Hegel introduced the Phenomenology of Mind as a work on the problem of knowledge. In the first chapter, entitled “Sense Certainty, or the This and Meaning,” he concluded that knowledge cannot consist of an immediate awareness of particulars ). The tradition discusses sense certainty in terms of this failure of immediate knowledge without, however, specifically addressing the problem of reference. Yet reference is distinct from knowledge in the sense that while there can be no knowledge of objects without reference, there (...) may be reference without knowledge. If that is the case, then the failure of immediate knowledge does not entitle us to conclude anything about the success or failure of reference. It is not surprising, then, that a few scholars have begun to examine sense certainty primarily as a thesis about reference. (shrink)

Over the course of the last four decades, William Leon McBride has distinguished himself as one of the most esteemed and accomplished philosophers of his generation. This volume—which celebrates the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday—includes contributions from colleagues, friends, and formers students and pays tribute to McBride’s considerable achievements as a teacher, mentor, and scholar.

This collection of essays is a critical document in Continental philosophy, reflecting its recent history, its present state, and its debt to Calvin O. Schrag. It begins with an overview of philosophy's role and responsibility or "task" and of Schrag's contributions to it, written from the perspective of a resolute defender of the phenomenological tradition that Schrag's work has extended and reconfigured. The essays are organized around the four conceptual figures widely considered Schrag's most significant and original philosophical achievements: transversal (...) rationality, the self after post-modernity, the fourth cultural value sphere, and communication praxis. The authors focus on topics ranging from Cartesian rationality to Foucauldian rational relativism; from transcendence in relation to the self to the Schragean self's connections with discourse, action, and community; from religion's disruptive presence in contemporary philosophy to recent developments in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Existentialist Ethics Ethics was Sartre's principal concern, beginning with his famous and complex treatment of "bad faith" in Being and Nothingness, and continuing through his massive posthumously-published Notebooks for an Ethics of the late 1940's, and his mostly unpublished lecture notes that date back to 1964. This volume contains highly informed analyses of all of these materials and other Sartrean works on ethics, as well as interpretations emphasizing the confrontation of his ethical ideas with inauthenticity, sexism, and racism.

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This collection of essays and reviews represents the most significant and comprehensive writing on Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors. Miola's edited work also features a comprehensive critical history, coupled with a full bibliography and photographs of major productions of the play from around the world. In the collection, there are five previously unpublished essays. The topics covered in these new essays are women in the play, the play's debt to contemporary theater, its critical and performance histories in Germany and Japan, (...) the metrical variety of the play, and the distinctly modern perspective on the play as containing dark and disturbing elements. To compliment these new essays, the collection features significant scholarship and commentary on The Comedy of Errors that is published in obscure and difficulty accessible journals, newspapers, and other sources. This collection brings together these essays for the first time. (shrink)

Existentialist Ontology and Human Consciousness The majority of the distinguished scholarly articles in this volume focus on Sartre's early philosophical work, which dealt first with imagination and the emotions, then with the critique of Husserl's notion of a transcendental ego, and finally with systematic ontology presented in his best-known book, Being and Nothingness. In addition, since his preoccupation with ontological questions and especially with the meanings of ego, self, and consciousness endured throughout his career, other essays discuss these themes in (...) light of later developments both in Sartre's own thought and in the phenomenological, hermeneutic, and analytic traditions. (shrink)

Existentialist Politics and Political Theory The publication of the Critique of Dialectical Reason in 1960 marked the culmination of Sartre's efforts, begun in his more occasional political writings in what became essentially his journal, Les Temps Modernes, and developed more systematically in his important essay, Search for a Method, to forge links between existentialism and a non-orthodox version of Marxism with a view to developing a new philosophy of politics, society, and history and a new approach to the philosophy of (...) the social sciences. The articles provide a wide-ranging, insightful exploration of Sartre's successes and failures in this domain. (shrink)

Offers various views on phenomenology and existentialism.

The dramatic events of 1989 and their aftermath raise fundamental questions about the nature of social and intellectual change, about the relation of philosophy to politics, and above all about human values within the global structures of today. This book offers a sober, critical analysis of the post-Marxist realities of the old Eastern Bloc and provides an overview of significant aspects of both the 'bygone era' and the present situation in the region. It analyzes the phenomenon of ideological conversation, re-examines (...) the relationship of philosophy to politics, and revisits questions about freedom, democracy, justice, civil society, religion, nationalism, and human relationships, in light of the changes there, together with the entire question of 'globalization.'. (shrink)

This text examines social and political philosophy in historical and contemporary terms from a global perspective. It provides a grounding in classical, British and continental traditions and offers a contemporary review of concepts such as freedom and rights, justice and community.

Sartre's French Contemporaries and Enduring Influences This final volume examines Sartre's best-known philosophical contemporaries in France-Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simone de Beauvoir-in terms of both their own philosophical insights and their relationship to Sartre's thought. The articles also offer some suggestive connections between Sartre's thought and subsequent developments in European philosophy, notably structuralism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism. The comparatively recent nature of much of this scholarship is solid testimony to the enduring influence of Sartrean existentialism.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Development and Meaning of Twentieth-Century Existentialism This volume recaptures, through the writings of figures already well-known in the mid-1940s, the coming-to-consciousness of the existentialist movement, along with early disagreements concerning its significance. The articles present various critics' shifting views of that significance and the movement's standing over subsequent decades. Despite the centrality of Sartre's thought to existentialism, these selections offer interestingly diverse perceptions of his place within the existentialist pantheon, along with varied interpretations of both the historical origins and (...) the future importance of existential philosophy. (shrink)

Professor Dupré says that he began this book as a revision and extension of ideas “proposed in an earlier publication” ; by this he means, although he never mentions it by name, his solid and erudite Philosophical Foundations of Marxism. What he has produced, instead, is a major new study, more philosophically original, at once more critical and more adulatory of Marx than its predecessor.