A founding figure of German idealism, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) developed a radically new version of transcendental idealism. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Fichte follows his intellectual life and presents a comprehensive overview of Fichte's dynamic philosophy, from his engagement with Kant to his rigorously systematic and nuanced Wissenschaftslehre and beyond. Covering a variety of topics and issues in epistemology, ontology, moral and political philosophy, as well as philosophy of right and philosophy of religion, an international team of experts on Fichte explores his important contributions to philosophy. Arranged chronologically, their chapters map Fichte's intellectual and philosophical development and the progression of his thought, identifying what motivated his philosophical inquiry and revealing why his ideas continue to shape discussions today. Alongside wide-ranging chapters advancing new insights into Fichte, there are topical discussions of conceptions and issues central to his philosophy. Featuring a chronology of Fichte's life, as well as a timeline of his publications and lectures, this is an invaluable research resource for all Fichte scholars and a reliable guide for anyone undertaking a study of Fichte and German idealism.

This book focuses on the development of Platonic philosophy at the hands of Roman writers between the first century BCE and the early fifth century CE. It discusses the interpretation of Plato's Timaeus by Cicero, Apuleius, Calcidius, and Augustine, and examines how these authors created new contexts and settings for the intellectual heritage they received and thereby contributed to the construction of the complex and multifaceted genre of Roman Platonism. It takes advantage of the authors' treatment of Plato's Timaeus as a continuous point of reference to illustrate the individuality and originality of each writer in his engagement with this Greek philosophical text; each chooses a specific vocabulary, methodology, and literary setting for his appropriation of Timaean doctrine. The authors' contributions to the dialogue's history of transmission are shown to have enriched and prolonged the enduring significance of Plato's cosmology.

The Greek commentary tradition devoted to explicating Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (NE) was extensive. It began in antiquity with Aspasius and reached a point of immense sophistication in the twelfth century with the commentaries of Eustratius of Nicaea and Michael of Ephesus, which primarily served educational purposes. The use of Aristotle's ethics in the classroom continued into the late Byzantine period, but until recently scholastic use of the NE was known mostly through George Pachymeres' epitome of the NE (Book 11 of his Philosophia). This volume radically changes the landscape by providing the editio princeps of the last surviving exegetical commentary on the NE stricto sensu, also penned by Pachymeres. This represents a new witness to the importance of Aristotelian studies in the cultural revival of late Byzantium. The editio princeps is accompanied by an English translation and a thorough introduction, which offers an informed reading of the commentary's genre and layout, relationship to its sources, exegetical strategies, and philosophical originality. This book also includes the edition of diagrams and scholia accompanying Pachymeres' exegesis, whose paratextual function is key to a full understanding of the work.

This book intends to broaden the study of idealism beyond its simplistic characterizations in contemporary philosophy. After idealist stances have practically disappeared from the mental landscape in the last hundred years, and the term "idealism" has itself become a sort of philosophical anathema, continental philosophy was, first, plunged into one of its deepest crises of truth, culminating in postmodernism, and then, the 21st century ushered in a new era of realism. Against this background, the volume gathers a number of renowned philosophers, among them Slavoj Zizek, Robert B. Pippin, Mladen Dolar, Sebastian Roedl, Paul Redding, Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel, James I. Porter, and others, in order to address the issue as to what exactly has been lost with the retreat of idealism, and what kind of idealism could still be rehabilitated in the present day. The contributions will both provide historical studies on idealism, pointing out the little known, overlooked, and surprising instances of idealist impulses, and set out to develop new perspectives and possibilities for a contemporary idealism. The appeal of the book lies in the fact that it defends a philosophical concept that has been increasingly under attack and thus contributes to an ongoing debate in ontology.

Historians of eighteenth-century thought have implied a clear distinction between mystical or occult writing, often termed 'illuminist', and better-known forms of Enlightenment thinking and culture. But where are the boundaries of 'enlightened' human understanding? This is the question posed by contributors to this volume, who put forward a completely new way of configuring these seemingly antithetical currents of thought, and identify a grey area that binds the two, a 'Super-Enlightenment'. Through articles exploring the social, religious, artistic, political and scientific dimensions of the Super-Enlightenment, contributors demonstrate the co-existence of apparent opposites: the enlightened and the esoteric, empiricism and imagination, history and myth, the secretive and the public, mysticism and science. The Enlightenment can no longer be seen as a sturdy, homogeneous movement defined by certain core beliefs, but one which oscillates between opposing poles in its social practices, historiography and even its epistemology: between daring to know, and daring to know too much.

In The Ethics of Theory, Robert Doran offers the first broad assessment of the ethical challenges of Critical Theory across the humanities and social sciences, calling into question the sharp dichotomy typically drawn between the theoretical and the ethical, the analytical and the prescriptive. In a series of discrete but interrelated interventions, Doran exposes the ethical underpinnings of theoretical discourses that are often perceived as either oblivious to or highly skeptical of any attempt to define ethics or politics. Doran thus discusses a variety of themes related to the problematic status of ethics or the ethico-political in Theory: the persistence of existentialist ethics in structuralist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial writing; the ethical imperative of the return of the subject (self-creation versus social conformism); the intimate relation between the ethico-political and the aesthetic (including the role of literary history in Erich Auerbach and Edward Said); the political implications of a "philosophy of the present" for Continental thought (including Heidegger's Nazism); the ethical dimension of the debate between history and theory (including Hayden White's idea of the "practical past" and the question of Holocaust representation); the "ethical turn" in Foucault, Derrida, and Rorty; the post-1987 "political turn" in literary and cultural studies (especially as influenced by Said). Drawing from a broad range of Continental philosophers and cultural theorists, including many texts that have only recently become available, Doran charts a new path that recognizes the often complex motivations that underlie the critical impulse, motivations that are not always apparent or avowed.

Source d'etude mais egalement d'inspiration, l'Orient a influence de nombreux penseurs, historiens et ecrivains anglais du XVIIIe siecle, dont les textes ont contribue au developpement d'une veritable mode orientale en Angleterre. Mais parmi ces representations de l'Orient se confondent ouvrages erudits et fictifs, connaissance et imagination. Relisant un corpus de romans dits pseudo-orientaux a partir de leur intertexte savant, Claire Gallien met en evidence la deconstruction des frontieres entre textes fictifs et non-fictifs. Si le roman s'inspire de l'erudition orientaliste, celle-ci emploie des techniques de vulgarisation propres a l'ecriture romanesque. Dans L'Orient anglais C. Gallien examine le lien qui unissait une mode a un systeme de connaissance, et permet de voir le role d'une culture etrangere dans la constitution d'une litterature nationale.