This innovative volume presents an insightful philosophical portrait of the life and work of Arthur Schopenhauer.
Focuses on the concept of the sublime as it clarifies Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory, moral theory and asceticism
Explores the substantial relationships between Schopenhauer's philosophy and Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity
Defends Schopenhauer's position that absolute truth can be known and described as a blindly striving, all-permeating, universal "Will"
Examines the influence of Asian philosophy on Schopenhauer
Describes the relationships between Schopenhauer's thought and that of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein.

In this book, Kevin M. Cherry compares the views of Plato and Aristotle about the practice, study, and, above all, the purpose of politics. The first scholar to place Aristotle's Politics in sustained dialogue with Plato's Statesman, Cherry argues that Aristotle rejects the view of politics advanced by Plato's Eleatic Stranger, contrasting them on topics such as the proper categorization of regimes, the usefulness and limitations of the rule of law, and the proper understanding of phron sis. The various differences between their respective political philosophies, however, reflect a more fundamental difference in how they view the relationship of human beings to the natural world around them. Reading the Politics in light of the Statesman sheds new light on Aristotle's political theory and provides a better understanding of Aristotle's criticism of Socrates. Most importantly, it highlights an enduring and important question: Should politics have as its primary purpose the preservation of life, or should it pursue the higher good of living well?"

Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web.A" Marcus Aurelius - 'Meditations' Marcus Aurelius is considered to one of the great Emperors of Rome who was not only a skilled military leader but also a great philosopher in the Stoic tradition. He was born in 121 AD and both of his parents came from wealthy backgrounds. His father died when Marcus was 3 years old and by the time he was 6 he had gained the attention of the Emperor Hadrian who oversaw his education. Hadrian ensured that Marcus was taught by some of the greatest scholars in Rome who educated him in literature, drama, geometry, Greek oratory, Greek and Latin. Marcus later abandoned most of those subjects in favor of philosophy, with the work of the Greek philosopher Epictetus being a major influence on his thinking. In 138, while still a young man, the Emperor Antoninus Pius adopted Marcus, and in 161 he himself became Emperor. Marcus insisted he would only take up the Emperorship if Lucius Verus were also installed. Marcus's insistence on Lucius joining him as Emperor was a military one. At that time Rome was fighting wars on multiple fronts and Marcus wanted someone he could trust to marshal the troops who he knew would not at some point lead a revolt against him. Lucius and Marcus were loyal to each other up until Lucius's death in 169 AD. After Lucius's death, Marcus was the sole Emperor and due to the incessant wars in the provinces he was unable to spend much time indulging his philosophical pursuits. He did manage to found four Chairs of Philosophy in Athens, one for each of the main philosophical schools of thought, Aristotelian, Epicurean, Platonic and Stoic. Although Marcus spent almost all of his reign on campaigns in foreign territories, he managed to write down his thoughts and these became what are now considered a masterpiece of Roman philosophy, the discourses 'Meditations'. Marcus wrote 'Meditations' around 170 - 180, whilst on a campaign in central Europe, most probably in what is now Serbia, Hungary and Austria. The 12 books that make up 'Meditations' were not written as an exercise in explaining his philosophy but rather as a personal notebook for self-improvement and study. 'Meditations' illustrates just how important Epictetus was to Marcus as he quotes the Greek philosopher's famed 'Discourses' on more than one occasion. Epictetus was a legendary figure in Greek philosophy and many claim he is the greatest of the Stoics; texts that remain in existence from the period suggest that in his native Greece, he was even more popular than Plato. As was previously mentioned, 'Meditations' was not written for public consumption but rather as an aid to personal development. Marcus wanted to change his way of living and thinking and to do this he embarked on a set of philosophical exercises. He would reflect on philosophical ideas and by writing them down and by repeating them he hoped to re-programme his mind and find his own philosophy to live by. One of the key exercises in the book discusses Marcus attempting to look at the world from 'the point of view of the cosmos' in a bid to try and look at life and the universe outside of the common and limited parameters of individual concerns. You have the power to strip away many superfluous troubles located wholly in your judgment, and to possess a large room for yourself embracing in thought the whole cosmos, to consider everlasting time, to think of the rapid change in the parts of each thing, of how short it is from birth until dissolution, and how the void before birth and that after dissolution are equally infinite.A" Marcus Aurelius died on March 17, 180, in the city of Vindobona which was situated where Vienna is today. History remembers him as the last of the 'Five Good Emperors' of the Nervan-Antonian dynasty. Marcus' son Commodus replaced his father as Emperor and although he reigned over a relatively stable period in Roman history, in terms of war and peace, his personal behavior and antics were not in the spirit of those Emperors that came immediately before him. Commodus was eventually murdered in a plot that involved his mistress Marcia, thus bringing to an end the highly regarded Nervan-Antonian dynasty.

