What should Christian discourse look like after philosophical modernity? In one manner or another the essays in this volume seek to confront and intellectually exorcise the prevailing elements of philosophical modernity, which are inherently transgressive disfigurations and refigurations of the Christian story of creation, sin, and redemption. To enact these various forms and styles of Christian intellectual exorcism these essays make appeal to, and converse with the magisterial corpus of Cyril O'Regan. The themes of the essays center around the Gnostic (...) return in modenity, apocalyptic theology, and the question of the bounds and borders of Christian orthodoxy. Along the way diverse figures are treated such as: Hegel, Shakespeare, von Balthasar, Przywara, Ricouer, Deleuse, Merleau-Ponty, and Kristeva."--Back cover. (shrink)

Modern, Stevie The appearance of Ayn Rand's 'lost' novel Ideal, 80 years after it was written, gives us cause to examine the life and works of the humanist author, playwright and philosopher.

The much-welcomed recent acknowledgement that there is a plurality of philosophical traditions has an important consequence: that we must acknowledge too that there are many philosophical modernities. Modernity, I will claim, is a polycentric notion, and I will substantiate my claim by examining in some detail one particular non-western philosophical modernity, a remarkable period in 16th to 17th century India where a diversity of philosophical projects fully deserve the label.

In this dissertation, I examine the development of autonomy in the philosophical works of Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. After outlining the centrality of this development to what I call, following Robert Pippin, "philosophical modernity," I show that the figure of genius described in Kant's third Critique becomes the model for the "aesthetic" versions of autonomy articulated by Nietzsche and Heidegger under the names of "sovereignty" and "authenticity" respectively. According to these more recent formulations, autonomy is not understood as rational self-legislation, (...) but as a quasi-artistic "self-creation." Moreover, in each of these versions of aesthetic autonomy, I claim that in spite of a disavowal of mimesis understood in a Platonic sense, an implicit reliance is placed upon the operations of a "higher" sense of mimesis, a mimesis of freedom, that enables autonomy to be exemplified and, paradoxically, "imitated." For Kant, this mimesis of freedom accounts for both the continuity and discontinuity of art-historical traditions. In Nietzsche and Heidegger, however, this covert deployment of mimesis has implications for our understanding of historicity more generally, and the relationship between history and modernity in particular. After showing what these implications are, I comment on the problems and limits of "aesthetic autonomy," especially when it is understood politically or collectively, and utterly decoupled from any moral constraints. (shrink)

Many women wrote philosophy in nineteenth-century Britain, and they wrote across the full range of philosophical topics. Yet these important women thinkers have been left out of the philosophical canon and many of them are barely known today. The aim of this book is to put them back on the map. It introduces twelve women philosophers - Mary Shepherd, Harriet Martineau, Ada Lovelace, George Eliot, Frances Power Cobbe, Helena Blavatsky, Julia Wedgwood, Victoria Welby, Arabella Buckley, Annie Besant, Vernon Lee, and (...) Constance Naden. Alison Stone looks at their views on naturalism, philosophy of mind, evolution, morality and religion, and progress in history. She shows how these women interacted and developed their philosophical views in conversation with one another, not only with their male contemporaries. The rich print and periodical culture of the period enabled these women to publish philosophy in forms accessible to a general readership, despite the restrictions women faced, such as having limited or no access to university education. Stone explains how these women became excluded from the history of philosophy because there was a cultural shift at the end of the nineteenth century towards specialised forms of philosophical writing, which depended on academic credentials that were still largely unavailable to women. (shrink)

Featuring essays from leading philosophical scholars, __12 Modern Philosophers__ explores the works, origins, and influences of twelve of the most important late 20th Century philosophers working in the analytic tradition. Draws on essays from well-known scholars, including Thomas Baldwin, Catherine Wilson, Adrian Moore and Lori Gruen Locates the authors and their oeuvre within the context of the discipline as a whole Considers how contemporary philosophy both draws from, and contributes to, the broader intellectual and cultural milieu.

