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4917 books match the query 'Philosophy' and 1267 start with t

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The Philosopher in Plato's Statesman

Mitchell Miller

Parmenides Publishing, 2004

In the Statesman, Plato brings together--only to challenge and displace--his own crowning contributions to philosophical method, political theory, and drama. In his 1980 study, reprinted here, Mitchell Miller employs literary theory and conceptual analysis to expose the philosophical, political, and pedagogical conflict that is the underlying context of the dialogue, revealing that its chaotic variety of movements is actually a carefully harmonized act of realizing the mean. The original study left one question outstanding: what specifically, in the metaphysical order of things, motivated the nameless Visitor from Elea to abandon bifurcation for his consummating non-bifurcatory division of fifteen kinds at the end of the dialogue? Miller addressed in a separate essay, first published in 1999 and reprinted here. In it, he opens the horizon of interpretation to include the new metaphysics of the Parmenides, the Philebus, and the "unwritten teachings."

"This study demonstrates how the Statesman is the culminating expression of Plato''s lifelong effort, both in Athens and in the Academy, to bring metaphysical insight to the unending political crisis of his times."The Philosopher in Plato's Statesman a trail-blazing work. While not every reader will agree with the lessons Miller himself draws from this approach, none should fail to be impressed by its interpretive power. All this is exciting stuff. The interpretive pathway on which Miller has embarked has the potential for changing the face of scholarship on the late Platonic dialogues. Parmenides [Publishing] is to be commended for making these two important contributions available under a single cover." --Kenneth Sayre, Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame

"Miller casts considerable light on virtually every aspect of the dialogue. . . . All in all, this book is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the Statesman." --Stanley Rosen, Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy, Boston University

MITCHELL MILLER is Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College. He is the author of Plato's Parmenides.

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The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand

Edited by Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen

University of Illinois Press, 1984

     "An excellent book that provides
      a systematic account of Rand's work as a philosopher.... The Philosophic
      Thought of Ayn Rand gathers contributions from professional philosophers
      (some of them quite renowned) to tackle the various components --- metaphysical/epistemological,
      ethical, and social/political --- of Rand's comprehensive system. All the
      contributors demonstrate the particular genius of current academic philosophy:
      the painstaking and meticulous analysis of assumptions with an eye toward
      the coherence and consistency of the conclusions derived therefrom.... Thorough
      and judicious, this book will provide the reader with the intellectual leverage
      necessary to understand an often confusing, always controversial, occasionally
      original, and perhaps curiously contemporary writer and thinker."
      -- Lloyd Lewis, Modern Fiction Studies

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The Philosophical Hitchcock

“Vertigo” and the Anxieties of Unknowingness

Robert B. Pippin

University of Chicago Press, 2017

On the surface, The Philosophical Hitchcock: Vertigo and the Anxieties of Unknowingness, is a close reading of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece Vertigo. This, however, is a book by Robert B. Pippin, one of our most penetrating and creative philosophers, and so it is also much more. Even as he provides detailed readings of each scene in the film, and its story of obsession and fantasy, Pippin reflects more broadly on the modern world depicted in Hitchcock’s films. Hitchcock’s characters, Pippin shows us, repeatedly face problems and dangers rooted in our general failure to understand others—or even ourselves—very well, or to make effective use of what little we do understand. Vertigo, with its impersonations, deceptions, and fantasies, embodies a general, common struggle for mutual understanding in the late modern social world of ever more complex dependencies. By treating this problem through a filmed fictional narrative, rather than discursively, Pippin argues, Hitchcock is able to help us see the systematic and deep mutual misunderstanding and self-deceit that we are subject to when we try to establish the knowledge necessary for love, trust, and commitment, and what it might be to live in such a state of unknowingness.

A bold, brilliant exploration of one of the most admired works of cinema, The Philosophical Hitchcock will lead philosophers and cinephiles alike to a new appreciation of Vertigo and its meanings.

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The Philosophical Life

Arthur P. Urbano

Catholic University of America Press, 2013

Ancient biographies were more than accounts of the deeds of past heroes and guides for moral living. They were also arenas for debating pressing philosophical questions and establishing intellectual credentials, as Arthur P. Urbano argues in this study of biographies composed in Late Antiquity

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The Philosophical Papers of Alan Donagan, Volume 1

Historical Understanding and the History of Philosophy

Alan Donagan

University of Chicago Press, 1994

A major voice in late twentieth-century philosophy, Alan Donagan is distinguished for his theories on the history of philosophy and the nature of morality. The Philosophical Papers of Alan Donagan, volumes 1 and 2, collect 28 of Donagan's most important and best-known essays on historical understanding and ethics from 1957 to 1991.

Volume 1 includes essays on Spinoza, Descartes, Bradley, Collingwood, Russell, Moore, and Popper, as well as two previously unpublished papers on the history of philosophy as a discipline, and on Ryle and Wittgenstein's nature of philosophy. Linked by Donagan's commitment to the central importance of history for philosophy and his interest in problems of historical understanding, these essays represent the remarkable scope of Donagan's thought.

