Search results for ""Kant""

The Animal That Therefore I Am is the long-awaited translation of the complete text of Jacques Derrida’s ten-hour address to the 1997 Cérisy conference entitled “The Autobiographical Animal,” the third of four such colloquia on his work. The book was assembled posthumously on the basis of two published sections, one written and recorded session, and one informal recorded session. The book is at once an affectionate look back over the multiple roles played by animals in Derrida’s work and a profound philosophical investigation and critique of the relegation of animal life that takes place as a result of the distinction—dating from Descartes—between man as thinking animal and every other living species. That starts with the very fact of the line of separation drawn between the human and the millions of other species that are reduced to a single “the animal.” Derrida finds that distinction, or versions of it, surfacing in thinkers as far apart as Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas, and he dedicates extended analyses to the question in the work of each of them. The book’s autobiographical theme intersects with its philosophical analysis through the figures of looking and nakedness, staged in terms of Derrida’s experience when his cat follows him into the bathroom in the morning. In a classic deconstructive reversal, Derrida asks what this animal sees and thinks when it sees this naked man. Yet the experiences of nakedness and shame also lead all the way back into the mythologies of “man’s dominion over the beasts” and trace a history of how man has systematically displaced onto the animal his own failings or bêtises. The Animal That Therefore I Am is at times a militant plea and indictment regarding, especially, the modern industrialized treatment of animals. However, Derrida cannot subscribe to a simplistic version of animal rights that fails to follow through, in all its implications, the questions and definitions of “life” to which he returned in much of his later work.

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American students vary in educational achievement, but white students in general typically have better test scores and grades than black students. Why is this the case, and what can school leaders do about it? In The Color of Mind, Derrick Darby and John L. Rury answer these pressing questions and show that we cannot make further progress in closing the achievement gap until we understand its racist origins. Telling the story of what they call the Color of Mind--the idea that there are racial differences in intelligence, character, and behavior--they show how philosophers such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and American statesman Thomas Jefferson, contributed to the construction of this pernicious idea, how it influenced the nature of schooling and student achievement, and how voices of dissent such as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and W. E. B. Du Bois debunked the Color of Mind and worked to undo its adverse impacts. Rejecting the view that racial differences in educational achievement are a product of innate or cultural differences, Darby and Rury uncover the historical interplay between ideas about race and American schooling, to show clearly that the racial achievement gap has been socially and institutionally constructed. School leaders striving to bring justice and dignity to American schools today must work to root out the systemic manifestations of these ideas within schools, while still doing what they can to mitigate the negative effects of poverty, segregation, inequality, and other external factors that adversely affect student achievement. While we cannot expect schools alone to solve these vexing social problems, we must demand that they address the dignitary injustices associated with how we track, discipline, and deal with special education that reinforce long-standing racist ideas. That is the only way to expel the Color of Mind from schools, close the racial achievement gap, and afford all children the dignity they deserve.

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"Our daily encounters with forgetting have not taught us enough about how much power it exercises over our lives, what reflections and feelings it evokes in different individuals, how even art and science presuppose—with sympathy or antipathy—forgetting, and finally what political and cultural barriers can be erected against forgetting when it cannot be reconciled with what is right and moral.... We find that cultural history provides a helpful perspective in which the value of the art of forgetting emerges.... That is the subject this book (through which flows Lethe, the meandering stream of forgetfulness) will try to represent and discuss by means of many concrete examples, taken primarily from literature."—from LetheLethe is an exploration of the art of forgetting—as the counterpart of the rhetorical art of memory—in Western culture from the Greeks to the present. It offers penetrating analyses of works by, among others, Augustine, Bellow, Borges, Casanova, Celan, Cervantes, Dante, Descartes, Freud, Goethe, Homer, Kant, Kleist, Levi, Locke, Mallarmé, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Ovid, Pirandello, Plato, Proust, Rabelais, Rousseau, Sartre, and Wiesel. What emerges is a general view of forgetting that combines a recognition of its necessity and inevitability with a critique of forgetting (particularly in the case of the Holocaust) and the need to combat it. Harald Weinrich's epilogue considers forgetting in the present age of information overflow, particularly in the area of the natural sciences.This magisterial book was first published in German in 1997 and has already been translated into French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish; a Korean translation is in the works. This is the first of Weinrich's books to be translated into English and will be welcomed by scholars and students of literature, intellectual and cultural historians, classicists, historians of philosophy, and other philosophers with literary interests. The range of the book is astonishing. In Steven Rendall's skillful and fluent translation, its readability is noteworthy.

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Premodern Buddhists are sometimes characterized as veritable "mind scientists" whose insights anticipate modern research on the brain and mind. Aiming to complicate this story, Dan Arnold confronts a significant obstacle to popular attempts at harmonizing classical Buddhist and modern scientific thought: since most Indian Buddhists held that the mental continuum is uninterrupted by death (its continuity is what Buddhists mean by "rebirth"), they would have no truck with the idea that everything about the mental can be explained in terms of brain events. Nevertheless, a predominant stream of Indian Buddhist thought, associated with the seventh-century thinker Dharmakirti, turns out to be vulnerable to arguments modern philosophers have leveled against physicalism. By characterizing the philosophical problems commonly faced by Dharmakirti and contemporary philosophers such as Jerry Fodor and Daniel Dennett, Arnold seeks to advance an understanding of both first-millennium Indian arguments and contemporary debates on the philosophy of mind. The issues center on what modern philosophers have called intentionality-the fact that the mind can be about (or represent or mean) other things. Tracing an account of intentionality through Kant, Wilfrid Sellars, and John McDowell, Arnold argues that intentionality cannot, in principle, be explained in causal terms. Elaborating some of Dharmakirti's central commitments (chiefly his apoha theory of meaning and his account of self-awareness), Arnold shows that despite his concern to refute physicalism, Dharmakirti's causal explanations of the mental mean that modern arguments from intentionality cut as much against his project as they do against physicalist philosophies of mind. This is evident in the arguments of some of Dharmakirti's contemporaneous Indian critics (proponents of the orthodox Brahmanical Mimasa school as well as fellow Buddhists from the Madhyamaka school of thought), whose critiques exemplify the same logic as modern arguments from intentionality. Elaborating these various strands of thought, Arnold shows that seemingly arcane arguments among first-millennium Indian thinkers can illuminate matters still very much at the heart of contemporary philosophy.

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Sometimes it seems like you need a PhD just to open a book of philosophy. We leave philosophical matters to the philosophers in the same way that we leave science to scientists. Scott Samuelson thinks this is tragic - for our lives as well as for philosophy. In The Deepest Human Life, he takes philosophy back from the specialists and restores it to its proper place at the center of our humanity, rediscovering it as our most profound effort toward understanding, as a way of life that anyone can live. Exploring the works of some of history's most important thinkers in the context of the everyday struggles of his students, he guides us through the most vexing quandaries of our existence and shows just how enriching the examined life can be. Samuelson begins at the beginning: with Socrates, working his most famous assertion - that wisdom is knowing that one knows nothing - into a method, a way of approaching our greatest mysteries. From there he springboards into a rich history of philosophy and the ways its journey is encoded in our own quests for meaning. He ruminates on Epicurus against the sonic backdrop of crickets and restaurant goers in Iowa City. He follows the Stoics into the cell where James Stockdale spent seven years as a prisoner of war. He spins with al-Ghazali first in doubt, then in the ecstasy of the divine. And he gets the philosophy education of his life when one of his students, who authorized a risky surgery for her son that inadvertently led to his death, asks with tears in her eyes if Kant was right, if it really is the motive that matters and not the consequences. Through heartbreaking stories, humanizing biographies, accessible theory, and evocative interludes like "On Wine and Bicycles" or "On Zombies and Superheroes," he invests philosophy with the personal and vice versa. The result is a book that is at once a primer and a reassurance - that the most important questions endure, coming to life in each of us.

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The continental tradition in philosophy has gotten more “materialistic” over the last two hundred years. This has resulted from a combination of some very specific moves with regard to the epistemological parameters of understanding and the assertion that ideas may have material force in history. Therefore, the materialism within the continental tradition is not a materiality of being, but a materiality of understanding and action. Such an inquiry opens up space between the activities of sensation and the mental faculty of cognition. ‘I think, therefore I am,’ is not an empirical statement, but a statement of cognition. It is assumed that this distinction is at the core of continental philosophy. Cognition is always interpretive. Experience is the start of cognition, but not its final product. Our cognitions cannot be separated from our experience of the physical, social, and cultural environment around us. The symbolic nature of language reinforces the interpretive nature of our thoughts and ideas. Our language is, therefore, always projecting an implicit image of the world. Language is, therefore, always political. The materiality of these cognitive world-views is manifested in two ways. First, in their formation. They are the products of sensual contact with the world. Second, in their effects. They move people. It is a picture of the world which serves to shape the content and character of human behavior. Whether we want to call these phantoms of the mind, world-view, ideas, thoughts, cognitions, or any other term, the dual character of their materiality is secure. This work examines the threads materialist ideas running through the efforts of some major authors in the continental tradition in philosophy. A model of materialism is constructed in Chapter One and used to assess the materialist elements in works from Kant, Marx, Weber, Nietzsche, and contemporary poststructuralism. The work demonstrates the evolution of materialist thinking within the tradition and asserts an evolving and developing articulation of materialism in relation to the thoughts and activities of human beings.

