Online research in philosophy

This work is an essential introduction to the vast body of writing about history, from classical Greece and Rome to the contemporary world. M.C. Lemon maps out key debates and central concepts of philosophy of history placing principal thinkers in the context of their times and schools of thought. Lemon explains the crucial differences between speculative philosophy as an n enquiry into the course and meaning of history and analytic philosophy of history as relating to the nature and methods of history as a discipline. After providing a guide to the principal thinkers from pre-historical times to the present, the book goes on to present a critical summary of the leading issues raised by critical theorists of history, incorporating topics such as objectivity, ideology, historical explanation and narrative.

Autobiographies by intellectuals are a privileged source of intellectual history. This potentiality is increased when we study historians' autobiographies, where they negotiate with a past which is actually their own past. Acknowledging the genre's potential as a source of theory and history, this essay examines Benedetto Croce and Robin Collingwood's memoirs, connecting them to the general trends of historiographic evolution in the twentieth century. Their exploration of the self becomes not only an excellent testimony of the methodological and epistemological trends of between-wars historiography, but also illustrates the natural alliance between history, philosophy, and literature at that time. The analysis focuses on the organic connection between their autobiography and their scholarly work and on how their autobiographies dialogue with the critical framework on scholarship of their time, giving us insight into processes of intellectual history.

Critical Theory constitutes one of the major intellectual traditions of the twentieth century, and is centrally important for philosophy, political theory, aesthetics and theory of art, the study of modern European literatures and music, the history of ideas, sociology, psychology, and cultural studies. In this volume an international team of distinguished contributors examines the major figures in Critical Theory, including Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin, and Habermas, as well as lesser known but important thinkers such as Pollock and Neumann. The volume surveys the shared philosophical concerns that have given impetus to Critical Theory throughout its history, while at the same time showing the diversity among its proponents that contributes so much to its richness as a philosophical school. The result is an illuminating overview of the entire history of Critical Theory in the twentieth century, an examination of its central conceptual concerns, and an in-depth discussion of its future prospects.

The sixteen essays in this volume confront the current debate about the relationship between philosophy and its history. On the one hand intellectual historians commonly accuse philosophers of writing bad - anachronistic - history of philosophy, and on the other, philosophers have accused intellectual historians of writing bad - antiquarian - history of philosophy. The essays here address this controversy and ask what purpose the history of philosophy should serve. Part I contains more purely theoretical and methodological discussion, of such questions as whether there are 'timeless' philosophical problems, whether the issues of one epoch are commensurable with those of another, and what style is appropriate to the historiography of the subject. The essays in Part II consider a number of case-histories. They present important revisionist scholarship and original contributions on topics drawn from ancient, early modern and more recent philosophy. All the essays have been specially commissioned, and the contributors include many of the leading figures in the field. The volume as a whole will be of vital interest to everyone concerned with the study of philosophy and of its history.

Organized thematically, this important five-volume set brings together key essays from the field of historical studies. Including an extensive general introduction by the editor in the first volume, as well as shorter individual introductions in each of the following volumes, this set is essential reading for scholars and students alike. Coverage includes: 1. Foundations - The Classic Tradition - The Old Cultural History - Economic History 2: Society - Social History - Marxism - Annales - History of Mentalities 3: Ideas - History of Ideas/ Intellectual History - History of Science - History of the Arts - History of Religion - History of Sexuality. 4: Culture - History and Anthropology - Microhistory - New Cultural History - History and Memory - The Poetics of History - Narrativity. Postmodernist Historiography and its Critics 5: Politics - Political History - Imperialism and Postcolonial History - World History - World-Systems Analysis.

A Critical Sense brings together, in their own words, the leading figures of contemporary radical theory. Moving freely between philosophy, politics and cultural studies, this book offers a fascinating overview of the lines of thought of today's intellectual left. Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis and critical theory, literary studies, deconstruction, pragmatism, postcolonial and queer theory are discussed in a series of interviews from the journal Radical Philosophy . The intellectuals at the center of these debates are: Judith Butler, Cornelius Castoriadis, Drucilla Cornell, Axel Honneth, Istvan Meszaros, Edward Said, Renata Salecl, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Cornel West, and Slavoj Zizek. A Critical Sense will throw new, and often surprising, light on the intellectual debates of our time.

‘Experience is the best teacher’ goes the cliché without ever making clear just want is meant by that slippery first term. ‘Experience is never remembered unaltered’ goes another. Is experience something to be undergone, like a journey, or is it perhaps the relational immediacy between organism and environment? What do we reference when we use the term experience?

Martin Jay, renowned intellectual historian from UC Berkeley, here examines these questions in a grand survey of the term’s use throughout the intellectual history of what was once called Western Civilization. Beginning with the ancient Greeks (of course), he reviews the surprising number of variations employed and assumed by philosophers, theologians critical theorists, and right up to the poststructuralists. Jay knows his territory and reading this survey of it — for anyone with any sort of background in the history of philosophy — is often as pleasant as hearing a familiar symphony well-played in a unique way.

In this paper I utilize Martin Beck Matuštík’s intellectual biography of Habermas as a means for reflecting on the meaning that criticaltheory has for us in the wake of September 11. I argue that the significant contribution of Matuštík’s book is that it fruitfully continues theconversation about the meaning of critical theory by underscoring the sociohistorical contexts that frame Habermas’s intellectual engagements. Matuštík’s figure of the critical theorist as witness refocuses attention on the critical theorist in context, nevertheless as critical theorists we also need to be mindful of the plurality of disastrous events that continue to shape our world.

Force Fields collects the recent essays of Martin Jay, an intellectual historian and cultural critic internationally known for his extensive work on the history of Western Marxism and the intellectual migration from Germany to America.