This book includes Emerson's re-written version of his early book, Nature, along with various essays, including: The American Scholar (1836), The Divinity School Address (1838), Literary Ethics (1838), The Method of Nature (1841), Man the Reformer (1841), Lecture on the Times (1841), The Conservative (1841), The Transcendentalist (1842), The Young American (1844).

Retrieving our spiritual heritage: a challenge of our time -- Spiritual foundation of human rights -- Response to the president of Ireland -- World peace and interreligious understanding -- Education as transformation: a Baha'i model of education for unity -- Globalization and the Baha'i community in the Muslim world -- Unity of vision and ethic: values and the workplace -- Environmental ethics: a Baha'i perspective -- 'Abdu'l-Baha and the spiritual foundation of the American dream -- United Nations and world (...) order -- Ethics of globalization: a Baha'i perspective -- Opening of the academic mind: the challenges facing a culture in crisis -- Heritage: poetry and archeology as the common language of the past, the present, and the future -- Address given before the House of Lords. (shrink)

Taking a cue from Derrida, this paper offers a reading of Heidegger on the issue of animal time. Recent scholarship on Heidegger and animal life has shown how he describes animals as always lacking something (language, world, hands, death…) in comparison to human Dasein. Yet little attention has been paid to time itself. By reading the few references to animals in Being and Time , as well as contemporaneous works, one discovers that Heidegger never fully addresses the (...) question of the animal in terms of time. Despite his claim to offer a “comparative examination” between the ontologies of humans and animals, Heidegger continually raises the issue of animal time but only to leave it unsettled. Moving from Being and Time to his 1929-30 lecture course, Heidegger effectively brackets out the question of time, which this essay takes to be the reason why he himself remains unconvinced by his own analyses of animal ontology. (shrink)

One of a pair ofbooks selected from Stanley Rosen's career as a philosopher, scholar, and teacher over the last half of a century. They represent both the vast range of his learning in the most important philosophers of the tradition and the daring and penetration of his exploration of the fundamental philosophical questions. Yet the essays are written with an accessibility that is an expression of Rosen's thesis that our ordinary experience and speech provides the only stable ground for understanding (...) and evaluating extraordinary thought and experiences. Rosen proposes that only a qualified Platonism in which the preservation of the link between the good and the rational on the everyday level was preserved on the philosophical level, can do justice to our experience of ourselves. The notions of form and intuition play a central role in his proposal to preserve the spontaneity of the soul and the heterogeneity of its objects. The essays were originally written for a variety of purposes: there are panoramic reviews of his philosophical intentions, intricate analyses of fundamental problems, challenging interpretations of classical texts, reviews of other authors, and informal commentaries on the state of philosophy in our time. Taken together these essays provide a key to the some of the most decisive questions in philosophy and a valuable explication of some the central themes of Rosen's work. The essays were selected from articles, chapters, and unpublished lectures that were composed over the last five decades. They are distributed into two volumes by their focus upon ancient and modern themes, a convenient division that is not meant to imply a doctrinal chasm. On the contrary, it is one of Rosen's arguments that those who wish to preserve ancient wisdom are best served by the demonstration of the both parties address the same essential human nature, however much the practical and theoretical demands differ from epoch to epoch. (shrink)

One of a pair ofbooks selected from Stanley Rosen's career as a philosopher, scholar, and teacher over the last half of a century. They represent both the vast range of his learning in the most important philosophers of the tradition and the daring and penetration of his exploration of the fundamental philosophical questions. Yet the essays are written with an accessibility that is an expression of Rosen's thesis that our ordinary experience and speech provides the only stable ground for understanding (...) and evaluating extraordinary thought and experiences. Rosen proposes that only a qualified Platonism in which the preservation of the link between the good and the rational on the everyday level was preserved on the philosophical level, can do justice to our experience of ourselves. The notions of form and intuition play a central role in his proposal to preserve the spontaneity of the soul and the heterogeneity of its objects. The essays were originally written for a variety of purposes: there are panoramic reviews of his philosophical intentions, intricate analyses of fundamental problems, challenging interpretations of classical texts, reviews of other authors, and informal commentaries on the state of philosophy in our time. Taken together these essays provide a key to the some of the most decisive questions in philosophy and a valuable explication of some the central themes of Rosen's work. The essays were selected from articles, chapters, and unpublished lectures that were composed over the last five decades. They are distributed into two volumes by their focus upon ancient and modern themes, a convenient division that is not meant to imply a doctrinal chasm. On the contrary, it is one of Rosen's arguments that those who wish to preserve ancient wisdom are best served by the demonstration of the both parties address the same essential human nature, however much the practical and theoretical demands differ from epoch to epoch. (shrink)

This collection of new essays offers a 'state-of-the-art' conspectus of major trends in the philosophy of logic and philosophy of mathematics. A distinguished group of philosophers addresses issues at the centre of contemporary debate: semantic and set-theoretic paradoxes, the set/class distinction, foundations of set theory, mathematical intuition and many others. The volume includes Hilary Putnam's 1995 Alfred Tarski lectures, published here for the first time.

When we fail to achieve our goals, procrastination is often the culprit. But how exactly is procrastination to be understood? This edited volume integrates the problem of procrastination into philosophical inquiry, exploring the relationship of procrastination to agency, rationality, and ethics--topics that philosophy is well-suited to address.

The title essay was originally presented as two lectures inaugurating the John Dewey lectures at Columbia. It is an important essay for understanding Quine's work for it brings together many themes at the center of his thinking since Word and Object. Quine quotes with approval Dewey's statement "meaning is primarily a property of behavior" and then goes on to consider a thesis which, according to Quine, is a consequence of such a behavioral theory of meaning, i.e., the thesis (...) of the indeterminacy of meaning and translation. Quine relates this indeterminacy thesis, which he has been defending for some time, to language learning, the foundations of mathematics, and to a general view of ontological relativity. Other essays in the volume concern natural kinds and the various paradoxes of confirmation, propositional objects, quantification and existence and the empirical basis of science. All the essays are post-1965 except the introductory essay which was Quine's Presidential Address to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1956. This address was something of an introduction to the ideas to appear in Word and Object and is placed at the beginning of this collection to emphasize that all the essays collected here expand on and defend some of the positions of Word and Object. Quine's fluid style is everywhere in evidence.--R. H. K. (shrink)

Philosophy lecturer and essayist Gary Jason tackles timely issues from education reform to the Arab Spring in his new anthology Disturbing Thoughts: Unorthodox Writings on Timely Issues. Disturbing Thoughts collects more than 160 political and social commentary essays published between 2010 and 2012. Among the many topics addressed are environmentalism, public employee pensions, education, and political reform. Today's headlines are filled with discussion on the growing dysfunction of unfunded pension benefits, the debate over immigration, and concerns about the shale industry. (...) Whatever the topic, Jason doesn't shy away from offering his opinion, asking, for instance, how could we allow in many more immigrants legally without causing financial strain. Disturbing Thoughts arrives as a follow-up to Jason's 2011 anthology, Dangerous Thoughts, which collected a similarly eclectic set of essays written between 1979 and 2010. His most recent articles include pieces published in Liberty, American Thinker, The Orange County Register, The Washington Times, and The American. Jason comes to issues from the classical liberal position-albeit with an unusual perspective that sets him apart from most other political commentators. Whether you agree or not, his views are sure to keep readers thinking. (shrink)