A new account of Aristotle's Ethics, this book argues for the central importance of the concept of techne or craft in Aristotle's moral theory. Exploring the importance of techne in the Platonic and pre-Platonic intellectual context in which Aristotle was writing, Tom Angier here shows that this concept has an important role in Aristotle's Ethics that has rarely been studied in Anglo-American scholarship. Through close-analysis of the primary texts, this book uses the focus on techne to systematically critique and renew Aristotelian moral philosophy. Techne in Aristotle's Ethics provides a novel and challenging approach to one of the Ancient World's most enduring intellectual legacies.

By exploring the philosophical character of some of the greatest medieval thinkers, An Introduction to Medieval Philosophy provides a rich overview of philosophy in the world of Latin Christianity. Explores the deeply philosophical character of such medieval thinkers as Augustine, Boethius, Eriugena, Anselm, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Scotus, and Ockham Reviews the central features of the epistemological and metaphysical problem of universals Shows how medieval authors adapted philosophical ideas from antiquity to apply to their religious commitments Takes a broad philosophical approach of the medieval era by,taking account of classical metaphysics, general culture, and religious themes

After the demise of German Idealism, Neo-Kantianism flourished as the defining philosophical movement of Continental Europe from the 1860s until the Weimar Republic. This collection of new essays by distinguished scholars offers a fresh examination of the many and enduring contributions that Neo-Kantianism has made to a diverse range of philosophical subjects. The essays discuss classical figures and themes, including the Marburg and Southwestern Schools, Cohen, Cassirer, Rickert, and Natorp's psychology. In addition they examine lesser-known topics, including the Neo-Kantian influence on theory of law, Husserlian phenomenology, Simmel's study of Rembrandt, Cassirer's philosophy of science, Cohen's philosophy of religion in relation to Rawls and Habermas, and Rickert's theory of number. This rich exploration of a major philosophical movement will interest scholars and upper-level students of Kant, twentieth-century philosophy, continental philosophy, sociology, and psychology.

This book offers a radically new interpretation of the work of Theodor Adorno. In contrast to the conventional view that Adorno's is in essence a critical philosophy, Yvonne Sherratt systematically traces an utopian thesis that pervades all the major aspects of Adorno's thought. She places Adorno's work in the context of German Idealist and later Marxist and Freudian traditions, and then analyzes his key works to show how the aesthetic, epistemological, psychological, historical and sociological thought interconnect to form an utopian image.

This edition makes available an entirely new version of Hegel's lectures on the development and scope of world history. Volume I presents Hegel's surviving manuscripts of his introduction to the lectures and the full transcription of the first series of lectures (1822-23). These works treat the core of human history as the inexorable advance towards the establishment of a political state with just institutions-a state that consists of individuals with a free and fully-developed self-consciousness. Hegel interweaves major themes of spirit and culture-including social life, political systems, commerce, art and architecture, religion, and philosophy-with an historical account of peoples, dates, and events. Following spirit's quest for self-realization, the lectures presented here offer an imaginative voyage around the world, from the paternalistic, static realm of China to the cultural traditions of India; the vast but flawed political organization of the Persian Empire to Egypt and then the Orient; and the birth of freedom in the West to the Christian revelation of free political institutions emerging in the medieval and modern Germanic world.
Brown and Hodgson's new translation is an essential resource for the English reader, and provides a fascinating account of the world as it was conceived by one of history's most influential philosophers. The Editorial Introduction surveys the history of the texts and provides an analytic summary of them, and editorial footnotes introduce readers to Hegel's many sources and allusions. For the first time an edition is made available that permits critical scholarly study, and translates to the needs of the general reader.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Pomona Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Filling a genuine gap in Zizek interpretation - through examining his relationship with Martin Heidegger, the author offers a new and useful overview of Zizek's work."Zizek and Heidegger" offers a radical new interpretation of the work of Slavoj Zizek, one of the world's leading contemporary thinkers, through a study of his relationship with the work of Martin Heidegger. Thomas Brockelman argues that Zizek's oeuvre is largely a response to Heidegger's philosophy of finitude, an immanent critique of it which pulls it in the direction of revolutionary praxis. Brockelman also finds limitations in Zizek's relationship with Heidegger, specifically in his ambivalence about Heidegger's technophobia.Brockelman's critique of Zizek departs from this ambivalence - a fundamental tension in Zizek's work between a historicist critical theory of techno-capitalism and an anti-historicist theory of revolutionary change. In addition to clarifying what Zizek has to say about our world and about the possibility of radical change in it, "Zizek and Heidegger" explores the various ways in which this split at the center of his thought appears within it - in Zizek's views on history or on the relationship between the revolutionary leader and the proletariat or between the analyst and the analysand.