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The Philosophical Papers of Alan Donagan, Volume 2

Action, Reason, and Value

Alan Donagan

University of Chicago Press, 1994

A major voice in late twentieth-century philosophy, Alan Donagan is distinguished for his theories on the history of philosophy and the nature of morality. The Philosophical Papers of Alan Donagan, volumes 1 and 2, collect 28 of Donagan's most important and best-known essays on historical understanding and ethics from 1957 to 1991.

Volume 2 addresses issues in the philosophy of action and moral theory. With papers on Kant, von Wright, Sellars, and Chisholm, this volume also covers a range of questions in applied ethics—from the morality of Truman's decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ethical questions in medicine and law.

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The Philosophical Roots of Anthropology

William Adams

CSLI, 1998

Anthropologists claim to have made mankind aware of its own prehistory and its importance to human self-understanding. Yet, anthropologists seem hardly to have discovered their own discipline's prehistory or to have realized its importance. William Y. Adams attempts to rectify this myopic self-awareness by applying anthropology's own tools on itself and uncovering the discipline's debt to earlier thinkers.

Like most anthropologists, Adams had previously accepted the premise that anthropology's intellectual roots go back no further than the moral philosophy of the Enlightenment, or perhaps at the earliest to the humanism of the Renaissance. In this volume, Adams recognizes that many good ideas were anticipated in antiquity and that these ideas have had a lasting influence on anthropological models in particular. He has chosen five philosophical currents whose influence has been, and is, very widespread, particularly in North American anthropology: progressivism, primitivism, natural law, German idealism, and "Indianology". He argues that the influences of these currents in North American anthropology occur in a unique combination that is not found in the anthropologies of other countries. Without neglecting the anthropologies of other countries, this work serves as the basis for the explanation of the true historical and philosophical underpinnings of anthropology and its goals.

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The Philosophical Status of Diagrams

Mark Greaves

CSLI, 2001

The use of diagrams in logic and geometry has encountered resistance in recent years. For a proof to be valid in geometry, it must not rely on the graphical properties of a diagram. In logic, the teaching of proofs depends on sentenial representations, ideas formed as natural language sentences such as "If A is true and B is true...." No serious formal proof system is based on diagrams.

This book explores the reasons why structured graphics have been largely ignored in contemporary formal theories of axiomatic systems. In particular, it elucidates the systematic forces in the intellectual history of mathematics which have driven the adoption of sentential representational styles over diagrammatic ones. In this book, the effects of historical forces on the evolution of diagrammatically-based systems of inference in logic and geometry are traced from antiquity to the early twentieth-century work of David Hilbert. From this exploration emerges an understanding that the present negative attitudes towards the use of diagrams in logic and geometry owe more to implicit appeals to their history and philosophical background than to any technical incompatibility with modern theories of logical systems.

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The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation

Paul A. Roth

Northwestern University Press, 2019

In The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, Paul A. Roth resolves disputes persisting since the nineteenth century about the scientific status of history. He does this by showing why historical explanations must take the form of a narrative, making their logic explicit, and revealing how the rational evaluation of narrative explanation becomes possible. Roth situates narrative explanations within a naturalistic framework and develops a nonrealist (irrealist) metaphysics and epistemology of history—arguing that there exists no one fixed past, but many pasts. The book includes a novel reading of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, showing how it offers a narrative explanation of theory change in science. This book will be of interest to researchers in historiography, philosophy of history, philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, and epistemology.

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The Philosophical Vision of John Duns Scotus

An Introduction

Mary Beth Ingham

Catholic University of America Press, 2004

In this much-anticipated work, distinguished authors Mary Beth Ingham and Mechthild Dreyer present an accessible introduction to the philosophy of the thirteenth century Franciscan John Duns Scotus

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The Philosophy Scare

The Politics of Reason in the Early Cold War

John McCumber

University of Chicago Press, 2016

From the rise of formalist novels that championed the heroism of the individual to the proliferation of abstract art as a counter to socialist realism, the years of the Cold War had a profound impact on American intellectual life. As John McCumber shows in this fascinating account, philosophy, too, was hit hard by the Red Scare. Detailing the immense political pressures that reshaped philosophy departments in midcentury America, he shows just how radically politics can alter the course of intellectual history.

McCumber begins with the story of Max Otto, whose appointment to the UCLA Philosophy Department in 1947 was met with widespread protest charging him as an atheist. Drawing on Otto’s case, McCumber details the hugely successful conservative efforts that, by 1960, had all but banished the existentialist and pragmatist paradigms—not to mention Marxism—from philosophy departments all across the country, replacing them with an approach that valorized scientific objectivity and free markets and which downplayed the anti-theistic implications of modern thought. As he shows, while there have since been many instances of definitive and even explosive rejection of this conservative trend, its effects can still be seen at American universities today.

