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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy
"God Crucified" and Other Essays on the New Testament's Christology
of Divine Identity The basic thesis of this important book on New
Testament Christology, sketched in the first essay 'God Crucified,
is that the worship of Jesus as God was seen by the early
Christians as compatible with their Jewish monotheism. Jesus was
thought to participate in the divine identity of the one God of
Israel. The other chapters provide more detailed support for, and
an expansion of, this basic thesis. Readers will find not only the
full text of Bauckham's classic book God Crucified, but also
groundbreaking essays, some of which have never been published
previously
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.
This study focuses on Laches, Protagoras, and the conversation
between Socrates and Agathon in the Symposium. For these dialogues
the author "proposes a strategy of interpretation that insists on
the dialogues' essentially interrogatory character. . . . Stokes
argues that we are not entitled to ascribea thesis to Socrates (far
less to Plato) unless he unambiguously asserts it as his own
belief. . . . For the most part, Stokes argues, Socrates is doing
what he claims to be doing: cross-examining his interlocutor. He
draws the materials of his own argument from the respondent's
explicit admissions and from his own knowledge of the respondent's
character, commitments and ways of life.What is shown by such a
procedure is not, . . . according to Stokes], that acertain thesis
is true or false, but, rather, that a certain sort of person, with
certain commitments, can be led, on pain of inconsistency, to
assent to theses that at first seem alien to him. Sometimes, as it
turns out, these are theses that Socrates also endorses in his own
person." "Times Literary Supplement"
This is the first of three volumes which will contain all of
Locke's extant philosophical writings relating to An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding, not included in other Clarendon
editions like the Correspondence. It contains the earliest known
drafts of the Essay, Drafts A and B, both written in 1671, and
provides for the first time an accurate version of Locke's text.
Virtually all his changes are recorded in footnotes on each page.
Peter Nidditch, whose highly acclaimed edition of An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding was published in this series in
1975, used pioneering editorial techniques in his compilation of
Volume 1. Most of the work was completed before his tragically
early death in 1983. Volumes 2 and 3, almost wholly the work of G.
A. J. Rogers will contain the third extant draft of the Essay
(Draft C), the Epitome and the Conduct of the Understanding. They
will also include a History of the Writing of the Essay, together
with other shorter writings by Locke.
Immanuel Kant's work changed the course of modern philosophy; Karl
Ameriks examines how. He compares the philosophical system set out
in Kant's Critiques with the work of the major philosophers before
and after Kant. Individual essays provide case studies in support
of Ameriks's thesis that late 18th-century reactions to Kant
initiated an historical turn, after which historical and systematic
considerations became joined in a way that fundamentally
distinguishes philosophy from science and art.
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.
considers the metaphysical tradition of the contemplation of Being:
Homer, the Greek Tragedians, Plato, Plotinus and the development of
the tradition in the Middle Ages. Von Balthasar then explores the
analogy between the metaphysical vision of Being and the Christian
vision of the Trinity.
Frederick F. Schmitt offers a systematic interpretation of David
Hume's epistemology, as it is presented in the indispensable A
Treatise of Human Nature. Hume's text alternately manifests
scepticism, empiricism, and naturalism in epistemology.
Interpretations of his epistemology have tended to emphasise one of
these apparently conflicting positions over the others. But Schmitt
argues that the positions can be reconciled by tracing them to a
single underlying epistemology of knowledge and probability quietly
at work in the text, an epistemology according to which truth is
the chief cognitive merit of a belief, and knowledge and probable
belief are species of reliable belief. Hume adopts Locke's
dichotomy between knowledge and probability and reassigns causal
inference from its traditional place in knowledge to the domain of
probability-his most significant departure from earlier accounts of
cognition. This shift of causal inference to an associative and
imaginative operation raises doubts about the merit of causal
inference, suggesting the counterintuitive consequence that causal
inference is wholly inferior to knowledge-producing demonstration.
