This paper constructs the theological polemic among Near Eastern Christian sects and the encounter with the new religio-political regional power: Islam. Focusing on the period from around the first Muslim conquests in the mid-seventh century until the ninth centure C. E., a list of East Syriac Church Fathers and their writings are selected as representative voices in the continuing Christological debates. In particular, the paper is concerned with how theological arguments were first used and reinterpreted to address conversion to Islam (...) and later used to emphasize, in an ironic twist, the proximity between Nestorianism and Islam contra other Christian “heresies”. This historical development is important to understand how Nestorian literature was later used by Muslim theologians well after the ninth century, such as Ibn Abī Ţālib al-Dimašqī in the fourteenth century, to defend Islam and debunk Christianity. For Nestorian apologetics the immediacy of addressing the issue of Christian conversion to Islam was clear. Letters from Nestorian clergy, such as Katholikos Īšō’yahb III. and Katholikos Georg, recount the old debates among Nestorians, Miaphysites, and Melkites concerning the nature of Christ. In order to explicate best the erroneous attraction of Islam, these two men contextualized Islamic theology as similar to a Christian heretical sect. Yet over time, appealing to Islamic overlordship became necessary. With the rise of the Abbasid caliphate and the establishment of its capital in the historical heartland of the Nestorian Church, the polemic was reversed. Hereafter, Nestorian dyophysite doctrine was used as an appeal to the Islamic conception of Christ’s divinity. For example, Katholikos Timotheos I. and the theologian Theodor Bar Koni underlined the blasphemy of the Miaphysite and Chalcedonian Christology. This very tactic, however, was easy for Muslim scholars to appropriate in Islamic apologetics. Well before al-Dimašqi, the words of the Abbasid Caliph al-Mahdi to Timotheos are distinct: the Nestorians understood correctly that God could not have suffered and died, but that they all were still wrong that Jesus is the Son of God. (shrink)

Karl Ameriks here collects his most important essays to provide a uniquely detailed and up-to-date analysis of Kant's main arguments in all three major areas of his work: theoretical philosophy (Critique of Pure Reason), practical philosophy (Critique of Practical Reason), and aesthetics (Critique of Judgment). Guiding the volume is Ameriks's belief that one cannot properly understand any one of these Critiques except in the context of the other two. The essays can be read individually, but read together they offer (...) a comprehensive guide to the main themes of the most influential of all modern philosophical systems. (shrink)

Marx was barely 25 when he produced this astonishing rich body of work-including economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and On the Jewish Question.

To develop this theory, Karl Löwith—beginning with the more accessible philosophies of history in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries and working back to the Bible—analyzes the writings of outstanding historians both in antiquity ...

2015 Reprint of Original 1936 American Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Karl Mannheim was a Hungarian-born sociologist, influential in the first half of the 20th century and one of the founding fathers of classical sociology as well as a founder of the sociology of knowledge. His essays on the sociology of knowledge have become classics in the field. In "Ideology and Utopia" he argued that the application of the term ideology ought (...) to be broadened. He traced the history of the term from what he called a "particular" view. This view originally saw ideology as the perhaps deliberate obscuring of facts. Over time this view gave way to a "total" conception (most notably in Marx), which argued that a whole social group's thought was formed by its social position (e.g. the proletariat's beliefs were conditioned by their relationship to the means of production). However, he called for a further step, which he called a general total conception of ideology, in which it was recognized that everyone's beliefs-including the social scientist's-were a product of the context they were created in. Mannheim points out social class, location and generation as the greatest determinants of knowledge. He feared this could lead to relativism but proposed the idea of relationism as an antidote. To uphold the distinction, he maintained that the recognition of different perspectives according to differences in time and social location appears arbitrary only to an abstract and disembodied theory of knowledge. (shrink)

Argues that there are two distinct senses in which knowledge is incompatible with accidental truth - each of which can be traced to a distinct role played by everyday knowledge attributions.

First published in English in 1933, this detailled philosophical examination of the contemporary state and nature of mankind is a seminal work by influential German philsopher Karl Jaspers. Elucidating his theories on a variety of topics pertaining to contemporary and future human existence, _Man in the Modern Age_ is a key text by a man whose influence in the field continues to be felt.

First published in English in 1933, this detailed philosophical examination of the contemporary state and nature of mankind is a seminal work by influential German philosopher Karl Jaspers. Elucidating his theories on a variety of topics pertaining to contemporary and future human existence, Man in the Modern Age is an ambitious and wide-ranging work, which meditates upon such diverse subjects as the tension between mass-order and individual human life, our present conception of human life and the potential for mankind’s (...) future existence. Written shortly before the accession to power of Hitler and National Socialism, this is not only an important philosophical work, but also an insightful and intriguing historical document. (shrink)

On its face, Hume's account of mental representation involves at least two elements. On the one hand, Hume often seems to write as though the representational properties of an idea are fixed solely by what it is a copy or image of. But, on the other, Hume's treatment of abstract ideas makes it clear that the representational properties of a Humean idea sometimes depend, not just on what it is copied from, but also on the manner in which the mind (...) associates it with other ideas. Past interpretations of Hume have tended to focus on one of these elements of his account to the neglect of the other. But no interpretation of this sort is likely to capture the role that both copying and association play within Hume's discussion. In what follows, I argue that the most plausible way of understanding Hume's discussion involves attributing to him a unified account of mental representation in which both of these elements play a central role. I close by discussing the manner in which reading Hume in this way would alter our understanding of the relationship between Hume's thought and contemporary philosophy of mind. (shrink)

This book grapples with these perennial questions, primarily through a dialogue with Cornelius Castoriadis and Charles Taylor, using an interdisciplinary ...

