Charting a genealogy of the modern idea of the self, Felix O Murchadha explores the accounts of self-identity expounded by key Early Modern philosophers, Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Hume and Kant. The question of the self as we would discuss it today only came to the forefront of philosophical concern with Modernity, beginning with an appeal to the inherited models of the self found in Stoicism, Scepticism, Augustinianism and Pelagianism, before continuing to develop as a subject of philosophical debate. Exploring this trajectory, The Formation of the Modern Self pursues a number of themes central to the Early Modern development of selfhood, including, amongst others, grace and passion. It examines on the one hand the deep-rooted dependence on the divine and the longing for happiness and salvation and, on the other hand, the distancing from the Stoic ideal of apatheia, as philosophers from Descartes to Spinoza recognised the passions as essential to human agency. Fundamental to the new question of the self was the relation of faith and reason. Uncovering commonalities and differences amongst Early Modern philosophers, O Murchadha traces how the voluntarism of Modernity led to the sceptical approach to the self in Montaigne and Hume and how this sceptical strand, in turn, culminated in Kant's rational faith. More than a history of the self in philosophy, The Formation of the Modern Self inspires a fresh look at self-identity, uncovering not only how our modern idea of selfhood developed but just how embedded the concept of self is in external considerations: from ethics, to reason, to religion.

Stefania Tutino shows that the hermeneutical and epistemological anxieties that characterize our current intellectual climate are rooted in the early modern world. Showing that post-Reformation Catholicism did not simply usher in modernity, but indeed postmodernity as well, her study complicates the well-established scholarly view concerning the context of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic response to it. Shadows of Doubt provides a collection of case-studies centered on the relationship between language, the truth of men, and the Truth of theology. Most of these case-studies illuminate little-known figures in the history of early modern Catholicism. The militant aspects of post-Tridentine Catholicism can be appreciated through study of figures such as Robert Bellarmine or Cesare Baronio, the solid pillars of the intellectual and theological structure of the Church of Rome; however, an understanding of the more enigmatic aspects of early modernity requires exploration of the demimonde of post-Reformation Catholicism. Tutino examines the thinkers whom few scholars mention and fewer read, demonstrating that post-Reformation Catholicism was not simply a world of solid certainties to be opposed to the Protestant falsehoods, but also a world in which the stable Truth of theology existed alongside and contributed to a number of far less stable truths concerning the world of men. Post-Reformation Catholic culture was not only concerned with articulating and affirming absolute truths, but also with exploring and negotiating the complex links between certainty and uncertainty. By bringing to light this fascinating and hitherto largely unexamined side of post-Tridentine Catholicism, Tutino reveals that post-Reformation Catholic culture was a vibrant laboratory for many of the issues that we face today: it was a world of fractures and fractured truths which we, with a heightened sensitivity to discrepancies and discontinuities, are now well-suited to understand.

David Hume launched a historic revolution in epistemology when he showed that our theories about the world have no probability relative to what we think of as our evidence for them, hence that the distinction between justified and unjustified theories does not lie in their different probabilities relative to that evidence. However, allies in his revolution appeared only in the 20th century, in the persons of Sir Karl Popper, Nelson Goodman and W. V. Quine. Hume's second great contribution to the field, which remains unrecognized to this day, was to propose what is now known as reflective equilibrium theory as the framework within which justified and unjustified theories are rightly distinguished. The core of this book comprises an account of these developments from Hume to Quine, an extension of reflective equilibrium theory that renders it a general theory of epistemic justification concerning our beliefs about the world, and an argument that all four of these thinkers would have endorsed that extension. In chapters on Sextus, Descartes, Wittgenstein's On Certainty, and other aspects of Hume's epistemology I defend new readings of those philosophers' writings on skepticism and note significant relationships among their views on matters bearing on the Humean revolution. Finally, in chapters on Hilary Putnam's "Brains in a Vat" and Fred Dretske's contextualism - the only promising version of that view - I show that both fail to rule out the possible truth of radical skeptical hypotheses. This is not surprising, since those hypotheses are in fact possible. They are not, however, of any epistemological significance, since the justification of our beliefs about the world is a function of the extent to which bodies of beliefs to which they belong are in reflective equilibrium, and no extant conception of knowledge is of any epistemological interest.

Research on Rousseau's innovative last work is changing direction. Long situated in a context of autobiographical writing, its moral and philosophical content is now a major critical preoccupation. The Nature of Rousseau's 'Reveries': physical, human, aesthetic brings together the work of international specialists to explore new approaches to the defining feature - the 'nature' - of the Reveries. In essays which range from studies of botany or landscape painting to thematic or stylistic readings, authors re-examine Rousseau's intellectual understanding of and personal relationship with different conceptions of nature. Drawing connections between this text and earlier theoretical writings, authors analyse not only the philosophical and personal implications of Rousseau's reflections on the outer world but also and his attempts to examine and validate both his own nature and that of 'l'homme naturel'. In The Nature of Rousseau's 'Reveries': physical, human, aesthetic the contributors offer new insights into the character of Rousseau's last major work and suggest above all its experimental, elusive quality, hovering between inner and outer worlds, escape and fulfilment, experience and writing. They underline the unique richness of the Reveries, a work to be situated not simply at the end of Rousseau's life, but at the very centre of his thought.

