"First published in this translation 1955; second edition (revised) 1974; reprinted with additional revisions 1987; reissued with new Further Reading 2003; reissued with new introduction 2007"--T.p. verso.

Edited by Richard McKeon, with an introduction by C.D.C. Reeve Preserved by Arabic mathematicians and canonized by Christian scholars, Aristotle’s works have shaped Western thought, science, and religion for nearly two thousand years. Richard McKeon’s The Basic Works of Aristotle—constituted out of the definitive Oxford translation and in print as a Random House hardcover for sixty years—has long been considered the best available one-volume Aristotle. Appearing in paperback at long last, this edition includes selections from the Organon, On the Heavens, (...) The Short Physical Treatises, Rhetoric, among others, and On the Soul, On Generation and Corruption, Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, and Poetics in their entirety. (shrink)

The German existentialist delineates his theories concerning the nature, problems, and limitations of man's being.

Selections from the books, notes, and letters of this 19th century philosopher.

The essays are based on a long and intimate familiarity with the works, but the essay on Aristotle is especially important as one of Strauss's few writings on ...

Friedrich Nietzsche was a troublesome genius, a figure outside the mainstream philosophical tradition whose very apartness has made him central to contemporary philosophy. Nietzsche and Political Thought reclaims the political implications of Nietzsche's work: it shows how his philosophy of power addresses key issues in modern political thought especially those having to do with the historical and cultural nature of human agency.In this thought-provoking study, Mark Warren claims entirely new ground. He develops a "postmetaphysical" political philosophy that provides a link (...) between Nietzsche's work and the later philosophies of the Frankfurt School and Michel Foucault.Warren comes to terms with Nietszche's views on power, freedom, domination, equality, ideology - topics that recent interpretations have neglected in favor of a focus on the literary and philosophical aspects of his work, but that in fact make these literary and philosophical concerns relevant to social and political thought. Importantly, Warren draws a distinction between the implications of Nietzsche's theories concerning power and agency for contemporary political thought and Nietzsche's own politics. He demonstrates how Nietzsche's actual political views did not reflect - and in large part falsified - his own philosophical insights which taken by themselves point toward a pluralistic society in which egalitarianism underscores individuality. But his politics, Warren argues, derived too heavily from a deficient understanding of modern social and political organization.Mark Warren is Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. Nietzsche and Political Thought is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy. (shrink)

The essays collected in Persecution and the Art of Writing all deal with one problem--the relation between philosophy and politics. Here, Strauss sets forth the thesis that many philosophers, especially political philosophers, have reacted to the threat of persecution by disguising their most controversial and heterodox ideas.

In this classic work, Leo Strauss examines the problem of natural right and argues that there is a firm foundation in reality for the distinction between right and wrong in ethics and politics. On the centenary of Strauss's birth, and the fiftieth anniversary of the Walgreen Lectures which spawned the work, _Natural Right and History_ remains as controversial and essential as ever. "Strauss... makes a significant contribution towards an understanding of the intellectual crisis in which we find ourselves... [and] brings (...) to his task an admirable scholarship and a brilliant, incisive mind."—John H. Hallowell, _American Political Science Review_ Leo Strauss was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Political Science at the University of Chicago. (shrink)

Review of Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics.

This book, first published in 2000, is a general and comprehensive treatment of the political thought of ancient Greece and Rome. It begins with Homer and ends in late antiquity with Christian and pagan reflections on divine and human order. In between come studies of Plato, Aristotle and a host of other major and minor thinkers - poets, historians, philosophers - whose individuality is brought out by extensive quotation. The international team of distinguished scholars assembled by the editors includes historians (...) of law, politics, culture and religion, and also philosophers. Some chapters focus mostly on the ancient context of the ideas they are examining, while others explore these ideas as systems of thought which resonate with modern or perennial concerns. This clearly written volume will long remain an accessible and authoritative guide to Greek and Roman thinking about government and community. (shrink)

contemporary ethical project--one that should inform our lives as well as our thoughts.