A new 2023 translation into American English of Marx's influential 1845 "Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik" from the original manuscript. This edition includes a new introduction by the translator and reference materials including a Glossary of Philosophic and Economic Marxist Terminology, an Index of Personalities Associated with Marx and a Timeline of Marx’s Life and Works. This is Volume IV in The Complete Works of Karl Marx by NL Press. The Holy Family is Marx's first foray (...) into building his dialectical materialism, while still attacking the modern Hegelians.The main title itself is mocking Bruno Bauer's "Pure Criticism", which Marx parodies with the nonsense "Critical Criticism". This is the first publication Engels and Marx published together, only one year after meeting in person in 1844. Here he is attacking other Hegelians and Critical Philosophy writ large, arguing against Hegel's idealistic dialectic for his own dialectal Epicurean Materialism which he began to outline in his Ph.D. Thesis "Differenz der demokritischen und epikureischen Naturphilosophie" in 1841. Marx believed that Critical Philosophy in general (kritische Philosophie), which sees the most fundamental task of Philosophy as primarily judging the possibility of knowledge before asserting any claim of knowledge itself, as misguided in its Platonic Ontology. The entire work is a polemic against "The Holy Family" of young Hegelians, mocking and insulting them on every page. He uses sarcastic parody, nearly Horatian satire, specifically towards Christianity- "Criticism so loved the masses that it sent its only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life". Ultimately, he declared these dilettante philosophers "false prophets" and himself the true prophet of Atheistic, Skeptical and Materialistic Humanism. Here he also argues that the only way to deal with "the Jewish problem" is by eradicating Christianity and all metaphysical beliefs because the "bourgeois morality" gets in the way of implementing a true, final solution to the muddying of pure European nationality by the existence of the Jews. Here we see the foundations of the National-Socialist movement which declared "there is no God but the German people" and started eradicating millions in the name of Humanism and Progress. (shrink)

In broad outlines, the first of these claims that beliefs and other cognitive states, on their own, can never motivate a new desire, intention, or action. Rather, on this view, what motivates us to desire, intend, or act is always the cooperation of some desire (or other conative state) with such cognitive states. Thus, on HTM, practical motivation is always the product of two fundamentally distinct categories of mental states operating in conjunction with one another.

Despite his own observations that autonomy is never complete, never once-and-for-all — in short, that autonomy is always relatively more-or-less; or rather, human subjects, institutions and societies can only ever be more-or-less autonomous, and thus more-or-less heteronomous — Castoriadis nevertheless polarizes autonomy and heteronomy. From the polarized perspective, then, he maintains that religion is intrinsically heteronomous, and thus intrinsically antithetical to the project of autonomy. By exploring Taylor's more nuanced understanding of the varieties of religious experience, I argue in this (...) article that there must be room for religious belief within an autonomous society, and that religiosity per se is not incompatible with the project of creating an autonomous society. (shrink)

Can desires and actions be evaluated as responsive or unresponsive to reasons, in ways that extend beyond the instrumental implications of one's (other) desires? And does there exist any form of inference or reasoning that is practical in nature? Hume is generally supposed to have given an unambiguously negative reply to both of these questions. In particular, he is often taken to have held that no desire, passion, or action may ever be said to be opposed to reasons, except (perhaps) (...) in so far as it is based on a false belief or confused piece of means-ends reasoning. And he is generally taken to have held that the existence of some sort of peculiarly practical form of inference or reasoning is fundamentally .. (shrink)

In this volume, Karl Ameriks explores 'Kantian subjects' in three senses. In Part I, he first clarifies the most distinctive features-such as freedom and autonomy-of Kant's notion of what it is for us to be a subject. Other chapters then consider related 'subjects' that are basic topics in other parts of Kant's philosophy, such as his notions of necessity and history. Part II examines the ways in which many of us, as 'late modern,' have been highly influenced by Kant's (...) philosophy and its indirect effect on our self-conception through successive generations of post-Kantians, such as Hegel and Schelling, and early Romantic writers such as Hölderlin, Schlegel, and Novalis, thus making us 'Kantian subjects' in a new historical sense. By defending the fundamentals of Kant's ethics in reaction to some of the latest scholarship in the opening chapters, Ameriks offers an extensive argument that Hölderlin expresses a valuable philosophical position that is much closer to Kant than has generally been recognized. He also argues that it was necessary for Kant's position to be supplemented by the new conception, introduced by the post-Kantians, of philosophy as fundamentally historical, and that this conception has had a growing influence on the most interesting strands of Anglophone as well as Continental philosophy. -/- . (shrink)