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Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Democracy refers to both ideal and real forms of government. The concept of democracy means that those governed — the demos — have a say in government. But different conceptions of democracy have left many out. Naomi Zack provides here a fresh treatment of the history of this idea and its key conceptions. In the ancient world, direct and representative democracy in Athens and Rome privileged elites, as did democratic deliberative bodies in Africa, India, the Middle East, and China. Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero were sceptical of mob-rule dangers of democracy. The medieval and renaissance periods saw legislative checks on monarchy, notably the Magna Carta. The social contract theories of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau matched political expectations that national government be based on consent, for the benefit of those governed. The American Revolution established a new sovereignty, based on British government tradition. By contrast, the French Revolution heralded universal humanitarian ideals. In the nineteenth century, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, and Karl Marx focused on the democratization of society. Mary Wollstonecraft had championed women's education and rights and Mill advocated further for that cause. Movements for the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, and labour unionization were organized. World War II brought a reset in the twentieth century, with new democratic governments for many countries, including India and South Africa, and new ideals. Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, and John Rawls emphasized orderly government transition, inclusion, and fairness. Equalitarian goals have concerned racial and ethnic minorities, as well as women. The twenty-first century has brought fresh challenges, including disasters and uninformed electorates. Democracy among nations is a future goal. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

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The four talks collected here transcribe lectures delivered to an audience of children between the ages of ten and fourteen, under the auspices of the “little dialogues” series at the Montreuil’s center for the dramatic arts. Modeled on Walter Benjamin’s “Aufklärung für Kinder” radio talks, this series aims to awaken its young audience to pressing philosophical concerns. Each talk in God, Justice, Love, Beauty explores what is at stake in these topics as essential moments in human experience. (Indeed, the book argues that they are constitutive of human experience.) Following each, Nancy’s audience is given a chance to engage with him in a process of philosophical questioning; the texts of these touching and probing exchanges are included in the volume. Despite the fact that these lectures were delivered to an audience of children, the intellectual level they achieve—while remaining easily comprehensible—is astounding. No attempt is made to simplify Nancy’s positions or to resolve the complexities that arise in the course of the talks or the question periods that follow. The work of opening performed here is fully in keeping with the strategy of Nancy’s philosophy as a whole. Thus, for readers unfamiliar with his work, God, Justice, Love, Beauty will function as an excellent introduction to Nancy’s larger corpus. As varied as the individual talks are, they share the motif of incalculability or the immeasurable. Broadly speaking, one could say that the various ways in which Nancy approaches this motif exemplify his deconstructive approach to think of human existence. As well, those treatments exemplify his conviction that the task of thinking is to develop original ways of communicating the incalculable. God, Justice, Love, Beauty is thus a skillful reminder that philosophy is important to all of us. The book is also a model of intellectual generosity and openness. Seamlessly moving from Schwarzenegger to Plato, from Kant, Roland Barthes, and Caravaggio to Caillou, Harry Potter, and the pages of Gala magazine, Nancy’s wide-ranging references bear witness to his commitment to think of “culture” in its broadest sense.

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Images of ruins may represent the raw realities created by bombs, natural disasters, or factory closings, but the way we see and understand ruins is not raw or unmediated. Rather, looking at ruins, writing about them, and representing them are acts framed by a long tradition. This unique interdisciplinary collection traces discourses about and representations of ruins from a richly contextualized perspective. In the introduction, Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle discuss how European modernity emerged partly through a confrontation with the ruins of the premodern past.Several contributors discuss ideas about ruins developed by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Georg Simmel, and Walter Benjamin. One contributor examines how W. G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn betrays the ruins erased or forgotten in the Hegelian philosophy of history. Another analyzes the repressed specter of being bombed out of existence that underpins post-Second World War modernist architecture, especially Le Corbusier’s plans for Paris. Still another compares the ways that formerly dominant white populations relate to urban-industrial ruins in Detroit and to colonial ruins in Namibia. Other topics include atomic ruins at a Nevada test site, the connection between the cinema and ruins, the various narratives that have accrued around the Inca ruin of Vilcashuamán, Tolstoy’s response in War and Peace to the destruction of Moscow in the fire of 1812, the Nazis’ obsession with imperial ruins, and the emergence in Mumbai of a new “kinetic city” on what some might consider the ruins of a modernist city. By focusing on the concept of ruin, this collection sheds new light on modernity and its vast ramifications and complexities.Contributors. Kerstin Barndt, Jon Beasley-Murray, Russell A. Berman, Jonathan Bolton, Svetlana Boym, Amir Eshel, Julia Hell, Daniel Herwitz, Andreas Huyssen, Rahul Mehrotra, Johannes von Moltke, Vladimir Paperny, Helen Petrovsky, Todd Presner, Helmut Puff, Alexander Regier, Eric Rentschler, Lucia Saks, Andreas Schönle, Tatiana Smoliarova, George Steinmetz, Jonathan Veitch, Gustavo Verdesio, Anthony Vidler

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Humankind has always been fascinated and troubled by the way languages and dialects differ. Linguistically based differences in point of view have preoccupied many original minds of the past, such as Kant, and remain at the forefront of language study: in philosophy, anthropology, literary criticism, and other fields.Paul Friedrich's The Language Parallax argues persuasively that the "locus and focus" of differences among languages lies not so much in practical or rational aspects as in the complexity and richness of more poetic dimensions—in the nuances of words, or the style and voice of an author. This poetic reformulation of what has been called "linguistic relativism" is grounded in the author's theory of the imagination as a main source of poetic indeterminacy. The reformulation is also based on the intimate relation of the concentrated language of poetry to the potential or possibilities for poetry in ordinary conversation, dreams, and other experiences. The author presents challenging thoughts on the order and system of language in their dynamic relation to indeterminacy and, ultimately, disorder and chaos.Drawing on his considerable fieldwork in anthropology and linguistics, Friedrich interweaves distinct and provocative elements: the poetry of language difference, the indeterminacy in dialects and poetic forms, the discovery of underlying orders, the workings of different languages, the strength of his own poetry. The result is an innovative and organic whole.The Language Parallax, then, is a highly original work with a single bold thesis. It draws on research and writing that has involved, in particular, English, Russian, and the Tarascan language of Mexico, as well as the personal and literary study of the respective cultures. Anthropologist, linguist, and poet, Friedrich synthesizes from his experience in order to interrelate language variation and structure, the creative individual, ideas of system-in-process, and questions of scientific and aesthetic truth. The result is a new view of language held to the light of its potentially creative nature.

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There are sons who grow up unhappily believing that no matter what they do, they cannot please their fathers. Often unable to shed their sense of lifelong failure, either they give up and suffer in a permanent sulk, or they try with all their might to prove they are worth something after all. These are the "loser sons," a group of historical men as varied as President George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden, and Mohammed Atta. Their names quickly illustrate that not only are their problems serious, but they also make serious problems for others, expanding to whole nations. When God is conceived and inculcated as an angry and impossible-to-please father, the problems can last for generations. In Loser Sons, Avital Ronell draws on current philosophy, literary history, and political events to confront the grim fact that divested boys become terrifying men. This would be old news if the problem didn't recur so often with such disastrous consequences. Looking beyond our current moment, she interrogates the problems of authority, paternal fantasy, and childhood as they have been explored and exemplified by Franz Kafka, Goethe's Faust, Benjamin Franklin, Jean-François Lyotard, Hannah Arendt, Alexandre Kojève, and Immanuel Kant. Brilliantly weaving these threads into a polyvocal discourse, Ronell shows how, with their arrays of powerful symbols, ideologies of all sorts perpetuate the theme that while childhood represents innocence, adulthood entails responsible cruelty. The need for suffering--preferably somebody else's--has become a widespread assumption, not only justifying abuses of authority, but justifying authority itself. Shockingly honest, Loser Sons recognizes that focusing on the spectacular catastrophes of modernity might make writer and reader feel they're engaged in something important, while in fact what they are engaged in is still only spectacle. To understand the implications of her insights, Ronell addresses them directly to her readers, challenging them to think through their own notions of authority and their responses to it.

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Richard Popkin has assembled 63 leading scholars to forge a highly approachable chronological account of the development of Western philosophical traditions. From Plato to Wittgenstein and from Aquinas to Heidegger, this volume provides lively, in-depth, and up-to-date historical analysis of all the key figures, schools, and movements of Western philosophy. The Columbia History significantly broadens the scope of Western philosophy to reveal the influence of Middle Eastern and Asian thought, the vital contributions of Jewish and Islamic philosophers, and the role of women within the tradition. Along with a wealth of new scholarship, recently discovered works in 17th- and 18th-century philosophy are considered, such as previously unpublished works by Locke that inspire a new assessment of the evolution of his ideas. Popkin also emphasizes schools and developments that have traditionally been overlooked. Sections on Aristotle and Plato are followed by a detailed presentation on Hellenic philosophy and its influence on the modern developments of materialism and scepticism. A chapter has been dedicated to Jewish and Moslem philosophical development during the Middle Ages, focusing on the critical role of figures such as Averroes and Moses Maimonides in introducing Christian thinkers to classical philosophy. Another chapter considers Renaissance philosophy and its seminal influence on the development of modern humanism and science. Turning to the modern era, contributors consider the importance of the Kaballah to Spinoza, Leibniz, and Newton and the influence of popular philosophers like Moses Mendelssohn upon the work of Kant. This volume gives equal attention to both sides of the current rift in philosophy between continental and analytic schools, charting the development of each right up to the end of the 20th century. Each chapter includes an introductory essay, and Popkin provides notes that draw connections among the separate articles. The rich bibliographic information and the indexes of names and terms make the volume a valuable resource. Combining a broad scope and penetrating analysis with a keen sense of what is relevant for the modern reader, The Columbia History of Western Philosophy will prove an accessible introduction for students and an informative overview for general readers.

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Democracy is overrated. Capitalism, on the other hand, doesn't get enough credit. In this provocative and engaging book, John Mueller argues that these mismatches between image and reality create significant political and economic problems--inspiring instability, inefficiency, and widespread cynicism. We would be far better off, he writes, if we recognized that neither system is ideal or disastrous and accepted instead the humdrum truth that both are "pretty good." And, to Mueller, that means good enough. He declares that what is true of Garrison Keillor's fictional store "Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery" is also true of democracy and capitalism: if you can't get what you want there, "you can probably get along without it." Mueller begins by noting that capitalism is commonly thought to celebrate greed and to require discourtesy, deceit, and callousness. However, with examples that range from car dealerships and corporate boardrooms to the shop of an eighteenth-century silk merchant, Mueller shows that capitalism in fact tends to reward behavior that is honest, fair, civil, and compassionate. He argues that this gap between image and reality hampers economic development by encouraging people to behave dishonestly, unfairly, and discourteously to try to get ahead and to neglect the virtuous behavior that is an important source of efficiency and gain. The problem with democracy's image, by contrast, is that our expectations are too high. We are too often led by theorists, reformers, and romantics to believe that democracy should consist of egalitarianism and avid civic participation. In fact, democracy will always be chaotic, unequal, and marked by apathy. It offers reasonable freedom and security, but not political paradise. To idealize democracy, Mueller writes, is to undermine it, since the inevitable contrast with reality creates public cynicism and can hamper democracy's growth and development. Mueller presents these arguments with sophistication, wit, and erudition. He combines mastery of current political and economic literature with references to figures ranging from Plato to P. T. Barnum, from Immanuel Kant to Ronald Reagan, from Shakespeare to Frank Capra. Broad in scope and rich in detail, the book will provoke debate among economists, political scientists, and anyone interested in the problems (or non-problems) of modern democracy and capitalism.

