Anxiety looms large in historical works of philosophy and psychology. It is an affect, philosopher Bettina Bergo argues, subtler and more persistent than our emotions, and points toward the intersection of embodiment and cognition. While scholars who focus on the work of luminaries as Freud, Levinas, or Kant often study this theme in individual works, they seldom draw out the deep and significant connections between various approaches to anxiety. This volume provides a sweeping study of the uncanny career of anxiety in nineteenth and twentieth century European thought. Anxiety threads itself through European intellectual life, beginning in receptions of Kant's transcendental philosophy and running into Levinas' phenomenology; it is a core theme in Schelling, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. As a symptom of an interrogation that strove to take form in European intellectual culture, Angst passes through Schelling's romanticism into Schopenhauer's metaphysical vitalism, before it is explored existentially by Kierkegaard. And, in the twentieth century, it proves an extremely central concept for Heidegger, even as Freud is exploring its meaning and origin over a thirty year-long period of psychoanalytic development. This volume opens new windows onto philosophers who have never yet been put into dialogue, providing a rigorous intellectual history as it connects themes across two centuries, and unearths the deep roots of our own present-day "age of anxiety."

A wide range of specialists provide a comprehensive overview of the reception of Pythagorean ideas in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, shedding new light especially on the understudied 'Medieval Pythagoras' of the Latin West. They also explore the survival of Pythagoreanism in the Arabic, Jewish, and Persian cultures, thus adopting a multicultural perspective. Their common concern is to detect the sources of this reception, and to follow their circulation in diverse linguistic areas. The reader can thus have a panoramic view of the major themes belonging to the Pythagorean heritage - number philosophy and the sciences of the quadrivium; ethics and way of life; theology, metaphysics and the soul - until the Early Modern times.

Addressing Merleau-Ponty's work Phenomenology of Perception, in dialogue with The Visible and the Invisible, his lectures at the College de France, and his reading of Proust, this book argues that at play in his thought is a philosophy of "ontological lateness". This describes the manner in which philosophical reflection is fated to lag behind its objects; therefore an absolute grasp on being remains beyond its reach. Merleau-Ponty articulates this philosophy against the backdrop of what he calls "cruel thought", a style of reflecting that seeks resolution by limiting, circumscribing, and arresting its object. By contrast, the philosophy of ontological lateness seeks no such finality-no apocalypsis or unveiling-but is characterized by its ability to accept the veiling of being and its own constitutive lack of punctuality. To this extent, his thinking inaugurates a new relation to the becoming of sense that overcomes cruel thought. Merleau-Ponty's work gives voice to a wisdom of dispossession that allows for the withdrawal of being. Never before has anyone engaged with the theme of Merleau-Ponty's own understanding of philosophy in such a sustained way as Whitmoyer does in this volume.