To defend his associationist psychology of causal inference from
this suggestion, Hume must favourably compare causal inference with
demonstration in a manner compatible with associationism. He does
this by finding an epistemic status shared by demonstrative
knowledge and causally inferred beliefs-the status of justified
belief. On the interpretation developed here, he identifies
knowledge with infallible belief and justified belief with reliable
belief, i.e., belief produced by truth-conducive belief-forming
operations. Since infallibility implies reliable belief, knowledge
implies justified belief. He then argues that causally inferred
beliefs are reliable, so share this status with knowledge. Indeed
Hume assumes that causally inferred beliefs enjoy this status in
his very argument for associationism. On the reliability
interpretation, Hume's accounts of knowledge and justified belief
are part of a broader veritistic epistemology making true belief
the chief epistemic value and goal of science. The veritistic
interpretation advanced here contrasts with interpretations on
which the chief epistemic value of belief is its empirical
adequacy, stability, or fulfilment of a natural function, as well
as with the suggestion that the chief value of belief is its
utility for common life. Veritistic interpretations are offered of
the natural function of belief, the rules of causal inference,
scepticism about body and matter, and the criteria of
justification. As Schmitt shows, there is much attention to Hume's
sources in Locke and to the complexities of his epistemic
vocabulary.
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
It's a belief that unites the left and right, psychologists and philosophers, writers and historians. It drives the headlines that surround us and the laws that touch our lives. From Machiavelli to Hobbes, Freud to Dawkins, the roots of this belief have sunk deep into Western thought. Human beings, we're taught, are by nature selfish and governed by self-interest.
Humankind makes a new argument: that it is realistic, as well as revolutionary, to assume that people are good. By thinking the worst of others, we bring out the worst in our politics and economics too.
In this major book, internationally bestselling author Rutger Bregman takes some of the world's most famous studies and events and reframes them, providing a new perspective on the last 200,000 years of human history. From the real-life Lord of the Flies to the Blitz, a Siberian fox farm to an infamous New York murder, Stanley Milgram's Yale shock machine to the Stanford prison experiment, Bregman shows how believing in human kindness and altruism can be a new way to think - and act as the foundation for achieving true change in our society.
It is time for a new view of human nature.
In this volume, Kieran McGroarty provides a philosophical
commentary on a section of the Enneads written by the last great
Neoplatonist thinker, Plotinus. The treatise is entitled
"Concerning Well-Being" and was written at a late stage in
Plotinus' life when he was suffering from an illness that was
shortly to kill him. Its main concern is with the good man and how
he should pursue the good life. The treatise is therefore central
to our understanding of Plotinus' ethical theory, and the
commentary seeks to explicate and elucidate that theory. Plotinus'
views on how one should live in order to fulfill oneself as a human
being are as relevant now as they were in the third century AD. All
Greek and Latin is translated, while short summaries introducing
the content of each chapter help to make Plotinus' argument clear
even to the non-specialist.
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?
The Wissenschaftslehre or "doctrine of science" was the great
achievement of the German idealist philosopher J. G. Fichte. Daniel
Breazeale presents accessible new translations of three works in
which Fichte developed this philosophical system. The centerpiece
of this volume is a new English translation of Fichte's only
full-scale presentation of the principles of his philosophy, the
Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre (1794/95). Accompanying
this are new translations of the work in which Fichte first
publicly introduced his new system, Concerning the Concept of the
Wissenschaftslehre (1794) and the Outline of what is Distinctive of
the Wissenschaftslehre with respect to the Theoretical Power
(1795), which was intended as a companion to the Foundation. In
addition Breazeale includes the transcripts of Fichte's unpublished
"Zurich lectures" on his system (1794), translated here for the
first time in English. Breazeale supplements his translations with
an extensive historical and systematic introduction, detailed
outlines of the contents and structure of the Foundation and
Outline, and copious scholarly annotation of the translated texts,
helping to orient readers who may otherwise find themselves lost in
the wilderness of Fichte's complex "derivations."
A. A. Long, one of the world's leading writers on ancient
philosophy, presents eighteen essays on the philosophers and
schools of the Hellenistic and Roman periods--Epicureans, Stoics,
and Sceptics. The discussion ranges over four centuries of
innovative and challenging thought in ethics and
politics, psychology, epistemology, and cosmology.
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