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Richard Popkin has assembled 63 leading scholars to forge a highly approachable chronological account of the development of Western philosophical traditions. From Plato to Wittgenstein and from Aquinas to Heidegger, this volume provides lively, in-depth, and up-to-date historical analysis of all the key figures, schools, and movements of Western philosophy. The Columbia History significantly broadens the scope of Western philosophy to reveal the influence of Middle Eastern and Asian thought, the vital contributions of Jewish and Islamic philosophers, and the role of women within the tradition. Along with a wealth of new scholarship, recently discovered works in 17th- and 18th-century philosophy are considered, such as previously unpublished works by Locke that inspire a new assessment of the evolution of his ideas. Popkin also emphasizes schools and developments that have traditionally been overlooked. Sections on Aristotle and Plato are followed by a detailed presentation on Hellenic philosophy and its influence on the modern developments of materialism and scepticism. A chapter has been dedicated to Jewish and Moslem philosophical development during the Middle Ages, focusing on the critical role of figures such as Averroes and Moses Maimonides in introducing Christian thinkers to classical philosophy. Another chapter considers Renaissance philosophy and its seminal influence on the development of modern humanism and science. Turning to the modern era, contributors consider the importance of the Kaballah to Spinoza, Leibniz, and Newton and the influence of popular philosophers like Moses Mendelssohn upon the work of Kant. This volume gives equal attention to both sides of the current rift in philosophy between continental and analytic schools, charting the development of each right up to the end of the 20th century. Each chapter includes an introductory essay, and Popkin provides notes that draw connections among the separate articles. The rich bibliographic information and the indexes of names and terms make the volume a valuable resource. Combining a broad scope and penetrating analysis with a keen sense of what is relevant for the modern reader, The Columbia History of Western Philosophy will prove an accessible introduction for students and an informative overview for general readers.

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'In an age of specialization, Capaldi and Lloyd have recreated that ancient tool of learning: the conversation. Beginning with the debate between Locke and Rousseau, and continuing through to Galbraith, Friedman, Hayek and Piketty, this book invites the reader to join a conversation which has now lasted over three centuries. Don't read this book if you just want a simple answer to complex problems. Do read this book if you want to think deeply and widely about the fundamental questions of how to organize a society.'- Jim Hartley, Mount Holyoke College'Liberty and Equality in Political Economy takes the reader across a convincing roadmap of how and why the ongoing conversation between Lockean Liberty and Rousseau Equality provides an evolutionary explanation of the development of formal and informal institutions that define Western Civilization and explain their consequences. This book should be a must-read for undergraduate and graduate students in humanities and social sciences.'- Svetozar (Steve) Pejovich, Texas A&M UniversityLiberty and Equality in Political Economy is an evolutionary account of the ongoing debate between two narratives: Locke and liberty versus Rousseau and equality. Within this book, Nicholas Capaldi and Gordon Lloyd view these authors and their texts as parts of a conversation, therefore highlighting a new perspective on the texts themselves. The authors argue that the debate initiated between Locke and Rousseau continues to define political economy today. They not only explore the strengths of each narrative, but also indicate how proponents within each will respond to their rivals. Other important views in economics and philosophy, including the works of Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Michael Oakeshott, are examined in conjunction with Locke; the works of the French Revolution, Proudhon, Marx and Engels, the Progressives, Keynes, Galbraith, Rawls, and Piketty reflect Rousseau's divergent views. Together this provides a rich exploration of the philosophical underpinnings of modern economics and politics.This comprehensive analysis will be of interest to philosophers, political theorists, and economists who wish to join the conversation. Graduate and undergraduate students in political theory, history of economics, political philosophy, and business ethics courses will also find this book valuable.

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Offers comprehensive treatment of Thomas Hobbes’s thought, providing readers with different ways of understanding Hobbes as a systematic philosopher As one of the founders of modern political philosophy, Thomas Hobbes is best known for his ideas regarding the nature of legitimate government and the necessity of society submitting to the absolute authority of sovereign power. Yet Hobbes produced a wide range of writings, from translations of texts by Homer and Thucydides, to interpretations of Biblical books, to works devoted to geometry, optics, morality, and religion. Hobbes viewed himself as presenting a unified method for theoretical and practical science—an interconnected system of philosophy that provides many entry points into his thought. A Companion to Hobbes is an expertly curated collection of essays offering close textual engagement with the thought of Thomas Hobbes in his major works while probing his ideas regarding natural philosophy, mathematics, human nature, civil philosophy, religion, and more. The Companion discusses the ways in which scholars have tried to understand the unity and diversity of Hobbes’s philosophical system and examines the reception of the different parts of Hobbes’s philosophy by thinkers such as René Descartes, Margaret Cavendish, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. Presenting a diversity of fresh perspectives by both emerging and established scholars, this volume: Provides a comprehensive treatment of Hobbes’s thought in his works, including Elements of Law, Elements of Philosophy, and Leviathan Explores the connecting points between Hobbes’ metaphysics, epistemology, mathematics, natural philosophy, morality, and civil philosophy Offers readers strategies for understanding how the parts of Hobbes’s philosophical system fit together Examines Hobbes’s philosophy of mathematics and his attempts to understand geometrical objects and definitions Considers Hobbes’s philosophy in contexts such as the natural state of humans, gender relations, and materialist worldviews Challenges conceptions of Hobbes’s moral theory and his views about the rights of sovereigns Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series, A Companion to Hobbes is an invaluable resource for scholars and advanced students of Early modern thought, particularly those from disciplines such as History of Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Intellectual History, History of Politics, Political Theory, and English.

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How can women create a meaningful and joyous life for themselves? Is it enough to be equal with men? In this provocative and wide-ranging book, Drucilla Cornell argues that women should transcend the quest for equality and focus on what she shows is a far more radical project: achieving freedom. Cornell takes us on a highly original exploration of what it would mean for women politically, legally, and culturally, if we took this ideal of freedom seriously--if, in her words, we recognized that "hearts starve as well as bodies." She takes forceful and sometimes surprising stands on such subjects as abortion, prostitution, pornography, same-sex marriage, international human rights, and the rights and obligations of fathers. She also engages with what it means to be free on a theoretical level, drawing on the ideas of such thinkers as Kant, Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Hegel, and Lacan. Cornell begins by discussing what she believes lies at the heart of freedom: the ability for all individuals to pursue happiness in their own way, especially in matters of love and sex. This is only possible, she argues, if we protect the "imaginary domain"--a psychic and moral space in which individuals can explore their own sources of happiness. She writes that equality with men does not offer such protection, in part because men themselves are not fully free. Instead, women must focus on ensuring that individuals face minimal interference from the state and from oppressive cultural norms. They must also respect some controversial individual choices. Cornell argues in favor of permitting same-sex couples to marry and adopt children, for example. She presses for access to abortion and for universal day care. She also justifies lifestyles that have not always been supported by other feminists, ranging from staying at home as a primary caregiver to engaging in prostitution. She argues that men should have similar freedoms--thus returning feminism to its promise that freedom for women would mean freedom for all. Challenging, passionate, and powerfully argued, Cornell's book will have a major impact on the course of feminist thought.

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Gary Dorrien expounds in this book the religious philosophy underlying his many magisterial books on modern theology, social ethics, and political philosophy. His constructive position is liberal-liberationist and post-Hegelian, reflecting his many years of social justice activism and what he calls "my dance with Hegel." Hegel, he argues, broke open the deadliest assumptions of Western thought by conceiving being as becoming and consciousness as the social-subjective relation of spirit to itself; yet his white Eurocentric conceits were grotesquely inflated even by the standards of his time. Dorrien emphasizes both sides of this Hegelian legacy, contending that it takes a great deal of digging and refuting to recover the parts of Hegel that still matter for religious thought. By distilling his signature argument about the role of post-Kantian idealism in modern Christian thought, Dorrien fashions a liberationist form of religious idealism: a religious philosophy that is simultaneously both Hegelianâas it expounds a fluid, holistic, open, intersubjective, ambiguous, tragic, and reconciliatory idea of revelationâand post-Hegelian, as it rejects the deep-seated flaws in Hegel's thought. Dorrien mines Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel as the foundation of his argument about intellectual intuition and the creative power of subjectivity. After analyzing critiques of Hegel by SÃ,ren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Karl Barth, and Emmanuel Levinas, Dorrien contends that though these monumental figures were penetrating in their assessments, they appear one-sided compared to Hegel. In a Post-Hegelian Spirit further engages with the personal idealist tradition founded by Borden Parker Bowne, the process tradition founded by Alfred North Whitehead, and the daring cultural contributions of Paul Tillich, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosemary Radford Ruether, David Tracy, Peter Hodgson, Edward Farley, Catherine Keller, and Monica Coleman. Dispelling common interpretations that Hegel's theology simply fashioned a closed system, Dorrien argues instead that Hegel can be interpreted legitimately in six different ways and is best interpreted as a philosopher of love who developed a Christian theodicy of love divine. Hegel expounded a process theodicy of God salvaging what can be salvaged from history, even as his tragic sense of the carnage of history cuts deep, lingering at Calvary.

