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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present > Western philosophy, from c 1900 -
Nietzsche, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics explores how
Nietzsche criticizes, adopts, and reformulates Kant's critique of
metaphysics and his transcendental idealism. Thing in itself and
phenomenon, space and time, intuition and thought, the I and
self-consciousness, concepts and judgments, categories and
schemata, teleological judgement: building on established and
recent literature on these topics in both thinkers, this volume
asks whether Nietzsche can - malgr lui - be considered a Kantian of
sorts. Nietzsche's intensive engagement with early Neo-Kantians
(Lange, Liebmann, Fischer, von Helmholtz) and other contemporaries
of his, largely ignored in the Anglophone literature, is also
addressed, raising the question whether Nietzsche's positions on
Kant's theoretical philosophy are best understood as historically
embedded in the often rather loose relation they had to the first
Critique. These and other questions are taken up in Nietzsche, Kant
and the Problem of Metaphysics, which in different ways tackles the
complexities of Nietzsche's relation to Kant's theoretical
philosophy and its reception in nineteenth Century philosophy.
Plato's "Phaedo", Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit" and Heidegger's
"Being and Time" are three of the most profound meditations on
variations of the ideas that to practice philosophy is to practice
how to die. This study traces how these variations are connected
with each other and with the reflections of this idea to be found
in the works of other ancient and modern philosophers - including
Neitzsche, Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and levinas. The book
also shows how this philosophical thanatology motivates or is
motivated by experiences documented in psychoanalysis and in the
anthropology of Western and Oriental religions and myths.
The "Nations" are the "seventy nations": a metaphor which, in the
Talmudic idiom, designates the whole of humanity surrounding
Israel. In this major collection of essays, Levinas considers
Judaism's uncertain relationship to European culture since the
Enlightenment, problems of distance and integration. It also
includes essays on Franz Rosenzweig and Moses Mendelssohn, and a
discussion of central importance to Jewish philosophy in the
context of general philosophy. This work brings to the fore the
vital encounter between philosophy and Judaism, a hallmark of
Levinas's thought.
Frank Jackson champions the cause of conceptual analysis as central
to philosophical inquiry. In recent years conceptual analysis has
been undervalued and, Jackson suggests, widely misunderstood; he
argues that there is nothing especially mysterious about it and a
whole range of important questions cannot be productively addressed
without it. He anchors his argument in discussion of specific
philosophical issues, starting with the metaphysical doctrine of
physicalism and moving on, via free will, meaning, personal
identity, motion and change, to the philosophy of colour and to
ethics. The significance of different kinds of supervenience
theses, Kripke and Putnam's work in the philosophy of modality and
language, and the role of intuitions about possible cases receive
detailed attention. Jackson concludes with a defence of a version
of analytical descriptivism in ethics. In this way the book not
only offers a methodological programme for philosophy, but also
throws fascinating new light on some much-debated problems and
their interrelations. puffs which may be quoted (please do not edit
without consulting OUP editor): 'This is an outstanding book. It
covers a vast amount of philosophy in a very short space, advances
a number of original and striking positions, and manages to be both
clear and concise in its expositions of other views and forceful in
its criticisms of them. The book offers something new for those
interested in the various individual problems it
discusses-conceptual analysis, the mind-body relation, secondary
qualities, modality, and ethical realism. But unifying these
individual discussions is an ambitious structure which amounts to
an outline of a complete metaphysical system, and an outline of an
epistemology for this metaphysics. It is hard to think of a central
area of analytic philosophy which will not be touched by Jackson's
conclusions.' Tim Crane, Reader in Philosophy, University College
London 'The writing is clear, straightforward, and down to
earth-the usual virtues one expects from Jackson . . . what he has
to say is innovative and valuable . . . the book deals with a large
number of apparently diverse philosophical issues, but it is also
an elegantly unified work. What gives it unity is the
metaphilosophical framework that Jackson works out with great care
and persuasiveness. This is the first serious and sustained work on
the methodology of metaphysics in recent memory. What he says about
the role of conceptual analysis in metaphysics is an important and
timely contribution. . . . It is refreshing and heartening to see a
first-class analytic philosopher doing some serious
metaphilosophical work . . . I think that the book will be greeted
as an important event in philosophical publishing.' Jaegwon Kim,
Professor of Philosophy, Brown University
Georg Lukcs stands as a towering figure in the areas of critical
theory, literary criticism, aesthetics, ethical theory and the
philosophy of Marxism and German Idealism. Yet, despite his
influence throughout the twentieth century, his contributions to
the humanities and theoretical social sciences are marked by
neglect. What has been lost is a crucial thinker in the tradition
of critical theory, but also, by extension, a crucial set of ideas
that can be used to shed new light on the major problems of
contemporary society. This book reconsiders Lukcs intellectual
contributions in the light of recent intellectual developments in
political theory, aesthetics, ethical theory, and social and
cultural theory. An international team of contributors contend that
Luk ideas and theoretical contributions have much to offer the
theoretical paucity of the present. Ultimately the book
reintegrates Lukcs as a central thinker, not only in the tradition
of critical theory, but also as a major theorist and critic of
modernity, of capitalism, and of new trends in political theory,
cultural criticism and legal theory.
This collection of essays aims to investigate the unique place of
Jacques Ranciere in the contemporary intellectual scene. This book
forms the first critical study of Jacques Ranciere's impact and
contribution to contemporary theoretical and interdisciplinary
studies. It showcases the work of leading scholars in fields such
as political theory, history, cinema studies and literary theory;
each of whom are uniquely situated to engage with the novelty of
Ranciere's thinking within their respective fields. Each of the
thirteen essays provides an investigation into the critical stance
Ranciere takes towards his contemporaries, concentrating on the
versatile application of his thought to diverse fields of study
(including, cinema studies, literary studies and the 'history as
fiction' and 'history from below' movements). The aim of this
collection is to use the critical interventions Ranciere's writing
makes on current topics and themes as a way of offering new
critical perspectives on his thought. Wielding their individual
expertise, each contributor assesses his perspectives and positions
on thinkers and topics of contemporary importance.
Meaning (significance) and nature are this book's principal topics.
They seem an odd couple, like raisins and numbers, though they
elide when meanings of a global sort-ideologies and religions, for
example-promote ontologies that subordinate nature. Setting one
against the other makes reality contentious. It signifies workmates
and a coal face to miners, gluons to physicists, prayer and
redemption to priests. Are there many realities, or many
perspectives on one? The answer I prefer is the comprehensive
naturalism anticipated by Aristotle and Spinoza: "natura naturans,
natura naturata." Nature naturing is an array of mutually
conditioning material processes in spacetime. Each structure or
event-storm clouds forming, nature natured-is self-differentiating,
self-stabilizing, and sometimes self-disassembling; each alters or
transforms a pre-existing state of affairs. This surmise
anticipated discoveries and analyses to which neither thinker had
access, though physics and biology confirm their hypothesis beyond
reasonable doubt. Hence the question this book considers: Is
reality divided:nature vrs. lived experience? Or is experience,
with all its meanings and values, the complex expression of natural
processes?
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