The most complete and accessible guide in any language to this key contemporary thinker. Alain Badiou is one of the most inventive and compelling philosophers working in France today--a thinker who, in these days of cynical resignation and academic specialization, is exceptional in every sense. Guided by disciplines ranging from mathematics to psychoanalysis, inspired as much by Plato and Cantor as by Mao and Mallarmé, Badiou's work renews, in the most varied and spectacular terms, a decidedly ancient understanding of philosophy-philosophy as a practice conditioned by truths, understood as militant processes of emancipation or transformation. This book is the first comprehensive introduction to Badiou's thought to appear in any language. Assuming no prior knowledge of his work, it provides a thorough and searching overview of all the main components of his philosophy, from its decisive political orientation through its startling equation of ontology with mathematics to its resolute engagement with its principal competition (from Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Deleuze, among others). The book draws on all of Badiou's published work and a wide sampling of his unpublished work in progress, along with six years of correspondence with the author. Peter Hallward pays careful attention to the aspect of Badiou's work most liable to intimidate readers in continental philosophy and critical theory: its crucial reliance on certain key developments in modern mathematics. Eschewing unnecessary technicalities, Hallward provides a highly readable discussion of each of the basic features of Badiou's ontology, as well as his more recent account of appearance and "being-there." Without evading the difficulties, Peter Hallward demonstrates in detail and in depth why Badiou's ongoing philosophical project should be recognized as the most resourceful and inspiring of his generation. Peter Hallward is lecturer in the French Department at King's College, London. His previous publications include Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific (2002) and a translation of Alain Badiou's Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2001).

In the past twenty years or more, there has been a growing interest among philosophers and theologians alike in the transcendentals and especially in the beautiful. This seems fortuitous since so much of contemporary culture is fixated in many ways on beauty, on what might be called a superficial or man-made beauty, intent on outward appearance, with little or no concern for the human person’s interiority and distinctive nature. The Ancients and the Medievals, on the contrary, were sensitive not only to the beauty of nature and art but also to beauty as intelligible, that is, to the beauty of moral harmony and of metaphysical splendor. While the question of whether the beautiful is in fact a transcendental aspect of being continues to be a subject of dispute in contemporary scholarship, the relationship between the beautiful and the good has been accepted since ancient times and has been attended to in recent publications. None of these publications, however, offers a systematic treatment of this relationship by drawing from the wisdom of both ancient and medieval thought in such a way as to bring together the work of scholars in this tradition. Beauty and the Good intends therefore to make a singular contribution by presenting a richer alternative to the contemporary cult of beauty and appearance on the one hand, and to the concomitant decline of real beauty on the other hand. In addition to highlighting the centrality of beauty in the Aristotelian account of moral virtue, where virtue is kalon and virtuous actions are done for the sake of kalon—an account which is found echoed in the medieval notion of intrinsic goodness (bonum honestum), understood as intelligible or spiritual beauty—this volume will provide the metaphysical and theological grounding for beauty, as influenced in part by Plato and Neoplatonism, together with a much needed account of how we know and judge beauty, and how for the recognition of true good and real beauty we need to be properly disposed. The integration of philosophical and theological reflection on the nature and relationship of beauty and the good, on our perception and judgment of beauty and of the good as beautiful, and on the motivational role of beauty in human action has as its goal to produce a coherent volume of essays.

Brings together articles that influenced the scholarly work of Ralph McInerny.

Truth, reason, and objectivity--can we survive without them? What happens to law, science, and the pursuit of social justice when such ideas and ideals are rejected? These questions are at the heart of the controversies between traditionalists and "postmodernists" that Barbara Herrnstein Smith examines in her wide-ranging book, which also offers an original perspective on the perennial--perhaps eternal--clash of belief and skepticism, on our need for intellectual stability and our experience of its inevitable disruption.

Focusing on the mutually frustrating impasses to which these controversies often lead and on the charges--"absurdity," "irrationalism," "complicity," "blindness," "stubbornness"--that typically accompany them, Smith stresses our tendency to give self-flattering reasons for our own beliefs and to discount or demonize the motives of those who disagree with us. Her account of the resulting cognitive and rhetorical dynamics of intellectual conflict draws on recent research and theory in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, developmental psychology, and the history and sociology of science, as well as on contemporary philosophy and language theory.

Smith's analyses take her into important ongoing debates over the possibility of an objective grounding of legal and political judgments, the continuing value of Enlightenment rationalism, significant challenges to dominant ideas of scientific truth, and proper responses to denials of the factuality of the Holocaust. As she explores these and other controversies, Smith develops fresh ways to understand their motives and energies, and more positive ways to see the operations of intellectual conflict more generally.

Electrifying when first delivered in 1973, legendary in the years since, Dieter Henrich's lectures on German Idealism were the first contact a major German philosopher had made with an American audience since the onset of World War II. They remain one of the most eloquent explanations and interpretations of classical German philosophy and of the way it relates to the concerns of contemporary philosophy. Thanks to the editorial work of David Pacini, the lectures appear here with annotations linking them to editions of the masterworks of German philosophy as they are now available.

Henrich describes the movement that led from Kant to Hegel, beginning with an interpretation of the structure and tensions of Kant's system. He locates the Kantian movement and revival of Spinoza, as sketched by F. H. Jacobi, in the intellectual conditions of the time and in the philosophical motivations of modern thought. Providing extensive analysis of the various versions of Fichte's Science of Knowledge, Henrich brings into view a constellation of problems that illuminate the accomplishments of the founders of Romanticism, Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, and of the poet Hölderlin's original philosophy. He concludes with an interpretation of the basic design of Hegel's system.

For anyone interested in an epoch of almost unrivaled intellectual activity and debate in India, the sixth-century Madhyamakahrdayakārikā along with its auto-commentary, the Tarkajvālā, is an indispensable resource. This partly doxographical treatise, composed by the Madhyamaka philosopher Bhāviveka, is the earliest and most substantial work to present and critically examine Śrāvaka, Yogācāra, Sāmkhya, Vaiśesika, Vedānta, and Mīmāmsā in great detail. Bhāviveka’s text is of unique value in its attempt to identify a Madhyamaka approach to other schools of philosophy as well as in furnishing us with valuable information regarding early Indic systematic philosophy, including what appear to be extracts from original sources that are otherwise unavailable. Most probably it served as a Madhyamaka debate manual for those engaged in discussion with representatives of opposing philosophical schools. Bhāviveka’s treatment of Sāmkhya and Vedānta is of particular importance because of the scarcity of sources pertaining to the early formation and development of these systems of philosophy. The present book includes a critical edition and English translation of the Sāmkhya and Vedānta chapters of the Madhyamakahrdayakārikā and Tarkajvālā along with a historical introduction.

This comprehensive biography of John Vitez, an instrumental figure of the Early Renaissance, presents a complex picture of cultural, political, and religious developments in Central Europe through one man’s life. Drawing on close study of Vitez’s writings and his various political and artistic networks of influence, Tomislav Matić demonstrates the wide scope of this church leader’s involvement in late medieval Central Europe. Not only were Vitez’s writings a catalyst for the introduction of humanism across the region, he was a patron of the arts, an avid astrologer, a master diplomat, and even a kingmaker, thus central to both political and cultural developments.

In this study of the relationship between Boethius and Thomas Aquinas, Ralph McInerny dispels the notion that Aquinas misunderstood the early philosopher and argues instead that he learned from Boethius, assimilated his ideas, and proved to be a reliable interpreter of his thought.