This volume is a collection of thirteen essays written by the late Francis Slade, a contemporary philosopher who has made an original contribution to political philosophy through the clarity of distinction he achieves between the modern state and the natural city/civitas/polis. Slade’s distinction between these two political forms is made in terms of their differing relation to philosophy. The city, as the political form belonging properly to human nature, exists independently of philosophical thought; the form of the state, on the other hand, with its genesis in the deliberate and creative design of philosophical thought, is dependent on philosophy for its coming to be.

Slade’s distinction illuminates the radical transformation in what philosophy understood itself to be that occurs with advent of modernity: the contemplative philosophy of premodernity is displaced in favor of modern philosophy’s active generation of ideal forms, of which the state is an instance. Philosophy is transformed by the erasure of the distinction between theoria and praxis. And it is a differing view of nature that underlies the two versions of philosophy Slade presents in these essays: the givenness of ends as constitutive of natural things is at the heart of the issue. Slade’s work thus has important consequences for the recovery of natural things in their ordinary givenness, a givenness overwhelmed into obscurity by the dominance of the various forms of philosophical idealism and their remarkably successful imposition on nature. Slade’s essays point to the “theological” stance (improperly) adopted by modern idealism, as it constructs a stance from outside nature which confounds the philosophic voice that originally and properly voices what is from within nature.

These essays are introduced by the distinguished philosopher, Robert Sokolowski, a long-time friend of Francis Slade, whom Sokolowski gratefully acknowledges as having had a significant influence on his thought.