Gregory Fried offers in this book a careful investigation of Martin Heidegger's understanding of politics. Disturbing issues surround Heidegger's commitment to National Socialism, his disdain for liberal democracy, and his rejection of the Enlightenment. Fried confronts these issues, focusing not on the historical debate over Heidegger's personal involvement with Nazism, but on whether and how the formulation of Heidegger's ontology relates to his political thinking as expressed in his philosophical works. The inquiry begins with Heidegger's interpretation of Heraclitus, particularly the (...) term polemos ("war," or, in Heidegger's usage, "confrontation"). Fried contends that Heidegger invests polemos with broad ontological significance and that his appropriation of the word provides important insights into major strands of his thinking--his conception of the human being, understanding of truth, and interpretation of history--as well as the meaning of the so-called turn in his thought. Although Fried finds that Heidegger's politics are continuous with his thought, he also argues that Heidegger's work raises important questions about contemporary identity politics. Fried also shows that many postmodernists, despite attempts to distance themselves from Heidegger, fail to avoid some of the same political pitfalls his thinking entailed. (shrink)

Considered one of the most important works of one of France's foremost philosophers, and long-awaited in English, "The Logic Of Sense" is an essay in literary and psychoanalytic theory, and philosophy, and helps to illuminate such works as "Anti-Oedipus".

In _Ecce Homo_ Friedrich Nietzsche calls himself "the first immoralist" and adds "that makes me the annihilator _par excellence_". Lester Hunt examines this and other radical claims in order to show that Nietzsche does have a coherent ethical and political philosophy. He uses Nietzsche's writings as a starting point for a critique of a wider, contemporary ethical project - one that should inform our lives as well as our thoughts.

This English translation—the first since 1909—restores Human, All Too Human to its proper central position in the Nietzsche canon. First published in 1878, the book marks the philosophical coming of age of Friedrich Nietzsche. In it he rejects the romanticism of his early work, influenced by Wagner and Schopenhauer, and looks to enlightened reason and science. The "Free Spirit" enters, untrammeled by all accepted conventions, a precursor of Zarathustra. The result is 638 stunning aphorisms about everything under and above the (...) sun. (shrink)

"In this densely imbricated volume Derrida pursues his devoted, relentless dismantling of the philosophical tradition, the tradition of Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger--each dealt with in one or more of the essays. There are essays too on linguistics (Saussure, Benveniste, Austin) and on the nature of metaphor ("White Mythology"), the latter with important implications for literary theory. Derrida is fully in control of a dazzling stylistic register in this book--a source of true illumination for those prepared to follow his (...) arduous path. Bass is a superb translator and annotator. His notes on the multilingual allusions and puns are a great service."--Alexander Gelley, Library Journal. (shrink)

This book encourages today's students to engage in Plato's thought, grapple with Plato's arguments, and explore the relevance of his arguments in contemporary terms. A text only comes alive if we make it our own; Plato's great work The Republic, often reads as though it were addressing the problems of the day rather than those of ancient Athens. Treating The Republic as a whole and offering a comprehensive introduction to Plato's arguments, Mitchell and Lucas draw students into an exploration of (...) the relevance of Plato's thought to our present ideas about politics, society and education, as well as the philosophy of mathematics, science and religion.The authors bring The Republic to life. The first chapters help the reader to make sense of the text, either in translation or the original Greek. Later chapters deal with the themes that Plato raises, treating Plato as a contemporary. Plato is inexhaustible: he speaks to many different people of different generations and from different backgrounds. The Republic is not just an ancient text: it never ceases to be relevant to contemporary concerns, and it demands fresh discussion in every age. (shrink)

This is an essential book for every serious student of Plato, for anyone teaching the Republic, and for every library.

