In the most comprehensive account to date of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of language, Alexander Stern explores the nature of meaning by putting Benjamin in dialogue with Wittgenstein.

Known largely for his essays on culture, aesthetics, and literature, Walter Benjamin also wrote on the philosophy of language. This early work is famously obscure and considered hopelessly mystical by some. But for Alexander Stern, it contains important insights and anticipates—in some respects surpasses—the later thought of a central figure in the philosophy of language, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

As described in The Fall of Language, Benjamin argues that “language as such” is not a means for communicating an extra-linguistic reality but an all-encompassing medium of expression in which everything shares. Borrowing from Johann Georg Hamann’s understanding of God’s creation as communication to humankind, Benjamin writes that all things express meanings, and that human language does not impose meaning on the objective world but translates meanings already extant in it. He describes the transformations that language as such undergoes while making its way into human language as the “fall of language.” This is a fall from “names”—language that responds mimetically to reality—to signs that designate reality arbitrarily.

While Benjamin’s approach initially seems alien to Wittgenstein’s, both reject a designative understanding of language; both are preoccupied with Russell’s paradox; and both try to treat what Wittgenstein calls “the bewitchment of our understanding by means of language.” Putting Wittgenstein’s work in dialogue with Benjamin’s sheds light on its historical provenance and on the turn in Wittgenstein’s thought. Although the two philosophies diverge in crucial ways, in their comparison Stern finds paths for understanding what language is and what it does.

This study of the questions of final causality is arranged in historical order from Aristotle to contemporary anthropic-principle cosmology. It discusses such teleological issues as chance and providence, and Aristotle's definition of nature in relation t

Immanuel Kant’s claim that the categorical imperative of morality is based in practical reason has long been a source of puzzlement and doubt, even for sympathetic interpreters. Kant’s own explanations, which mainly concern his often-criticized formula of universal law, are laconic and obscure, leading interpreters to dismiss them in favor of less ambitious claims involving his other famous formulas.

In The Form of Practical Knowledge, Stephen Engstrom provides an illuminating new interpretation of the categorical imperative, arguing that we have exaggerated and misconceived Kant’s break with tradition: Kant never departs from the classical conception of practical reason as a capacity for knowledge of the good. His distinctive contribution is the idea that morality’s imperatives express the form of such knowledge.

By developing an account of practical knowledge that situates Kant’s ethics within his broader epistemology and rethinks numerous topics in his moral psychology and in his account of practical reason (including desire, intention, choice, will, as well as pleasure, happiness, and the good), Engstrom’s work promises to deepen and to reshape our understanding of Kantian ethics.

The first treatment of contemporary thought by the acclaimed cultural critic. In books lauded as "brilliant,"* "exhilarating,"** and "profound,"*** Roberto Calasso has revealed the unexpected intersections of ancient and modern through topics ranging from Greek and Indian mythology to what a legendary African kingdom can tell us about the French Revolution. In this first translation of his most important essays, Calasso brings his powerful intellect and elegant prose style to bear on the essential thinkers of our time, providing a sweeping analysis of the current state of Western culture. "Forty-nine steps" refers to the Talmudic doctrine that there are forty-nine steps to meaning in every passage of the Torah. Employing this interpretive approach, Calasso offers a "secret history" of European literature and philosophy in the wake of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. Calasso analyzes how figures ranging from Gustav Flaubert, Gottfried Benn, Karl Kraus, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, and Theodor Adorno have contributed to, or been emblematic of, the current state of Western thought. The book's theme, writ large, is the power of fable-specifically, its persistence in art and literature despite its exclusion from orthodox philosophy. In its breadth and the nature of its concerns, The Forty-nine Steps is a philosophical and literary twin to the widely-praised The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. Combining erudition with engaging prose and original insights, Calasso contributes a daring new interpretation of some of the most challenging writers of the past 150 years. Roberto Calasso is the author of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (1993), The Ruin of Kasch (1994), Ka (1998), and Literature and the Gods (2000). He is the publisher of Adelphi Edizioni and lives in Milan. John Shepley is a freelance writer and translator who lives in New York City. His translation of Pasolini's Roman Nights and Other Stories won the first Italo Calvino Translation Award in 1987.

An essential consideration of these two closely related and influential figures. Michel Foucault and Martin Heidegger are two of the most important intellectual figures of the twentieth century, and yet there are significant, largely unexplored questions about the relationship between their projects. Foucault and Heidegger stages a crucial critical encounter between these two thinkers; in doing so, it clarifies not only the complexities of the Heidegger-Foucault relationship, but also their relevance to questions about truth and nihilism, acquiescence and resistance, and technology and agency that are central to debates in contemporary thought. These essays examine topics ranging from Heidegger's and Foucault's intellectual forebears to their respective understanding of the Enlightenment, modernity, and technology, to their conceptions of power and the political. Contributors: Hubert L. Dreyfus, Stuart Elden, Béatrice Han, Steven V. Hicks, Ladelle McWhorter, Jana Sawicki, Michael Schwartz, Charles E. Scott, William V. Spanos, Leslie Paul Thiele, Rudi Visker, Edith Wyschogrod. Alan Milchman is lecturer in political science and Alan Rosenberg is associate professor of philosophy, both at Queens College, City University of New York.

