European philosophy from the late seventeenth century through most of the eighteenth is broadly conceived as the "Enlightenment," a period of empricist reaction to the great seventeeth century Rationalists. This volume begins with Herbert of Cherbury and the Cambridge Platonists and with Newton and the early English Enlightenment. Locke is a key figure, as a result of his importance both in the development of British and Irish philosophy and because of his seminal influence in the Enlightenment as a whole. (...)British Philosophy and the Age of the Enlightenment includes discussion of the Scott Enlightenment and its influence on the German Aufklaring , and consequently on Kant. The French Enlightenment, which in turn affected the late radical Enlightenment, especially Bentham, is also considered here. This survey brings together clear, authorative chapters from leading experts and provides a scholarly introduction to this period in the history of philosophy. It includes a glossary of technical terms and a chronological table of important political, philosophical, scientific and other cultural events. (shrink)
What do real philosophers do? What are the big philosophical issues of today? Clear and engaging, New British Philosophy contains sixteen fascinating interviews with some of the top philosophers working in Britain today, on topics that range from music to the mind and feminism to the future of philosophy. This unique snapshot of philosophy today includes interviews with: Ray Monk, Nigel Warburton, Aaron Ridley, Jonathan Wolff, Roger Crisp, Rae Langton, Miranda Fricker, M.G.F. Martin, Timothy Williamson, Tim Crane, Robin Le (...) Poidevin, Christina Howells, Simon Critchley Simon Glendinning, Stephen Mulhall and Keith Ansell Pearson. (shrink)
The eighteenth century was a time of brilliant philosophical innovation in Britain. In Of Liberty and Necessity James A. Harris presents the first comprehensive account of the period's discussion of what remains a central problem of philosophy, the question of the freedom of the will. He offers new interpretations of contributions to the free will debate made by canonical figures such as Locke, Hume, Edwards, and Reid, and also discusses in detail the arguments of some less familiar writers. Harris puts (...) the eighteenth-century debate about the will and its freedom in the context of the period's concern with applying what Hume calls the "experimental method of reasoning" to the human mind. His book will be of substantial interest to historians of philosophy and anyone concerned with the free will problem. (shrink)
GROUPS INTERESTED IN RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY 184 General remarks — The Oxford Movement — John Henry Newman — William George Ward — Francis William Newman ...
Fish, S. Georgics of the mind: Bacon's philosophy and the experience of his Essays.--Brett, R. L. Thomas Hobbes.--Watt, I. Realism and the novel.--Tuveson, E. Locke and Sterne.--Kampf, L. Gibbon and Hume.--Frye, N. Blake's case against Locke.--Abrams, M. H. Mechanical and organic psychologies of literary invention.--Ryle, G. Jane Austen and the moralists.--Schneewind, J. B. Moral problems and moral philosophy in the Victorian period.--Donagan, A. Victorian philosophical prose: J. S. Mill and F. H. Bradley.--Pitcher, G. Wittgenstein, nonsense, and Lewis Carroll.--Bolgan, A. C. (...) The philosophy of F. H. Bradley and the mind and art of T. S. Eliot: an introduction.--Davie, D. Yeats, Berkeley, and Romanticism.--Ross, M. L. The mythology of friendship: D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, and "The Blind man".--Rosenbaum, S. P. The philosophical realism of Virginia Woolf.--Bibliography (p. 357-360). (shrink)
The focus of this volume is the crisis of the traditional view of the relationship between words and things and the emergence of linguistic arbitrarism in 17th ...