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The "place" in the title of Claudia Brodsky's remarkable new book is the intersection of language with building, the marking, for future reference, of material constructions in the world. The "referent" Brodsky describes is not something first found in nature and then named but a thing whose own origin joins language with materiality, a thing marked as it is made to begin with. In the Place of Language: Literature and the Architecture of the Referent develops a theory of the "referent" that is thus also a theory of the possibility of historical knowledge, one that undermines the conventional opposition of language to the real by theories of nominalism and materialism alike, no less than it confronts the mystical conflation of language with matter, whether under the aegis of the infinite reproducibility of the image or the identification of language with "Being." Challenging these equally naive views of language - as essentially immaterial or the only essential matter - Brodsky investigates the interaction of language with the material that literature represents. For literature, Brodsky argues, seeks no refuge from its own inherently iterable, discursive medium in dreams of a technologically-induced freedom from history or an ontological history of language-being. Instead it tells the complex story of historical referents constructed and forgotten, things built into the earth upon which history "takes place" and of which, in the course of history, all visible trace is temporarily effaced. Literature represents the making of history, the building and burial of the referent, the present world of its oblivion and the future of its unearthing, and it can do this because, unlike the historical referent, it literally takes no place, is not tied to any building or performance in space. For the same reason literature can reveal the historical nature of the making of meaning, demonstrating that the shaping and experience of the real, the marking of matter that constitutes historical referents, also defers knowledge of the real to a later date. Through close readings of central texts by Goethe, Plato, Kant, Heidegger, and Benjamin, redefined by the interrelationship of building and language they represent, In the Place of Language analyzes what remains of actions that attempt to take the place of language: the enduring, if intermittently obscured bases, of theoretical reflection itself.

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Following periods of mass atrocity and oppression, states are faced with a question of critical importance in the transition to democracy: how to offer redress to victims of the old regime without perpetuating cycles of revenge. Traditionally, balance has been restored through arrests, trials, and punishment, but in the last three decades, more than twenty countries have opted to have a truth commission investigate the crimes of the prior regime and publish a report about the investigation, often incorporating accounts from victims. Although many praise the work of truth commissions for empowering and healing through words rather than violence, some condemn the practice as a poor substitute for traditional justice, achieved through trials and punishment. There has been until now little analysis of the unarticulated claim that underlies the truth commissions' very existence: that language—in this case narrative stories—can substitute for violence. Acknowledging revenge as a real and deep human need, Shattered Voices explores the benefits and problems inherent when a fragile country seeks to heal its victims without risking its own future. In developing a theory about the role of language in retribution, Teresa Godwin Phelps takes an interdisciplinary approach, delving into sources from Greek tragedy to Hamlet, from Kant to contemporary theories about retribution, from the Babylonian law codes to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Report. She argues that, given the historical and psychological evidence about revenge, starting afresh by drawing a bright line between past crimes and a new government is both unrealistic and unwise. When grievous harm happens, a rebalancing is bound to occur, whether it is orderly and lawful or disorderly and unlawful. Shattered Voices contends that language is requisite to any adequate balancing, and that a solution is viable only if it provides an atmosphere in which storytelling and subsequent dialogue can flourish. In the developing culture of ubiquitous truth reports, Phelps argues that we must become attentive to the form these reports take—the narrative structure, the use of victims' stories, and the way a political message is conveyed to the citizens of the emerging democracy. By looking concretely at the work and responsibilities of truth commissions, Shattered Voices offers an important and thoughtful analysis of the efficacy of the ways human rights abuses are addressed.

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This book argues that The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche's first book, does not mark a rupture with his prior philosophical undertakings but is, in fact, continuous with them and with his later writings as well. These continuities are displayed above all in the entanglement of his surface narratives, in the self-consuming artifice of his writing, in the interplay of his voices, posturings, and ironies—in a word, in his staging of meaning rather than in his advocacy of one position or another. The author shows that many of the substantive elements of The Birth of Tragedy are reminiscent of Nietzsche's earlier revisions of philology and that they anticipate the later writings: the inversion of the Dionysian and Appollinian domains; the interest in the atomistic challenge to Platonism (one of Nietzsche's lifelong concerns); and the theory of the all-too-human subject that emerges as a cultural anthropology, a hauntingly present reminder of human pretensions and their limits, which is likewise a thread that runs through the whole of Nietzsche's oeuvre, critically undoing what his philosophy appears to erect. The author argues that the coherence of Nietzsche's writings up to and including The Birth of Tragedy is incontestable. It points to a fact that needs to be turned to account in any reading of The Birth of Tragedy, namely that Nietzsche is a most unreliable witness to his own meaning. The first parts of the study focus on broader issues: the relation of The Birth of Tragedy to the later writings; the problems of what the author calls "the metaphysics of appearances" (as opposed to the identification of the metaphysical as a realm lurking "behind" appearances); and the appearance—the apparition—of metaphysics in both the early and late works. In the latter parts of the study, the focus falls more narrowly on the formal and thematic complications in the narrative of The Birth of Tragedy. This book, the author argues, is a self-standing, complexly organized, and complete piece of imagining that needs to be examined on its own terms. And so while the surrounding philosophical reflections that Nietzsche made prior to and at the time of The Birth of Tragedy are brought in as needed, for instance the notes on Kant, Schopenhauer, and Lange, the primary interest lies in the self-presentation of the work itself.

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The intellectual and political elite of the West is nowadays taking for granted that religion, in particular Christianity, is a cultural vestige, a primitive form of knowledge, a consolation for the poor minded, an obstacle to coexistence. In all influential environments, the widespread watchword is "We are all secular" or "We are all post-religious." As a consequence, we are told that states must be independent of religious creed, politics must take a neutral stance regarding religious values, and societies must hold together without any reference to religious bonds. Liberalism, which in some form or another is the prevailing view in the West, is considered to be "free-standing," and the Western, liberal, open society is taken to be "self-sufficient." Not only is anti-Christian secularism wrong, it is also risky. It's wrong because the very ideas on which liberal societies are based and in terms of which they can be justified--the concept of the dignity of the human person, the moral priority of the individual, the view that man is a "crooked timber" inclined to prevarication, the limited confidence in the power of the state to render him virtuous--are typical Christian or, more precisely, Judeo-Christian ideas. Take them away and the open society will collapse. Anti-Christian secularism is risky because it jeopardizes the identity of the West, leaves it with no self-conscience, and deprives people of their sense of belonging. The Founding Fathers of America, as well as major intellectual European figures such as Locke, Kant, and Tocqueville, knew how much our civilization depends on Christianity. Today, American and European culture is shaking the pillars of that civilization. Written from a secular and liberal, but not anti-Christian, point of view, this book explains why the Christian culture is still the best antidote to the crisis and decline of the West. Pera proposes that we should call ourselves Christians if we want to maintain our liberal freedoms, to embark on such projects as the political unification of Europe as well as the special relationship between Europe and America, and to avoid the relativistic trend that affects our public ethics. "The challenges of our particular historical moment", as Pope Benedict XVI calls them in the Preface to the book, can be faced only if we stress the historical and conceptual link between Christianity and free society.

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David Brion Davis has long been recognized as the leading authority on slavery in the Western World. His books have won every major history award--including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award--and he has been universally praised for his prodigious research, his brilliant analytical skill, and his rich and powerful prose. Now, in Inhuman Bondage , Davis sums up a lifetime of insight in what Stanley L. Engerman calls "a monumental and magisterial book, the essential work on New World slavery for several decades to come." Davis begins with the dramatic Amistad case, which vividly highlights the international character of the Atlantic slave trade and the roles of the American judiciary, the presidency, the media, and of both black and white abolitionists. The heart of the book looks at slavery in the American South, describing black slaveholding planters, the rise of the Cotton Kingdom, the daily life of ordinary slaves, the highly destructive internal, long-distance slave trade, the sexual exploitation of slaves, the emergence of an African-American culture, and much more. But though centered on the United States, the book offers a global perspective spanning four continents. It is the only study of American slavery that reaches back to ancient foundations (discussing the classical and biblical justifications for chattel bondage) and also traces the long evolution of anti-black racism (as in the writings of David Hume and Immanuel Kant, among many others). Equally important, it combines the subjects of slavery and abolitionism as very few books do, and it illuminates the meaning of nineteenth-century slave conspiracies and revolts, with a detailed comparison with 3 major revolts in the British Caribbean. It connects the actual life of slaves with the crucial place of slavery in American politics and stresses that slavery was integral to America's success as a nation--not a marginal enterprise. A definitive history by a writer deeply immersed in the subject, Inhuman Bondage offers a compelling narrative that links together the profits of slavery, the pain of the enslaved, and the legacy of racism. It is the ultimate portrait of the dark side of the American dream. Yet it offers an inspiring example as well--the story of how abolitionists, barely a fringe group in the 1770s, successfully fought, in the space of a hundred years, to defeat one of human history's greatest evils.

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For Akiva Jaap Vroman "a day in the infinite past" is nonsense. All the days that have elapsed belong to a past of countable days; they started on a first day a finite number of days ago. Time began this first day. It follows that an eternal past does not exist. Vroman bases his reasoning on a simple mathematical law: an infinite quantity remains the same infinite quantity if a finite quantity, however large, is subtracted from it. On God, Space, and Time devotes itself to this proof.On God, Space, and Time is rooted in the epistemological thinking of Immanuel Kant and Jean Piaget and the law of Leucippus, and draws from the somewhat disparate fields of psychology, physiology, mathematics, and physics. Vroman discusses the modern vindication of the existence of the Creator using ontological arguments, which observe the cosmos solely through our sense-perceptions and the world of space and matter. He balances this worldview with a discussion of brain chemistry and physiology in "God, Mind, and Body" showing that the world of space and matter is nothing but an interpretation made by our working mind. Vroman also describes the Spanish-based Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages who came close to solving the Genesis-Creation contradiction, which cannot be reconciled through the external world of Greek philosophy.As we travel through time with Vroman, who ranges easily and poetically over important concepts and influential thinkers, we encounter a variety of subjects: Spinoza's new definition of God and the authority of reason in the age of Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton; Jewish idealists, such as Nachman Krochmal, Solomon L. Steinman, Solomon Formstecher, and Samuel Hirsch; the concept of space-time; and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Arthur Schopenhauer, Max Wentscher, and Charles Darwin. He presents engaging, worthwhile discussions of futurology; the astrological world of sub-lunar events; religious eschatology, specifically the Jewish and Christian Messiah; apocalyptic revelation in psychological science, the future of the universe, God and moral virtue, the medical approach to the question of life and death, and finally, personal thoughts on religious worship and service based on reason and moral sense. On God, Space, and Timea valuable historical synthesis of Western thought on man's vision of God, and consequently reality. This volume will interest many, particularly those intrigued by philosophy, religion, and futurology.