Frederic Jameson and Film Theory is the first collection of its kind, it assesses and critically responds to Fredric Jameson’s remarkable contribution to film theory. The essays assembled explore key Jamesonian concepts—such as totality, national allegory, geopolitics, globalization, representation, and pastiche—and his historical schema of realism, modernism, and postmodernism, considering, in both cases, how these can be applied, revised, expanded and challenged within film studies. Featuring essays by leading and emerging voices in the field, the volume probes the contours and complexities of neoliberal capitalism across the globe and explores world cinema's situation within these forces by deploying and adapting Jamesonian concepts, and placing them in dialogue with other theoretical paradigms. The result is an innovative and rigorously analytical effort that offers a range of Marxist-inspired approaches towards cinemas from Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America in the spirit of Jameson's famous rallying cry: 'always historicize!'.  

The American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars ranks as one of the leading twentieth-century critics of empiricism—a philosophical approach to knowledge that seeks to ground it in human sense experience. Sellars stood in the forefront of a recoil within analytic philosophy from the foundationalist assumptions of contemporary empiricists. From Empiricism to Expressivism is a far-reaching reinterpretation of Sellars from one of the philosopher’s most brilliant intellectual heirs.

Unifying and extending Sellars’s most important ideas, Robert Brandom constructs a theory of pragmatic expressivism which, in contrast to empiricism, understands meaning and knowledge in terms of the role expressions play in social practices. The key lies in Sellars’s radical reworking of Kant’s idea of the categories: the idea that the expressive job characteristic of many of the most important philosophical concepts is not to describe or explain the empirical world but rather to make explicit essential features of the conceptual framework that makes description and explanation possible.

Brandom reconciles otherwise disparate elements of Sellars’s system, revealing a greater level of coherence and consistency in the philosopher’s arguments against empiricism than has usually been acknowledged. From Empiricism to Expressivism clarifies what Sellars had in mind when he talked about moving analytic philosophy from its Humean to its Kantian phase, and why such a move might be of crucial importance today.

In this study, Charles M. Sherover argues that there is a single, substantial line of development that can be traced from the work of Leibniz through Kant and Royce to Heidegger. Sherover traces a movement from deep within the roots of German idealism through Royce's insights into American pragmatism to the ethical ramifications of Heidegger's existential phenomenology, and then provides an analysis of the neglected ethical and political implications of Heidegger's Being and Time. The essays lead finally to Sherover's own view of the self as a member of a moral and political community.

In From Kant to Husserl, Charles Parsons examines a wide range of historical opinion on philosophical questions, from mathematics to phenomenology. Amplifying his early ideas on Kant’s philosophy of arithmetic, Parsons uses Kant’s lectures on metaphysics to explore how his arithmetical concepts relate to the categories. He then turns to early reactions by two immediate successors of Kant, Johann Schultz and Bernard Bolzano, to shed light on disputed questions regarding interpretation of Kant’s philosophy of mathematics. Interested, as well, in what Kant meant by “pure natural science,” Parsons considers the relationship between the first Critique and the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. His commentary on Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic departs from mathematics to engage the vexed question of what it tells about the meaning of Kant’s transcendental idealism.

Proceeding on to phenomenology, Parsons examines Frege’s evolving idea of extensions, his attitude toward set theory, and his correspondence, particularly exchanges with Russell and Husserl. An essay on Brentano brings out, in the case of judgment, an alternative to the now standard Fregean view of negation, and, on truth, alternatives to the traditional correspondence view that are still discussed today. Ending with the question of why Husserl did not take the “linguistic turn,” a final essay included here marks the only article-length discussion of Husserl Parsons has ever written, despite a long-standing engagement with this philosopher.

Plotinus is often accused of writing haphazardly, with little concern for the integral unity of a treatise. By analyzing each treatise as a whole, From the Alien to the Alone finds much evidence that he constructed them skillfully, with the parts working together in subtle ways. This insight was also key in translating several central passages by considering the flow of the argument as a whole to shed light on the difficulties in these passages as well as reveal the structure often latent in particular treatise. The volume also serves to clarify Plotinus’ rich use of images. Commentators, for instance, tend to take the images of light and warmth to explain the relation of soul and body as in conflict, with light casting out warmth. A close look at the text, however, reveals that Plotinus uses each image to correct the limitations of the other. Thus, since the soul is incorporeal, it is actually more transcendent than light and as activating the body is more completely present than warmth. Similarly, recent commentators are quick to take the related impassibility of the soul as implying a Cartesian gap between body and soul. The problem Plotinus faces, however, is that his description of the soul’s pervasive presence in the body jeopardizes its impassibility as in the intelligible. His effort then is actually to introduce a gap that preserves the soul’s nature, rather than overcome a gap that would make the very existence of the body problematic. While this work confirms much recent scholarly consensus on Plotinus, many of Gurtler's interpretations and general conclusions give constructive challenges to some existing modes of understanding Plotinus’ thought. The arguments and their textual evidence, with the accompanying Greek, provide the reader with direct evidence for testing these conclusions as well as appreciating the nature of Plotinus’ philosophizing.

This book is the first philosophical study in English devoted to Antonio Rosmini (1797-1855) for over a century.