»Philosophieren ist die Annäherung an eine Offenbarung, die nie stattfindet. Der Weg dahin ist voll von den scharfsinnigsten menschlichen Weisheiten«, so Marcuse in seiner Geschichte der Philosophie, in der er den Leser bekannt macht mit den Freuden »der großen Ernte des Denkens«.

Students of government and history- and many other readers with an interest in books off the beaten track, will find this lively discussion of the three attempts made by Plato to put theory into practice a fascinating study. The author has brought history to life, creating living beings rather than dry dust, and making the period live again. This practical side of the idealist, Plato, is not well known. He despised tyranny, as brute force, but yearned toward the tyranny of (...) a good and just man, who would austerely dominate his people toward the end of the Perfect State, with lasting peace as a goal. During 25 years three attempts were made, in Syracuse, a tyrant-held city, each coming closer to success. Plato's theory that the Perfect State demanded a king guided by a philosopher proved impractical, when after two failures, the loyal Platonist, Dion, seized the government, only to find that the teachings of Plato covered the ends to be achieved, while ignoring the means to reach them. Kirkus Review, Aug. 21st, 1947. (shrink)

Die Bibliotheca Teubneriana, gegr ndet 1849, ist die weltweit lteste, traditionsreichste und umfangreichste Editionsreihe griechischer und lateinischer Literatur von der Antike bis zur Neuzeit. Pro Jahr erscheinen 4-5 neue Editionen. S mtliche Ausgaben werden durch eine lateinische Praefatio erg nzt. Die wissenschaftliche Betreuung der Reihe obliegt einem Team anerkannter Philologen: Gian Biagio Conte (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa) James Diggle (University of Cambridge) Donald J. Mastronarde (University of California, Berkeley) Franco Montanari (Universit di Genova) Heinz-G nther Nesselrath (Georg-August-Universit t G (...) ttingen) Dirk Obbink (University of Oxford) Oliver Primavesi (Ludwig-Maximilians Universit t M nchen) Michael D. Reeve (University of Cambridge) Richard J. Tarrant (Harvard University) Vergriffene Titel werden als Print-on-Demand-Nachdrucke wieder verf gbar gemacht. Zudem werden alle Neuerscheinungen der Bibliotheca Teubneriana parallel zur gedruckten Ausgabe auch als eBook angeboten. Die lteren B nde werden sukzessive ebenfalls als eBook bereitgestellt. Falls Sie einen vergriffenen Titel bestellen m chten, der noch nicht als Print-on-Demand angeboten wird, schreiben Sie uns an: [email protected] S mtliche in der Bibliotheca Teubneriana erschienenen Editionen lateinischer Texte sind in der Datenbank BTL Online elektronisch verf gbar. (shrink)

Unlike most books on the psychology and philosophy of humor, and following Ludwig Wittgenstein’s wonderful advice—"A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes," this book is replete with jokes, ...

Der Reader versammelt programmatische Ansätze der kulturwissenschaftlichen Auseinandersetzung mit dem Problem der Evidenz aus dem Blickpunkt der Sprach-, Geschichts-, Kunst- und Literaturwissenschaft, Medientheorie, Anthropologie und Soziologie. Mit Beiträgen u.a. von Rüdiger Campe, Iris Daermann, Egon Flaig, Peter Geimer, Vinzenz Hediger, Caspar Hirschi, Ludwig Jäger, Albrecht Koschorke, Helmut Lethen, Jakob Moser, Inka Mülder-Bach, Jan-Dirk Müller, Karl Schlögel, Florian Sprenger, Jakob Tanner, Marcus Twellmann, Juliane Vogel und Claus Zittel.

Wittgenstein finished part 1 of the Philosophical Investigations in the spring of 1945. From 1946 to 1949 he worked on the philosophy of psychology almost without interruption. The present two-volume work comprises many of his writings over this period. Some of the remarks contained here were culled for part 2 of the Investigations ; others were set aside and appear in the collection known as Zettel . The great majority, however, although of excellent quality, have hitherto remained unpublished. This bilingual (...) edition of the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology presents the first English translation of an essential body of Wittegenstein's work. It elaborates Wittgenstein's views on psychological concepts such as expectation, sensation, knowing how to follow a rule, and knowledge of the sensations of other persons. It also shows strong emphasis on the "anthropological" aspect of Wittgenstein's thought. Philosophers, as well as anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists will welcome this important publication. (shrink)

The dominant theory of the evolution of moral cognition across a variety of fields is that moral cognition is a biological adaptation to foster social cooperation. This chapter argues, to the contrary, that moral cognition is likely an evolutionary exaptation: a form of cognition where neurobiological capacities selected for in our evolutionary history for a variety of different reasons—many unrelated to social cooperation—were put to a new, prosocial use after the fact through individual rationality, learning, and the development and transmission (...) of social norms. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the emerging behavioral neuroscience of moral cognition. It then outlines a novel theory of moral cognition that I have previously argued explains these findings better than alternatives. Finally, it shows how the evidence for this theory of moral cognition and human evolutionary history together suggest that moral cognition is likely not a biological adaptation. Instead, like reading sheet music or riding a bicycle, moral cognition is something that individuals learn to do—in this case, in response to sociocultural norms created in our ancestral history and passed down through the ages to enable cooperative living. (shrink)

Bazzocchi disposes the text of the Tractatus in a user-friendly manner, exactly as Wittgenstein's decimals advise. This discloses the logical form of the book by distinct reading units, linked into a fashioned hierarchical tree. The text becomes much clearer and every reader can enjoy, finally, its formal and literary qualities.