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The Philosophy of Alain Locke

Harlem Renaissance and Beyond

edited by Leonard Harris

Temple University Press, 1991

This collection of essays by American philosopher Alain Locke (1885-1954) makes readily available for the first time his important writings on cultural pluralism, value relativism, and critical relativism. As a black philosopher early in this century, Locke was a pioneer: having earned both undergraduate and doctoral degrees at Harvard, he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, studied at the University of Berlin, and chaired the Philosophy Department at Howard University for almost four decades. He was perhaps best known as a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

Locke’s works in philosophy—many previously unpublished—conceptually frame the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro movement and provide an Afro-American critique of pragmatism and value absolutism, and also offer a view of identity, communicative competency, and contextualism. In addition, his major works on the nature of race, race relations, and the role of race-conscious literature are presented to demonstrate the application of his philosophy. Locke’s commentaries on the major philosophers of his day, including James, Royce, Santayana, Perry, and Ehrenfels help tell the story of his relationship to his former teachers and his theoretical affinities.

In his substantial Introduction and interpretive concluding chapter, Leonard Harris describes Locke’s life, evaluates his role as an American philosopher and theoretician of the Harlem Renaissance, situates him in the pragmatist tradition, and outlines his affinities with modern deconstructionist ideas. A chronology of the philosopher’s life and bibliography of his works are also provided. Although much has been written about Alain Locke, this is the first book to focus on his philosophical contributions.

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The Philosophy of Antonio Negri, Volume One

Resistance in Practice

Edited by Timothy S. Murphy

Pluto Press, 2005

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The Philosophy of Antonio Negri, Volume Two

Revolution in Theory

Edited by Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha

Pluto Press, 2007

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The Philosophy of Art

F.W.J. Schelling

University of Minnesota Press, 1989

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The Philosophy of Autobiography

Edited by Christopher Cowley

University of Chicago Press, 2015

We are living through a boom in autobiographical writing. Every half-famous celebrity, every politician, every sports hero—even the non-famous, nowadays, pour out pages and pages, Facebook post after Facebook post, about themselves. Literary theorists have noticed, as the genres of “creative nonfiction” and “life writing” have found their purchase in the academy. And of course psychologists have long been interested in self-disclosure. But where have the philosophers been? With this volume, Christopher Cowley brings them into the conversation.

Cowley and his contributors show that while philosophers have seemed uninterested in autobiography, they have actually long been preoccupied with many of its conceptual elements, issues such as the nature of the self, the problems of interpretation and understanding, the paradoxes of self-deception, and the meaning and narrative structure of human life. But rarely have philosophers brought these together into an overarching question about what it means to tell one’s life story or understand another’s. Tackling these questions, the contributors explore the relationship between autobiography and literature; between story-telling, knowledge, and agency; and between the past and the present, along the way engaging such issues as autobiographical ethics and the duty of writing. The result bridges long-standing debates and illuminates fascinating new philosophical and literary issues.

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The Philosophy of Baruch Spinoza

Richard Kennington

Catholic University of America Press, 2018

This volume is a collection of articles that looks at the work of Baruch Spinoza through his metaphysics, his philosophy of politics and religion, and alternative approaches to Spinoza.

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The Philosophy of Claude Lefort

Interpreting the Political

Bernard Flynn

Northwestern University Press, 2005

From the beginning the French philosopher Claude Lefort has set himself the task of interpreting the political life of modern society-and over time he has succeeded in elaborating a distinctive conception of modern democracy that is linked to both historical analysis and a novel form of philosophical reflection. This book, the first full-scale study of Lefort to appear in English, offers a clear and compelling account of Lefort's accomplishment—its unique merits, its relation to political philosophy within the Continental tradition, and its great relevance today.

Much of what passes for political philosophy in our day is merely politicized philosophical concepts, a distinction author Bernard Flynn underscores as he describes the development of Lefort's truly political philosophy—its ideas formed in response to his own political experience and to the work of certain major figures within the tradition of political thought. Beginning with Lefort's most important single work, his book on Machiavelli, Flynn presents the philosopher's conceptions of politics, modernity, and interpretation in the context within which they took shape. He then draws on a wide variety of Lefort's works to explicate his notions of premodern and modern democracy in which totalitarianism, in Lefort's singular and highly influential theory, is identified as a permanent problem of modernity.

A valuable exposition of one of the most important Continental philosophers of the post-World War II period, Flynn's book is itself a noteworthy work of interpretive philosophy, pursuing the ideas and issues addressed by Lefort to a point of unparalleled clarity and depth.

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The Philosophy of Edmund Burke

A Selection from His Speeches and Writings

Edmund Burke

University of Michigan Press, 1960

Edmund Burke, the greatest Whig spokesman of his day in the British Parliament, was one of the most forceful and rational political thinkers of all time. This selection from his speeches and writings reveals a political philosophy which is viable, even prophetic, in our own time. Burke's distrust of disembodied reason, his vision of the law of all nations, and his wise pragmatism speak to everyone concerned with maintaining the democratic freedoms in an age when millions are subject to the tyranny of abstract political ideas.

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The Philosophy of Epicurus

Letters, Doctrines, and Parallel Passages from Lucretius

Epicurus, translated with commentary and introduction by George K. Strodach

Northwestern University Press, 1963

The teachings of Epicurus, whose philosophy focused on the pursuit of happiness, attracted adherents throughout the ancient Mediterranean world and deeply influenced later European thought. The Philosophy of Epicurus contains a long introductory essay on the philosophy of Epicurus and a selection of primary texts. In in George K. Strodach translates excerpts from “The Life of Epicurous” by Diogenes Laertius, letters to Herodotus, Pythocles, and Menoeceus with parallel passages from Lucretius, and the Vatican collection of Epicurus’s aphorisms. These have become the standard English translations of these classic texts that are foundational to Western philosophy.