The first philosophers paved the way for the work of Plato and Aristotle - and hence for the whole of Western thought. Aristotle said that philosophy begins with wonder, and the first Western philosophers developed theories of the world which express simultaneously their sense of wonder and their intuition that the world should be comprehensible. But their enterprise was by no means limited to this proto-scientific task. Through, for instance, Heraclitus' enigmatic sayings, the poetry of Parmenides and Empedocles, and Zeno's (...) paradoxes, the Western world was introduced to metaphysics, rationalist theology, ethics, and logic, by thinkers who often seem to be mystics or shamans as much as philosophers or scientists in the modern mould. And out of the Sophists' reflections on human beings and their place in the world arose and interest in language, and in political, moral, and social philosophy. This volume contains a translation of all the most important fragments of the Presocratics and Sophists, and of the most informative testimonia from ancient sources, supplemented by lucid commentary. (shrink)

More than 700 alphabetically organized entries by an international team of contributors provide a fascinating survey of French culture post 1945. Entries include: * advertising * Beur cinema * Coco Chanel * decolonization * écriture feminine * football * francophone press * gay activism * Seuil * youth culture Entries range from short factual/biographical pieces to longer overview articles. All are extensively cross-referenced and longer entries are 'facts-fronted' so important information is clear at a glance. It includes a thematic contents (...) list, extensive index and suggestions for further reading. The Encyclopedia will provide hours of enjoyable browsing for all francophiles, and essential cultural context for students of French, Modern History, Comparative European Studies and Cultural Studies. (shrink)

This work is a collection of the philosophical correspondences of English women thinkers of the late seventeenth century. It includes letters to and from some of the most famous philosophers of the age, including Locke and Leibniz. Their letters range over a wide variety of philosophical subjects, from religion and ethics to knowledge and metaphysics. The introductory essays and annotations to this work make these women's ideas accessible and comprehensible to modern readers. Taken as a whole, the collection significantly (...) enhances our appreciation of women's involvement in the shaping and development of philosophy from 1650 to 1700. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno's multifaceted work has exerted a profound impact on far-ranging discourses and critical practices in late modernity. His analysis of the fate of art following its alleged end, of ethical imperatives "after Auschwitz," of the negative dialectic of myth and freedom from superstition, of the manipulation of consciousness by the unequal siblings of fascism and the culture industry, and of the narrowly-conceived concept of reason that has given rise to an unprecedented exploitation of nature and needless human suffering, (...) all speak to central concerns of our time. The essays collected here analyze the full range of implications emanating from Adorno's demand that the task of critical thinking be to imagine a mode of being in the world that occurs in and through a language that has liberated itself from the spell of an alleged historical and political inevitability, what he once tellingly called a "language without soil." Adorno' s finely chiseled sentences perform a ceaseless gesture of thoughtful vigilance, a vigilance understood not in the sense of moralizing or ethical normativity but of a rigorous attention to the presuppositions of thinking itself. The volume's fresh readings conspire to yield a refractory and unorthodox Adorno, a suggestive and at times infuriating thinker of the first order, whose intellectual gestures sponsor politically conscious modes of theoretical speculation in a late modernity that may still have a future because its language and aspirations are without soil. Also included is an annotated translation of a seminal interview Adorno gave in 1969 concerning the relationship of Critical Theory to political activism. In it, the dialectical interplay between thought and action forcefully emerges. (shrink)

Jonathan Bennett engages with the thought of six great thinkers of the early modern period: Descaretes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume. While not neglecting the historical setting of each, his chief focus is on the words they wrote. What problem is being tackled? How exactly is the solution meant to work? Does it succeed? If not, why not? What can be learned from its success or failure? For newcomers to the early modern scene, this clearly written work is (...) an excellent introduction to it. Those already in the know can learn how to argue with the great philosophers of the past, treating them as colleagues, antagonists, students, teachers. (shrink)

Philosophy evolves as the philosophical imagination of thinkers seek answers to emerging data and circumstances that inherited perspectives did not provide. This short history of philosophy shows how materialism, immaterialism, rationalism, empiricism, phenomenalism, historicism, existentialism, pragmatism, hermeneutics, the linguistic turn, and feminism developed to sharpen and enlarge the modern mind.

In the mid-seventeenth century a movement of self-styled experimental philosophers emerged in Britain. Originating in the discipline of natural philosophy amongst Fellows of the fledgling Royal Society of London, it soon spread to medicine and by the eighteenth century had impacted moral and political philosophy and even aesthetics. Early modern experimental philosophers gave epistemic priority to observation and experiment over theorising and speculation. They decried the use of hypotheses and system-building without recourse to experiment and, in some quarters, developed (...) a philosophy of experiment. The movement spread to the Netherlands and France in the early eighteenth century and later impacted Germany. Its important role in early modern philosophy was subsequently eclipsed by the widespread adoption of the Kantian historiography of modern philosophy, which emphasised the distinction between rationalism and empiricism and had no place for the historical phenomenon of early modern experimental philosophy. The re-emergence of interest in early modern experimental philosophy roughly coincided with the development of contemporary x-phi and there are some important similarities between the two. (shrink)

