Karen Ng sheds new light on Hegel's famously impenetrable philosophy. She does so by offering a new interpretation of Hegel's idealism and by foregrounding Hegel's Science of Logic, revealing that Hegel's theory of reason revolves around the concept of organic life. Beginning with the influence of Kant's Critique of Judgment on Hegel, Ng argues that Hegel's key philosophical contributions concerning self-consciousness, freedom, and logic all develop around the idea of internal purposiveness, which appealed to Hegel deeply. She charts the development of the purposiveness theme in Kant's third Critique, and argues that the most important innovation from that text is the claim that the purposiveness of nature opens up and enables the operation of the power of judgment. This innovation is essential for understanding Hegel's philosophical method in the Differenzschrift (1801) and Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), where Hegel, developing lines of thought from Fichte and Schelling, argues against Kant that internal purposiveness constitutes cognition's activity, shaping its essential relation to both self and world. From there, Ng defends a new and detailed interpretation of Hegel's Science of Logic, arguing that Hegel's Subjective Logic can be understood as Hegel's version of a critique of judgment, in which life comes to be understood as opening up the possibility of intelligibility. She makes the case that Hegel's theory of judgment is modelled on reflective and teleological judgments, in which something's species or kind provides the objective context for predication. The Subjective Logic culminates in the argument that life is a primitive or original activity of judgment, one that is the necessary presupposition for the actualization of self-conscious cognition. Through bold and ambitious new arguments, Ng demonstrates the ongoing dialectic between life and self-conscious cognition, providing ground-breaking ways of understanding Hegel's philosophical system.

In Kant and Theodicy: A Search for an Answer to the Problem of Evil, George Huxford proves that Kant's engagement with theodicy was career-long and not confined to his short 1791 treatise that dealt explicitly with the subject. Huxford treats Kant's developing thought on theodicy in three periods: pre-Critical (exploration), early-Critical (transition), and late-Critical (conclusion). Illustrating the advantage of approaching Kant through this framework, Huxford argues that Kant's stance developed through his career into his own unique authentic theodicy; Kant rejected philosophical theodicies based on theoretical/speculative reason but advanced authentic theodicy grounded in practical reason, finding a middle ground between philosophical theodicy and fideism, both of which he rejected. Nevertheless, Huxford concludes that Kant's authentic theodicy fails because it fails to meet his own definition of a theodicy.

In most Western societies, guilt is widely regarded as a vital moral emotion. In addition to playing a central role in moral development and progress, many take the capacity to feel guilt as a defining feature of morality itself: no truly moral person escapes the pang of guilt when she has done something wrong. But proponents of guilt's importance face important challenges, such as distinguishing healthy from pathological forms of guilt, and accounting for the fact that not all cultures value guilt in the same way, if at all. In this volume, philosophers and psychologists come together to think more systematically about the nature and value of guilt. The book begins with chapters on the biological origins and psychological nature of guilt and moves on to discuss the culturally enriched conceptions of guilt and its value that we find in various eastern and western philosophic traditions. In addition, numerous chapters discuss healthy or morally valuable forms guilt and their pathological or irrational shadows.

This volume explores the various 'labyrinths' of Leibniz's philosophy, that is, hard-to-solve problems in which the human mind becomes entangled. Although the Hanoverian explicitly distinguished two such labyrinths (freedom and continuum), one may notice that in his theory there are more intricate issues the thinker can resolve with the help of the 'Ariadne's thread' - a certain principle to be followed by the reflecting mind. In the perspective of the mazes of theodicy, consciousness and absolute and relative differences, the authors try to unravel issues such as: the etymology of 'theodicee', the concepts of freedom and metaphysical evil, the reception of monadology by Olivier Sacks, the understanding of 'panpsychism', the similarity between jurisprudence and theology, and many others.