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The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig

Edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr

University Press of New England, 2002

Eleven essays on the life and thought of the Jewish philosopher and theologian Franz Rosenzweig.

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The Philosophy of Grammar

Otto Jespersen

University of Chicago Press, 1992

This study grew out of a series of lectures Jespersen gave at Columbia
University in 1909-10, called “An Introduction to English Grammar.”
It is the connected presentation of Jespersen's views of the general
principles of grammar based on years of studying various languages
through both direct observation of living speech and written and
printed documents.

“[The Philosophy of Grammar and Analytic Syntax] set
forth the most extensive and original theory of universal grammar
prior to the work of Chomsky and other generative grammarians of the
last thirty years.”—Arne Juul and Hans F. Nielsen, in Otto
Jespersen: Facets of His Life and Work

“Besides being one of the most perceptive observers and original
thinkers that the field of linguistics has ever known, Jespersen was
also one of its most entertaining writers, and reading The
Philosophy of Grammar is fun. Read it, enjoy it.”—James D.
McCawley, from the Introduction

Otto Jespersen (1860-1943), an authority on the growth and structure
of language, was the Chair of the English Department at the University
of Copenhagen. Among his many works are A Modern English
Grammar and Analytic Syntax, the latter published by the
University of Chicago Press.

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The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity

Volume One: The Doctrine of God

I. A. Il’in, Translated by Philip T. Grier

Northwestern University Press, 2010

This landmark two-volume translation from Russian of The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity marks the first appearance in English of any of the works of Russian philosopher Ivan Aleksandrovich Il’in (Ilyin). Originally published in 1918, on the eve of the Russian civil war, Il'in's commentary on Hegel marked both an apogee of Russian Silver Age philosophy and a significant manifestation of the resurgence of interest in Hegel that began in the early twentieth century.

A. F. Losev accurately observed in the same year it appeared: “Neither the study of Hegel nor the study of contemporary Russian philosophical thought is any longer thinkable without this book of I. A. Il’in’s.” Some Hegel scholars may know this work through the abridged translation into German that Il’in produced himself in 1946. However, that edition omitted most of the original volume two. Noted Hegel scholar Philip T. Grier’s edition—with an introduction setting Il’in’s work in its proper historical, cultural, and philosophical contexts and annotation throughout—represents the first opportunity for non-Russian-speaking readers to acquaint themselves with the full scope of Il’in’s still provocative interpretation of Hegel.

Volume 1 is "The Doctrine of God." Volume 2 is "The Doctrine of Humanity."

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The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity

Volume Two: The Doctrine of Humanity

I. A. Il’in, Translated by Philip T. Grier

Northwestern University Press, 2011

The publication of volume 2 of Philip T. Grier’s translation of The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity completes the first appearance in English of any of the works of Russian philosopher I. A. Il’in (Ilyin).

Most of the contents of volume 2 will be unknown even to those who have read the 1946 German version prepared by Il’in, because in that version he omitted eight of the original ten chapters. These omitted chapters provide an extended reflection on the central categories of Hegel’s moral, legal, and political philosophies, as well as of the philosophy of history. The topics examined are, in order: freedom, humanity, will, right, morality, ethical life, personhood and its virtue, and the state. Contained within these chapters are some notably insightful expositions of core doctrines in Hegel’s philosophy.

Il’in’s colleague A. F. Losev accurately observed in the same year the text first appeared: “Neither the study of Hegel nor the study of contemporary Russian philosophical thought is any longer thinkable without this book of I. A. Il’in’s.”

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The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant

Richard Kennington

Catholic University of America Press, 2018

A collection devoted to mark the bicentennial of the publication of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

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The Philosophy of Improvisation

Gary Peters

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Improvisation is usually either lionized as an ecstatic experience of being in the moment or disparaged as the thoughtless recycling of clichés. Eschewing both of these orthodoxies, The Philosophy of Improvisation ranges across the arts—from music to theater, dance to comedy—and considers the improvised dimension of philosophy itself in order to elaborate an innovative concept of improvisation.

Gary Peters turns to many of the major thinkers within continental philosophy—including Heidegger, Nietzsche, Adorno, Kant, Benjamin, and Deleuze—offering readings of their reflections on improvisation and exploring improvisational elements within their thinking. Peters’s wry, humorous style offers an antidote to the frequently overheated celebration of freedom and community that characterizes most writing on the subject. Expanding the field of what counts as improvisation, The Philosophy of Improvisation will be welcomed by anyone striving to comprehend the creative process.

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The Philosophy of Jesus

Peter Kreeft

St. Augustine's Press, 2007

Amazingly, no one ever seems to have looked at Jesus as a philosopher, or his teaching as philosophy. Yet no one in history has ever had a more radically new philosophy, or made more of a difference to philosophy, than Jesus. He divided all human history into two, into "B.C." and "A.D."; and the history of philosophy is crucial to human history, since philosophy is crucial to man; so how could He not also divide philosophy?