This book is a history of modern European philosophy, focusing on the great philosophers of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, from Descartes through Nietzsche, all of whom develop comprehensive systems of thought. Such a history can be seen as telling a story (indeed, the very word "story" comes from the Latin word historia). It has been traditionally understood since ancient times that a good story has a beginning, an end, and a middle that reasonably moves us from the (...) beginning to its end. Although it may seem a bit artificial, we can think of the history of modern European philosophy as beginning in the 1620s, when Descartes was writing his Rules for the Direction of the Mind, and ending in 1900, with the death of Nietzsche. In some ways, the development from the former to the latter is a process of intellectual radicalization. Yet a focus that persists through this process is an emphasis on the individual thinker as the subject of experience, belief, knowledge, and action. (shrink)

Volume I. Ancient philosophers -- volume II. Medieval philosophers -- volume III. Modern philosophers -- volume IV. Contemporary philosophers.

In the seventeenth century the microscope opened up a new world of observation, and, according to Catherine Wilson, profoundly revised the thinking of scientists and philosophers alike. The interior of nature, once closed off to both sympathetic intuition and direct perception, was now accessible with the help of optical instruments. The microscope led to a conception of science as an objective, procedure-driven mode of inquiry and renewed interest in atomism and mechanism. Focusing on the earliest forays into microscopical research, from (...) 1620 to 1720, this book provides us with both a compelling technological history and a lively assessment of the new knowledge that helped launch philosophy into the modern era. Wilson argues that the discovery of the microworld--and the apparent role of living animalcula in generation, contagion, and disease--presented metaphysicians with the task of reconciling the ubiquity of life with human-centered theological systems. It was also a source of problems for philosophers concerned with essences, qualities, and the limits of human knowledge, whose positions are echoed in current debates about realism and instrument-mediated knowledge. Covering the contributions of pioneering microscopists (Leeuwenhoek, Swammerdam, Malpighi, Grew, and Hooke) and the work of philosophers interested in the microworld (Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, Malebranche, Locke, and Berkeley), she challenges historians who view the abstract sciences as the sole catalyst of the Scientific Revolution as she stresses the importance of observational and experimental science to the modern intellect. (shrink)

This book presents the views of 22 women philosophers from outside the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian worlds. These eminent thinkers are from Mesopotamia, India, Tibet, China, Korea, Japan, Australia, America, the Philippines and Nigeria. Six philosophers, the earliest of whom predates the Greek pre-Socratics by two thousand years, lived at “the dawn of philosophy”; another six from late Antiquity through the Classical period; five more taught and wrote during the Middle Ages up to the Age of Exploration, and yet five others (...) were active during the modern period to the mid-twentieth century. Most belonged to major philosophical traditions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Zen, or Sufism. The chapters of the book describe the life and views of the philosophers, outline the fundamental features of their respective schools, and contain translations of their writings. The book is intended for scholars of philosophy and women’s studies who wish to expand their knowledge of non-Western philosophical traditions and is ideally suited for undergraduate education. Comprehensive multilingual bibliographies of carefully documented sources offer scholars many promising resources for further research. (shrink)

Philosophical Perspectives on Modern Qur'anic Exegesis: Key Paradigms and Concepts, by Massimo Campanini, is a very interesting book and actually quite important in signaling the arrival of philosophy in modern times as part of Qur'anic studies. In the past the discipline has tended to be on the outskirts of the study of the religion of Islam and its Book, but in recent years philosophy has crept closer and closer to the mainstream discussion of the Qur'an. Campanini has made (...) a real contribution not only to our understanding of the Book but also to how to go about studying it.Like many good reads it has heroes and villains, and in the former camp are Nasr Abu Zayd and the school of Fazlur Rahman, however they are... (shrink)

Much recent work has been done on Plato’s notion of the female Guardian, but examples are limited. Jane Duran argues that aristocratic women of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are indeed exemplary and embody the concept of Guardianship.

This book consists of fifteen dialogues between Bryan Magee and some of the outstanding thinkers of the twentieth century. It includes contributions from Isaiah Berlin, Noam Chomsky, W. V. O. Quine, A. J. Ayer, Iris Murdoch, and Herbert Marcuse.

