Discusses the nature and status of political systems from the Puritan upheaval of the seventeenth century to the totalitarian movements of our own day.

Ambiguities in the concept of ideology may be clarified by a history of the word and the phenomenon. "Ideology" can mean both the consciousness of an epoch and the "false consciousness" of men unaware of their true historical position. It was coined in early nineteenth-century France for a "science of ideas," knowledge of which would assure harmonious social life . For Hegel, ideology is the false consciousness necessarily arising from the partial and transitory nature of thought in its dialectical development. (...) Marx, as a materialist, went further, holding all speculative thought to be ideological defense of the status quo; Nietzsche cynically reduced all thought to ideology. Weber, Lukfics, and Mannheim made a more creative critique. For Lukdcs, the solution of the problem of ideology lay in the consciousness of the proletariate, the "identical subject-object" of history; for Mannheim, in that of the intellectuals. (shrink)

"While the great Hungarian critic and philosopher George Lukacs wrote voluminously over a 60-year period, his work is insufficiently known in the English-speaking world. In this remarkable study, George Lichtheim interprets Lukacs' political career and his equally controversial literary critiques, relating them to the traditional issues of Central European philosophy that inform all of Lukacs' work..." - Book jacket.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:96 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the other hand, he tried like Ramsay to distinguish the "all being" of God from nature; he emphasized the doctrine of final causes and of God's "excellence" as man's chief end. It is possible that Edwards's enigmatic sermon on the Trinity may have been stimulated by Ramsay's speculation on this subject, though this is a mere guess. In any case, Ramsay must have made Edwards (...) aware of Berkeley, without converting him to the kind of pluralistic metaphysics which both Ramsay and Berkeley represent. Quite apart from the historical questions of influence and contacts among philosophers, Ramsay's work is a significant event in the history of ideas; it brings to direct collision the two extremes of the Enlightenment. It brings to life in the imagination of a reader today the basic philosophical issues of the eighteenth century and it makes them relevant to those aspects of the old problems that are central issues today. HERBERTW. SCHNEIDER Claremont, Cali/ornia THE ORIGINS OF MARXISM Interest in the philosophical origins of Marxism is currently so widespread as to constitute something of an intellectual phenomenon in its own right. That it denotes a shift of attention away from Marx's own emphasis on human prax~ as the cure for useless metaphysical agonies, the authors here under review would not deny. A tendency to see Marxism as an historicalphenomenon--thus applying to it the criterion of judgment inherent in Marx's own critique of his predecessors -is common to them all.Such an approach is proper to a postrevolutionary age, though this description may seem oddly chosen in view of the continuing turmoil that surrounds us. To describe the present age as postrevolutionary is after all to say no more than was implied by those nineteenth-century writers who looked back upon the French Revolution. If our situation today is similar, it does not follow that we are about to enter calmer waters, though for all one knows the East-West antagonism may gradually come to resemble the rather undramatic tension which characterized Anglo-French relations during the earlier part of the Victorian era. The Russian Revolution might then at last appear as a closed chapter, and Marx himself as its Rousseau: the philosopher of one particular historic upheaval whose consequences have now been absorbed. Such an attitude presupposes that one is not unduly concerned with the intellectual claims of Soviet Marxism but treats it as the ideology of a society which has not yet acquired a self-critical understanding of its own myths. This would be quite in tune with Marx's own approach, though hardly with the Leninist belief that the Russian Revolution represents the start of a new epoch: that of consciousness raised to the level of global reconstruction. For to say that the Bolsheviks, like the Jacobins before them, unwittingly prepared the way for a new exploitative society is to say that the enterprise was a failure. At the same time, recognition of this fact validates the Marxian insight into the peculiar NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 97 mechanism whereby history has hitherto managed to accomplish its real aims. Thus the critical, or "revisionist," Marxist is able to have it both ways. What prevents the writers under review from taking this easy way out is their concern with the philosophical origins of Marxism. If Marx had been content, like Weber and Pareto, to analyze the mechanism whereby society renews itself from time to time, his position would be unassailable, but by the same token he would simply be another scholar. The perennial interest of Marxism springs from that "union of theory and practice" of which Marx himself was the first and greatest exemplar. No one who has felt the spell of the Theses on Feuerbach or the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts can fail to inquire whether these writings may not outlast the dissolution of the scholastic system constructed by Engels and the epigoni. To say this is not to range oneself on the side of romanticism in its current quasi-anarchist form, which plainly corresponds to a loss of interest in politics. It is simply to acknowledge that thinking people will go on asking... (shrink)

This books contains Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, along with his essay, "Who Thinks Abstractly?," translated by Walter Kaufmann, along with Kaufmann's commentary. It was re-issued by the University of Notre Dame Press in 1977. Rear cover blurb: "[Kaufmann's] lengthy commentary is a minor masterpiece of concise and erudite interpretation. This is a welcome departure from the lazy habit of pretending that Hegel was an obscure pedant who left some quite readable lectures on the philosophy of (...) history....To grasp what Hegel was really trying to do, one has to confront his metaphysics, and thanks to Kaufmann this can now be done even by the philosophical novice." - George Lichtheim in New York Review of Books. (shrink)