This book (1) looks at Jesus as a complete human being (as well as divine), therefore also as a philosopher; (2) looks at philosophy as Jesus' pre-modern contemporaries did, as a wisdom, a world-view, and a way of life rather than as a super-science (Descartes, Hegel) or as a servant-science (Hobbes, Hume); and (3) looks at philosophy in light of Jesus rather than at Jesus in light of philosophy. It explores the consequences of Etienne Gilson's point that when St. John brought Christianity and Greek philosophy into contact and identified the Messiah the Jews had most deeply sought with the logos that the Greeks had most deeply sought, nothing happened to Christ but something happened to the logos.

This book explores the most radical revolution in the history of philosophy, the differences Jesus made to metaphysics (the philosophy of being), to epistemology (the philosophy of knowing), to anthropology (the philosophy of man), and to philosophical ethics and politics.

And, besides, it has the greatest ending of any philosophy book in a century.

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The Philosophy of John Dewey

Volume 1. The Structure of Experience. Volume 2: The Lived Experience

John Dewey

University of Chicago Press, 1981

The most important of John Dewey's landmark writings on philosophy in a single volume

John J. McDermott's anthology, The Philosophy of John Dewey, provides the best general selection available of the writings of America's most distinguished philosopher and social critic. This comprehensive collection, ideal for use in the classroom and indispensable for anyone interested in the wide scope of Dewey's thought and works, affords great insight into his role in the history of ideas and the basic integrity of his philosophy.

This edition combines in one book the two volumes previously published separately. Volume 1, "The Structure of Experience," contains essays on metaphysics, the logic of inquiry, the problem of knowledge, and value theory. In volume 2, "The Lived Experience," Dewey's writings on pedagogy, ethics, the aesthetics of the "live creature," politics, and the philosophy of culture are presented. McDermott has prefaced each essay with a helpful explanatory note and has written an excellent general introduction to the anthology.

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The Philosophy of John Henry Newman and Pragmatism

A Comparison

Marial Corona

Catholic University of America Press, 2023

In recent years, interest in John Henry Newman as a philosopher has gained momentum. This work places his philosophical insights in conversation with philosophers from the pragmatic tradition, particularly with C. S. Peirce, the classical pragmatists, and those who have followed their line, and shows several lines of concurrence. It argues that Newman overcame the modern philosophy of his time by reconnecting to the Aristotelian tradition in a very similar way to how Peirce did it fifty years later and the new pragmatists a century after. Without claiming that Newman is a pragmatist philosopher, pragmatism is used as a foil, or point of access, to delve into Newman’s philosophy and bring forth the richness of his thought while placing him in the canon of philosophy. This approach deepens the understanding of his philosophical contributions and widens their reach to circles that have previously not engaged with him. Further, this study provides a means to understand pragmatism’s resources from a seldom-used vantage point and perhaps appreciate its fruitfulness in a new way. Much emphasis is placed in Newman’s texts that refer to his search for and commitment to the truth. The particular nuances of his thought that are brought to light showcase the effective intellectual resources that his writings contain. Newman does not provide ready-made answers to today’s questions, but the way he analyzes and engages with the quandaries of his time can point us to creative and fruitful ways of engaging with those of our times.

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The Philosophy of Law in Historical Perspective

Carl Joachim Friedrich

University of Chicago Press, 1963

Mr. Friedrich develops his own position within the framework of the history of Western legal philosophy from the Old Testament down to contemporary writers. In addition, he highlights some important problems of the present day, including certain aspects of legal realism. First published in 1958, this book has been revised and enlarged.

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The Philosophy of Living

François Jullien

Seagull Books, 2015

This volume asks poignant questions about what it means to be alive and inhabit the present.

Living holds us between two places. It expresses what is most elementary—to be alive—and the absoluteness of our aspiration—finally living! But could we desire anything other than to live? In The Philosophy of Living, François Jullien meditates on Far Eastern thought and philosophy to analyze concepts that can be folded into a complete philosophy of living, including the idea of the moment, the ambiguity of the in-between, and what he calls the “transparency of morning.” Jullien here develops a strategy of living that goes beyond morality and dwells in the space between health and spirituality.

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The Philosophy of Living Nature

Zdenek Kratochvíl

Karolinum Press, 2016

The Philosophy of Living Nature focuses on the approach of the Western philosophical tradition to physis, or nature. Zdenek Kratochvíl reveals, on a philosophical level, the roots of today’s environmental crisis, presenting an etymological investigation of the concept of “nature” itself and arguing for the necessity of focusing on the world and its plurality as the background for phenomena and the context of things, as a unity of horizons, as a paradigm for understanding nature. However, as Kratochvíl makes clear, questions about the natural world have stakes far beyond the realm of philosophy: chapters in this wide-ranging and richly nuanced book deal with the identity of living organisms and the relation of life and being. Together, they provide an analysis of Darwinian and neo-Darwinian evolution and question in what sense we may know living beings.