When women work in male-dominated professions, they encounter a “glass ceiling” that prevents their ascension into the top jobs. Twenty years ago, I introduced the concept of the “glass escalator,” my term for the advantages that men receive in the so-called women’s professions, including the assumption that they are better suited than women for leadership positions. In this article, I revisit my original analysis and identify two major limitations of the concept: it fails to adequately address intersectionality; in particular, it (...) fails to theorize race, sexuality, and class; and it was based on the assumptions of traditional work organizations, which are undergoing rapid transformation in our neoliberal era. The glass escalator assumes stable employment, career ladders, and widespread support for public institutions —which no longer characterize the job market today. Drawing on my studies of the oil and gas industry and the retail industry, I argue that new concepts are needed to understand workplace gender inequality in the 21st century. (shrink)

In an effort to reassess the status of Phenomenology of Perception and its relation to The Visible and the Invisible, this essay argues that Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Husserl's text and his discussion of the “field of presence” in La temporalité are intended to think through the field in which time makes its appearance as one of passage. Time does not show itself as presence or in the present but manifests itself as Ablauf, as lapse or flow, an écoulement (...) that is simultaneously an explosion, an éclatement. Merleau-Ponty's account of temporality in these pages is thus legible as recovering the primordial experience of time as a self-differentiating déhiscence in its dual power of articulation and erosion. Time is thus simultaneously the vehicle of the world's appearance and of its “disarticulation”, the passage of a rhythm of affirmation and disintegration. Merleau-Ponty's account of temporality in Phenomenology of Perception is oblique, somewhat fragmentary and circuitous.11 References to Merleau-Ponty's works cite the French followed by the English translation. I will use the abbreviation PhP for Phenomenology of Perception and VI for The Visible and the Invisible. Other texts by Merleau-Ponty will be referenced by the title. References to Husserl and Heidegger use the German followed by the translation. I will use the abbreviations ZB for the Zeitbewußtsein lectures; FT for Formale und transzendentale Logik; EU for Erfahrung und Urteil; and SZ for Sein und Zeit. View all notes While of course this phenomenon comes under close scrutiny in La temporalité, a brief inspection of this text as a whole finds it to be virtually everywhere.22 The theme of temporality is introduced as early as the Preface to Part I, “Experience and Objective Thought” and appears again in almost every subsequent chapter: the first chapter of Part I ; in his discussion on number blindness and Goldstein's patient known as Schneider in La spatialité du corps et la motricité ; in the sexuality chapter ; in the discussion of memory in La corps comme expression et la parole ; in Le sentir ; in the discussion of depth in L'espace ; in La chose et le monde naturel ; in Autrui et le monde humain and in Le cogito. Rather than providing the perhaps much called for synopsis of these scattered accounts of time or trying to locate a unified account in Phenomenology of Perception through such a synopsis, this essay will focus only on La temporalité, particularly the discussion of Husserl's diagram from the Zeitbewußtsein and the “champ de présence”. View all notes It is this apparent ubiquity that will motivate scholars such as Renaud Barbaras to claim that “… the entire structure of Phenomenology of Perception rests on a chapter devoted to temporality”.33 Barbaras The Being of the Phenomenon, 218. View all notes In spite of this ubiquity and apparent centrality, however, the treatment of temporality seems to neglect a systematic and thoroughgoing approach, and whether this work manages to address this theme with a sufficient degree of rigor remains open to debate. Furthermore, beyond the scattered and fragmented appearance of temporality in the text, the chapter devoted to its exploration contains numerous, well-recognized problems.44 Merleau-Ponty's misinterpretation of Bergson in this chapter has received much warranted attention. Alia Al-Saji, for example, has criticized Merleau-Ponty's account of temporality in this chapter of Phenomenology of Perception for this misreading as well as its perhaps too uncritical infatuation with Husserl and his emphasis on presence. See Lawlor Thinking Through French Philosophy, Al-Saji “The Temporality of Life” and “A Past Which Has Never Been Present” and Barbaras “The Turn of Experience”. View all notes Among these difficulties, Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Husserl's lectures on time-consciousness, the Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins,55 The 1928 publication of the Zeitbewußtsein, edited by Heidegger, is what appears in the bibliography of Phenomenology of Perception. This version, from the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologishe Forschung, as Brough notes, appears as “Part A” of Husserliana X. The notes that constitute this version of the text, furthermore, as Heidegger mentions in his preface to the Jahrbuch version and which Brough repeats were heavily edited by Husserl's assistant at the time, Edith Stein. Merleau-Ponty's references to the Zeitbewußtsein cut across various moments of the text and do not focus on one section in particular, and in fact, he actually references section 11, “Urimpression und retentionale Modifikation”/“Primal impression and retentional modification” in his discussion of the field of presence. As Al-Saji has noted, the extent to which Merleau-Ponty's account of time in La temporalité centres the account of time on “the living present” can be shown to be at play behind the misreading of Bergson. While I do not wish to dispute the specifics of her compelling reading, it is nonetheless worth noting that Al-Saji's reading of the Zeitbewußtsein only focuses on Appendix V, “Gleichzeitigkeit von Wahrnehmung und Wahrgenommenem”/“Simultaneity of Perception and the Perceived”. View all notes looms large, as it seems that his discussion of what he designates as le champ de présence or “field of presence” commits him to the ontological primacy of the present in his account of time. As a result, this earlier work appears to confine itself to a metaphysics organized around the privilege and authority of the present in establishing the structure of time.66 Leonard Lawlor has convincingly argued against this interpretation. Following the famous remark at the end of Le Sentir about “a past which has never been present”, Lawlor argues that precisely because Merleau-Ponty's critique of Bergson is a straw man – that is, because his critique of Bergson is based on a misreading – a closer inspection of Le Sentir and La temporalité shows Merleau-Ponty to be committed to the ontological primacy of an “originary” past. See Lawlor Thinking Through French Philosophy, 89. Marratto, following Lawlor, takes up the charge of a metaphysics of presence in Phenomenology of Perception in dialogue with Derrida. Marratto argues that Derrida's reading selectively overlooks “the very imporant dimensions of difference, discontinuity, and delay and non-self-presence in Merleau-Ponty's descriptions”, located particularly in the latter's theory of subjectivity. I agree with Marratto's assessment, and my aim here is to deepen it by turning in more detail to La temporalité. View all notes This apparent commitment to the ontological primacy of the present, for some readers, has also functioned as an index for tracking the revision of Phenomenology of Perception that is said to figure in The Visible and the Invisible, where a metaphysics of the present is replaced with a commitment to the primacy of an original past, signalling a significant break in the development of Merleau-Ponty's thought.77 This has bearing on the debate mentioned above as the question of temporality and Merleau-Ponty's evolving relationship with Bergson are also cited as part of the index for tracking the differences between Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible. What we see, according to this reading, is Merleau-Ponty move away from a more strictly phenomenological orientation of Phenomenology of Perception, an orientation that is said to adversely mediate his early, critical stance with respect to Bergson, toward a progressively less Husserlian and more Bergsonian stance in The Visible and the Invisible. While he does not specifically address Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Bergson, Marratto's reading also places a special emphasis on the significance of the past, specifically Merleau-Ponty's reference to a “past which has never been present”. It is also not my intention to enter into the question of Merleau-Ponty's relationship