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Virtue has been rediscovered in the United States as a subject of public debate and of philosophical inquiry. Politicians from both parties, leading intellectuals, and concerned citizens from diverse backgrounds are addressing questions about the content of our character. William Bennett's moral guide for children, A Book of Virtues, was a national bestseller. Yet many continue to associate virtue with a prudish, Victorian morality or with crude attempts by government to legislate morals. Peter Berkowitz clarifies the fundamental issues, arguing that a certain ambivalence toward virtue reflects the liberal spirit at its best. Drawing on recent scholarship as well as classical political philosophy, he makes his case with penetrating analyses of four central figures in the making of modern liberalism: Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and Mill. These thinkers are usually understood to have neglected or disparaged virtue. Yet Berkowitz shows that they all believed that government resting on the fundamental premise of liberalism--the natural freedom and equality of all human beings--could not work unless citizens and officeholders possess particular qualities of mind and character. These virtues, which include reflective judgment, sympathetic imagination, self-restraint, the ability to cooperate, and toleration do not arise spontaneously but must be cultivated. Berkowitz explores the various strategies the thinkers employ as they seek to give virtue its due while respecting individual liberty. Liberals, he argues, must combine energy and forbearance, finding public and private ways to support such nongovernmental institutions as the family and voluntary associations. For these institutions, the liberal tradition powerfully suggests, play an indispensable role not only in forming the virtues on which liberal democracy depends but in overcoming the vices that it tends to engender. Clearly written and vigorously argued, this is a provocative work of political theory that speaks directly to complex issues at the heart of contemporary philosophy and public discussion. New Forum Books makes available to general readers outstanding, original, interdisciplinary scholarship with a special focus on the juncture of culture, law, and politics. New Forum Books is guided by the conviction that law and politics not only reflect culture, but help to shape it. Authors include leading political scientists, sociologists, legal scholars, philosophers, theologians, historians, and economists writing for nonspecialist readers and scholars across a range of fields. Looking at questions such as political equality, the concept of rights, the problem of virtue in liberal politics, crime and punishment, population, poverty, economic development, and the international legal and political order, New Forum Books seeks to explain--not explain away--the difficult issues we face today.

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The Western inheritance is under sustained theoretical and practical assault. Legitimate self-criticism has given way to nihilistic self-loathing and cultural, moral, and political repudiation is the order of the day. Yet, as Daniel J. Mahoney shows in this learned, eloquent, and provocative set of essays, two contemporary philosophic thinkers, Roger Scruton and Pierre Manent, have––separately and together––traced a path for the renewal of politics and practical reason, our civilized inheritance, the natural moral law, and the soul as the enduring site of self-conscious reflection, moral and civic agency, and mutual accountability. Both Scruton and Manent have repudiated the fashionable nihilism associated with the “thought of 1968” and the “Parisian nonsense machine,” and have shown that gratitude is the proper response of the human person to the “givenness of things.” Both defend the self-governing nation against reckless nationalism and the even more reckless temptation of supranational governance and post-political democracy, what Manent suggestively calls a “kratos” without a “demos.” Both defend the secular state while taking aim at a radical secularism that rejects “the Christian mark” that is at the heart of our inheritance and that sustains the rich and necessary interpenetration of truth and liberty. Scruton’s more “cultural” perspective is indebted to Burke and Kant; Manent’s more political perspective draws on Aristotle, St. Thomas, Tocqueville, and Raymond Aron, among others. By highlighting their affinities, and reflecting on their instructive differences, Mahoney shows how, together, the English man of letters Scruton, and the French political philosopher Manent, guide us to the recovery of a horizon of thought and action animated by practical reason and the wellsprings of the human soul. They show us the humanizing path forward, but first we must make the necessary spiritual decision to repudiate repudiation once and for all. “With sophisticated and profound scholarship, Daniel Mahoney deploys his elegant style to defend the soul of civilization. Through the writings of Pierre Manent and Roger Scruton, he charts a course through the political and philosophical turmoil of the present age, providing hope and light amid the prevailing darkness.” — Mark Dooley, Irish philosopher, writer and journalist. Author of Conversations with Roger Scruton and Sir Roger's literary executor. “Mahoney's collection of essays does a marvelous job of contextualizing and explaining the vital work of these two philosophers. He's also an engaging and elegant writer.” — Daniel DiSalvo, City Journal “A series of reflective essays by Mahoney on the philosophical, theological, and political thinking of our best conservative theorists: Pierre Manent and the late Roger Scruton. Recovering Politics, Civilization, and the Soul expresses well what we need.” — Richard M. Reinsch II, National Review

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This book represents a new approach to philosophy. It treats philosophy as not a collection of systems, but as a study of problems. It recognizes in traditional philosophical systems the historical function of having asked questions rather than having given solutions. Professor Reichenbach traces the failures of the systems to psychological causes. Speculative philosophers offered answers at a time when science had not yet provided the means to give true answers. Their search for certainty and for moral directives led them to accept pseudo-solutions. Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and many others are cited to illustrate the rationalist fallacy: reason, unaided by observation, was regarded as a source of knowledge, revealing the physical world and 'moral truth'. The empiricists could not disprove this thesis, for they could not give a valid account of mathematical knowledge. Mathematical discoveries in the early nineteenth century cleared the way for modern scientific philosophy. Its advance was furthered by discoveries in modern physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology. These findings have made possible a new conception of the universe and of the atom. The work of scientists thus altered philosophy completely and brought into being a philosopher with a new attitude and training. Instead of dictating so-called laws of reason to the scientist, this modern philosopher proceeds by analyzing scientific methods and results. He finds answers to the age-old questions of space, time, causality, and life; of the human observer and the external world. He tells us how to find our way through this world without resorting to unjustifiable beliefs or assuming a supernatural origin for moral standards. Philosophy thus is no longer a battleground of contradictory opinions, but a science discovering truth step by step. Professor Reichenbach, known for his many contributions to logic and the philosophy of science, addresses this book to a wider audience. He writes for those who do not have the leisure or preparation to read in the fields of mathematics, symbolic logic, or physics. Besides showing the principal foundations of the new philosophy, he has been careful to provide the necessary factual background. He has written a philosophical study, not a mere popularization. It contains within its chapters all the necessary scientific material in an understandable form - and, therefore, conveys all the information indispensable to a modern world-view. The late Hans Reichenbach was Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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With the publication of French Philosophy of the Sixties, Alain Renaut and Luc Ferry in 1985 launched their famous critique against canonical figures such as Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan, bringing under rigorous scrutiny the entire post-structuralist project that had dominated Western intellectual life for over two decades. Their goal was to defend the accomplishments of liberal democracy, particularly in terms of basic human rights, and to trace the reigning philosophers' distrust of liberalism to an "antihumanism" inherited mainly from Heidegger. In The Era of the Individual, widely hailed as Renaut's magnum opus, the author explores the most salient feature of post-structuralism: the elimination of the human subject. At the root of this thinking lies the belief that humans cannot know or control their basic natures, a premise that led to Heidegger's distrust of an individualistic, capitalist modern society and that allied him briefly with Hitler's National Socialist Party. While acknowledging some of Heidegger's misgivings toward modernity as legitimate, Renaut argues that it is nevertheless wrong to equate modernity with the triumph of individualism. Here he distinguishes between individualism and subjectivity and, by offering a history of the two, powerfully redirects the course of current thinking away from potentially dangerous, reductionist views of humanity. Renaut argues that modern philosophy contains within itself two opposed ways of conceiving the human person. The first, which has its roots in Descartes and Kant, views human beings as subjects capable of arriving at universal moral judgments. The second, stemming from Leibniz, Hegel, and Nietzsche, presents human beings as independent individuals sharing nothing with others. In a careful recounting of this philosophical tradition, Renaut shows the resonances of these traditions in more recent philosophers such as Heidegger and in the social anthropology of Louis Dumont. Renaut's distinction between individualism and subjectivity has become an important issue for young thinkers dissatisfied with the intellectual tradition originating in Nietzsche and Heidegger. Moreover, his proclivity toward the Kantian tradition, combined with his insights into the shortcomings of modernity, will interest anyone concerned about today's shifting cultural attitudes toward liberalism. Originally published in 1997. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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Grandes ideas, explicaciones sencillasCon un lenguaje claro, El libro de la filosofía ofrece concisas explicaciones que desbrozan la jerga académica, esquemas que hacen sencillas las teorías más complejas, citas clásicas y una serie de ingeniosas ilustraciones que juegan con nuestra comprensión de la filosofía.¿Cómo surgió el universo? ¿Qué es la verdad? ¿Por qué el ser humano está de forma constante buscando la felicidad?A lo largo de la historia de la humanidad, estas y otras preguntas acerca de la naturaleza y de la existencia han suscitado respuestas de grandes pensadores como Friedrich Nietzsche e Immanuel Kant que continúan dando forma al mundo.Tanto el neófito como el estudiante o el experto aficionado hallarán en este libro de filosofía en español materia con la que nutrir su pensamiento.Pensamientos cultivados, grandes teorías¿Te gustaría filosofar con una buena base sólida y conocer los detalles de los pensadores más ilustres de la historia? Este libro de filosofía para mentes inquietas te abre las puertas a las maravillosas ideas y teorías que se han desarrollado hasta la actualidad. Ordenado de forma cronológica, El libro de la filosofía ilustra de una forma didáctica los orígenes de citas famosas que tratan de explicar el por qué y para qué de la vida. Con esta fabulosa lectura se desvelan las raíces y el contexto sociocultural de donde nacieron citas famosas como “Pienso, luego existo” de Descartes, “La imaginación lo decide todo” de Blaise Pascal, “La vida se vivirá tanto mejor si no tiene sentido” de Albert Camus, o “Al hombre se le define como ser humano, a la mujer como hembra” de Simone de Beauvoir.Conoce las ramas y las orientaciones que han tenido lugar en la historia de la filosofía, desde el existencialismo o la fenomenología, al budismo o el feminismo. Acompañado de hechos históricos, fechas, acontecimientos, biografías y grandes obras literarias, y diseñado para jóvenes y adultos.El libro de la filosofía es una interesante referencia para empaparse de las brillantes ideas y teorías sobre la existencia humana, desde los orígenes de la filosofía griega y romana hasta la actualidad: • Filosofía antigua • Filosofía medieval • Filosofía renacentista • Filosofía moderna • Filosofía contemporánea El libro de la filosofía pertenece a la galardonada serie Grandes Ideas explica temas complejos de un modo fácil de entender mediante explicaciones claras y alejándose del academicismo tradicional. Su creativo diseño y los gráficos innovadores que acompañan al texto hacen de esta serie una introducción perfecta a una gran diversidad de materias para toda la familia.

