Lively current debates about narratives of historical progress, the conditions for international justice, and the implications of globalisation have prompted a renewed interest in Kant's Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim. The essays in this volume, written by distinguished contributors, discuss the questions that are at the core of Kant's investigations. Does the study of history convey any philosophical insight? Can it provide political guidance? How are we to understand the destructive and bloody upheavals that constitute so much of human experience? What connections, if any, can be traced between politics, economics, and morality? What is the relation between the rule of law in the nation state and the advancement of a cosmopolitan political order? These questions and others are examined and discussed in a book that will be of interest to philosophers, social and political theorists, and intellectual and cultural historians.

Lively debates about narratives of historical progress, the conditions for international justice, and the implications of globalisation have prompted a renewed interest in Kant's Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim. The essays in this volume, written by distinguished contributors, discuss the questions that are at the core of Kant's investigations. Does the study of history convey any philosophical insight? Can it provide political guidance? How are we to understand the destructive and bloody upheavals that constitute so much of human experience? What connections, if any, can be traced between politics, economics, and morality? What is the relation between the rule of law in the nation state and the advancement of a cosmopolitan political order? These questions and others are examined and discussed in a book that will be of interest to philosophers, social and political theorists, and intellectual and cultural historians.

Philosophy is a dangerous profession, risking censorship, prison, even death. And no wonder: philosophers have questioned traditional pieties and threatened the established political order. Some claimed to know what was thought unknowable; others doubted what was believed to be certain. Some attacked religion in the name of science; others attacked science in the name of mystical poetry; some served tyrants; others were radical revolutionaries.
This historically based collection of philosophers' reflections--the letters, journals, prefaces that reveal their hopes and hesitations, their triumphs and struggles, their deepest doubts and convictions--allow us to witness philosophical thought-in-process. It sheds light on the many--and conflicting--aims of philosophy: to express skepticism or overcome it, to support theology or attack it, to develop an ethical system or reduce it to practical politics. As their audiences differed, philosophers experimented with distinctive rhetorical strategies, writing dialogues, meditations, treatises, aphorisms. Ranging from Plato to Hannah Arendt, with contributions from 44 philosophers (Augustine, Maimonides, AlGhazali, Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, among others) this remarkable collection documents philosophers' claim that they change as well as understand the world. In her introductory essay, "Witnessing Philosophers," Amelie Rorty locates philosophers' reflections in the larger context of the many facets of their other activities and commitments.

De Anima is one of the most influential and widely-studied of Aristotle's works; this volume offers stimulating discussions of all aspects of this work by leading philosophers, including, in this paperback edition, a new essay by Myles Burnyeat. Covering topics such as the relation between soul and body, sense-perception, imagination, memory, desire, and thought, the essays present the philosophical substance of Aristotle's views to the modern reader.

Aimed at deepening our understanding of the Poetics, this collection places Aristotle's analysis of tragedy in its larger philosophical context. In these twenty-one essays, philosophers and classicists explore the corpus of Aristotle's work in order to link the Poetics to the rest of his views on psychology and on history, ethics, and politics. The essays address such topics as catharsis, pity and fear, pleasure, character and the unity of action, and the modality of dramatic action. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Elizabeth Belfiore, Rdiger Bittner, Mary Whitlock Blundell, Wayne Booth, Dorothea Frede, Cynthia Freeland, Leon Golden, Stephen Halliwell, Richard Janko, Aryeh Kosman, Jonathan Lear, Alexander Nehamas, Martha C. Nussbaum, Deborah Roberts, G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, Nancy Sherman, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Stephen A. White, and Paul Woodruff.

Students of philosophy, psychology, sociology, and literature will welcome this collection of original essays on self-deception and related phenomena such as wishful thinking, bad faith, and false consciousness. The book has six sections, each exploring self-deception and related phenomena from a different perspective.

Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics" deals with character and its proper development in the acquisition of thoughtful habits directed toward appropriate ends. The articles in this unique collection, many new or not readily available, form a continuos commentary on the "Ethics." Philosophers and classicists alike will welcome them.

Essays on Aristotle's Rhetoric offers a fresh and comprehensive assessment of a classic work. Aristotle's influence on the practice and theory of rhetoric, as it affects political and legal argumentation, has been continuous and far-reaching. This anthology presents Aristotle's Rhetoric in its original context, providing examples of the kind of oratory whose success Aristotle explains and analyzes. The contributors--eminent philosophers, classicists, and critics--assess the role and the techniques of rhetorical persuasion in philosophic discourse and in the public sphere. They connect Aristotle's Rhetoric to his other work on ethics and politics, as well as to his ideas on logic, psychology, and philosophy of language. The collection as a whole invites us to reassess the place of rhetoric in intellectual and political life.

The challenge of explaining the emotions has engaged the attention of the best minds in philosophy and science throughout history. Part of the fascination has been that the emotions resist classification. As adequate account therefore requires receptivity to knowledge from a variety of sources. The philosopher must inform himself of the relevant empirical investigation to arrive at a definition, and the scientist cannot afford to be naive about the assumptions built into his conceptual apparatus.
The contributors to this volume have approached the problem of characterizing and classifying emotions from the perspectives of neurophysiology, psychology, and social psychology as well as that of philosophical psychology. They discuss the difficulties that arise in classifying the emotions, assessing their appropriateness and rationality, and determining their function in motivating moral action.

In this volume, thirteen philosophers contribute new essays analyzing the criteria for personal identity and their import on ethics and the theory of action: it presents contemporary treatments of the issues discussed in "Personal Identity", edited by John Perry (University of California Press, 1975).

The essays in this volume form a commentary on Descartes' "Meditations." Following the sequence of the meditational stages, the authors analyze the function of each stage in transforming the reader, to realize his essential nature as a rational inquirer, capable of scientific, demonstrable knowledge of the world. There are essays on the genre of meditational writing, on the implications of the opening cathartic section of the book on Descartes' theory of perception and his use of skeptical arguments; essays on the theory of ideas and their role of Descartes' reconstructive analytic method; essays on the proofs for the existence of God, on the role of the will in the formation and malformation of judgments; and the essays on the foundations of the science of extension and on Descartes' account of the union of mind and body.

Many philosophers believe that normative ethics is in principle independent of psychology. By contrast, the authors of these essays explore the interconnections between psychology and moral theory. They investigate the psychological constraints on realizable ethical ideals and articulate the psychological assumptions behind traditional ethics. They also examine the ways in which the basic architecture of the mind, core emotions, patterns of individual development, social psychology, and the limits on human capacities for rational deliberation affect morality. Owen Flanagan is Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. Ami1/2lie Oksenberg Rorty is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Holyoke College.