with Bergson. Rather, I will restrict my remarks specifically to Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Husserl and the Zeitbewußtsein in La temporalité in order to show that there are grounds for at least questioning one of the premises of the interpretation mentioned above, namely that Phenomenology of Perception is unequivocally legible as committed to the ontological primacy of the present. As will become clear later in the essay, I also dispute interpretations that would place the emphasis on the ontological primacy of an original past. For my own views on the significance of a “past which has never been present”, see Whitmoyer “The Primary Silence of the Past”. View all notes In considering the manner in which the Zeitbewußtsein figures in La temporalité and Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the field of presence, it will do to think about the parameters in which his engagement with Husserl is staged more generally. It seems that Merleau-Ponty never considered his task in terms of the perhaps false alternative of fidelity and heresy, because “any commemoration is also a betrayal”, and because the task of the interpreter is, as he famously notes, thinking through that “unthought-of element … which is wholly his [Husserl's] and yet opens out on something else”.88 Merleau-Ponty, Signes, 203/160. This methodological dictum is developed in more detail in the notes to the course offered on Husserl's Origin of Geometry in 1959–1960. “We are saying not that Husserl was that, but that Husserl was not only what they say, was also another, bearer of an unthought”. View all notes Following Merleau-Ponty's own indications, we could suggest that Husserl's text, rather than a source of orthodoxy, functions as a point of orientation through which Merleau-Ponty marks out his own theory of temporality.99 I will not, therefore, address the question of the “accuracy” of his interpretation of Husserl because, according to Merleau-Ponty himself, this question presupposes that the author, in this case Husserl, has a privileged access to his thought, as if there is some kernel or essence of what a philosopher thought that interpreters can either get right or wrong. As the remarks in “The Philosopher and His Shadow” make clear, interpretation can never really avail itself of this presupposition and in this manner the question of accuracy is precisely the wrong question. View all notes This essay argues that his discussion of the Zeitbewußtsein in Phenomenology of Perception does not offer an account of time that “centers around the living present”, as some have argued,1010 Al-Saji “A Past Which Has Never Been Present”, 42–44. View all notes but that the discussion of the field of presence and what follows are rather intended to account for the field of temporal phenomenalization – not as a presence – but as écoulement, passage and flux. Time, therefore, does not appear in the present or as presence, but manifests itself as a flow and movement that is simultaneously an éclatement, an eruption, and a self-differentiating “dehiscence”.1111 A favorite word of Merleau-Ponty, borrowed from botany, where it designates the splitting open of a seed-pod or flower as well as medicine, where it refers to the splitting open of a healed or partially healed wound. The idea here is that, in its flow and passage, time splits open in a process of differentiation – which is simultaneously a process of degeneration, decay, and what Merleau-Ponty will term in The Visible and the Invisible, “disarticulation”. View all notes Time's passage is not determined, organized and oriented in advance in accordance with a transcendental synthesis that would give it shape and form, privileging one temporal dimension over another, so much as it is understood in terms of a splitting open, or to use another favoured locution of Merleau-Ponty, a “deflagration”.1212 In Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty speaks of the “deflagration of being”. Metaphors of explosiveness and dissonance populate his attempt to think being otherwise than as structure, form, and stability. Here I will focus particularly on écoulement, flux and éclatement, eruption, because these are the terms he uses in his discussion of time in La temporalité. See Merleau-Ponty L’Œil et l'esprit, 64/369. View all notes To this extent, Merleau-Ponty's account of temporality in Phenomenology of Perception cannot be said to orient itself in terms of the ontological primacy of any one temporal dimension – past, present, or future – but is more accurately understood as an attempt to recover the primordial experience of time as the simultaneity of écoulement and éclatement – an account that thinks time in its dual power of phenomenalization and erosion, the “pulse [pulsation] of my existence, its systole and diastole”.1313 Merleau-Ponty PhP, 337/332. View all notes Time is the vehicle of the world's appearance, and at the same time of its “disarticulation” [désarticulation],1414 This is a term Merleau-Ponty uses in The Visible and the Invisible in a well-known working note entitled “ Transcendence – forgetting – time”. See Merleau-Ponty VI, 247/197. View all notes the vehicle through which “becoming” – rather than being – shows itself. This process of phenomenalization, precisely because it is temporal, never achieves the density of fully realized being – the sense of this becoming is never fully articulate – but is perpetually subject to a temporal erasure that necessitates its repetition and reiteration. Time, in other words, is the principle of the world's eloquence – it is that thanks to which things have and make sense and simultaneously the principle of the world's murmuring stutter, the principle through which the sense of things remains incomplete and even erodes, decays, and degenerates. To begin, I will turn to Merleau-Ponty's reading of Husserl's diagram from the Zeitbewußtsein, which opens his attempt to “arrive at authentic time”.1515 Merleau-Ponty PhP, 477/483. View all notes Rather than simply rehearsing Husserl's discussion of primal impression, retention and protention, Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the diagram provides an opportunity for raising two problems: the problem of time's representability and the problem of its synthesis. Rather than through an “act intentionality” carried out by a transcendental subjectivity, time appears in accordance with an “operative intentionality” always already under way. Turning to the section of La temporalité aptly entitled “Passive Synthesis”, we see that Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the diagram leads him to the paradox of passive synthesis and what he calls, following Husserl, “transition synthesis”. Time does not show itself punctually – time appears neither as presence nor in the present – but only in the dual movement of its flux, its écoulement, and its éclatement, its explosive, self-differentiating unfurling. These reflections, finally, bring Merleau-Ponty into dialogue with Heidegger on what the latter called the Zusammenhang des Lebens. The “unity of a life”, accordingly, is not a question of any “resolution”, but is a function of our immersion in this temporal dehiscence. The important lesson to be learned from Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Husserl's Zeitbewußtsein is not something about the ontological primacy of one temporal dimension over another but what Merleau-Ponty famously calls in The Visible and the Invisible the “passivity of our activity”1616 Merleau-Ponty VI, 270/221. View all notes and our immersion in time's power of disarticulation. (shrink)

The murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children during World War II was an act of such barbarity as to constitute one of the central events of our time; yet a list of the major concerns of professional philosophers since 1945 would exclude the Holocaust. This collection of twenty-three essays, most of which were written expressly for this volume, is the first book to focus comprehensively on the profound issues and philosophical significance of the Holocaust.The essays, written (...) for general as well as professional readers, convey an extraordinary range of factual information and philosophical reflection in seeking to identify the haunting meanings of the Holocaust. Among the questions addressed are: How should philosophy approach the Holocaust? What part did the philosophical climate play in allowing Hitlerism its temporary triumph? What is the philosophical climate today and what are its probable cultural effects? Can philosophy help our culture to become a bulwark against future agents of evil? The multiple dimensions of the Holocaust-historical, sociological, psychological, religious, moral, and literary-are collected here for concentrated philosophical interpretations. Author note: Alan Rosenberg is a Lecturer in the Philosophy Department at Queens College of the City University of New York. Gerald E. Myers is Professor of Philosophy at Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center. (shrink)