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This book brings together for the first time five recent essays by Jacques Derrida, which advance his reflections on many issues: lying, perjury, forgiveness, confession, the profession of faith, and, most recently, cruelty, sovereignty, and capital punishment. Strongly linked by their attention to "performatives" and the "as if," the essays show the necessity of thinking beyond the category of acts that are possible for a subject. Derrida argues forcefully that thought must engage with the im-possible, that is, the order of the unforeseeable event, the absolute future still to come. This acute awareness of the limits of performative programs informs the essays throughout and attunes them closely to events of a world undergoing "globalization." The first essay, "History of the Lie," reviews some classic and modern definitions of the lie (Augustine, Rousseau, Kant, Koyré, Arendt), while renewing questions about what is called lying, as distinguished from other forms of nontruth. This inventive analysis is followed by "Typewriter Ribbon," which examines at length the famous lie recounted by Rousseau in his Confessions, when he perjured himself by accusing another of his own crime. Paul de Man's reading of this textual event is at the center of Derrida's patient, at times seriously funny analyses. "Le parjure, Perhaps" engages with a remarkable novel by Henri Thomas that fictionalizes the charge of perjury brought against Paul de Man in the 1950s. Derrida's extraordinary fineness as a reader and thinker of fiction here treats, to profound effect, the "fatal experience of perjury." The two final essays, "The University Without Condition" and "Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul," address the institutions of the university and of psychoanalysis as sites from which to resist and deconstruct the nontruth or phantasm of sovereignty. For the university, the principle of truth remains at the core of its resistance; for psychoanalysis, there is the obligation to remain true to what may be, Derrida suggests, its specific insight: into psychic cruelty. Resistance to the sovereign cruelty of the death penalty is just one of the stakes indicated by the last essay, which is the text of a keynote address to the "States General of Psychoanalysis" held in Paris, July 2000. Especially for this volume, Derrida has written "Provocation: Forewords," which reflects on the title Without Alibi while taking up questions about relations between deconstruction and America. This essay-foreword also responds to the event of this book, which Peggy Kamuf in her introduction presents as event of resistance. Without Alibi joins two other books by Derrida that Kamuf has translated for Stanford University Press: Points . . .: Interviews, 1974-1994 (1994) and Resistances of Psychoanalysis (1998).

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Isaiah Berlin was deeply admired during his life, but his full contribution was perhaps underestimated because of his preference for the long essay form. The efforts of Henry Hardy to edit Berlin's work and reintroduce it to a broad, eager readership have gone far to remedy this. Now, Princeton is pleased to return to print, under one cover, Berlin's essays on these celebrated and captivating intellectual portraits: Vico, Hamann, and Herder. These essays on three relatively uncelebrated thinkers are not marginal ruminations, but rather among Berlin's most important studies in the history of ideas. They are integral to his central project: the critical recovery of the ideas of the Counter-Enlightenment and the explanation of its appeal and consequences--both positive and (often) tragic. Giambattista Vico was the anachronistic and impoverished Neapolitan philosopher sometimes credited with founding the human sciences. He opposed Enlightenment methods as cold and fallacious. J. G. Hamann was a pious, cranky dilettante in a peripheral German city. But he was brilliant enough to gain the audience of Kant, Goethe, and Moses Mendelssohn. In Hamann's chaotic and long-ignored writings, Berlin finds the first strong attack on Enlightenment rationalism and a wholly original source of the coming swell of romanticism. Johann Gottfried Herder, the progenitor of populism and European nationalism, rejected universalism and rationalism but championed cultural pluralism. Individually, these fascinating intellectual biographies reveal Berlin's own great intelligence, learning, and generosity, as well as the passionate genius of his subjects. Together, they constitute an arresting interpretation of romanticism's precursors. In Hamann's railings and the more considered writings of Vico and Herder, Berlin finds critics of the Enlightenment worthy of our careful attention. But he identifies much that is misguided in their rejection of universal values, rationalism, and science. With his customary emphasis on the frightening power of ideas, Berlin traces much of the next centuries' irrationalism and suffering to the historicism and particularism they advocated. What Berlin has to say about these long-dead thinkers--in appreciation and dissent--is remarkably timely in a day when Enlightenment beliefs are being challenged not just by academics but by politicians and by powerful nationalist and fundamentalist movements. The study of J. G. Hamann was originally published under the title The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism. The essays on Vico and Herder were originally published as Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas. Both are out of print. This new edition includes a number of previously uncollected pieces on Vico and Herder, two interesting passages excluded from the first edition of the essay on Hamann, and Berlin's thoughtful responses to two reviewers of that same edition.

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Entrepreneurship is a discipline that can be taught across the disciplines. Angela Beeching's chapter demonstrates how the essential business concepts of entrepreneurship can be made relevant to music students. By using short case studies featuring musical entrepreneurs, Beeching's excellent chapter provides a context for teaching entrepreneurship that reflects musicians' values and priorities. As one might expect from Beeching, a luminary in the music entrepreneurship world, her chapter also includes insights for educators and practitioners from all disciplines inspired by our musical golden age of entrepreneurship.'- Catherine Fitterman Radbill, author of Introduction to the Music Industry: An Entrepreneurial Approach'Satish Nambisan has assembled a great team of authors who have produced a fascinating collection of chapters. The book does an excellent job of bringing together for the first time developments in entrepreneurship across disparate disciplines that have important research, policy and practical implications. Entrepreneurship can learn from other disciplines but fundamentally this is a two-way process as other disciplines can learn from entrepreneurship. This approach provides a much needed emphasis on the increasing richness of adopting a cross-disciplinary approach in understanding the scope of entrepreneurship.'- Mike Wright, Centre for Management Buyout Research, Imperial College Business School, UK and University of Ghent, Belgium'Entrepreneurship is crossing borders with great impact. After decades of being confined to business schools, entrepreneurship scholarship and teaching are being diffused throughout the university: in engineering, natural and biological sciences, social sciences, art, music, medicine and other schools and departments. This is one of the very first books that captures this important trend, identifying areas for research, teaching and outreach activities. Every chapter is written by an area expert, offering rich insights into the growing power of entrepreneurship as a discipline and a way of thinking and doing. As such, the book is a major reference to any entrepreneurship scholar. The editor, Satish Nambisan, did a masterful job in selecting authors and themes covered in the book. His achievement is simply remarkable.'- Shaker A. Zahra, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, USUnique ideas, insights and themes from diverse disciplines-from engineering, science and medicine to arts, design, and music-have the potential to enrich and deepen our understanding of entrepreneurship. This book brings together contributions from an eclectic set of entrepreneurship scholars and educators from different fields to advance cross-disciplinary entrepreneurial thinking.Embracing Entrepreneurship Across Disciplines draws on case studies and examples to provide a rich illustration of key themes and concepts, providing an opportunity to share lessons and best practices. It describes innovative programs and practices that could serve as templates for entrepreneurship educators and informs the development and evaluation of policies, programs and educational materials that cross or impact multiple fields.The creative, accessible ideas and insights offered in this book will appeal to a broad audience interested in entrepreneurship-from scholars and educators to practitioners and policy makers.Contributors: R.J. Anderson, G.D. Beckman, A.M. Beeching, R.W. Brown, O.R. Butler, L. Canning, J.D. Hart, A. Kant, D. Melton, A. Meyers, S. Nambisan, C. Patterson, J. Thomas

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The European Enlightenment is a period that contributed concepts that continue to be authoritative in philosophical conversation, and defined the criteria for what is important in the endeavors of human thought even in our own day. Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy presents the questions that are responsible for a departure from Scholasticism and the dawn of modern philosophy. To understand Continental Philosophy, and the history that precedes the analytical tradition, one cannot overlook Descartes’ precedent. Even into the eighteenth century philosophical bearings were considered a prerequisite to culture. But to understand the transition of philosophy into the keeping of the universities, one cannot sidestep Descartes’ union of philosophy to science. But not only this – in its beginnings, it must be noted that this chapter of the Enlightenment contains one of the most meaningful convergences of God and science. Despite the success or failure of Descartes’ conclusions of innate ideas and the undoubtability of kmo God, the attempt and its commitments define a significant displacement of both faith and reason (even mathematics) that provides the context for recognizing, for example, the likes of Kant and Newton in the fullness of their own projects. Emanuala Scribano’s guide to the reading of the Meditations is both a critical treatment of the content of this text as well as an historical overview of the philosophical climate and conversation of Descartes’ contemporaries. It is an accurate presentation of Descartes’ motivation and immediate influence on the culture, and in particular those aspects which succeeded in altering theology, philosophy, and physics simultaneously. Scribano provides rich references to the Scholastic and Platonic traditions in order to better characterize the way in which nuances of thought lead to momentous shifts in general theory and the construction of concepts. Descartes tries to found an untouchable science, but one that also defends the existence of God. Hence, it is not enough to look forward from Descartes, but also behind to the patrimony of human enterprise in what regards satisfying the need of both gnosis and episteme. Scribano’s commentary is especially helpful for those already familiar with Aquinas and Aristotle, as she employs frequent juxtapositions between these and Descartes’ divergences. Beyond the general interest and scholarship, this book is especially helpful for any liberal arts curriculum that engages original text. It assists the reader in constructing the progression and consequences of Descartes’ thought and provides a bibliography and notes that introduce the reader to the larger body of Cartesian literature. Nevertheless, Scribano’s emphasis is on the concepts and notions proper to Descartes and the novelties of his project. One might say she vindicates Descartes’ attempt without defending him. The reader is shown Descartes’ positive contribution well enough that he might disagree, or reconsider the negative reputation of his work based solely on its consequences. The book is accessible though not compromised in its clarity. It is essential for students who seek to understand Descartes in all his integrity and historical claims. As Scribano writes, “[Descartes’] is a strange adventure of human thought,” and indispensable to a comprehensive understanding of one of the most formidable trends in human intellectual history.