Idealist philosopher Georg Hegel defied the traditional epistemological distinction of objective from subjective and developed his own dialectical alternative. Remarkable for its breadth and profundity, this work combines aspects of psychology, logic, moral philosophy, and history to form a comprehensive view that encompasses all forms of civilization. Its three divisions consist of the subjective mind (dealing with anthropology and psychology), the objective mind (concerning philosophical issues of law and morals), and the absolute mind (covering fine arts, religion, and philosophy). Wide-ranging (...) in its influence, this survey of the evolution of consciousness is essential reading for all students of philosophy and history. (shrink)

TRANSLATORS PREFACE THE PRESENT TRANSLATION OF GEORG SIMMEL'S Schopen- hauer und Nietzsche: Ein Vortragszyklus (1907), ...

Marketing Ethics addresses head-on the ethical questions, misunderstandings and challenges that marketing raises while defining marketing as a moral activity. A substantial introduction to the ethics of marketing, exploring the integral relations of marketing and morality Identifies and discusses a series of ethical tools and the marketing framework they constitute that are required for moral marketing Considers broader meanings and background assumptions of marketing infrequently included in other marketing literature Adds direction and meaning to problems in marketing ethics through reflection (...) on concepts such as individual choice, freedom and responsibility, desire satisfaction, noncoercive exchanges, and instrumental efficiency. (shrink)

The description for this book, Desert, will be forthcoming.

The idea of nature in medical theory and practice -- Diseases -- Health: popular concept and philosophical question -- Is a pedagogy of healing possible? -- The problem of regulation in the organism and in society.

Berkeley's Idealism both advances Berkeley scholarship and serves as a useful guide for teachers and students.

What drives much of the current philosophical interest in the idea of group cognition is its appeal to the manifestation of psychological properties—understood broadly to include states, processes, and dispositions—that are in some important yet elusive sense emergent with respect to the minds of individual group members. Our goal in this paper is to address a set of related, conditional questions: If human mentality is real yet emergent in a modest metaphysical sense only, then: (i) What would it mean for (...) a group to have emergent cognitive states? (ii) Is this even a metaphysically coherent view? (iii) Relative to which notion of emergence do we have reason to believe that certain groups in fact have emergent cognitive states? We shall argue that evidence from a wide variety of social science domains makes it plausible that there are group cognitive states and processes no less metaphysically emergent than human cognitive (and other special science) states and processes. (shrink)

Georges Sorel's Study on Vico is a revelatory document of the depths and stakes of French social thought at the end of the 19th century. What brought Sorel to the 18th century Neapolitan theorist of history? Acute awareness of the limitations of Marxist thought in his day, a profound concern with the material underpinnings of language, law, and culture, and the imperative to understand the possibilities of revolutionary change. We find here a different Sorel, one who speaks in surprising ways (...) to the 21st century. The translation is accompanied by an introduction and by a set of notes which situate the text both in Sorel's overall intellectual trajectory and in the fin de siècle debates from which it emerged. (shrink)

In the light of two unpublished letters from Carnap to Kuhn, this essay examines the relationship between Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Carnap's philosophical views. Contrary to the common wisdom that Kuhn's book refuted logical empiricism, it argues that Carnap's views of revolutionary scientific change are rather similar to those detailed by Kuhn. This serves both to explain Carnap's appreciation of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and to suggest that logical empiricism, insofar as that program rested on Carnap's (...) shoulders, was not substantially upstaged by Kuhn's book. (shrink)

Darwin the writer -- Learning to see : Darwin's prophetic apprenticeship on the Beagle voyage -- The prose of On the origin of species -- Surprise and paradox : Darwin's artful legacy -- Darwinian mind and Wildean paradox -- Hardy's Woodlanders and the Darwinian grotesque -- Coda : the comic Darwin.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Stolen Legacy by George G.M. James refutes the Euro-centric myth that the origin of Western philosophy is Greek. First published in 1954, this book was seminal in leading to a radical reappraisal of a philosophical system long thought to be of European origin. It is an essential work in the syllabus for the study of Western philosophy.

This edited volume draws upon Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to examine the conscious and unconscious forces underlying race as a social formation, conceptualizing race, racial identity, and racism in ways that go beyond traditional modes of psychoanalytic thought Featuring contributions from Lacanian scholars from diverse geographical and disciplinary contexts, chapters span a wide breadth of topics including white nationalism and contemporary debates over confederate monuments; emergent theories of race rooted in Afropessimism and postcolonialism; Latinx and other racialized groups; apartheid and American (...) slavery; and applications of Lacan's concepts of the lamella, drive and sexuation to processes of racialization. The collection both reorients readers' understandings of race through its deployment of Lacanian theory and redefines the Lacanian subject through its theorizing of subjectivity in relation to race, racism and racial identification. Lacan and Race will be a definitive text for psychoanalytic theorists and contemporary scholars of race and appeal to readers across the fields of psychology, cultural studies, humanities, politics, and sociology. (shrink)

Many epistemologists have been interested in justification because of its presumed close relationship to knowledge. This relationship is intended to be ...