This book sheds new light on the history of the philosophically crucial notion of intentionality, which accounts for one of the most distinctive aspects of our mental life: the fact that our thoughts are about objects. Intentionality is often described as a certain kind of relation. Focusing on Franz Brentano, who introduced the notion into contemporary philosophy, and on the Aristotelian tradition, which was Brentano's main source of inspiration, the book reveals a rich history of debate on precisely the relational nature of intentionality. It shows that Brentano and the Aristotelian authors from which he drew not only addressed the question whether intentionality is a relation, but also devoted extensive discussions to what kind of relation it is, if any. The book aims to show that Brentano distinguishes the intentional relation from two other relations with which it might be confused, namely, causality and reference, which also hold between thoughts and their objects. Intentionality accounts for the aboutness of a thought; causality, by contrast, explains how the thought is generated, and reference, understood as a sort of similarity, occurs when the object towards which the thought is directed exists. Brentano claims to find some anticipation of his views in Aristotle. This book argues that, whether or not Brentano's interpretation of Aristotle is correct, his claim is true of the Aristotelian tradition as a whole, since followers of Aristotle more or less explicitly made some or all of Brentano's distinctions. This is demonstrated through examination of some major figures of the Aristotelian tradition (broadly understood), including Alexander of Aphrodisias, the Neoplatonic commentators, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Francisco Suarez. This book combines a longue duree approach - focusing on the long-term evolution of philosophical concepts rather than restricting itself to a specific author or period - with systematic analysis in the history of philosophy. By studying Brentano and the Aristotelian authors with theoretical sensitivity, it also aims to contribute to our understanding of intentionality and cognate features of the mind.

Hilary Putnam is one of America's most important living philosophers. This book offers an introduction to and overview of Putnam's ideas, his writings and his contributions to the various fields of philosophy.Hilary Putnam is one of America's most important and influential contemporary philosophers. He has made considerable contributions to the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, logic, metaphysics and ethics. In many of these areas he has been not only an active participant, but a foundational thinker. This book offers an overview of Putnam's ideas, his key writings and his contributions to the various fields of philosophy.Thematically organized, the book begins with Putnam's work in the philosophy of language and shows how his theory of semantic externalism serves as a lynchpin for understanding his thought as a whole. Crucially, Lance P. Hickey also examines the ways in which Putnam has shifted his position on some key philosophical issues and argues that there is in fact more unity to Putnam's thought than is widely believed. This is the ideal companion to study of this hugely influential thinker." The Continuum Contemporary American Thinkers" series offers concise and accessible introductions to the most important and influential thinkers at work in philosophy today. Designed specifically to meet the needs of students and readers encountering these thinkers for the first time, these informative books provide a coherent overview and analysis of each thinker's vital contribution to the field of philosophy. The series is the ideal companion to the study of these most inspiring and challenging of thinkers.

This book examines the ways in which religious communities experimentally engage the world and function as fallible inquisitive agents, despite frequent protests to the contrary. Using the philosophy of inquiry and semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, it develops unique naturalist conceptions of religious meaning and ultimate orientation while also arguing for a reappraisal of the ways in which the world's venerable religious traditions enable novel forms of communal inquiry into what Peirce termed "vital matters." Pragmatic inquiry, it argues, is a ubiquitous and continuous phenomenon. Thus, religious participation, though cautiously conservative in many ways, is best understood as a variety of inhabited experimentation. Religious communities embody historically mediated hypotheses about how best to engage the world and curate networks of semiotic resources for rendering those engagements meaningful. Religions best fulfill their inquisitive function when they both deploy and reform their sign systems as they learn better to engage reality.

One of the basic insights of the book is that there is a notion of non-relational linguistic representation which can fruitfully be employed in a systematic approach to literary fiction. This notion allows us to develop an improved understanding of the ontological nature of fictional entities. A related insight is that the customary distinction between extra-fictional and intra-fictional contexts has only a secondary theoretical importance. This distinction plays a central role in nearly all contemporary theories of literary fiction. There is a tendency among researchers to take it as obvious that the contrast between these two types of contexts is crucial for understanding the boundary that divides fiction from non-fiction. Seen from the perspective of non-relational representation, the key question is rather how representational networks come into being and how consumers of literary texts can, and do, engage with these networks. As a whole, the book provides, for the first time, a comprehensive artefactualist account of the nature of fictional entities.