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The book aims at a new exposition of the basic idea of modern aesthetics by way of a reconstruction of its genesis in the 18th century, between Baumgarten’s Aesthetics and Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The claim is that the historical invention of aesthetics was not about expanding the range of legitimate objects of philosophical inquiry—these objects all existed before aesthetics. Rather, aesthetics, by introducing the category of the “aesthetic,” fundamentally redefined these objects. But most importantly, the reconstruction of the historical genesis of aesthetics shows that the introduction of the category of the “aesthetic” required nothing less than a transformation of the fundamental terms of philosophy. What begins in—or as—aesthetics is modern philosophy. More precisely, Force shows that in—or as—aesthetics modern philosophy began twice, in two different, even opposite forms. On the one hand, Baumgarten’s Aesthetics is organized around the new concept of the “subject”: the concept of the subject as the totality of faculties, as the agent defined by his capabilities; of the subject as one who is able. By conceiving sensible cognition and (re)presentation as the exercise of subjective faculties acquired in practice, Baumgarten has framed the modern conception of human practices (and of philosophy as the inquiry into the conditions that enable the success of these practices). That is why aesthetics, the reflection upon the aesthetic, is a central pillar of modern philosophy: in aesthetics, the philosophy of the subject or of the subject’s faculties assures itself of its own possibility. Yet here, in the aesthetic and the reflection on it, the aesthetics “in the Baumgartian manner” (Herder), as the theory of the sensible faculties of the subject, at once faces a different aesthetics: the aesthetics of force, which conceives the aesthetic not as sensible cognition but instead as a play of expression—propelled by a force that, rather than being exercised, like a faculty, in practices, realizes itself; a force that does not recognize or represent anything because it is “obscure” and unconscious; a force not of the subject but of man as distinct from the same man as subject. The aesthetics of force is a science of the nature of man: of his aesthetic nature as distinct from the culture, acquired by practice, of his practices. That is the hypothesis the six chapters of Force intend to unfold. The first chapter, analyzing the rationalist concept of the sensible, recollects the point of departure of aesthetics: the sensible is that which is without determinable definition or measure. The second chapter reconstructs Baumgarten’s aesthetics of sensible cognition as a theory of the subject and its faculties. The third and fourth chapters draw on writings by Herder, Sulzer, and Mendelssohn to develop the basic motifs of a counter-model, an aesthetics of force: the aesthetic, as the operation of an “obscure” force, is a performance without generality, divorced from all norm, law, and purpose—a play. And the aesthetic, as the pleasure of self-reflection, is a process of the transformation of the subject, of its faculties and practices—a process of aestheticization. The aesthetics of force founds an anthropology of difference: between force and faculty, between man and subject. The two concluding chapters explore the consequences: for the idea of philosophical aesthetics; and for ethics as the theory of the good. The fifth chapter engages Kant to show that an aesthetics conceived as an aesthetics of force is the scene of an irresolvable contention: aesthetics unfolds within philosophy the contention between philosophy and aesthetic experience. The sixth chapter draws on Nietzsche to demonstrate the ethical import of aesthetic experience as the experience of the play of force: it teaches us to distinguish between action and life; it teaches the other good of life. – “The last word of aesthetics is human freedom.”

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The book aims at a new exposition of the basic idea of modern aesthetics by way of a reconstruction of its genesis in the 18th century, between Baumgarten’s Aesthetics and Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The claim is that the historical invention of aesthetics was not about expanding the range of legitimate objects of philosophical inquiry—these objects all existed before aesthetics. Rather, aesthetics, by introducing the category of the “aesthetic,” fundamentally redefined these objects. But most importantly, the reconstruction of the historical genesis of aesthetics shows that the introduction of the category of the “aesthetic” required nothing less than a transformation of the fundamental terms of philosophy. What begins in—or as—aesthetics is modern philosophy. More precisely, Force shows that in—or as—aesthetics modern philosophy began twice, in two different, even opposite forms. On the one hand, Baumgarten’s Aesthetics is organized around the new concept of the “subject”: the concept of the subject as the totality of faculties, as the agent defined by his capabilities; of the subject as one who is able. By conceiving sensible cognition and (re)presentation as the exercise of subjective faculties acquired in practice, Baumgarten has framed the modern conception of human practices (and of philosophy as the inquiry into the conditions that enable the success of these practices). That is why aesthetics, the reflection upon the aesthetic, is a central pillar of modern philosophy: in aesthetics, the philosophy of the subject or of the subject’s faculties assures itself of its own possibility. Yet here, in the aesthetic and the reflection on it, the aesthetics “in the Baumgartian manner” (Herder), as the theory of the sensible faculties of the subject, at once faces a different aesthetics: the aesthetics of force, which conceives the aesthetic not as sensible cognition but instead as a play of expression—propelled by a force that, rather than being exercised, like a faculty, in practices, realizes itself; a force that does not recognize or represent anything because it is “obscure” and unconscious; a force not of the subject but of man as distinct from the same man as subject. The aesthetics of force is a science of the nature of man: of his aesthetic nature as distinct from the culture, acquired by practice, of his practices. That is the hypothesis the six chapters of Force intend to unfold. The first chapter, analyzing the rationalist concept of the sensible, recollects the point of departure of aesthetics: the sensible is that which is without determinable definition or measure. The second chapter reconstructs Baumgarten’s aesthetics of sensible cognition as a theory of the subject and its faculties. The third and fourth chapters draw on writings by Herder, Sulzer, and Mendelssohn to develop the basic motifs of a counter-model, an aesthetics of force: the aesthetic, as the operation of an “obscure” force, is a performance without generality, divorced from all norm, law, and purpose—a play. And the aesthetic, as the pleasure of self-reflection, is a process of the transformation of the subject, of its faculties and practices—a process of aestheticization. The aesthetics of force founds an anthropology of difference: between force and faculty, between man and subject. The two concluding chapters explore the consequences: for the idea of philosophical aesthetics; and for ethics as the theory of the good. The fifth chapter engages Kant to show that an aesthetics conceived as an aesthetics of force is the scene of an irresolvable contention: aesthetics unfolds within philosophy the contention between philosophy and aesthetic experience. The sixth chapter draws on Nietzsche to demonstrate the ethical import of aesthetic experience as the experience of the play of force: it teaches us to distinguish between action and life; it teaches the other good of life. – “The last word of aesthetics is human freedom.”

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Jokes, Life after Death, and God has two main tasks: to try to understand exactly what a joke is, and to see whether there are any connections between jokes, on the one hand, and life after death and God, on the other hand. But it pursues other tasks as well, tasks of an ancillary sort. This book devises a general and comprehensive, but brief, theory of jokes. The author begins with critiques of other writers’ views on the subject. 1) Ted Cohen thinks that such a theory is impossible. 2) Ronald Berk, on the other hand, provides just such a theory. And 3) John Morreall provides a general theory of laughter, which may include some things which can be used in a general theory of jokes. 4) Neil Schaeffer, too, provides a general theory of laughter, which makes a big point out of what he calls the “ludicrous context”; but he does include a chapter on jokes. 5) Christopher Wilson offers a general theory of jokes in which he focuses on form and content. And 6) Thomas Werge, in reflecting on the comic, suggests a general theory of jokes which identifies their matter, form, agents, purposes, and beyond these, the underlying shared relational context, which makes it possible for jokes to arise. 7) Bill Fuller’s message is that there is more funniness coming out of two or more heads than out of one, just as Socrates’ message was that there is more clarity coming out of two or more heads than out of one. 8) Umberto Eco feels that monks should laugh, just as ordinary people do; for laughter not only refreshes our seeking spirits, it also illuminates the truth we seek. 9) Simon Critchley, in his reflections on humor, notes that jokes bring on a kind of everyday anamnesis, that they are anti-story stories, that they are like prayers, that they are like philosophy; and that they require a certain underlying context, which is implicitly recognized by both teller and listener, and which renders possible the tension needed to make the punch line work. 10) Martha Wolfenstein, pursuing a psychological analysis of children’s humor, proposes that the underlying motive for telling jokes remains the same from childhood to adulthood, i.e., to transform painful and frustrating experiences so as to extract pleasure from them; and that the agent or productive cause of jokes is the repressing unconscious, as suggested by Freud. As John Morreall has argued, neither the Superiority Theory (as in Plato, Aristotle and Hobbes), nor the Relief Theory (as in Spencer and Freud), nor the Incongruity Theory (as in Kant, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard) appears to work as a general and comprehensive theory. Moreover, these writers talk more about humor and laughter than about jokes. To be sure, a joke is a type of humor. Thus, to say something about humor is to say something, though of a generic sort, about jokes. Similarly, to say something about the laughter caused by humor is to say something, though generic, about the laughter caused by jokes. Most of the authors considered in chapter one are concerned with jokes, and not only with humor as such. Section 11 of chapter one puts together, out of the combined contributions of these authors, what can be considered the beginnings of, some thoughts toward, a general and comprehensive theory of jokes. This task the author illustrates in a concrete way, by looking at individual jokes of different sorts; not, however, without inviting the reader to enjoy these jokes. The author looks particularly at Jewish jokes, Christian jokes, and Islamic jokes (jokes in three major religious traditions), jokes about philosophy and philosophers (philosophers ought to be able to laugh at themselves and at what they do), yo mama jokes (out of a healthy curiosity), Italian jokes and Slovak jokes, all of which makes for a clearer understanding of exactly what a joke is. The analysis of general theory is then followed by some views on the morality of jokes and joke-telling, and an analysis of the connection between jokes and life after death, on the one hand, and God, on the other. Throughout the book Bobik offers innumerable examples to heighten our understanding and entertain us.