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The Philosophy of Loyalty

Josiah Royce

Vanderbilt University Press, 1995

A transitional book in the development of Royce's thought, originally published in 1908, The Philosophy of Loyalty is a key to understanding his influence on the development of pragmatism. Royce's basic argument is clear. Individual wills are a given, and social training is a natural aspect of community.

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The Philosophy of Movement

An Introduction

Thomas Nail

University of Minnesota Press, 2024

An influential thinker distills years of work on the philosophy of movement into one accessible account

Why are city dwellers worldwide walking on average ten percent faster than they were a decade ago? Why are newcomer immigrant groups so often maligned when migration has always constituted civilization? To analyze and understand the depth of the reasons, Thomas Nail suggests that it serves us well to turn to a philosophy of movement. Synthesizing and extending many years of his influential work, The Philosophy of Movement is a comprehensive argument for how motion is the primary force in human and natural history.

Nail critiques the bias toward stasis at the core of Western thought, asking: what would a philosophy that began with the primacy of movement look like? Interrogating the consequences of movement throughout history and in daily life in the twenty-first century, he draws connections and traces patterns between scales of reality, periods of history, and fields of knowledge. In our age of rapid movements shaped by accelerating climate change and ensuing mass global migration, as well as ubiquitous digital media, Nail provides a contemporary philosophy that helps us understand how we got here and how to grapple with these interlocking challenges.

With a foreword by philosopher Daniel W. Smith, The Philosophy of Movement: An Introduction is a must-read for scholars and students not only of philosophy but also history, anthropology, science and technology studies, mobility studies, and other fields across the humanities and social sciences.

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The Philosophy of Nature

Ivor Leclerc

Catholic University of America Press, 2018

The philosophy of nature is a field of inquiry which had been a casualty of the increasing and dominant acceptance from the early 19th century of the conception of physics as a mechanics.

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The Philosophy of Nietzsche

Reiner Schürmann Lecture Notes

Reiner Schürmann

Diaphanes, 2018

Nietzsche praised Kant for having “annihilated Socratism,” for exhibiting all ideals as essentially unattainable, and for having exposed himself to the despair of truth—all essential traits Nietzsche claimed for his own thinking. At the same time, the existentialist philosopher remained highly critical of Kant.
This volume of Reiner Schürmann’s lectures unpacks Nietzsche’s ambivalence towards Kant, in particular positioning Nietzsche’s claim to have brought an end to German idealism against the backdrop of the Kantian transcendental-critical tradition. Rather than simply compare the two philosophers, Schürmann’s lectures help us to understand the consequences Nietzsche derived from Kantian concepts, as well as the wider horizon within which Nietzsche’s ideas arose and can best be shown to apply. According to Schürmann’s trenchant reading: if Nietzsche was indeed “fatal” to Western philosophy, as he claimed, he was so in large part because of the Kantian transcendental thinking from which he inherited the very elements and tools of his criticism.

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The Philosophy of Parochialism

Radomir Konstantinovic, Edited and with an Introduction by Branislav Jakovljevic, Translation by Ljiljana Nikolic and Branislav Jakovljevic

University of Michigan Press, 2021

The Philosophy of Parochialism is Radomir Konstantinović’s (1928–2011) most celebrated and reviled book. First published in Belgrade as Filosofija palanke in 1969, it attracted keen attention and controversy through its unsparing critique of Serbian and any other nationalism in Yugoslavia and beyond. The book was prophetic, seeming to anticipate not only the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, but also the totalitarian turn in politics across the globe in the first decades of the new century. With this translation, English-speaking audiences can at last discover one of the most original writers of eastern European late modernism, and gain an important and original perspective into contemporary politics and culture in the West and beyond. This is a book that seems to age in reverse, as its meanings become deeper and more universal with the passage of time.

Konstantinović’sbookresists easy classification, mixing classical, Montaigne-like essay, prose poetry, novel, and literary history. The word “philosophy” in the book’s title refers to the solitary activity of reflection and critical thinking, and is also paradoxical: according to the author, a defining characteristic of parochialism is precisely its intolerance toward this kind of self-reflexivity. In Konstantinović’s analysis, parochialism is not a simply a characteristic of a geographical region or a cultural, political, and historical formation—these are all just manifestations of the parochial spirit as the spirit of insularity. His book illuminates the current moment, in which insularity undergirds not only ethnic and national divisions, but also dictates the very structure of everyday life, and where individuals can easily find themselves locked in an echo chamber of social media. The Philosophy of Parochialism can help us understand better not only the dead ends of ethnic nationalism and other atavistic ideologies, but also of those cultural forces such as digital technologies that have been built on the promise of overcoming those ideologies.

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The Philosophy of Paul Elmer More

The Ethical Basis of Life and Letters

Folke Leander

University of Missouri Press, 2026

Folke Leander (1910-1981) was a prolific and internationally known Swedish philosopher. He is best known in the United States as an explicator of the New Humanism, an informal movement of literary and cultural criticism founded by Paul Elmer More (1864-1937) and Irving Babbitt (1865-1933).

Leander’s manuscript for The Philosophy of Paul Elmer More was completed in the early 1970s, but because of the academic environment at the time and the book’s special philosophical focus, Leander was unable to find a publisher. Since then, the work existed only as a typescript, a copy of which he left with Claes G. Ryn, his former student and collaborator, in the hope that one day in more favorable intellectual circumstances it might be published.