Expressions of gratitude abound. Hardly a book is published that does not include in its preface or acknowledgments some variation on, "I am grateful to...for..." Indeed, most achievements come to be only through the help of others. We value the benevolence of others, and when we-or our loved ones-are the recipients of benevolence, our emotional response is often one of gratitude. But, are we bound to the requirement of 'repaying' our benefactors in some way? If we are, and there are-as ordinary language suggests-debts of gratitude, what kind of debts are these? Does the appropriateness of my gratitude require that my benefactor in fact intended to benefit me (in just the way she did)? Is there a difference between feeling grateful and being grateful? Is a precondition of my being grateful to another that I respect her? Do we owe a special sort of gratitude to those who have shaped us into the persons we are? What are the psychological and normative relations between gratitude the emotion, and gratitude the virtue? These are among the questions carefully addressed in The Moral Psychology of Gratitude. This volume provides readers with the state-of-the-art in research on gratitude. It does so in the form of sixteen never-before published articles on the emotion by leading voices in philosophy and the sciences of the mind.

A new idea of the future emerged in eighteenth-century France. With the development of modern biological, economic, and social engineering, the future transformed from being predetermined and beyond significant human intervention into something that could be dramatically affected through actions in the present. The Time of Enlightenment argues that specific mechanisms for constructing the future first arose through the development of practices and instruments aimed at countering degeneration. In their attempts to regenerate a healthy natural state, Enlightenment philosophes created the means to exceed previously recognized limits and build a future that was not merely a recuperation of the past, but fundamentally different from it. A theoretically inflected work combining intellectual history and the history of science, this book will appeal to anyone interested in European history and the history of science, as well as the history of France, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution.

While Kant is commonly regarded as one of the most austere philosophers of all time, this book provides quite a different perspective of the founder of transcendental philosophy. Kant is often thought of as being boring, methodical, and humorless. Yet the thirty jokes and anecdotes collected and illustrated here for the first time reveal a man and a thinker who was deeply interested in how humor and laughter shape how we think, feel, and communicate with fellow human beings. In addition to a foreword on Kant's theory of humor by Noel Carroll as well as Clewis's informative chapters, Kant's Humorous Writings contains new translations of Kant's jokes, quips, and anecdotes. Each of the thirty excerpts is illustrated and supplemented by historical commentaries which explain their significance.

Cosmotheism retrieves the importance of a cosmic approach to reality through its revival of the heliocentric creed championed by Copernicus, Bruno and Kepler, through its critiques of historical patterns of politics and technology, and through its sponsorship of emancipatory thinkers, artists, "psychonauts," and cosmologists.

The author of this book speaks out again in regard to the Enlightenment. His inspiration comes not only from new observations occasioned by own studies, but also from the recently read material as well as opinions and appraisals of the era articulated lately at academic conferences. Although they have not led the author to perform a fundamental revision of his views in regard to the nature of Enlightenment and its crucial contributions to the Western culture, they did afford a better understanding of its complexity. They also made him more aware that his interpretation and presentation of that era depends considerably on what its prominent representatives had to say, as well as on the worldview-based assumptions and methods of appraisal adopted by its later observers and interpreters.