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"Margaret L. King has put together a highly representative selection of readings from most of the more significant—but by no means the most obvious—texts by the authors who made up the movement we have come to call the 'Enlightenment.' They range across much of Europe and the Americas, and from the early seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth. In the originality of the choice of texts, in its range and depth, this collection offers both wide coverage and striking insights into the intellectual transformation which has done more than any other to shape the world in which we live today. It is simply the best introduction to the subject now available." —Anthony Pagden, UCLA, and author of The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters Contents:Chronology, IntroductionChapter One - Casting Out Idols: 1620–1697 Idols, or false notions: Francis Bacon, The New Instrument (1620) I think, therefore I am: René Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637) God, or Nature: Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677) The system of the world: Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687) He searched for truth throughout his life: Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697) Chapter Two - The Learned Maid: 1638–1740 A face raised toward heaven: Anna Maria van Schurman, Whether the Study of Letters Befits a Christian Woman (1638) The worlds I have made: Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World (1666) A finer sort of cattle: Bathsua Makin, An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen (1673) I warn you of the world: Madame de Maintenon, Letter: On the Education of the Demoiselles of Saint-Cyr (August 1, 1686), and Instruction: On the World (1707) The daybreak of your reason: Émilie Du Châtelet, Fundamentals of Physics (1740) Chapter Three - A State of Perfect Freedom: 1689–1695 The chief criterion of the True Church: John Locke, Letter on Toleration (1689) Freedom from any superior power on earth: John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government (1689) A white paper, with nothing written on it: John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) Let your rules be as few as possible: John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) From death, Jesus Christ restores all to life: John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695) Chapter Four - All Things Made New: 1725–1784 In the wilderness, they are reborn: Giambattista Vico, The New Science (1725/1730/1744) Without these Names, nothing can be known, Carl Linnaeus, System of Nature (1735) All the clouds at last are lifted: Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, The Successive Advancement of the Human Mind (1750) A genealogical or encyclopedic tree of knowledge: Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse (1751) Dare to know! : Immanuel Kant, What Is Enlightenment? (1784) Chapter Five - Mind, Soul, and God: 1740–1779 The narrow limits of human understanding: David Hume, An Abstract of a Book Lately Published (1740) The soul is but an empty word: Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine (1747) All is reduced to sensation: Claude Adrien Helvétius, On the Mind (1758) An endless web of fantasies and falsehoods: Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach, Common Sense (1772) Let each believe that his own ring is real: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan the Wise (1779) Chapter Six - Crush That Infamous Thing: 1733–1764 This is the country of sects: Voltaire, Philosophical Letters (1733) Disfigured by myth, until enlightenment comes: Voltaire, The Culture and Spirit of Nations (1756) The best of all possible worlds: Voltaire, Candide (1759) Are we not all children of the same God?: Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance (1763) If a book displeases you, refute it! : Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (1764) Chapter Seven - Toward the Greater Good: 1748–1776 Things must be so ordered that power checks power, Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748) Complete freedom of trade must be ensured: François Quesnay, General Maxims for the Economic Management of an Agricultural Kingdom (1758) The nation's war against the citizen: Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments (1764) There is no peace in the absence of justice: Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) Led by an invisible hand: Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) Chapter Eight - Encountering Others: 1688–1785 Thus died this great man: Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: or The Royal Slave (1688) Not one sins the less for not being Christian: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Embassy Letters (1716–1718) Do you not restore to them their liberty?: Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Philosophical and Political History of European Colonies and Commerce in the Two Indies (1770) Some things which are rather interesting: Captain James Cook, Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World (1777) The inner genius of my being: Johann Gottfried von Herder, Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humankind (1785) Chapter - Nine Citizen of Geneva: 1755–1782 The most cunning project ever to enter the human mind: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Human Inequality (1754) The supreme direction of the General Will: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762) Two lovers from a small town at the foot of the Alps, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) Build a fence around your child’s soul: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education (1762) This man will be myself: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (1770) Chapter Ten - Vindications of Women: 1685–1792 No higher design than to get her a husband: Mary Astell, Reflections on Marriage (1700) The days of my bondage begin: Anna Stanisławska, Orphan Girl (1685) A dying victim dragged to the altar: Denis Diderot, The Nun (1760/1780) Created to be the toy of man: Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) Man, are you capable of being just?: Olympe de Gouges, Declaration of the Rights of Woman as Citizen (1791) Chapter Eleven - American Reverberations: 1771–1792 I took upon me to assert my freedom: Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (1771/1792) Freedom has been hunted round the globe: Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776) Endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights: Thomas Jefferson and Others, Declaration of Independence (1776) A safeguard against faction and insurrection: James Madison, Federalist No. 10 (1787) An end to government by force and fraud: Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791–1792) Chapter Twelve - Enlightenment's End: 1790–1794 A partnership of the living, the dead, and those unborn: Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) The future destiny of the human species: Nicolas de Condorcet, A Sketch of a Historical Portrait of the Progress of the Human Mind (1793–1794) Texts and Studies, Index

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"Margaret L. King has put together a highly representative selection of readings from most of the more significant—but by no means the most obvious—texts by the authors who made up the movement we have come to call the 'Enlightenment.' They range across much of Europe and the Americas, and from the early seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth. In the originality of the choice of texts, in its range and depth, this collection offers both wide coverage and striking insights into the intellectual transformation which has done more than any other to shape the world in which we live today. It is simply the best introduction to the subject now available." —Anthony Pagden, UCLA, and author of The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters Contents:Chronology, IntroductionChapter One - Casting Out Idols: 1620–1697 Idols, or false notions: Francis Bacon, The New Instrument (1620) I think, therefore I am: René Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637) God, or Nature: Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677) The system of the world: Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687) He searched for truth throughout his life: Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697) Chapter Two - The Learned Maid: 1638–1740 A face raised toward heaven: Anna Maria van Schurman, Whether the Study of Letters Befits a Christian Woman (1638) The worlds I have made: Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World (1666) A finer sort of cattle: Bathsua Makin, An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen (1673) I warn you of the world: Madame de Maintenon, Letter: On the Education of the Demoiselles of Saint-Cyr (August 1, 1686), and Instruction: On the World (1707) The daybreak of your reason: Émilie Du Châtelet, Fundamentals of Physics (1740) Chapter Three - A State of Perfect Freedom: 1689–1695 The chief criterion of the True Church: John Locke, Letter on Toleration (1689) Freedom from any superior power on earth: John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government (1689) A white paper, with nothing written on it: John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) Let your rules be as few as possible: John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) From death, Jesus Christ restores all to life: John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695) Chapter Four - All Things Made New: 1725–1784 In the wilderness, they are reborn: Giambattista Vico, The New Science (1725/1730/1744) Without these Names, nothing can be known, Carl Linnaeus, System of Nature (1735) All the clouds at last are lifted: Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, The Successive Advancement of the Human Mind (1750) A genealogical or encyclopedic tree of knowledge: Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse (1751) Dare to know! : Immanuel Kant, What Is Enlightenment? (1784) Chapter Five - Mind, Soul, and God: 1740–1779 The narrow limits of human understanding: David Hume, An Abstract of a Book Lately Published (1740) The soul is but an empty word: Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine (1747) All is reduced to sensation: Claude Adrien Helvétius, On the Mind (1758) An endless web of fantasies and falsehoods: Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach, Common Sense (1772) Let each believe that his own ring is real: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan the Wise (1779) Chapter Six - Crush That Infamous Thing: 1733–1764 This is the country of sects: Voltaire, Philosophical Letters (1733) Disfigured by myth, until enlightenment comes: Voltaire, The Culture and Spirit of Nations (1756) The best of all possible worlds: Voltaire, Candide (1759) Are we not all children of the same God?: Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance (1763) If a book displeases you, refute it! : Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (1764) Chapter Seven - Toward the Greater Good: 1748–1776 Things must be so ordered that power checks power, Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748) Complete freedom of trade must be ensured: François Quesnay, General Maxims for the Economic Management of an Agricultural Kingdom (1758) The nation's war against the citizen: Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments (1764) There is no peace in the absence of justice: Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) Led by an invisible hand: Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) Chapter Eight - Encountering Others: 1688–1785 Thus died this great man: Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: or The Royal Slave (1688) Not one sins the less for not being Christian: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Embassy Letters (1716–1718) Do you not restore to them their liberty?: Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Philosophical and Political History of European Colonies and Commerce in the Two Indies (1770) Some things which are rather interesting: Captain James Cook, Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World (1777) The inner genius of my being: Johann Gottfried von Herder, Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humankind (1785) Chapter - Nine Citizen of Geneva: 1755–1782 The most cunning project ever to enter the human mind: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Human Inequality (1754) The supreme direction of the General Will: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762) Two lovers from a small town at the foot of the Alps, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) Build a fence around your child’s soul: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education (1762) This man will be myself: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (1770) Chapter Ten - Vindications of Women: 1685–1792 No higher design than to get her a husband: Mary Astell, Reflections on Marriage (1700) The days of my bondage begin: Anna Stanisławska, Orphan Girl (1685) A dying victim dragged to the altar: Denis Diderot, The Nun (1760/1780) Created to be the toy of man: Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) Man, are you capable of being just?: Olympe de Gouges, Declaration of the Rights of Woman as Citizen (1791) Chapter Eleven - American Reverberations: 1771–1792 I took upon me to assert my freedom: Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (1771/1792) Freedom has been hunted round the globe: Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776) Endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights: Thomas Jefferson and Others, Declaration of Independence (1776) A safeguard against faction and insurrection: James Madison, Federalist No. 10 (1787) An end to government by force and fraud: Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791–1792) Chapter Twelve - Enlightenment's End: 1790–1794 A partnership of the living, the dead, and those unborn: Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) The future destiny of the human species: Nicolas de Condorcet, A Sketch of a Historical Portrait of the Progress of the Human Mind (1793–1794) Texts and Studies, Index

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