"Under Magee's sensitive guidance a remarkably coherent interpretation of this period emerges."--Marshall Cohen, Listener. "The whole book has a marvellous air of casualness and clarity that makes it a delight to read."--Colin Wilson. Contemporary British philosophy is experiencing unprecedented openness to influences from abroad. New growth is evident in many areas of traditional philosophy which had been neglected by the logical positivists and the linguistic analysts. This sense of freedom permeates Magee's volume of conversations with leading British philosophers. (...) Under Magee's direction, the philosophers discuss other influential thinkers, such as Wittgenstein, Russell, Moore, and Austin, as well as ideas of universal interest, such as morality, art, religion, and social theory. As an introduction to contemporary British philosophy, a unique collection of candid commentaries by important thinkers, and study of fresh ideas, Modern British Philosophy is consistently lively and authoritative. (shrink)
This is the long-awaited publication of a set of writings by the British philosopher, historian, and archaeologist R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943) on critical, anthropological, and cultural themes only hinted at in his previously available work. At the core are six essays on folktale and magic in which Collingwood applies the principles of his philosophy of history to problems in the long-term evolution of human society and culture. The volume opens with three substantial introductory essays by the editors, authorities in their (...) various fields, who provide their explanatory and contextual notes to guide the reader through the texts. The Philosophy of Enchantment highlights the broad range of Collingwood's intellectual engagements, their integration, and their relevance to current areas of debate in the fields of philosophy, cultural studies, social and literary history, and anthropology. (shrink)
This book is a major work in the history of ethics, and provides the first study of early modern British philosophy in several decades. Professor Darwall discerns two distinct traditions feeding into the moral philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, there is the empirical, naturalist tradition, comprising Hobbes, Locke, Cumberland, Hutcheson, and Hume, which argues that obligation is the practical force that empirical discoveries acquire in the process of deliberation. On the other hand, there (...) is a group including Cudworth, Shaftesbury, Butler, and in some moments Locke, which views obligation as inconceivable without autonomy and which seeks to develop a theory of the will as self-determining. (shrink)
What Russell regarded to be the ?chief outcome? of his 1914 Lowell Lectures at Harvard can only be fully appreciated, I argue, if one embeds the outcome back into the ?classificatory problem? that many at the time were heavily engaged in. The problem focused on the place and relationships between the newly formed or recently professionalized disciplines such as psychology, Erkenntnistheorie, physics, logic and philosophy. The prime metaphor used in discussions about the classificatory problem by British philosophers was a (...) spatial one, with such motifs as ?standpoints?, ?place? and ?perspectives? in the space of knowledge. In fact, Russell?s construction of a perspectival space of six-dimensions was meant precisely to be a timely solution to the widely discussed classificatory problem. (shrink)
Ideas about soul and body – about thinking or remembering, mind and life, brain and self – remain both diverse and controversial in our neurocentric age. The history of these ideas is significant both in its own right and to aid our understanding of the complex sources and nature of our concepts of mind, cognition, and psychology, which are all terms with puzzling, difficult histories. These topics are not the domain of specialists alone, and studies of emotion, perception, or reasoning (...) have never been isolated theoretical endeavours. As Francis Bacon described human philosophy or ‘the knowledge of ourselves’, within which he located the study of body, soul, and mind, it ‘deserveth the more accurate handling, by how much it toucheth us more nearly’ (1605/ 2000: 93). The history of ideas in these domains is particularly challenging given the practical dimensions and implications of theories of mind. Because theories of human nature and debates about body and mind do ‘touch us’ so ‘nearly’, they attract and can thus reveal, in specific historical contexts, interconnected discourses or associations which may be quite unlike our own. So there are no neat boundaries around a historical category of ‘seventeenth-century British philosophy of the soul’. The central topic of this chapter can be thought of either as pneumatology, the doctrine or science of spirits and souls, or as continuous with the ‘psychologia’ or psychology of Aristotelian traditions (Park and Kessler 1988; Hatfield 1995: 184-6). In neither case, however, should we expect any deep unity to be provided by history, geography, discipline, or subject-matter. (shrink)
This paper defends an orthodox model of the linguistic intuitions which form a central source of evidence for generative grammars. According to this orthodox conception, linguistic intuitions are the upshot of a system of grammatical competence as it interacts with performance systems for perceiving and articulating language. So conceived, probing speakers’ linguistic intuitions allows us to investigate the competence–performance distinction empirically, so as to determine the grammars that speakers are competent in. This model has been attacked by Michael Devitt in (...) his recent book and a series of papers. In its place, Devitt advances a model of linguistic intuitions whereby they are speakers’ theory-laden judgements about the properties of languages. In this paper, I try to make clear the rationale behind the orthodox model and the inadequacies of Devitt's model. (shrink)
This book offers a reassessment of the political philosophy of the British Idealists, a group of once influential and now neglected nineteenth-century Hegelian philosophers, whose work has been much misunderstood. Peter Nicholson focuses on F. H. Bradley's idea of morality and moral philosophy; T. H. Green's theory of the Common Good, of the social nature of rights, of freedom, and of state interference; and Bernard Bosanquet's notorious theory of the General Will. By examining the arguments offered by the Idealists (...) and by their critics the author is able to penetrate the deep layers of hostile comment laid down by several generations of later writers and to show that these ideas, once properly understood, are not only defensible but interesting and important. (shrink)
Brentano's work has had, and has, its greatest influence in Austria, Germany, Poland and Italy, but its importance for an understanding of British analytical philosophy is increasingly being recognised.
Ever since Freud, psychoanalysts have explored the connections between psychoanalysis and literature and psychoanalysis and philosophy, while literary criticism, social science and philosophy have all reflected on and made use of ideas from psychoanalytic theory. The Academic Face of Psychoanalysis presents contributions from these fields and gives the reader an insight into different understandings and applications of psychoanalytic theory. This book comprises twelve contributions from experts in their fields covering philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology and literary theory. The chapters are divided into (...) three distinct sections: Psychoanalysis Philosophy Social science and literary theory Louise Braddock and Michael Lacewing successfully bring these contributions together with an in-depth introduction that allows the reader to explore the connections between the different disciplines. The multi-disciplinary approach to this book is rare; it will appeal to academics and students, from the subject areas of psychoanalysis, humanities and social science. (shrink)
v. 1. Convergences of British schools of psychoanalysis, Piager's analysis, the Gestalt school and ethology, and ethics of British idealism vs logical realism and prescriptivism.