The markings - marginal notes, underlinings, bookmarks, turned down corners - on the books in Voltaire's vast library bear witness to his thinking. The Corpus des notes marginales reproduces them alongside the extracts to which they relate. Comprehensive editorial notes show how Voltaire's reading influenced his writing. On Voltaire's death in 1778, his vast library, consisting of some 7000 volumes, was sold by his niece, Marie-Louise Denis, to Catherine the Great of Russia for 30,000 roubles. The empress, who had corresponded with Voltaire for fifteen years, wished to preserve the library intact as a monument to the writer, and housed the collection in the palace of the Hermitage. It was subsequently transferred to the Imperial Public Library, and then incorporated into the National Library of Russia, St Petersburg, where it now resides. Beginning in the 1950s Russian scholars typed out the extracts annotated by Voltaire and his secretaries and added their notes and markings for publication. The Corpus des notes marginales was launched by Akademie Verlag in East Berlin in 1979, with the Voltaire Foundation as co-publisher. Akademie Verlag was obliged to abandon the project in the mid-1990s, but in 2003 the Voltaire Foundation took the decision to complete it. In 2004 Natalia Elaguina, Head of Western Manuscripts at the National Library, began sending material to the Voltaire Foundation, and it is thanks to her that the Corpus des notes marginales was published as volumes 136 to 144 of the Complete Works of Voltaire. MARGINALIA OUTSIDE ST PETERSBURG. As a complement to the Corpus des notes marginales, the Notes et ecrits marginaux conserves hors de la Bibliotheque nationale de Russie (volume 145 of the Complete Works) reproduces marginalia by Voltaire found in works outside of his personal library in both printed books and manuscripts. It occupies a unique place within the series as some of the texts included therein were annotated by Voltaire not for his own use but for friends, acquaintances and correspondents. Contributors: Larissa Albina, Samuel Bailey, Nicholas Cronk, Jean Dagen, Natalia Elaguina, Nathalie Ferrand, Graham Gargett, Paul Gibbard, Ethel Groffier, John R. Iverson, Edouard Langille, Christiane Mervaud, Michel Mervaud, Patrick Neiertz, Christophe Paillard, Jean-Alexandre Perras, Gillian Pink, John Renwick, Kelsey Rubin-Detlev, Alain Sandrier, Bertram E. Schwarzbach, Gerhardt Stenger, Gemma Tidman,Bruno Tribout, David Williams, Irina Zaitseva.

This anthology brings together texts of significance for the conceptualisation of human dignity as a constitutional principle in Europe from the earliest evidence until 1965. It divides into four parts, respectively presenting the ancient, the medieval, the early modern and the modern sources. As far as human dignity is a constitutional principle, its history follows closely that of the constitution of states. However, various traditions of human dignity, understanding it to rely on features unrelated to the state, combine in the background to reflect the substance of the idea. The introductions to texts, chapters and parts narrates this history in relation to the texts presented to reflect it. The aim is to provide for scholars and students of law, philosophy, political science and theology a collection of texts documenting the history of the concept of human dignity that is sufficiently comprehensive to contextualise the various understandings of it. A structured bibliography accompanies the work.

This volume investigates the impact the first and third Earls of Shaftesbury had on Enlightenment thought. The focus is on both their tangible actions on the political stage of the day and on the more general intellectual repercussions of what these men stood for in word and deed. As a result, "Shaping Enlightenment Politics" offers important re-evaluations of what two towering figures of the age had to contribute to much-contested topics such as slavery, the discourse of civic humanism, or party politics.

This book analyzes how the public character of judgments of taste makes implicit statements in moral and political philosophy. The framework that relates aesthetic, moral, and political aspects into such a triadic relationship is an implicit conception of freedom. In "The Critique of Judgment" Kant elaborates the idea that judgments of taste can only exist where society exists. The author regards Friedrich Schiller's and Hannah Arendt's approaches on the normative resources of Kant's aesthetics for moral and political thought. He evaluates the discovery of the presence of a constant feature of Kant's conception of freedom in both his aesthetic and moral theory: freedom as autonomy.

Why read Montaigne today? Richard Scholar argues that Montaigne, whose essays were read by Shakespeare and remain a landmark of European culture, is above all a masterful exponent of the art of free-thinking. Montaigne invites his readers to follow the twists and turns of his mind, and challenges them to embark on an inner adventure of their own. Free-thinking is an art every bit as difficult to practice today as it was in sixteenth-century France, but it remains equally crucial to a fulfilled life and to a healthy body politic, and Montaigne offers his readers a master-class in that art.

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.

Aligning Values and Politics argues that empowering individuals for self-actualization is an indispensable tool for attaining freedom; therefore, politics must align with the promotion of self-actualization. Private property rights have in the past helped people to develop skills, but such rights were abused. Once these rights are combined with an ethics of responsibility, the book opens the doors to a nonpartisan analysis of income inequality, inheritance, race relations, abortion and governance. The book argues that the American government is engaged in producing "bread and circuses," inducing people into living vicariously. Using the ideas of Immanuel Kant, the authors claim that we can return to a civil society that values independence rather than entitlements.