Leander is rare among the scholars of the New Humanism for his first-rate philosophical training, depth of insight, and clarity of expression. In The Philosophy of Paul Elmer More he grapples carefully and precisely with the most fundamental tenets of the New Humanism. Although very supportive of the movement, Leander provides essential critiques of its contentions—and even improves upon some of them in crucial respects. In a series of concise, limpid chapters, he explains and assesses such fundamental—but often hazily understood—Humanist concepts as the “inner check,” “naturalism,” and “the higher will.” The result is a book essential for anyone who wants to understand the New Humanism.

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The Philosophy of Punishment and the History of Political Thought

Edited by Peter Karl Koritansky

University of Missouri Press, 2011

What does the institution of punishment look like in an ideal political system? Is punishment merely an exercise of violence of the strong against the weak? And what does the phenomenon of revealed religion add to the understanding of punishment? These are some of the many questions contemplated in The Philosophy of Punishment and the History of Political Thought, which provides a provocative exploration of the contributions of nine major thinkers and traditions regarding the question of punitive justice.

For the last half century, the philosophical debates over punishment have been deadlocked at two schools of thought: Utilitarianism and Retributivism. In his introduction, Koritansky provides an overview of the stymied debate by analyzing H. L. A. Hart’s argument for a philosophy unifying the theories of Utilitarianism and Retributivism. While Koritansky allows that both theories have contributed substantially to the contemporary understanding of punishment, he points out that Hart’s lack of success in combining these theories proves that both are less than ideal. From this starting point, Koritansky urges transcendence from these two theories in order to respond to new developments and circumstances surrounding the enactment of punishment today.

Conveniently divided into three sections, the book explores pagan and Christian premodern thought; early modern thought, culminating in chapters on Kant and classic Utilitarianism; and postmodern thought as exemplified in the theories of Nietzsche and Foucault. In all, the essays probe the work of Plato, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, Cesere Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Michel Foucault.

These essays devoted to the philosophy of punishment from the perspective of political thought delve deep into key contributions from thinkers of all eras to help further debates on punishment, provide the history of political thought in order to trace changes and effects on future theories, as well as expose the roots of the two prevailing schools of thought. This collection will engage all social scientists interested in the issue of punishment and energize the ongoing debate surrounding this complex issue.

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The Philosophy of Rhetoric

George Campbell. Edited by Lloyd F. Bitzer

Southern Illinois University Press, 1988

Here, after a quarter century of additional study and reflection, Bitzer presents a new critical edition of George Campbell’s classic. Bitzer provides a more complete review and assessment of Campbell’s work, giving particular emphasis to Campbell’s theological views, which he demonstrates played an important part in Campbell’s overall view of reasoning, feeling, and moral and religious truth. The Rhetoric is widely regarded as the most important statement of a theory of rhetoric produced in the 18th century. Its importance lies, in part, in the fact that the theory is informed by the leading assumptions and themes of the Scottish Enlightenment—the prevailing empiricism, the theory of the association of ideas, the effort to explain natural phenomena by reference to principles and processes of human nature. Campbell’s work engages such themes in an attempt to formulate a universal theory of human communication. Campbell attempts to develop his theory by discovering deep principles in human nature that account for all instances and kinds of human communication. He seeks to derive all communication principles and processes empirically. In addition, all statements in discourse that have to do with matters of fact and human affairs are likewise to be empirically derived. Thus, his theory of rhetoric is vastly wider than, and different from, such classical theories as those proposed by Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, whose theories focused on discourse related to civic affairs.

Bitzer shows that, by attempting to elaborate a general theory of rhetoric through empirical procedures, Campbell’s project reveals the limitations of his method. He cannot ground all statements empirically and it is at this point that his theological position comes into play. Inspection of his religious views shows that God’s design of human nature, and God’s revelations to humankind, make moral and spiritual truths known and quite secure to human beings, although not empirically.

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The Philosophy of Vegetarianism

Daniel A. Dombrowski

University of Massachusetts Press, 1984

The idea that it is morally wrong to eat animals held sway for about one thousand years among some of the most prominent ancient Greek philosophers, including Pythagoras, Empedocles, Theophrastus, Plotinus, Plutarch, Porphyry, and, perhaps, Plato. The idea then died out for almost seventeen-hundred years. Since the 1970s, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in vegetarianism, marked by lively debates and the emergence of a substantial literature in the form of scholarly books and articles.

Daniel A. Dombrowski uses the tools and insights of these contemporary debates in order to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of ancient philosophical vegetarianism. He also uses the wisdom of the Greek vegetarians as an Archimedean point from which to critique both the opponents and the defenders of contemporary philosophical vegetarianism. The book includes an annotated bibliography of the current debates in this burgeoning field of scholarship.

