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This volume begins with the rise of German Idealism and Romanticism, traces the developments of naturalism, positivism, and materialism and of later-century attempts to combine idealist and naturalist modes of thought. Written by a team of leading international scholars this crucial period of philosophy is examined from the novel perspective of themes and lines of thought which cut across authors, disciplines, and national boundaries. This fresh approach will open up new ways for specialists and students to conceptualise the history of 19th-century thought within philosophy, politics, religious studies and literature.

Platonism, Ficino to Foucault explores some key chapters in the history Platonic philosophy from the revival of Plato in the fifteenth century to the new reading of Platonic dialogues promoted by the so-called 'Critique of Modernity'.

In this rich and detailed study of early modern women's thought, Jacqueline Broad explores the complexity of women's responses to Cartesian philosophy and its intellectual legacy in England and Europe. She examines the work of thinkers such as Mary Astell, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway and Damaris Masham, who were active participants in the intellectual life of their time and were also the respected colleagues of philosophers such as Descartes, Leibniz and Locke. She also illuminates the continuities between early modern women's thought and the anti-dualism of more recent feminist thinkers. The result is a more gender-balanced account of early modern thought than has hitherto been available. Broad's clear and accessible exploration of this still-unfamiliar area will have a strong appeal to both students and scholars in the history of philosophy, women's studies and the history of ideas.

Why were Chinese and Indian ways of thinking excluded from European philosophy in early modern times? This is a study of what happened to the European understanding of China and India between the late 16th century and the first half of the 18th century. Investigating the description of these two Asian civilizations during a century and a half of histories of philosophy, this book accounts for the change of historiographical paradigms, from Neoplatonic philosophia perennis and Spinozistic atheism to German Eclecticism. Uncovering the reasons for inserting or excluding Chinese and Indian ways of thinking within the field of Philosophy in early modern times, it reveals the origin of the Eurocentric understanding of Philosophy as a Greek-European prerogative. By highlighting how this narrowing and exclusion of non-Western ways of thought was a result of conviction of superiority and religious prejudice, this book provides a new way of thinking about the place of Asian traditions among World philosophies.

The philosopher Stanley Cavell once asked, \"Can a human being be free of human nature?\" On Ceasing to Be Human examines philosophical as well as literary texts and contexts, in which various senses of Cavell's question might be explored and developed. During the past thirty or so years, the very concept of \"being human\" has been called into question within such fields as cybernetics, animal-rights theory, analytic philosophy (neurophilosophy in particular). This book examines these issues, but its main concern is the link between freedom and nonidentity that Cavell's question implies, and which turns out to be a major concern among the thinkers Bruns takes up in this book: Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Jacques Derrida. Each of these is, in different ways, a philosopher of the \"singular\" for whom the singular cannot be reduced to concepts, categories, distinctions, or the rule of identity.

Reproduces the Cogito debate: the central articles written by Foucault and Derrida, and the correspondence between Jean-Marie Beyssade and Foucault. In the second part of the book, 10 essays by well-known contemporary continental philosophers address the intersections and divergences between Foucault and Derrida.

The debate on \"political theology\" that ran throughout the twentieth century has reached its end, but the ultimate meaning of the notion continues to evade us. Despite all the attempts to resolve the issue, we still speak its language--we remain in its horizon. The reason for this, says Roberto Esposito, lies in the fact that political theology is neither a concept nor an event; rather, it is the pivot around which the machine of Western civilization has revolved for more than 2,000 years. At its heart stands the juncture between universalism and exclusion, unity and separation: the tendency of the Two to make itself into One by subordinating one part to the domination of the other. All the philosophical and political categories that we use, starting with the Roman and Christian notion of \"the person,\" continue to reproduce this exclusionary dispositif. To take our departure from political theology, then--the task of contemporary philosophy--we must radically revise our conceptual lexicon. Only when thought has been returned to its rightful \"place\"--connected to the human species as a whole rather than to individuals--will we be able to escape from the machine that has imprisoned our lives for far too long.long.

Is there life after postmodernism? Many claim that it sounded the death knell for history, art, ideology, science, possibly all of Western philosophy, and certainly for the concept of reality itself. Responding to essential questions regarding whether the humanities can remain politically and academically relevant amid this twenty-first-century uncertainty, Why the Humanities Matter offers a guided tour of the modern condition, calling upon thinkers in a variety of disciplines to affirm essential concepts such as truth, goodness, and beauty. Offering a lens of \"new humanism, \" Frederick Aldama also provides a liberating examination of the current cultural repercussions of assertions by such revolutionary theorists as Said, Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida, as well as Latin Americanists such as Sommer and Mignolo. Emphasizing pedagogy and popular culture with equal verve, and writing in colloquial yet multifaceted prose, Aldama presents an enlightening way to explore what \"culture\" actually does—who generates it and how it shapes our identities—and the role of academia in sustaining it.

Professional philosophy has strayed so far from its roots that Socrates wouldn’t stand a chance of landing tenure in most departments today. After all, he spent his time talking with people from all walks of life rather than being buried in the secondary literature and polishing arguments for peer-reviewed journals. Yet somehow this hypertrophy styles itself ‘real’ philosophy. Socrates Tenured diagnoses the pathologies of contemporary philosophy and shows how the field can be revitalized. The first part of the book sketches the crisis facing philosophy in a neoliberal age and traces its roots back to the 20th-century move to turn philosophy into an academic discipline. In the second part the authors look at various attempts from applied ethics to their own brand of ‘field philosophy’ to confront the resulting problems of insularity and societal irrelevance. Part three connects this evaluation of philosophy with wider discussions in the politics of knowledge about the impacts of research on society. The final chapters consider both what impacts philosophy might have and what a philosophy of impact might look like.

This is a major, wide-ranging history of analytic philosophy since 1900, told by one of the tradition's leading contemporary figures. The first volume takes the story from 1900 to mid-century. The second brings the history up to date. As Scott Soames tells it, the story of analytic philosophy is one of great but uneven progress, with leading thinkers making important advances toward solving the tradition's core problems. Though no broad philosophical position ever achieved lasting dominance, Soames argues that two methodological developments have, over time, remade the philosophical landscape. These are (1) analytic philosophers' hard-won success in understanding, and distinguishing the notions of logical truth, a priori truth, and necessary truth, and (2) gradual acceptance of the idea that philosophical speculation must be grounded in sound prephilosophical thought. Though Soames views this history in a positive light, he also illustrates the difficulties, false starts, and disappointments endured along the way. As he engages with the work of his predecessors and contemporaries--from Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein to Donald Davidson and Saul Kripke--he seeks to highlight their accomplishments while also pinpointing their shortcomings, especially where their perspectives were limited by an incomplete grasp of matters that have now become clear. Soames himself has been at the center of some of the tradition's most important debates, and throughout writes with exceptional ease about its often complex ideas. His gift for clear exposition makes the history as accessible to advanced undergraduates as it will be important to scholars. Despite its centrality to philosophy in the English-speaking world, the analytic tradition in philosophy has had very few synthetic histories. This will be the benchmark against which all future accounts will be measured.