The founder of the eponymous engineering firm, which continues to realize seminal projects around the world, Ove Arup is widely acknowledged as one of the most significant engineers of his time. Generated over the course of his illustrious career, these lectures, essays, and interviews broadlyshare several themes: insight into Arup's thinking on the nature of good design, quality and value in the built environment, and the growing need for better collaboration between engineers, architects, and contractors in order to (...) exploit technological advances in materials and methods, while at the same time reducing the environmental impact of building. These chronologically arranged essays span five decades, and many of the themes they address are as relevant today as they were when first produced. Illustrating wisdom, practical problem solving, and Arup's philosophical approach, this book is a necessary and long-overdue addition to the library of anyone who has a passion for, and an interest in, the principles of great design. (shrink)

I take up Kant's remarks about a " transcendental deduction" of the "concepts of space and time". I argue for the need to make a clearer assessment of the philosophical resources of the Aesthetic in order to account for this transcendental deduction. Special attention needs to be given to the fact that the central task of the Aesthetic is simply the "exposition" of these concepts. The Metaphysical Exposition reflects upon facts about our usage to reveal our commitment to the (...) idea that these concepts refer to pure intuitions. But the legitimacy of these concepts still hangs in the balance: these concepts may turn out to refer to nothing real at all. The subsequent Transcendental Exposition addresses this issue. The objective validity of the concepts of space and time, and hence their transcendental deduction, hinges on careful treatment of this last point. (shrink)

Lectures: The metaphysics of Kant. The metaphysics of T.H. Green. The philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer.-- Essays: l. The sophists (two papers from the Journal of philology, 1872 and 1873) 2. Incoherence of empirical philosophy (from Mind, vol. VII, 0. 8., Oct. 1882) 3. A dialogue on time and common sense (from Mind, vol. III, n. s., Oct. 1894) 4. The philosophy of common sense (from Mind, vol. IV. n. s., April 1895) 5. Criteria of truth and error (...) (from Mind, vol. IX, n. s., Jan 1900) Appendix to the preceding essay. (shrink)

This essay examines the link between time and history through the use of cyclic and linear concepts of time. While the former occurs in a cosmological context, the latter is found in familiar historical forms. The author argues for the existence of historical consciousness in early India, on the evidence of early texts.

These writings chart Harman's rise from Chicago sportswriter to co-founder of one of Europe's most promising philosophical movements: Speculative Realism. In 1997, Graham Harman was an obscure graduate student covering Chicago sporting events for a California website. Unpublished in philosophy at the time, he was already a popular conference speaker on Heidegger and related themes. Little more than a decade later, as the author of stimulating and highly visible books on continental philosophy, he was Associate Vice Provost for Research (...) at the American University in Cairo, and a key member of the Speculative Realist movement along with Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Quentin Meillassoux. This fascinating collection of eleven essays and lectures from 1997-2009, anchored by Harman's rebellious transformation of Heideggerian philosophy, show the evolution of his object-oriented metaphysics from its early days into an increasingly developed philosophical position. Each chapter is preceded by Harman's delightful and witty scene-setting commentary. (shrink)

Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) was active during the Renaissance, developing adventurous ideas even while serving as a churchman. The religious issues with which he engaged - spiritual, apocalyptic and institutional - were to play out in the Reformation. These essays reflect the interests of Cusanus but also those of Gerald Christianson, who has studied church history, the Renaissance and the Reformation. The book places Nicholas into his times but also looks at his later reception. The first part addresses institutional issues, (...) including Schism, conciliarism, indulgences and the possibility of dialogue with Muslims. The second treats theological and philosophical themes, including nominalism, time, faith, religious metaphor, and prediction of the end times. (shrink)

This volume is the best available introduction to the achievement of Jacob Klein, which is still insufficiently recognized. Klein published his monumental study, which in English translation is called Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, in two parts in 1934 and 1936. The book lacked an introduction; it needed a concluding part; and its title was somewhat misleading. In its 1968 translation Klein added a note of explanation. "This study was originally written and published in Germany during rather (...) turbulent times. Were I writing it today, the vocabulary would be less 'scholarly,' and the change from the ancient to the modern way of thinking would be viewed in a larger perspective." The present collection of twenty-two items, all but four prepared for publication by Klein, contains almost all of his writings apart from his three books, arranged chronologically, and spanning five decades. The earliest, "The World of Physics and the 'Natural' World," was originally given as a lecture at Marburg in 1932, approximately contemporary to the writing of the first study. To that study it is a useful introduction; it can also plausibly serve as a compressed draft of a possible third section of that book, as the editors suggest. (shrink)

The papers in this volume of Ernst Cassirer’s unpublished works give insight into the major issues that engaged Cassirer’s interest between 1935 and 1945. The book begins with his inaugural address at the University of Göteborg, Sweden, in the first years of his exile from Hitler’s Germany, and ends with a talk to the Columbia Philosophy Club. The note that introduces this piece was written on the day of his death. In his long and productive career, Ernst Cassirer always tried (...) to integrate his works of original philosophy and studies in intellectual history into a general understanding of the nature of myth, culture, and symbol. These essays show that his interest persisted to the end. His piece on Judaism and political myths is perhaps the most dramatic in this collection, as it blends philosophical coolness with his deeply felt outrage at fascism. Best known in this country for _The Myth of the State_, _The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms_, and _An Essay on Man_, Ernst Cassirer has been read and studied by generations of students. In this book they will find illuminations, in a more informal voice, of the major themes in Cassirer’s work. New readers will be introduced to the great issues that occupied the interest of one of the twentieth century’s most widely read philosophers. “A genuine contribution to the history of modern philosophy – and of special value to the informed general reader, since it includes a number of valid attempts by Cassirer to translate his radical, sometimes difficult, concepts of culture into non-technical terms.” -- _The Booklist_. (shrink)

In this presidential address, I use the metaphor of “reclaiming my time” as a framework that highlights the ways black women are playing an essential role transforming workplaces, media, and politics in the current moment. I consider how black feminist thought provides a useful starting point for assessing these efforts, and I examine how black women’s leadership offers a blueprint for how other groups also can restructure social institutions in an era of increasing polarization and inequality.