Designed as a textbook for use in courses on natural theology and used by Immanuel Kant as the basis for his Lectures on The Philosophical Doctrine of Religion, Johan August Eberhard's Preparation for Natural Theology (1781) is now available in English for the first time. With a strong focus on the various intellectual debates and historically significant texts in late renaissance and early modern theology, Preparation for Natural Theology influenced the way Kant thought about practical cognition as well as moral and religious concepts. Access to Eberhard's complete text makes it possible to distinguish where in the lectures Kant is making changes to what Eberhard has written and where he is articulating his own ideas. Identifying new unexplored lines of research, this translation provides a deeper understanding of Kant's explicitly religious doctrines and his central moral writings, such as the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason. Accompanied by Kant's previously untranslated handwritten notes on Eberhard's text as well as the Danzig transcripts of Kant's course on rational theology, Preparation for Natural Theology features a dual English-German / German-English glossary, a concordance and an introduction situating the book in relation to 18th-century theology and philosophy. This is a significant contribution to twenty-first century Kantian studies.

The literary and scientific renaissance that struck Germany around 1800 is usually taken to be the cradle of contemporary humanism. Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism shows how figures like Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang Goethe as well as scientists specializing in the emerging modern life and cognitive sciences not only established but also transgressed the boundaries of the "human." This period so broadly painted as humanist by proponents and detractors alike also grappled with ways of challenging some of humanism's most cherished assumptions: the dualisms, for example, between freedom and nature, science and art, matter and spirit, mind and body, and thereby also between the human and the nonhuman. Posthumanism is older than we think, and the so-called "humanists" of the late Enlightenment have much to offer our contemporary re-thinking of the human.

What is the point of living? If we are all going to die anyway, if nothing will remain of whatever we achieve in this life, why should we bother trying to achieve anything in the first place? Can we be mortal and still live a meaningful life? Questions such as these have been asked for a long time, but nobody has found a conclusive answer yet. The connection between death and meaning, however, has taken centre stage in the philosophical and literary work of some of the world's greatest writers: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Soren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, Herman Melville, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Marcel Proust, and Albert Camus. This book explores their ideas, weaving a rich tapestry of concepts, voices and images, helping the reader to understand the concerns at the heart of those writers' work and uncovering common themes and stark contrasts in their understanding of what kind of world we live in and what really matters in life.

Sleep is quite a popular activity, indeed most humans spend around a third of their lives asleep. However, cultural, political, or aesthetic thought tends to remain concerned with the interpretation and actions of those who are awake. How to Sleep argues instead that sleep is a complex vital phenomena with a dynamic aesthetic and biological consistency. Arguing through examples drawn from contemporary, modern and renaissance art; from literature; film and computational media, and bringing these into relation with the history and findings of sleep science, this book argues for a new interplay between biology and culture. Meditations on sex, exhaustion, drugs, hormones and scientific instruments all play their part in this wide-ranging exposition of sleep as an ecology of interacting processes. How to Sleep builds on the interlocking of theory, experience and experiment so that the text itself is a lively articulation of bodies, organs and the aesthetic systems that interact with them. This book won't enhance your sleeping skills, but will give you something surprising to think about whilst being ostensibly awake.

From populist propaganda attacking knowledge as 'fake news' to the latest advances in artificial intelligence, human thought is under unprecedented attack today. If computers can do what humans can do and they can do it much faster, what's so special about human thought? In this new book, bestselling philosopher Markus Gabriel steps back from the polemics to re-examine the very nature of human thought. He conceives of human thinking as a 'sixth sense', a kind of sense organ that is closely tied our biological reality as human beings. Our thinking is not a form of data processing but rather the linking together of images and imaginary ideas which we process in different sensory modalities. Our time frame expands far beyond the present moment, as our ideas and beliefs stretch far beyond the here and now. We are living beings and the whole of evolution is built into our life story. In contrast to some of the exaggerated claims made by proponents of AI, Gabriel argues that our thinking is a complex structure and organic process that is not easily replicated and very far from being superseded by computers. With his usual wit and intellectual verve, Gabriel combines philosophical insight with pop culture to set out a bold defence of the human and a plea for an enlightened humanism for the 21st century. This timely book will be of great value to anyone interested in the nature of human thought and the relations between human beings and machines in an age of rapid technological change.

While large bodies of scholarship exist on the plays of Shakespeare and the philosophy of Heidegger, this book is the first to read these two influential figures alongside one another, and to reveal how they can help us develop a creative and contemplative sense of ethics, or an 'ethical imagination'. Following the increased interest in reading Shakespeare philosophically, it seems only fitting that an encounter take place between the English language's most prominent poet and the philosopher widely considered to be central to continental philosophy. Interpreting the plays of Shakespeare through the writings of Heidegger and vice versa, each chapter pairs a select play with a select work of philosophy. In these pairings the themes, events, and arguments of each work are first carefully unpacked, and then key passages and concepts are taken up and read against and through one another. As these hermeneutic engagements and cross-readings unfold we find that the words and deeds of Shakespeare's characters uniquely illuminate, and are uniquely illuminated by, Heidegger's phenomenological analyses of being, language, and art.

Bringing together phenomenology and materialism, two perspectives seemingly at odds with each other, leading international theorist, Manuel DeLanda, has created an entirely new theory of visual perception. Engaging the scientific (biology, ecological psychology, neuroscience and robotics), the philosophical (idea of 'the embodied mind') and the mathematical (dynamic systems theory) to form a synthesis of how to see in the 21st century. A transdisciplinary and rigorous analysis of how vision shapes what matters.