Quick, accessible, compact guide to understanding key political concepts. Contents include: Liberty, Justice, Equality, Human rights, Social contract, Democracy, Monarchy, Anarchism, Capitalism, Socialism, Nationalism and Globalisation.

These works, as the sub-title makes clear, are unfinished sketches for Philosophical Investigations, possibly the most important and influential philosophical work of modern times. The 'Blue Book' is a set of notes dictated to Witgenstein's Cambridge students in 1933-1934: the 'Brown Book' was a draft for what eventually became the growth of the first part of Philosophical Investigations. This book reveals the germination and growth of the ideas which found their final expression in Witgenstein's later work. It is indispensable therefore (...) to students of Witgenstein's thought and to all those who wish to study at first-hand the mental processes of a thinker who fundamentally changed the course of modern philosophy. (shrink)

This paper develops a non-relativist version of contextualism about knowledge. It is argued that a plausible contextualism must take into account three features of our practice of attributing knowledge: (1) knowledge-attributions follow a default-and-challenge pattern; (2) there are preconditions for a belief's enjoying the status of being justified by default (e.g. being orthodox); and (3) for an error-possibility to be a serious challenge, there has to be positive evidence that the possibility might be realized in the given situation. It is (...) argued that standard "semantic" versions of contextualism (e.g. those of Lewis, Cohen, DeRose) fail to take these features into account, which makes them overly hospitable to the sceptic, and that Williams' version of contextualism, although incorporating (1), fails to do justice to (2) and (3). According to the contextualism developed here, although epistemic standards vary with the context, the truth-value of particular knowledge-attributions does not. Contexts here are understood as being constituted by two elements: an epistemic practice (a rule-governed social practice such as a scientific discipline, the law, a craft etc., in which knowledge-claims are evaluated according to specific standards) and the "facts of the matter" (i.e. those facts which, together with the epistemic standards in question, determine which error-possibilities are relevant and thus have to be eliminated for a knowledge-claim to be true). If there are several epistemic practices, and thus several contexts, in which a knowledge-claim can be evaluated, it is the "strictest" practice that counts. In this way, the counterintuitive consequence of other versions of contextualism that the same knowledge-claim can be true in one context, but false in another, can be avoided. At the same time, scepticism can be resisted since even in the "strictest" epistemic practices, error-possibilities become relevant only when backed by positive evidence that they might in fact obtain. (shrink)

Can you master the ideas of Plato, Kant, Nietzsche and Sartre? What does 'I think, therefore I am' really mean? Do you know the arguments for and against the existence of god? And what do the great philosophers tell us about knowledge and truth, good and evil? Packed with bite-sized briefings, shortcuts and bluffs, Get Smart: Philosophy demystifies 50 key philosophical concepts and provides you with all you need to speak out about the very biggest ideas.

Editorial preface to the fourth edition and modified translation -- The text of the Philosophische Untersuchungen -- Philosophische untersuchungen = Philosophical investigations -- Philosophie der psychologie, ein fragment = Philosophy of psychology, a fragment.

Written in code under constant threat of battle, Wittgenstein's searing and illuminating diaries finally emerge in this first-ever English translation. During the pandemic, Marjorie Perloff, one of our foremost scholars of global literature, found her mind ineluctably drawn to the profound commentary on life and death in the wartime diaries of eminent philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). Upon learning that these notebooks, which richly contextualize the early stages of his magnum opus, the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus, had never before been published in English, (...) the Viennese-born Perloff determinedly set about translating them. Beginning with the anxious summer of 1914, this historic, en-face edition presents the first-person recollections of a foot soldier in the Austrian Army, fresh from his days as a philosophy student at Cambridge, who must grapple with the hazing of his fellow soldiers, the stirrings of a forbidden sexuality, and the formation of an explosive analytical philosophy that seemed to draw meaning from his endless brushes with death. Much like Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief, Private Notebooks takes us on a personal journey to discovery as it augments our knowledge of Wittgenstein himself. (shrink)

Raimo Tuomela is one of the pioneers of social action theory and has done as much as anyone over the last thirty years to advance the study of social action and collective intentionality. Social Ontology: Collective Intentionality and Group Agents (2013) presents the latest version of his theory and applications to a range of important social phenomena. The book covers so much ground, and so many important topics in detailed discussions, that it would impossible in a short space to do (...) it even partial justice. In this brief note, I will concentrate on a single, though important, theme in the book, namely, the claim that we must give up methodological individualism in the social sciences and embrace instead irreducibly group notions. I wish to defend methodological individualism as up to the theoretical tasks of the social sciences while acknowledging what is distinctive about the social world and collective intentional action. -/- Tuomela frames the question of the adequacy of methodological individualism in terms of a contrast between what he calls the I-mode and the we-mode. He argues that we-mode phenomena are not reducible to I-mode phenomena, and concludes that we must reject methodological individualism. I will argue that the irreducibility of the we-mode to the I-mode, given how the contrast is set up, does not entail the rejection of methodological individualism. In addition, I will argue that the three conditions that Tuomela places on genuine we-mode activities, the group reason, collectivity, and collective commitment conditions, if they are understood in a way that does not beg the question, can plausibly be satisfied by a reductive account. Finally, I will argue that the specific considerations advanced in the book do not give us reason to think that a reductive account cannot be adequate to the descriptive and explanatory requirements of a theory of the social world. (shrink)