This essay treats the final version of Hume's Essays, Volume 1, as an artfully shaped whole. Framed by essays on taste that address the interaction of personal and social dynamics, the volume is organized into loose clusters of political and moral essays that share a common pattern of offering multiple approaches to the issues they examine and pursuing a given idea until it reaches a point of excess that generates a salutary correction. This activity circumscribes an inexact range of balance, (...) which is left for the reader to resolve or, better, to continue. In this, Hume's Essays invite readers to participate in the interaction between self-formation and cultural forms that is motor of Hume's post-skeptical philosophy and the genre of the essay alike. (shrink)

Lectures from the late period of Fichte’s career, never before available in English. Translated here for the first time into English, this text furnishes a new window into the final phase of Fichte’s career. Delivered in the summer of 1812 at the newly founded University of Berlin, Fichte’s lectures on ethics explore some of the key concepts and issues in his evolving system of radical idealism. Addressing moral theory, the theory of education, the philosophy of history, and (...) the philosophy of religion, Fichte engages both directly and indirectly with some of his most important contemporaries and philosophical rivals, including Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. Benjamin D. Crowe’s translation includes extensive annotations and a German-English glossary. His introduction situates the text systematically, historically, and institutionally within an era of cultural ferment and intellectual experimentation, and includes a bibliography of recent scholarship on Fichte’s moral theory and on the final period of his career. (shrink)

In this essay, we will discuss what Husserl mean when he says that immanent objects are “constituted” by inner temporality. Our discussion will amount to a study of how sensations and intentions come to be in out subjectivity, and how we are conscious of them; Husserl’s opinion on these points will be taken from his Lectures on the Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness.

"This volume is a collection of essays based on lectures given at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent at various occasions over the last 4 years.

Originally published in 1942, this book contains the text of eleven lectures originally delivered the previous year to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the visit of the great educator Jan Amos Komenský to Cambridge in 1641. The lectures all come from a background in education or writing, and each describes the effect that Comenius has had on their experience of education, the world, and social order. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Comenius (...) or the history of education. (shrink)

The greatest intensity of “live” life is captured from as close as possible in order to be borne as far as possible away. Jacques Derrida. Echographies of Television . Rainer Ganahl has made a study of studying. As part of his extensive autobiographical art practice, he documents and presents many of the ambitious educational activities he undertakes. For example, he has been videotaping hundreds of hours of solitary study that show him struggling to learn Chinese, Arabic and a host of (...) other languages. The stacked boxes of tapes are then presented like minimalist monoliths, dense archives of effort. About fifteen years ago, Ganahl began photographing the lectures that he attends. At the time, he hadn’t seen anyone else doing it, so besides his spare selection of images of the speaker and the audience, much of the time the lectures would just pass into memory, undocumented, or recorded in writing alone. Since then, he has felt the transition to digital cause a significant shift in his process. At the same time, he has seen the habit become ubiquitous as others photograph, record, and videotape the lectures all around him. In keeping with the theme of this inaugural issue of continent. , can we propose each small grouping of photographs that result an isthmus stretching between two disparate bodies of mind? The first being the body of the lecture as spelled out in the title of each work – the experience of the event in all its constituent parts. The second is the body of the recipient, the listener, in this case an artist, who plays a minimal role just beyond the prescripted behavior of sitting and listening. He uses a gesture of documentation to draw a line between himself and the event, creating an artwork. Františka + Tim Gilman: As we mentioned before, the theme of the magazine for this issue is "isthmus." It seems like a very good way into your work, and it leads us to ask what connection you see between your photographs of the lecture and the lecture itself? Rainer Ganahl: The relationship is of course a concrete, pictorial one, or if you want a mimetic one but also an abstract one because the photographs carry the title of the lecture, the names of the lecturers, the site, the institution and the time of the lecture. Photos are fixed moments of time and can reproduce images displayed and reproduce visuals presented at a moment but they don’t come with time based recordings that video or sound takes are offering. What remains of a lecture is usually just the memory, some notes and all the announcements of it. In my case I end up with a visual product I declare as my artwork. It might not differ from any snapshot taken by any other student or member of the audience but I do this in a semi-systematic way with certain rules and procedures I have set up. While I am at a lecture I am mainly focusing on the lecture itself. Last night I went to one of Slavoj Žižek which demanded quite some concentration. I even was asking him a question at the end. I took photos as well but still didn’t lose track of the lecture. I didn’t walk around, I was not preoccupied by where I was sitting and what light I was having like some of the other photographing and filming people in the room who came and left, moved around and tried to capture him from this and that angle, from close and far. I just sat there and concentrated on the lecture and yet managed to take about 30 or so images of him, the public around me and of the film clips he presented. Once the lecture is over the story changes: it all becomes a question of the images, their selection, their visual qualities, their labeling and archiving. The function of the images also change: not only do they stand for an intellectual event in a row of lectures that become part of my intellectual history within many possible such histories but they also have to function as art, something not everybody else with images of lecturers demands of their images. This is my specific claim as an artist to impose them as artworks. And as with all artistic propositions the offer can be accepted or rejected. I basically spend my life trying to do exactly that: making what I declare as art, offering something to anybody interested in it as my art, an offer that is not and will never be accepted as such by all people. F+T: What are your criteria for selection, i.e. how do you choose which lectures to photograph, by lecturer, by topic, or do you photograph any and every lecture you can? RG: As everything in my life, I go by my interest which is the result of many factors. If I am aware of a lecturer, read his books or appreciate his works my interest of attending his much higher than if I am not aware of it. I usually don’t go to lecturers simply based on their subjects—something that can happen of course, if the subject, the title of the lecture is promising or at the heart of my interest. Sometimes I also wait for years to get a change to photograph certain people but I do that in a very low-level “keep your ears up” mentality and not in a systematic scanning of all channels and possibilities. I do not go into philosophy departments and photograph everybody teaching there. I go with the flow—and unfortunately a great deal of great talks I also miss because I hear too late of them. Often, I also stumble into them by traveling, by getting emails from friends and by simply being in the right spot at the right time. Somehow you could look at my lecture par cours as some kind of loose intellectual flâneurism . If you know of interesting lectures and events, please, let me know. F+T: Is your selection of images more of a production or post-production method? That is, do you take a lot of photos and select only a few images from each lecture, or do you take them very selectively? Do you have a particular methodology for the selection of images? RG: This all changed a bit with the arrival of digital photography. In the beginning I had to pay a lot of money for film developing. Hence, I was taking either one role - 36 images - or half a role - 13 images - depending on who talked and whether they projected images. With the unlimited capacity of digital imaging I easily end up between 30 and 150 images of one event still depending of whether images are presented or not. In the first years of that project when I wasn’t fully aware yet of what I was doing, I printed at least 2 images of any lecture and sometimes three or even four, a choice that was also constrained by costs. But again, since I have a web site and since images can easily be selected and presented on my web site without generating remarkable costs I have now more and more pain to reduce them to less than ten or eight images for an event. Now, before I have them printed which really is expensive, I can present them already as artwork on my web site without any immediate costs. Thus the economic factor is at the end of the chain which enables me to be more ‘generous’ and include more images. Over the last years I have been mostly selecting at least four photographs for a lecture unit but recently also as many as ten. But so far only one set above four images has been actually printed and sold. What might sound even more shocking is the likely fact that if a curator or a collector demands me to reduce the number of images due to costs, I might compromise at this current stage if the images have not been yet printed or published outside my own web site. This means that to a certain degree any selection that has only seen publication on my web site and not yet been produced runs the risk to change in numbers of images included. Needless to say, I am the last one that finally makes a decision and I do honor all given earlier decision if those were final. F+T: How do you feel the act of photographing the lecture affects your reception of the contents of the lecture? And your recollection afterwards, do you remember the lecture more having photographed it, or just having sat and listened? RG: As mentioned above, I get very little distraction from photographing since I can multitask well and do not obsess about the quality of the image: I photograph from where I am and listen with my ears and not my eyes. I am not sure whether the images serve as a mnemonic devise to the content of the lecture if there are no images involved but they at least remind me that the lecture existed, the title of the lecture and the name of the people and institutions involved. The titles of the hundreds of lectures I took during the past 15 years can also be read as an essay of theoretical life in that period. This will be come more and more visible as time passes by. These images age much better than I do. F+T: You mentioned at the outset of our discussions that you started this practice some time ago and have seen the practice of photographing lecturers become more commonplace. Why do you think that this shift has taken place? RG: The answer is very simple. Photographing is now free of any charge and hence omnipresent. You buy a phone or any other personal digital assistant and it has a camera integrated in it whether you want it or not. There is no need to develop images and there is no hassle to keep images, to distribute images, to organize images and save them. It is all virtual, not creating any costs and doesn’t require any efforts. You don’t spend twenty dollars for photo-developing anymore, you don’t need to walk anymore to your pharmacy or your photo shop to drop off and return to pick up and pay. You don’t need to go to the post office to send somebody a picture. You have a program like Photoshop already built into your camera. Photographing is now a thing for everybody—with functioning cameras made for two year olds. It is technically now nearly impossible to make bad images. The image quality is virtually guaranteed by cheap, high performing, mini-computers packed into miniscule cameras. With all these technological changes, we are undergoing now a cultural paradigm shift that includes permanent recording (not only still image taking) of everything. I wonder even whether babies are just born to be photographed—at least a process where the first photograph is right there. What is interesting now, is how the law is trying to catch up. I am experiencing and expecting more restrictions on photographing and recording—something already in place in many museums and in certain galleries—as the recording devices become more and more invisible and undetectable. It is an interesting cat and mouse play and will end up with some of us that are photographing the world around us in court. The world has become very transparent and everybody is contributing to it with social networking technologies—like twitter and Facebook—that are designed to monitor and communicate every step we make in our lives. F+T: Why did you start the practice? As a way to remember, or to capture the experience of the lecture and the environment there? RG: A couple of years earlier I started to photograph my own reading seminars as part of my art work with results that surprised me positively. I really liked these images of students and people discussing heavy non-fiction with me. The reading seminars justified this kind of pictorialism. Then in 1995 I had the chance to attend an entire seminar by Edward Said entitled “The Representation of Intellectuals at Columbia University,” which really gave me the idea to start this series. Why not also photograph these lectures I visit all the time since this really is a way of representing intellectuals? F+T: The constellation of images and the title seem like a kind of portrait, do you agree? If so, is it a portrait of the speaker, of yourself, or of the event? RG: Well, to follow up on the previous question the lectures are more than just portraits of lecturers since I include not only the speakers but also the audience, an audience that is not named or specifically highlighted as is the speaker. So if we stick with the metaphor of the portrait we would have to extend it also to the environment, the class room, the lecture hall, the arrangements of seats or benches, tables, lecture stands and other stuff typically seen on my images. Often the walls are decorated or even tagged with graffiti or posters and other stuff. There is a big difference between a small seminar room at the English Department of Columbia University, full with books and cabinets and a lecture room at a Paris or Frankfurt university that accommodates 50 to 150 people. We should, maybe, also distinguish between lectures that are one time events—mostly open to the public, free of charge or paid—and events that are weekly, closed to the public and held mostly in universities that can cost fortunes or be paid by the State as it is still predominantly the case in continental Europe. All this, of course, is not necessarily announced in the title of the lecture and is subject to information that isn’t visible on the images. To a certain degree we see also portraits of a general privilege when it comes to the public of certain institutions that are highly selective and extremely costly without forgetting that most of the lectures are dealing with theory, art, philosophy and other highbrow subjects. In general, I would say we see very little if we don’t know already what’s going on, who the lecturer, the institutions, the context are in which we subsequently can zoom into variants like sexual, racial, or age-related make-up without ignoring clothing fashions, hair styling, body mannerisms, gadgets and stuff. F+T: Do you see a relation between this body of work and your other work, for example your language studies? RG: Everything I do is “unfortunately” related. I say unfortunately because this makes my work not so easy to grasp. The relationship to the language studies is relatively clear since both are originally grounded in the domain of education and knowledge production. Nearly all my work comes across that nexus where knowledge and power are addressed. I was at one point wondering what the relationship was to some of my earlier indexical work where I was happy alone with footnotes from books painted on the walls: I came to understand that both are just different manifestations of knowledge and information. F+T: Do you foresee continuing the series indefinitely, or is there an end to it? RG: I think that I will continue this series indefinitely or to be more precise, as long as I go listen to lectures and want to learn something which brings me to your previous question: What do the reading seminars, language studies, historical research and lecture hopping have in common: I learn something. Further Reading Rainer Ganahl’s website William Kaizen. “ Vulgar Politics .” art&education . April 2009. Web. Smith, Roberta. “ Rainer Ganahl: ‘Language of Emigration & Pictures of Emigration .’” New York Times April 23 2010. Web. (shrink)