The influential political philosopher Leo Strauss has been credited by conservatives with the recovery of the great tradition of political philosophy stretching back to Plato. Among Strauss's most enduring legacies is a strongly negative assessment of Nietzsche as the modern philosopher most at odds with that tradition and most responsible for the sins of twentieth-century culture--relativism, godlessness, nihilism, and the breakdown of family values. In fact, this apparent denunciation has become so closely associated with Strauss that it is often seen (...) as the very core of his thought. In Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, the eminent Nietzsche scholar Laurence Lampert offers a controversial new assessment of the Strauss-Nietzsche connection. Lampert undertakes a searching examination of the key Straussian essay, "Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil." He shows that this essay, written toward the end of Strauss's life and placed at the center of his final work, reveals an affinity for and debt to Nietzsche greater than Strauss's followers allow. Lampert argues that the essay comprises the most important interpretation of Nietzsche ever published, one that clarifies Nietzsche's conception of nature and of human spiritual history and demonstrates the logical relationship between the essential themes in Nietzsche's thought--the will to power and the eternal return. (shrink)

"... a richly textured intellectual biography... " --History "... well worth reading and pondering by all who are concerned with the fate of humankind in capitalist civilization." --Socialism and Democracy "... an extraordinary book. Although intellectually challenging, it is well worth the effort to read." --New York City Tribune "... insightful and richly documented... " --Review of Politics "The novelty and value of this book lie in Bergmann's painstaking examination of Nietzsche's reactions to and interaction with the political events and (...) currents of his time." --American Historical Review "... superb... " --The Historian "... historian Bergmann has given the basic Nietzsche library a major addition... it is a reading of Nietzsche's early life, educational influences and later career by a scholar intent on recording the interaction of the philosopher with the political events of his own time." --Monatshefte Among both admirers and detractors, perhaps no issue has remained as hotly contested as Nietzsche's actual relationship to politics. Peter Bergmann's fine intellectual biography provides the first down-to-earth appraisal of Nietzsche's place among the individuals, events, and concerns of the Bismarckian age. (shrink)

The four short works in Untimely Meditations were published by Nietzsche between 1873 and 1876.They deal with such broad topics as the relationship between popular and genuine culture, strategies for cultural reform, the task of philosophy, the nature of education, and the relationship between art, science and life. They also include Nietzsche's earliest statement of his own understanding of human selfhood as a process of endlessly 'becoming who one is'. As Daniel Breazeale shows in his introduction to this new edition (...) of R. J. Hollingdale's translation of the essays, these four early texts are key documents for understanding the development of Nietzsche's thought and clearly anticipate many of the themes of his later writings. Nietzsche himself always cherished his Untimely Meditations and believed that they provide valuable evidence of his 'becoming and self-overcoming' and constitute a 'public pledge' concerning his own distinctive task as a philosopher. (shrink)

Catherine Zuckert examines the work of five key philosophical figures from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the lens of their own decidedly postmodern readings of Plato. She argues that Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, and Derrida, convinced that modern rationalism had exhausted its possibilities, all turned to Plato in order to rediscover the original character of philosophy and to reconceive the Western tradition as a whole. Zuckert's artful juxtaposition of these seemingly disparate bodies of thought furnishes a synoptic view, not (...) merely of these individual thinkers, but of the broad postmodern landscape as well. The result is a brilliantly conceived work that offers an innovative perspective on the relation between the Western philosophical tradition and the evolving postmodern enterprise. (shrink)

This is the third volume to appear in an edition that will be the first complete, critical, and annotated English translation of all of Nietzsche's work. The edition is a new English translation, by various hands, of the celebrated Colli-Montinari edition. The present volume provides for the first time English translations of all of Nietzsche's unpublished notebooks from summer 1872 to the end of 1874. The major works published in this period were the first three Unfashionable Observations: 'David Strauss the (...) Confessor and the Writer,' 'On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,' and 'Schopenhauer as educator.' Translations of the preliminary notes for these pieces are coordinated with the translations of the published texts printed in Volume 2: Unfashionable Observations. These notebooks represent important transitional documents in Nietzsche's intellectual development, marking, among other things, the shift away from philological studies toward unabashed cultural criticism. (shrink)

supplies English-language readers with a crucial missing link in Nietzsche's development by reproducing the text of a lecture series delivered by the young philosopher at the University of Basel between 1872 and 1876. In these lectures, Nietzsche surveys the Greek philosophers from Thales to Socrates, establishing a new chronology for the progression of their natural scientific insights. He also roughly sketches concepts such as the will to power, eternal recurrence, and self-overcoming and links them to specific pre-Platonics.