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The Philosophy, Theology, and Rhetoric of Marius Victorinus

Stephen A. Cooper

SBL Press, 2022

Pagan rhetor, (Neo-)Platonist philosopher, Christian theologian

This collection of essays is devoted to the rhetoric, Neoplatonic philosophy, and Christian theology of Marius Victorinus, a mid-fourth-century professor of rhetoric and philosopher who converted to Christianity late in life. Scholars from eight different countries, some of whom have not previously published in English, reflect on debates about his writings and theological development. These topics include Victorinus's deployment of philosophical sources for trinitarian theology, possible connections in his work to Origen, Augustine, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Gnosticism, as well as his contributions to Latin rhetoric and dialectic. Contributors include Jan Dominik Bogataj, Michael Chase, Nello Cipriani, Stephen A. Cooper, Volker Henning Drecoll, Lenka Karfíková, Josef Lössl, Václav Němec, Thomas Riesenweber, Guadalupe Lopetegui Semperena, Miran Špelič, Chiara O. Tommasi, John D. Turner, and Florian Zacher. The chapters in this volume are of great interest to students of late antique philosophy, Christian theology, and Latin rhetoric.

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The Pilgrimage of Philosophy

A Festschrift for Charles E. Butterworth

el-rayes

St. Augustine's Press, 2019

This book intends to introduce readers to the work of Charles E. Butterworth, and thereby to introduce students to Medieval islamic political philosophy, of which Butterworth is one of the world’s most prominent scholars. In a wider sense, the Festschrift introduces its readers to the current debates on Medieval islamic political philosophy, related as they are to the questions of the relationship between islam and Christianity, the Medieval to the Modern world, and reason and revelation. Butterworth’s scholarship spans six decades, primarily translating, editing, and interpreting the works of the Muslim political philosopher Alfarabi (d. 950) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd, d. 1198). He began his studies of Muslim political philosophy at a time when the Middle East and islam did not have the political salience they have acquired in more recent years. instead, Butterworth’s reason for engaging with islam was rooted in the question of the relationship between reason and revelation.

While one possible answer was pursued in the Christian, latin West, the islamic borderlands of Greek, Roman, and Muslim civilization offered another. By exploring Averroes, who provides the possibility of an Aristotelian-Islamic political philosophy, and Alfarabi, who pursues a Platonic-islamic political philosophy, Butterworth showed how islamic civilization provided a viable alternative to the theologico-political question reason v revelation, as well as serving as an inspiration to the latin West.

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The Place of the Symbolic

Essays on Art and Politics

Reiner Schürmann

Diaphanes, 2021

This book weaves together Reiner Schürmann’s work on art and politics, drawing on a range of the most important thinkers and poets of the twentieth century and beyond.

The Place of the Symbolic gathers Reiner Schürmann’s essays on the nexus of art and politics. In keeping with his translation of the destruction of metaphysics into an an-archic philosophy of practice, Schürmann develops a radical theory of the place of symbols, irreducible either to idealist theories of symbols or structuralist accounts of the symbolic. Symbols, Schürmann argues, may provide a bridge between ontological difference and politics. They resist being grasped metaphysically, in terms of representation. Instead, their understanding requires a specific way of existence: attending to the coming-to-presence of phenomena. As such, the understanding of symbols discloses a form of praxis that abandons ultimate grounds and opens onto the manifold.

Alongside Schürmann’s theory of symbols, the collection includes essays on the relation between metaphysics, tragedy, and technology; on the “there is” in poetry; as well as on judgment. Throughout these characteristically lucid interventions, Schürmann’s most urgent concern remains a consideration of singular and finite practices that enact a release from universal principles. Art and politics appear here as the unworking of ultimate grounds; that is, as practices attuned to a truly groundless form of life.

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The Plan for Perpetual Peace, On the Government of Poland, and Other Writings on History and Politics

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Dartmouth College Press, 2011

These abridgements of The Plan for Perpetual Peace (published 1761), On the Government of Poland (1771–1772), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s other writings on history and politics represent his considerations of the practical applications of key principles developed in his best-known theoretical writings. In this latest volume in the classic series, Rousseau reflects on projects for a European union; the possibilities for governmental reform for France, including the polysynody experiment; international relations; and the establishment of governments for Poland and Corsica, both recently liberated from foreign oppression. Taken together, these works offer definitive insights into Rousseau’s decidedly nonutopian thoughts on cosmopolitanism and nationalism, and on the theory and practice of politics.

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The Planetary Turn

Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru

Northwestern University Press, 2015

A groundbreaking essay collection that pursues the rise of geoculture as an essential framework for arts criticism, The Planetary Turn shows how the planet—as a territory, a sociopolitical arena, a natural space of interaction for all earthly life, and an artistic theme—is increasingly the conceptual and political dimension in which twenty-first-century writers and artists picture themselves and their work. In an introduction that comprehensively defines the planetary model of art, culture, and cultural-aesthetic interpretation, the editors explain how the living planet is emerging as distinct from older concepts of globalization, cosmopolitanism, and environmentalism and is becoming a new ground for exciting work in contemporary literature, visual and media arts, and social humanities. Written by internationally recognized scholars, the twelve essays that follow illustrate the unfolding of a new vision of potential planetary community that retools earlier models based on the nation-state or political “blocs” and reimagines cultural, political, aesthetic, and ethical relationships for the post–Cold War era.

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