Peter Kivy, world-renowned philosopher of art, completed work on this book shortly before his untimely death in 2017. In it he addresses the novel, making an invaluable contribution to the field of philosophy of literature and raising questions of a philosophical nature about the novel that will be of interest both to the professional philosopher and to the general reader.

Peter Kivy, world-renowned philosopher of art, completed work on this book shortly before his untimely death in 2017. In it he addresses the novel, making an invaluable contribution to the field of philosophy of literature and raising questions of a philosophical nature about the novel that will be of interest both to the professional philosopher and to the general reader.

This interdisciplinary volume of essays explores how the notion of time varies across disciplines by examining variance as a defining feature of temporalities in cultural, creative, and scholarly contexts. Featuring a President's Address by philosopher David Wood, it begins with critical reassessments of J.T. Fraser's hierarchical theory of time through the lens of Anthropocene studies, philosophy, ecological theory, and ecological literature; proceeds to variant narratives in fiction, video games, film, and graphic novels; and concludes by measuring time's (...) variance with tools as different as incense clocks and computers, and by marking variance in music, film, and performance art. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt was born in Germany in 1906 and lived in America from 1941 until her death in 1975. Thus her life spanned the tumultuous years of the twentieth century, as did her thought. She did not consider herself a philosopher, though she studied and maintained close relationships with two great philosophers—Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger—throughout their lives. She was a thinker, in search not of metaphysical truth but of the meaning of appearances and events. She was a questioner rather (...) than an answerer, and she wrote what she thought, principally to encourage others to think for themselves. Fearless of the consequences of thinking, Arendt found courage woven in each and every strand of human freedom. In 1951 she published The Origins of Totalitarianism, in 1958 The Human Condition, in 1961 Between Past and Future, in 1963 On Revolution and Eichmann in Jerusalem, in 1968 Men in Dark Times, in 1970 On Violence, in 1972 Crises of the Republic, and in 1978, posthumously, The Life of the Mind. Starting at the turn of the twenty-first century, Schocken Books has published a series of collections of Arendt’s unpublished and uncollected writings, of which Thinking Without a Banister is the fifth volume. The title refers to Arendt’s description of her experience of thinking, an activity she indulged without any of the traditional religious, moral, political, or philosophic pillars of support. The book’s contents are varied: the essays, lectures, reviews, interviews, speeches, and editorials, taken together, manifest the relentless activity of her mind as well as her character, acquainting the reader with the person Arendt was, and who has hardly yet been appreciated or understood. (Edited and with an introduction by Jerome Kohn). (shrink)

