpretative) analysis. The investigation of this tension allows
for a hermeneutical approach that demystifies the common view of
Hegel's idealism as a form of abstract thought, while allowing for
a new assessment of the importance of speculation for a concrete
understanding of the world.
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.
In this interdisciplinary work, Stacy J. Lettman explores real and
imagined violence as depicted in Caribbean and Jamaican text and
music, how that violence repeats itself in both art and in the
actions of the state, and what that means for Caribbean cultural
identity. Jamaica is known for having one of the highest per capita
murder rates in the world, a fact that Lettman links to remnants of
the plantation era-namely the economic dispossession and structural
violence that still haunt the island. Lettman contends that the
impact of colonial violence is so embedded in the language of
Jamaican literature and music that violence has become a separate
language itself, one that paradoxically can offer cultural modes of
resistance. Lettman codifies Paul Gilroy's concept of the "slave
sublime" as a remix of Kantian philosophy through a Caribbean lens
to take a broad view of Jamaica, the Caribbean, and their political
and literary history that challenges Eurocentric ideas of slavery,
Blackness, and resistance. Living at the intersection of
philosophy, literary and musical analysis, and postcolonial theory,
this book sheds new light on the lingering ghosts of the plantation
and slavery in the Caribbean.
In this interdisciplinary work, Stacy J. Lettman explores real and
imagined violence as depicted in Caribbean and Jamaican text and
music, how that violence repeats itself in both art and in the
actions of the state, and what that means for Caribbean cultural
identity. Jamaica is known for having one of the highest per capita
murder rates in the world, a fact that Lettman links to remnants of
the plantation era-namely the economic dispossession and structural
violence that still haunt the island. Lettman contends that the
impact of colonial violence is so embedded in the language of
Jamaican literature and music that violence has become a separate
language itself, one that paradoxically can offer cultural modes of
resistance. Lettman codifies Paul Gilroy's concept of the "slave
sublime" as a remix of Kantian philosophy through a Caribbean lens
to take a broad view of Jamaica, the Caribbean, and their political
and literary history that challenges Eurocentric ideas of slavery,
Blackness, and resistance. Living at the intersection of
philosophy, literary and musical analysis, and postcolonial theory,
this book sheds new light on the lingering ghosts of the plantation
and slavery in the Caribbean.
In this book, Marek Sullivan challenges a widespread consensus
linking secularization to rationalization, and argues for a more
sensual genealogy of secularity connected to affect, race and
power. While existing works of secular intellectual history,
especially Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007), tend to rely on
rationalistic conceptions of Enlightenment thought, Sullivan offers
an alternative perspective on key thinkers such as Descartes,
Montesquieu and Diderot, asserting that these figures sought to
reinstate emotion against the rationalistic tendencies of the past.
From Descartes's last work Les Passions de l'Ame (1649) to Baron
d'Holbach's System of Nature (1770), the French Enlightenment
demonstrated an acute understanding of the limits of reason, with
crucial implications for our current 'postsecular' and
'postliberal' moment. Sullivan also emphasizes the importance of
Western constructions of Oriental religions for the history of the
secular, identifying a distinctively secular-yet impassioned-form
of Orientalism that emerged in the 18th century. Mahomet's racial
profile in Voltaire's Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet (1741), for example,
functioned as a polemic device calibrated for emotional impact, in
line with Enlightenment efforts to generate an affective body of
anti-Catholic propaganda that simultaneously shored up people's
sense of national belonging. By exposing the Enlightenment as a
nationalistic and affective movement that resorted to racist,
Orientalist and emotional tropes from the outset, Sullivan
ultimately undermines modern nationalist appeals to the
Enlightenment as a mark of European distinction.
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