Henri Lefebvre's Critical Theory of Space offers a rigorous analysis and revival of Lefebvre's works and the context in which he produced them. Biagi traces the historical-critical time-frame of Lefebvre's intellectual investigations, bringing to light a theoretical constellation in which historical methods intersect with philosophical and sociological issues: from Marxist political philosophy to the birth of urban sociology; from rural studies to urban and everyday life studies in the context of capitalism. Examining Lefebvre's extended investigations into the urban sphere as well as highlighting his goal of developing a "general political theory of space" and of innovating Marxist thought, and clarifying the various (more or less accurate) meanings attributed to Lefebvre's concept of the "right to the city" (analysed in the context of the French and international sociological and philosophical-political debate), Henri Lefebvre's Critical Theory of Space ultimately brings the contours of Lefebvre's innovative perspective-itself developed at the end of the "short twentieth century"-back into view in all its richness and complexity.

This book is a defense of modal realism; the thesis that our world is but one of a plurality of worlds, and that the individuals that inhabit our world are only a few out of all the inhabitants of all the worlds. Lewis argues that the philosophical utility of modal realism is a good reason for believing that it is true.

After putting forward the type of modal realism he favors, Lewis answers numerous objections that have been raised against it. These include an insistence that everything must be actual; paradoxes akin to those that confront naive set theory; arguments that modal realism leads to inductive skepticism, or to disregard for prudence and morality; and finally, sheer incredulity at a theory that disagrees so badly with common opinion. Lewis grants the weight of the last objection, but takes it to be outweighed by the benefits to systematic theory that acceptance of modal realism brings. He asks whether these same benefits might be gained more cheaply if we replace his many worlds by many merely 'abstract' representations; but concludes that all versions of this 'ersatz modal realism' are in serious trouble. In the final chapter, Lewis distinguishes various questions about trans-world identity, and argues that his 'method of counterparts' is preferable to alternative approaches.

This book discusses the influence of creative work on human life, and the role it has played in shaping human civilization since antiquity. To do so, it analyzes the history of thought on creative work from three civilizations: Greek, Indian, and Chinese, as well as contemporary neurological studies on consciousness. According to the classical Greeks, humans are instinctively predisposed to use creative work to gain truth, wisdom and happiness; the Indians consider that Dharma (duty, morality, etc.) can be achieved only through work (karma); and for the Chinese, creative work is needed to attain the supreme wisdom (Dao). Modern studies on consciousness show that our brain creates a personal self-model (ego tunnel) when we learn things creatively, and developing such skills provides lifelong protection for the brain. In the 21st century, human involvement in creative work is declining as we use mechanized systems to gain more and more profit, but the wealth falls into the hands of the few superrich: the Plutonomy. As creative work is taken over by AI systems, human work is reduced to operating those machines, and this in turn leads to an exponential growth in the number of part-time workers (Precariat). The declining value of human life today is a consequence of this change in society. Further, reducing creative work means we have no way to distribute wealth, nor do we have any means to address problems like the lack of enthusiasm in the young; the health crisis due to lack of physical activity; or the environmental crisis due to the high demand for energy to run mechanized systems. This book explores these issues.

In The Domestication of Derrida, Lorenzo Fabbri argues that Rorty's powerful reading protocol is motivated by the necessity to contain the risks of Derrida's critique of Western philosophy and politics. Rorty claims that Derrida reduces philosophy to a production of private fantasies that do not have any political or epistemological relevance. Fabbri challenges such an aberrant appropriation by investigating the two key features of Rorty's privatization of deconstruction: the reduction of deconstructive writing to an example of merely autobiographical literature; and the idea that Derrida not only dismisses, but also mocks the desire to engage philosophy with political struggle. What is ultimately questioned in The Domestication of Derrida is the legitimacy of labelling deconstruction as a post-modern withdrawal from politics and theory. By discussing Derrida's resistance against the very possibility of theoretical and political ascetism, Fabbri shows that there is much more politics and philosophy in deconstruction than Rorty is willing to admit.

The political regime of global capitalism reduces the world to an endless network of numbers within numbers, but how many of us really understand what numbers are? Without such an understanding, how can we challenge the regime of number?

In "Number and Numbers" Alain Badiou offers an philosophically penetrating account with a powerful political subtext of the attempts that have been made over the last century to define the special status of number. Badiou argues that number cannot be defined by the multiform calculative uses to which numbers are put, nor is it exhausted by the various species described by number theory. Drawing on the mathematical theory of surreal numbers, he develops a unified theory of Number as a particular form of being, an infinite expanse to which our access remains limited. This understanding of Number as being harbours important philosophical truths about the structure of the world in which we live.

In Badiou's view, only by rigorously thinking through Number can philosophy offer us some hope of breaking through the dense and apparently impenetrable capitalist fabric of numerical relations. For this will finally allow us to point to that which cannot be numbered: the possibility of an event that would deliver us from our unthinking subordination of number.