A common theme of this set of thirteen essays by one of the major figures in contemporary German philosophy is the idea of a postmetaphysical modernity. In his preface Wellmer relates the title of his book, Endgames, to this common theme: The historical utopias of the Marxist tradition and the programs of ultimate justification in the Kantian tradition are both endgames within metaphysics, the deconstruction of those utopias and programs of ultimate justification are endgames played with metaphysics, and the game (...) with an end as ultimate telos--the end of history, the end of knowledge, the end of human life--is metaphysics. The title, Endgames, finally also refers polemically to postmodernist games with an end of modernity; as opposed to these, Wellmer defends the fragile moral and political substance of the modernity that postmodernists attempt to overcome--and that sense of what needs to be preserved of the modern tradition for a postmetaphysical modernity is what makes his writings unique.In the first of the book's three parts, "Negative and Communicative Freedom," Wellmer focuses on political philosophy, examining in particular the links and tensions between liberal basic rights and modern ideas of democracy. In Part II, "Postmetaphysical Perspectives," he attempts to develop a postmetaphysical perspective on aesthetics and metaphysics, on the problem of truth, and on hermeneutics. Part III, "Images of the Times," contains occasional pieces on Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Frankfurt School, Hans Jonas, and architecture. The book closes with an appended critical essay on Hannah Arendt, reflecting the importance of Arendt's political philosophy to Wellmer's work. (shrink)

As the editor notes, the importance of this collection of “Heidegger’s early experimental essays” is considerable for an appreciation and understanding of the formative period of Heidegger’s thought, including his early lecture courses, Being and Time, and even the transitional reflections from the late 1930s gathered under the title Contributions to Philosophy. Modestly entitled “supplements,” these texts are illuminating documents of the formative period of perhaps the twentieth century’s most important philosopher.—Miles Groth, Wagner College.

No Professor's Lectures Can Save Us: William James's Pragmatism, Radical Empiricism, and Pluralism draws critically on the full range of the writings of William James--his psychology, theory of belief and truth, radical empiricism, pluralism, and his accounts of religion, ethics, politics, and society-to develop a powerful case for an original pragmatic world view and temperament resonant with James's philosophy. In a manner that avoids the "vicious intellectualism" that James criticized, the book engages more than a century of scholarship on (...) James, and places him in conversation with both his contemporaries and more recent writers. Throughout the book's seven interwoven chapters, the author moves both with James and at times against James to address and illuminate central issues about the nature of the self, freedom, morality, community, truth, reality, and possibility. The chapters take up, in turn, James's views on: faith and freedom; habit, attention, and flourishing; inclusive and ethical lives; democratic politics; the temperament of pragmatism; a radically empirical ontology of relations; and, a pluralistic and unfinished universe. The focus throughout is practical: the book aims to show the differences in concrete lives that it makes to take up a broadly Jamesian pragmatic, radically empirical, and pluralistic personal perspective across the fallible and "ever not quite" endeavours of our finite lives. "From this unsparing practical ordeal," James noted, "no professor's lectures and no array of books can save us." In this spirit, this book does not pretend to provide, by itself, salvation. Instead, it effectively develops insights in the writings of William James that continue to constitute invaluable resources for new problems, new possibilities, and new forms of personal and social life. (shrink)

This edition of G. E. Moore's notes taken at Wittgenstein's seminal Cambridge lectures in the early 1930s provides, for the first time, an almost verbatim record of those classes. The presentation of the notes is both accessible and faithful to their original manuscripts, and a comprehensive introduction and synoptic table of contents provide the reader with essential contextual information and summaries of the topics in each lecture. The lectures form an excellent introduction to Wittgenstein's middle-period thought, covering (...) a broad range of philosophical topics, ranging from core questions in the philosophy of language, mind, logic, and mathematics, to illuminating discussions of subjects on which Wittgenstein says very little elsewhere, including ethics, religion, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. The volume also includes a 1932 essay by Moore critiquing Wittgenstein's conception of grammar, together with Wittgenstein's response. A companion website offers access to images of the entire set of source manuscripts. (shrink)

At a time of great and increasing interest in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, this volume draws readers into what Levinas described as "philosophy itself"--"a discourse always addressed to another." Thus the philosopher himself provides the thread that runs through these essays on his writings, one guided by the importance of the fact of being addressed--the significance of the Saying much more than the Said. The authors, leading Levinas scholars and interpreters from across the globe, explore the philosopher's relationship (...) to a wide range of intellectual traditions, including theology, philosophy of culture, Jewish thought, phenomenology, and the history of philosophy. They also engage Levinas's contribution to ethics, politics, law, justice, psychoanalysis and epistemology, among other themes. In their radical singularity, these essays reveal the inalienable alterity at the heart of Levinas's ethics. At the same time, each essay remains open to the others, and to the perspectives and positions they advocate. Thus the volume, in its quality and diversity, enacts an authentic encounter with Levinas's thought, embodying an intellectual ethics by virtue of its style. Bringing together contributions from philosophy, theology, literary theory, gender studies, and political theory, this book offers a deeper and more thorough encounter with Levinas's ethics than any yet written. (shrink)

One can rightly say of Peter Sloterdijk that each of his essays and lectures is also an unwritten book. That is why the texts presented here, which sketch a philosophical physiognomy of Martin Heidegger, should also be characterized as a collected renunciation of exhaustiveness. In order to situate Heidegger's thought in the history of ideas and problems, Peter Sloterdijk approaches Heidegger's work with questions such as: If Western philosophy emerged from the spirit of the polis, what are we to (...) make of the philosophical suitability of a man who never made a secret of his stubborn attachment to rural life? Is there a provincial truth of which the cosmopolitan city knows nothing? Is there a truth in country roads and cabins that would be able to undermine the universities with their standardized languages and globally influential discourses? From where does this odd professor speak, when from his professorial chair in Freiburg he claims to inquire into what lies beyond the history of Western metaphysics? Sloterdijk also considers several other crucial twentieth-century thinkers who provide some needed contrast for the philosophical physiognomy of Martin Heidegger. A consideration of Niklas Luhmann as a kind of contemporary version of the Devil's Advocate, a provocative critical interpretation of Theodor Adorno's philosophy that focuses on its theological underpinnings and which also includes reflections on the philosophical significance of hyperbole, and a short sketch of the pessimistic thought of Emil Cioran all round out and deepen Sloterdijk's attempts to think with, against, and beyond Heidegger. Finally, in essays such as "Domestication of Being" and the "Rules for the Human Park," which incited an international controversy around the time of its publication and has been translated afresh for this volume, Sloterdijk develops some of his most intriguing and important ideas on anthropogenesis, humanism, technology, and genetic engineering. (shrink)