The question is, of whether alongside a theme and method concentrated philosophy teaching it would be sensisible for young people to have a teaching form where great philosophers themselves are the centre of interest and are presented as personalities engaged in philosophical research. As an illustration the philosophers Plato, René Descartes, John Locke and Immanuel Kant, who essentially laid down the foundations of modern scientific thinking, would be presented in relationship to teaching practice. This train of thought can be (...) extended without exception for all nations and all forms of culture so long as the conditions of peaceableness and civilizing productivity are met with. Exemplary biographies could play a large role for young people with regard to their psychological development. (shrink)

Greek Philosophers of the Hellenistic Age examines an important but frequently neglected group of philosophers writing after Aristotle between the third and first centuries B.C. The work of a distinguished intellectual historian, this book is based on an erudite reading of a vast number of primary sources: the Greek and Latin writings of the philosophers, and the fragments, paraphrases, and testimonies from their lost works. Kristeller explores the thought of Epicurus; Zenon and Cleanthes, the founder of the Stoic school and (...) his successor; Pyrrhon and Arcesilaus, the founder of Skepticism and the philosopher who introduced it into the Platonic Academy; and Chrysippus, the third head of the Stoic school and its most important representative. Other figures include Carneades and Philo of Larissa, the second and third representatives of Skepticism in the Platonic Academy, respectively; Panaetius, the first leader of Middle Stoicism; and Antiochus of Ascalon, the head of the Academy, who led it back from Skepticism and prepared Middle Platonism, which paved the way for Neoplatonism. Originally presented as a series of lectures before the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, Greek Philosophers of the Hellenistic Age assesses a group of philosophers who exerted an enormous influence upon pagan and Christian writers of late antiquity - including Cicero and St. Augustine - and on many medieval and early modern philosophers, theologians, and other thinkers. (shrink)

_One Hundred Twentieth-Century Philosophers_ offers biographical information and critical analysis of the life, work and impact of some of the most significant figures in philosophy this century. Taken from the acclaimed _Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers_, the 100 entries are alphabetically organised, from Adorno to Zhang Binglin, and cover individuals from both continental and analytic philosophy. The entries have an identical four-part structure making it easy to compare and contrast information, comprising: * biographical details * a bibliography of major works (...) * a listing of relevant secondary and critical literature * an appraisal of the philosopher's thoughts and achievements. A separate glossary provides an introduction to the origins, development and main features of major philosophical schools and movements and offers select bibliographies to guide the reader to further research. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been renewed interest in Pyrrhonism among both philosophers and historians of philosophy. This skeptical tradition is complex and multifaceted, since the Pyrrhonian arguments have been put into the service of different enterprises or been approached in relation to interests which are quite distinct. The diversity of conceptions and uses of Pyrrhonism accounts for the diversity of the challenges it is deemed to pose and of the attempts to meet them. The present volume brings together twelve (...) essays by leading specialists which explore the history and philosophical significance of this form of skepticism: they discuss some thorny questions concerning ancient Pyrrhonism, explore its influence on certain modern thinkers, and examine it in relation to contemporary analytic philosophy. The essays combine historical and exegetical analysis with an assessment of the philosophical merits of the Pyrrhonian outlook, with the aim of understanding it both in its historical context and in connection with contemporary concerns. This volume, the first entirely devoted to a detailed study of the Pyrrhonian tradition, is intended to open up new exegetical and philosophical perspectives on Pyrrhonism and to motivate further examination of certain difficult issues. It will be a valuable resource for scholars of ancient philosophy, historians of modern philosophy, and epistemologists, as well as for graduate students interested in skepticism. (shrink)

History and Philosophy of Modern Mathematics was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The fourteen essays in this volume build on the pioneering effort of Garrett Birkhoff, professor of mathematics at Harvard University, who in 1974 organized a conference of mathematicians and historians of modern mathematics to examine how the two disciplines approach the history of (...) mathematics. In History and Philosophy of Modern Mathematics, William Aspray and Philip Kitcher bring together distinguished scholars from mathematics, history, and philosophy to assess the current state of the field. Their essays, which grow out of a 1985 conference at the University of Minnesota, develop the basic premise that mathematical thought needs to be studied from an interdisciplinary perspective. The opening essays study issues arising within logic and the foundations of mathematics, a traditional area of interest to historians and philosophers. The second section examines issues in the history of mathematics within the framework of established historical periods and questions. Next come case studies that illustrate the power of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of mathematics. The collection closes with a look at mathematics from a sociohistorical perspective, including the way institutions affect what constitutes mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

Volume 1: The ancient to premodern world, 3000 BCE-1815 CE -- Volume 2: The modern world, 1815-present.