This is a collection of brilliant and often lucid philosophical writings that will appeal to and engage students new to philosophy. Spanning the entire history of philosophy, the collection contains material from the Upanishads, Socrates, Aquinas, the British Empiricists, the Continental Philosophers and some of the leading analytic philosophers.
Wayne Waxman here presents an ambitious and comprehensive attempt to link the philosophers of what are known as the British Empiricists--Locke, Berkeley, and Hume--to the philosophy of German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Much has been written about all these thinkers, who are among the most influential figures in the Western tradition. Waxman argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Kant is actually the culmination of the British empiricist program and that he shares their methodological assumptions and basic convictions about human (...) thought and knowledge. (shrink)
This book offers the first full-length study of philosophical dialogue during the English Enlightenment. It explains why important philosophers - Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Berkeley and Hume - and innumerable minor translators, imitators and critics wrote in and about dialogue during the eighteenth century; and why, after Hume, philosophical dialogue either falls out of use or undergoes radical transformation. Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment describes the extended, heavily coded, and often belligerent debate about the nature and proper management of dialogue; (...) and it shows how the writing of philosophical fictions relates to the rise of the novel and the emergence of philosophical aesthetics. Novelists such as Fielding, Sterne, Johnson and Austen are placed in a philosophical context, and philosophers of the empiricist tradition in the context of English literary history. (shrink)
The branch of philosophy to which these works belong is that which goes by the name of the Theory of Knowledge. And what the Theory of Knowledge is supposed ...
The theme of this book is the crisis of the early modern state in eighteenth-century Britain. The revolt of the North American colonies and the simultaneous demand for wider religious toleration at home challenged the principles of sovereignty and obligation that underpinned arguments about the character of the state. These were expressed in terms of the 'common good', 'necessity', and 'community' - concepts that came to the fore in early modern European political thought and which gave expression to the problem (...) of defining legitimate authority in a period of increasing consciousness of state power. The Americans and their British supporters argued that individuals ought to determine the common good of the community. A new theory of representation and freedom of thought defines the cutting edge of this revolutionary redefinition of the basic relationship between individual and community. (shrink)
This volume contributes to the remarkable resurgence in interest for American pragmatism and its proponents by focusing on the influence of British empiricism, ...
This collection includes papers by such leading thinkers as Michael Ayers, J.A. Passmore, Ian Hacking, Hide Ishiguro, G.E.M. Anscombe, David Pears, A.M. Quinton, and Richard Wollheim.
Introduction -- Stout's proto-new-realism -- Situating G.F. Stout -- Stout's doctrine of primary and secondary qualities -- Stout and the Brentano School -- Representative function of presentations -- Sensible space and real space -- Cook Wilson's geometrical counter-example -- Stout's central question -- Ideal constructions -- Ideal constructions in psychology and epistemology -- British new realism : the language of madness -- Stout's criticisms of Alexander -- Alexander's response -- The nature of sensations, images, and other presentations -- What (...) is the metaphysical problem? -- "How can the interpretation which is supplied by the mind be a constituent of the [physical] object?" -- Some general remarks -- British new realism : the language of common-sense -- T.P. Nunn and the new realism -- Nunn and things -- Nunn's postulate -- Russell and Stout on sensible objects -- Russell, sense-data and sensibilia -- The methods of construction -- Russell's constructions and Nunn's postulate -- Constructions, psychology, and the essence of philosophy -- The methods of logical construction -- A mathematical development -- The principle of abstraction. (shrink)
This collection of essays looks at the distinctively English intellectual, social and political phenomenon of Latitudinarianism, which emerged during the Civil War and Interregnum and came into its own after the Restoration, becoming a virtual orthodoxy after 1688. Dividing into two parts, it first examines the importance of the Cambridge Platonists, who sought to embrace the newest philosophical and scientific movements within Church of England orthodoxy, and then moves into the later seventeenth century, from the Restoration onwards, culminating in essays (...) on the philosopher John Locke. These new contributions establish a firmly interdisciplinary basis for the subject, while collectively gravitating towards the importance of discourse and language as the medium for cultural exchange. The variety of approaches serves to illuminate the cultural indeterminacy of the period, in which inherited models and vocabularies were forced to undergo revisions, coinciding with the formation of many cultural institutions still governing English society. (shrink)
This paper argues that Henry Sidgwick’s account of the relationship between the right and the good, as well as his theory of the good are still undervalued in many respects. An applied section illustrates the practical significance of this finding. In cases in which shooting down a passenger plane can save a greater number of people on the ground, and no other relevant considerations apply, the passengers should desire their own destruction—not only to promote the general good, but also in (...) order to reach the only good they can still secure for themselves: giving their inevitable deaths a positive meaning. This utilitarian position regarding some one-versus-the-many cases has been overlooked in the German Supreme Court ruling on the destruction of 9/11 airplanes in 2006. (shrink)