Erin Plunkett draws from both analytic and continental sources to argue for the philosophical relevance of style, making the case that the essay form is uniquely suited to address the sceptical problem. The authors examined here-Montaigne, Hume, the early German Romantics, Kierkegaard and Stanley Cavell-bring into relief the relationship between scepticism and ordinary life and situate the will to know within a broader frame of meaningful human activity. The formal features of the essay call attention to time, subjectivity, and (...) language as the existential conditions of knowledge. -/- In contrast to foundationalist approaches, which expect philosophy to reach empirical or rational certainty, Plunkett demonstrates through these writings the philosophical advantages of a fragmentary, non-dogmatic style of writing. A Philosophy of the Essay shows how this medium can help us come to terms with the contingency and uncertainty of life. (shrink)

In the winter of 1807, while Berlin was occupied by French troops, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte presented fourteen public lectures that have long been studied as a major statement of modern nationalism. Yet Fichte's _Addresses to the German Nation_ have also been interpreted by many as a vision of a cosmopolitan alternative to nationalism. This new edition of the _Addresses_ is designed to make Fichte's arguments more accessible to English-speaking readers. The clear, readable, and reliable translation is accompanied (...) by a chronology of the events surrounding Fichte's life, suggestions for further reading, and an index. The groundbreaking introductory essay situates Fichte's theory of the nation state in the history of modern political thought. It provides historians, political theorists, and other students of nationalism with a fresh perspective for considering the interface between cosmopolitanism and republicanism, patriotism and nationalism. (shrink)

Copublished in the U.K. by Routledge. These lively essays, transcribed by Kant's students during his lectures on ethics at Konigsberg in the years 1775-1780, are celebrated not only for their insight into Kant's polished and often witty lecture style but also as a key to understanding the development of his moral thought. As Lewis White Beck points out in the Foreword to this edition, those who know Kant only from his rigorous and abstract intellectual critiques may be surprised by (...) the accessibility of these essays, which put flesh on the bones of the critical ethics, while revealing Kant as a practical moralist, greatly concerned with the nuances of human conduct and the social effects of his moral teaching. The sharply focused discussions and definitions strengthen an interpretation of Kant's more mature speculative works and remain the riches document we have for understanding the history of the preeminent ethical theory of modern times. (shrink)

This is a unique collection presenting work by Alain Badiou and commentaries on his philosophical theories. It includes three lectures by Badiou, on contemporary politics, the infinite, cinema and theatre and two extensive interviews with Badiou – one concerning the state of the contemporary situation and one wide ranging interview on all facets of his work and engagements. It also includes six interventions on aspects of Badiou's work by established scholars in the field, addressing his concept of history, Lacan, (...) Cinema, poetry, and feminism; and four original essays by young and established scholars in Australia and New Zealand addressing the key concerns of Badiou's 2015 visit to the Antipodal region and the work he presented there. With new material by Badiou previously unpublished in English this volume is a valuable overview of his recent thinking. Critical responses by distinguished and gifted Badiou scholars writing outside of the European context make this text essential reading for anyone interested in the development and contemporary reception of Badiou's thought. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 47, Issue 1, pp 1 - 18 This essay addresses time’s dissemination both in the sense of an undoing or fracturing of unifying conceptions of time, as well as in the sense of ‘scattering seeds’ by conceiving of manifold temporalizing configurations of living beings, things, and events without an overarching sense of time. After a consideration of traditional conceptions of time, this essay explores the notion of duration in Bergson in order to make (...) it fruitful for thinking duration without centering it in human consciousness. The author suggests that we can begin to think the temporal happening of things and events in terms of different temporal configurations of various degrees and qualities of complexity that may be occasioned by chance, whereby chance is understood as the freeing of time-spaces of indeterminacy in which temporal configurations take shape or manifest themselves. 1. (shrink)

Volume 39 of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values includes lectures initially scheduled during the academic year 2019-2020. Owing to the global coronavirus pandemic, some were delivered at a later date. The Tanner Lectures are published in an annual volume. In addition to permanent lectures at nine universities, the Tanner Lectures on Human Values funds special one-time lectures at selected higher educational institutions in the United States and around the world.

Is there any moral obligation to improve oneself, to foster and develop various capacities in oneself? From a broadly Kantian point of view, Self-Improvement defends the view that there is such an obligation and that it is an obligation that each person owes to him or herself. The defence addresses a range of arguments philosophers have mobilized against this idea, including the argument that it is impossible to owe anything to yourself, and the view that an obligation to improve onself (...) is overly 'moralistic'. Robert N. Johnson argues against Kantian universalization arguments for the duty of self-improvement, as well as arguments that bottom out in a supposed value humanity has. At the same time, he defends a position based on the notion that self- and other-respecting agents would, under the right circumstances, accept the principle of self-improvement and would leave it up to each to be the person to whom this duty is owed. (shrink)

Addresses of the Mississippi Philosophical Association is a collection of presidential and invited addresses from the members of the Mississippi Philosophical Association (MPA). Papers date from the inception of the association in the mid-1940s and continue through 1999. The common thread in these addresses is the authors' service to or leadership in the MPA. The content and methods in the chapters are diverse, including addresses on ethics, political philosophy, history of philosophy, epistemology, aesthetics, philosophy of language, philosophy of religion, philosophy (...) of science, and philosophical theology. Some unique features of this book are a history of the MPA, biographical sketches and photographs of each contributor, and the inclusion of the unpublished 1988 Dunbar Lectures from Millsaps College and the unpublished 1992 Akin Lecture from Mississippi College. These essays and lectures reveal the vitality of philosophy in the colleges and universities of Mississippi. As part of the special series, Histories and Addresses of Philosophical Societies in the larger Value Inquiry Book Series, this book documents - in a unique historical format - the value and vitality of a state philosophical organization. "There has been no attempt to mold these addresses into a unity; rather, the addresses offer a glimpse of the pluralistic philosophical reflection among the philosophical faculties of the private colleges and public universities in the state of Mississippi. To the surprise of some people, philosophy is alive, well, diverse, and flourishing in Mississippi!" (from the Preface). (shrink)

This collection of essays on policing and the use of force, while written over the course of the last twenty-five years, remains relevant and timely. Although issues in policing and questions about excessive force and brutality have been addressed by criminologists, sociologists, philosophers, and criminal justice ethicists, only a handful of theological ethicists treat this pressing matter. While the Christian moral tradition has a voluminous record of theological attention to violence and nonviolence, war and peace, there is a dearth of (...) references to policing. And most considerations of criminal justice issues by Christians and their churches concentrate on prison reform, or abolition, and the death penalty, but not policing. These essays, authored by a theological ethicist possessing professional experience in law enforcement, seek to fill this curious gap. They offer a framework for moral reasoning concerning the justification for police use of force and the just application of such force, and they propose just policing as a model that is consonant with promoting a just peace in communities and society. In addition, they explore the implications of such an approach for wider, international questions about just war, terrorism, the responsibility to protect, and post-war justice. (shrink)