How do we evaluate the power and utility of language when it has been made to articulate falsehoods in certain totalitarian regimes or has been charged with vulgarity and imprecision in a mass-consumer democracy? How will language react to the increasingly urgent claims of more exact speech such as mathematics and symbolic notation? These are some of the questions Steiner addresses in this elegantly written book, first published in 1967 to international acclaim.

This book introduces the reader to the philosophy of early Christianity in the 2nd-4th centuries AD, and contextualizes the philosophical contributions of early Christians in the framework of the ancient philosophical debates. It examines the first attempts of Christian thinkers to engage with issues such as questions of cosmogony and first principles, freedom of choice, concept formation, and the body-soul relation, as well as later questions like the status of the divine persons of the Trinity. It also aims to show (...) that the philosophy of early Christianity is part of ancient philosophy as a distinct school of thought, being in constant dialogue with the ancient philosophical schools, such as Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and even Epicureanism and Scepticism. This book examines in detail the philosophical views of Christian thinkers such as Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Basil and Gregory of Nyssa and sheds light in the distinct ways they conceptualized traditional philosophical issues and made some intriguing contributions. The book's core chapters survey the central philosophical concerns of the early Christian thinkers and examines their contributions. These range across natural philosophy, metaphysics, logic and epistemology, psychology and ethics, and include such questions as how the world came into being, how God relates to the world, what is the status of matter, how we can gain knowledge, in what sense humans have freedom of choice, what the nature of soul is and how it relates to the body, and how we can attain happiness and salvation. The Philosophy of Early Christianity is intended for undergraduate and postgraduate students of ancient philosophy and early Christianity, from across the disciplines of classics, history and theology. (shrink)

Benjamin Franklin famously wrote that “the good [that] men do separately is small compared with what they may do collectively” (Isaacson 2004). The ability to join with others in groups to accomplish goals collectively that would hopelessly overwhelm the time, energy, and resources of individuals is indeed one of the greatest assets of our species. In the history of humankind, groups have been among the greatest workers, builders, producers, protectors, entertainers, explorers, discoverers, planners, problem-solvers, and decision-makers. During the late 19th (...) and early 20th century, many social scientists employed the notorious “group mind” idiom to express the sensible idea that groups can function as the seats of cognition, intelligence, and agency in their own right (Allport 1968; Wilson 2004). In their quest to stress (rightly) that group phenomena are something “over and above” the sum of individual contributions, a fondness for vitalist metaphors led them to believe (wrongly) that genuine group cognition must be the result of tapping into individualistically inaccessible, “holistic” forces. Today, inspired in part by historically unparalleled forms of mass collaboration enabled by the internet, it has once again become popular to speak of collective intelligence, group agency, or even the emergence of a “global brain” (cf. the wiki-edited MIT Handbook of Collective Intelligence). -/- In this chapter, I review some contemporary developments of the idea of group cognition, defined broadly as the collaborative performance of cognitive tasks such as remembering, problem-solving, decision-making, or verbal creativity for the purpose of producing a group-level outcome. My discussion serves a two-fold purpose. First, by discussing how the idea of group cognition can be operationalized, I seek to show that we can retain some central theoretical insights of the “group mind” thesis without succumbing to its eccentric metaphysical overtones. Second, by providing a useful array of generalizable taxonomic resources, I hope to foster greater degrees of mutual awareness among insufficiently integrated areas of research on group performance. (shrink)

Since its publication in 1935, Kenneth Burke's Permanence and Change, a text that can serve as an introduction to all of Burke's theories, has become a landmark of rhetorical study. Using new archival sources and by contextualizing the theory in the past and present, Ann George offers the first sustained exploration of Burke's work and seeks to clarify the notoriously difficult book for both amateurs and scholars of rhetoric in Kenneth Burke's Permanence and Change: A Critical Companion.

De récents travaux ont éclairé sans équivoque aucune l'adhésion de Martin Heidegger au totalitarisme hitlérien. Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, traducteur de Kafka et de Nietzsche, reprend la question par un biais plus personnel, dans les pas de Victor Klemeperer, l'auteur de la Lingua Tertii Imperrii (1947). "Gefolgschaft", "Einsatz", "Ereignis" : autant de termes appartenant à la fois au vocabulaire nazi et au système philosophique heideggerien. L'appropriation d'un tel langage n'a rien d'opportuniste ou d'occasionnel, mais marque un engagement profond. Cet ouvrage rare et (...) décisif restitue au lecteur français le champ lexical allemand contemporain d'Heidegger. Il dévoile les implications politiques d'une terminologie qui, en passant dans la traduction d'une langue à l'autre, lui échappent souvent. Une telle contamination constitue symboliquement l'un des événements les plus importants du XXe siècle philosophique, dont on ne finira pas de mesurer la portée et les conséquences. (shrink)