This book examines both the personal and the political sides of Nietzsche's writings to show how his writings can expand notions of democratic politics and democratic understanding.

Jean-Pierre Vernant delineates a compelling new vision of ancient Greece that takesus far from the calm and familiar images of Polykleitos and the Parthenon, and reveals a culture ofslavery, of blood sacrifice, of perpetual and ritualized warfare, of ceremonial hunting andecstasies.In his provocative discussions of various institutions and practices including war,marriage, and the city state, Vernant unveils a complex and previously unexplored intersection ofthe religious, social, and political structures of ancient Greece. He concludes with a genealogy ofthe study of myth (...) from antiquity to the present, and offers a critique of structuralism.Jean-PierreVernant is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Study of Ancient Religions at the College de France inParis. (shrink)

Praised for its rare combination of scholarly rigor and imaginative interpretation, _Nietzsche and Philosophy_ has long been recognized as one of the most important analyses of Nietzsche. It is also one of the best introductions to Deleuze's thought, establishing many of his central philosophical positions. In _Nietzsche and Philosophy_, Deleuze identifies and explores three crucial concepts in Nietzschean thought-multiplicity, becoming, and affirmation-and clarifies Nietzsche's views regarding the will to power, eternal return, nihilism, and difference. For Deleuze, Nietzsche challenged conventional philosophical (...) ideas and provided a means of escape from Hegel's dialectical thinking, which had come to dominate French philosophy. He also offered a path toward a politics of difference. In this new edition, Michael Hardt's foreword examines the profound influence of Deleuze's provocative interpretations on the study of Nietzsche, which opened a whole new avenue in postwar thought. (shrink)

Taylor analyzes Nietzsche's thoughts on the state, culture and education.

Unpublished during Nietzsche's lifetime, presents the philosopher's exploration of the culture of the Greeks.

Introductions should introduce, but sometimes lead to engagements. That is our aim. We want to make Plato’s Republic more easily read by modern readers, but do not want to do only that. For philosophy is like poetry, and cannot be learned second-hand. I can learn all sorts of facts about a poem, but unless I have entered into the poet’s experience, if only in my imagination, it remains dead. Similarly, I shall not see the point of text-book analyses of philosophical (...) doctrines unless I have felt the force of the arguments that led the philosopher to propose them, and have some sense of the objections he encountered and the way he sought to surmount them. That is why we still need to read Plato and Aristotle, as we do Homer and Sophocles, in a way that we do not, save as a historical exercise, read ancient textbooks of medicine or mechanical construction. (shrink)

Keith Ansell-Pearson's book is an important and very welcome contribution to a neglected area of research: Nietzsche's political thought. Nietzsche is widely regarded as a significant moral philosopher, but his political thinking has often been dismissed as either impossibly individualistic or dangerously totalitarian. Nietzsche contra Rousseau takes a serious look at Nietzsche as political thinker and relates his political ideas to the dominant traditions of modern political thought. In particular, the nature of Nietzsche's dialogue with the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (...) is examined, in order to demonstrate Rousseau's crucial role in Nietzsche's understanding of modernity and its discontents. (shrink)

This is a lively and engaging introduction to the contentious topic of Nietzsche's political thought. It traces the development of Nietzsche's thinking on politics from his earliest writings to the mature work in which he advocates aristocratic radicalism as opposed to 'petty' European nationalism. The key ideas of the will to power, eternal return and the overman are discussed and all Nietzsche's major works analysed in detail, such as Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals, within the context (...) of the concerns of modern political theory. The book concludes with an assessment of Nietzsche's enduring relevance and of the insights afforded by contemporary liberal and feminist readings. This textbook will be essential for all students of Nietzsche and of the history of political ideas. It includes a chronology of Nietzsche's life and works and a guide to further reading. (shrink)