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Books > 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.
Colin Wilson revitalised existentialism with a completely new
approach to the philosophy. The six volumes of his 'Outsider'
series created an existentialism that is not paralysed by its own
nihilism. This book, first published in 1966, is a clear summary of
the ideas of the 'Outsider' cycle, and also develops them to a new
stage. Wilson's 'new existentialism' sees philosophy as an
intellectual adventure that aims at a real command and control of
human existence, and this book is its clearest exponent.
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.
This book offers a fresh and up-to-date account of the ethical
thought of one of the twentieth century's greatest theologians:
Karl Barth. In it, the author seeks to recover Barth's ethics from
some widespread misunderstandings, and also presents a picture of
it as a whole. Drawing on recently published sources, Dr Biggar
construes the ethics of the Church Dogmatics as it might have been
had Barth lived to complete it. However, The Hastening that Waits
is more than apology and description. For it recommends to
contemporary Christian ethics the theological rigour with which
Barth expounds the good life in terms of the living presence of
God-in-Christ to his creatures; his conception of right human
action as that which is able to hasten in the service of humanity
precisely by waiting prayerfully upon God; and his discriminate
openness to moral wisdom outside the Christian church. Among
particular topics treated are: the concept of human freedom and of
created moral order; moral norms and their relation to individual
vocation; the relative ethical roles of the Bible, the Church,
philosophy, and empirical science; moral character and its
formation; and the problem of war.
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.
Cheryl Misak presents the first collective study of the development
of philosophy in North America, from the 18th century to the end of
the 20th century. Twenty-six leading experts examine distinctive
features of American philosophy, trace notable themes, and consider
the legacy and influence of notable figures. This will be the first
reference point for future work on the subject, and a fascinating
resource for anyone interested in modern philosophy or American
intellectual history.
Now in a new edition, this volume updates Davidson's exceptional
Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984), which set out his
enormously influential philosophy of language. The original volume
remains a central point of reference, and a focus of controversy,
with its impact extending into linguistic theory, philosophy of
mind, and epistemology. Addressing a central question--what it is
for words to mean what they do--and featuring a previously
uncollected, additional essay, this work will appeal to a wide
audience of philosophers, linguists, and psychologists.
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
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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