The title of this paper makes an obvious reference to Pippin’s book Modernism as a Philosophical Problem. The paper is divided into three parts. The first part presents Pippin’s conception of Modernity, why it is a philosophical problem, and how two philosophers have responded to it, namely, Kant and Hegel whose position in an attenuated manner Pippin supports. The second part evokes dimensions of Merleau-Ponty’s thought which contest Pippin’s Hegelianism. The third part of the paper offers a different conception of (...) Modernity drawn from the work of Claude Lefort. Lefort’s understanding of Modernity avails itself of aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, in particular: Hyper-reflection and Institution. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe famously argued that "modern moral philosophy" centrally involved unsupported notions of obligation and culpability. Modern Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to Kant exhibits, for the first time, resources that modern moral philosophers had to respond to Anscombe's challenge, also enhancing our own philosophical grasp of morality and its foundations.

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)

Eighteen of the world's most eminent philosophers of recent years tackle central questions of philosophy. They discuss mind, morality, freedom, identity, religion, politics, and philosophy itself. This anthology of lectures from the Royal Institute of Philosophy offers a fascinating sampler of philosophy at its best.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, and: Anne Conway: A Woman PhilosopherJane DuranWomen Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, by Jacqueline Broad; 204 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. $65.00. Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, by Sarah Hutton; 280 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. $75.00.Recent work on women philosophers has, in general, approached the topic from two vantage points: on the one hand, a number of anthologies have (...) been published, wherein commentators present a small portion of the woman thinker's work, often without the background necessary for a fuller understanding. On the other hand, some few women philosophers have been the subject of full-length works, but these have tended, by and large, to be women thinkers of the twentieth century, with whose work we are already familiar. Two recent books, one by Jacqueline Broad and the other by Sarah Hutton, go a long way toward improving the situation.Work by Eileen O'Neill, Sarah Hutton and Margaret Atherton, among others, has helped familiarize us with the notion that the seventeenth century—that era so commonly associated with Descartes and the rise of modern philosophy—was also a time of rich theorizing by women philosophers. Jacqueline Broad's book possesses many virtues: it has the finely-tuned style of the careful historian, while at the same time not failing to demonstrate acquaintance with a range of contemporary feminist commentary. Part of the problem in addressing women thinkers of the past is another version of what we are now tempted to call the essentialism problem: does it make sense to think that there is a style that might be demarcated as "feminine," or that might, in some way, pertain uniquely to women theorists? These are difficult issues, but a partial response to the question is to try to remember that it is not for no reason that women thinkers have, indeed, been left out of the canon. As Broad herself says, women philosophers "are now mere footnotes to the standard historical-intellectual accounts of the early modern period" (p. 1).Broad does a superb job of navigating between the need to set out the plain tenets of the thinker's philosophy, and the desire to try to tie it into these larger questions. In six chapters, she addresses the work of Elizabeth of Bohemia, [End Page 200] Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, Damaris Masham and Catharine Trotter Cockburn The chapters on Elizabeth, Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell are particularly strong—here part of the difficulty is that we do have familiar commentaries addressing the work of these women, and it is hard to try to see them in a new light. We are accustomed, for example, to think of Elizabeth merely as Descartes's correspondent. As is the case with information that is currently coming to bear on the question of Harriet Taylor Mill's input into the work of John Stuart Mill, it is difficult for us to see Elizabeth as a thinker in her own right, or, indeed, to give her the credit that Descartes himself gave her; as Broad notes, he had described her as "the only person I have so far found who has completely understood all my previous works" (p. 13). Margaret Cavendish's reputation has suffered from the somewhat scattered approach of her writings, and Broad cites her "reputation for eccentricity" (p. 38). Nevertheless, the sheer volume of her work and its allusion to the problems addressed by the Cambridge Platonists (areas also worked on by Anne Conway) demands that she be taken far more seriously than she has in the past. Astell has become known largely for her more overtly feminist works, such as A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, but she was also the author of several other pieces addressing issues in metaphysics, and again the amount of her work and its citation during her own time would militate against the notion that it should not receive thorough examination.Broad does a wonderful job of setting out the main philosophical questions found in these theorists' works, and she excels at pitting their views against those of the various male philosophers whose work—according to... (shrink)

There are many reasons to include texts written by women in early modern philosophy courses. The most obvious one is accuracy: women helped to shape the philosophical landscape of the time. Thus, to craft a syllabus that wholly excludes women is to give students an inaccurate picture of the early modern period. Since it seems safe to assume that we all aim for accuracy, this should be reason enough to include women writers in our courses. This article nonetheless (...) offers an additional reason: when students are exposed to philosophical texts written by women, they learn that women have been, are, and can be philosophers. Given how underrepresented women are in philosophy, this finding is significant. If we aim to change the face of philosophy—so that it includes more women—we must include texts written by women in our syllabi. The article considers various obstacles faced by those who work to respond to this call to action. (shrink)