Philosophy

A landmark new translation of the most significant text in medieval Jewish thought.

Written in Arabic and completed around 1190, the Guide to the Perplexed is among the most powerful and influential living texts in Jewish philosophy, a masterwork navigating the straits between religion and science, logic and revelation. The author, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, commonly known as Maimonides or as Rambam, was a Sephardi Jewish philosopher, jurist, and physician. He wrote his Guide in the form of a letter to a disciple. But the perplexity it aimed to cure might strike anyone who sought to square logic, mathematics, and the sciences with biblical and rabbinic traditions. In this new translation by philosopher Lenn E. Goodman and historian Phillip I. Lieberman, Maimonides' warm, conversational voice and clear explanatory language come through as never before in English.

Maimonides knew well the challenges facing serious inquirers at the confluence of the two great streams of thought and learning that Arabic writers labeled 'aql and naql, reason and tradition. The aim of the Guide, he wrote, is to probe the mysteries of physics and metaphysics. But mysteries, to Maimonides, were not conundrums to be celebrated for their obscurity. They were problems to be solved.

Maimonides' methods and insights resonate throughout the work of later Jewish thinkers, rationalists, and mystics, and in the work of philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Newton. The Guide continues to inspire inquiry, discovery, and vigorous debate among philosophers, theologians, and lay readers today. Goodman and Lieberman's extensive and detailed commentary provides readers with historical context and philosophical enlightenment, giving generous access to the nuances, complexities, and profundities of what is widely agreed to be the most significant textual monument of medieval Jewish thought, a work that still offers a key to those who hope to harmonize religious commitments and scientific understanding.

"Brilliant, the corrective we need to pull the nation back from the abyss of unreason."—Dean Koontz

A bestselling moral philosopher dissects and explodes the crazy—but deadly serious—ideas that have spread, bred, and metastasized throughout contemporary society.

What is happening to the world? Why does it seem like everyone has gone insane? Why are so many things that seemingly everyone believed the day before yesterday suddenly held to be retrograde, hateful, or even criminal? And why are things that everyone seemed to view as lunacy the day before yesterday suddenly taught or even required? 

In Pandemic of Lunacy: How to Think Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy, University of Texas philosopher J. Budziszewski patiently explains the delusions that beset us. Ranging over the topics of morality and happiness, politics and government, family and sexuality, the real and the unreal, and God and religion, Budziszewski makes the case for sanity in commonsense language accessible to all. 

Pandemic of Lunacy will be treasured by anyone who is troubled or confused, anyone who wonders whether the world has gone crazy or whether they have, and anyone who feels the need for a trustworthy guide in a topsy-turvy age.

Salomo Friedlaender was a prolific German-Jewish philosopher, poet, and satirist. His Kant for Children is intended to help young people learn about Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. Friedlaender writes, “Morality is inherent in us organically. But its abstract formula should be imprinted on schoolchildren.”

This first English translation includes an introduction to Friedlaender as well as essays by Paul Mendes-Flohr, Sarah Holtman, Robert Louden, Kate Moran, Krista Thomason, and Jens Timmermann.

For translating and editing Kant for Children, Bruce Krajewski received The 2023 Silvers Grant for Work in Progress from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. The Robert B. Silvers Foundation is a charitable trust established by a bequest of the late Robert B. Silvers, a founding editor of the New York Review of Books, with the aim of supporting writers in the fields of long-form literary and arts criticism, the intellectual essay, political analysis, and social reportage.

A philosopher explores the many dimensions of a beguilingly simple question.

Why did triceratops have horns? Why did World War I occur? Why does Romeo love Juliet? And, most importantly, why ask why? Through an analysis of these questions and others, philosopher Philippe Huneman describes the different meanings of "why," and how those meanings can, and should (or should not), be conflated.

As Huneman outlines, there are three basic meanings of why: the cause of an event, the reason of a belief, and the reason why I do what I do (the purpose). Each of these meanings, in turn, impacts how we approach knowledge in a wide array of disciplines: science, history, psychology, and metaphysics. Exhibiting a rare combination of conversational ease and intellectual rigor, Huneman teases out the hidden dimensions of questions as seemingly simple as "Why did Mickey Mouse open the refrigerator?" or as seemingly unanswerable as "Why am I me?" In doing so, he provides an extraordinary tour of canonical and contemporary philosophical thought, from Plato and Aristotle, through Descartes and Spinoza, to Elizabeth Anscombe and Ruth Millikan, and beyond.

Of course, no proper reckoning with the question "why?" can afford not to acknowledge its limits, which are the limits, and the ends, of reason itself. Huneman thus concludes with a provocative elaboration of what Kant called the "natural need for metaphysics," the unallayed instinct we have to ask the question even when we know there can be no unequivocal answer.

A careful reading of Book IV of Xenophon's Memorabilia and a demonstration of a Socratic education

It is well known that Socrates was executed by the city of Athens for not believing in the gods and for corrupting the youth. Despite this, it is not widely known what he really thought, or taught the youth to think, about philosophy, the gods, and political affairs. Of the few authors we rely on for firsthand knowledge of Socrates—Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle—only Xenophon, the least read of the four, lays out the whole Socratic education in systematic order.

In Xenophon's Socratic Education, through a careful reading of Book IV of Xenophon's Memorabilia, Dustin Sebell shows how Socrates ascended, with his students in tow, from opinions about morality or politics and religion to knowledge of such things. Besides revealing what it was that Socrates really thought—about everything from self-knowledge to happiness, natural theology to natural law, and rhetoric to dialectic—Sebell demonstrates how Socrates taught promising youths, like Xenophon or Plato, only indirectly: by jokingly teaching unpromising youths in their presence. Sebell ultimately shows how Socrates, the founder of moral and political philosophy, sought and found an answer to the all-important question: should we take our bearings in life from human reason, or revealed religion?

The possibility of a nuclear war that could destroy civilization has influenced the course of international affairs since 1945, suspended like a sword of Damocles above the heads of the world's leaders. The fact that we have escaped a third world war involving strategic nuclear weapons—indeed, that no atomic weapon of limited power has yet been used under battlefield conditions—seems nothing short of a miracle.

Revisiting debates on the effectiveness and ethics of nuclear deterrence, Jean-Pierre Dupuy is led to reformulate some of the most difficult questions in philosophy. He develops a counterintuitive but powerful theory of apocalyptic prophecy: once a major catastrophe appears to be possible, one must assume that it will in fact occur. Dupuy shows that the contradictions and paradoxes riddling discussions of deterrence arise from the tension between two opposite conceptions of time: one in which the future depends on decisions and strategy, and another in which every occurring event is one that could not have failed to occur.

Considering the immense destructive power of nuclear warheads and the almost unimaginable ruin they are bound to cause, Dupuy reaches a provocative conclusion: whether they bring about good or evil does not depend on the present or future intentions of those who are in a position to use them. The mere possession of nuclear weapons is a moral abomination.

Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer is one of the seminal works of political philosophy in recent decades. A twenty-year undertaking, this project is a series of interconnected investigations of staggering ambition and scope investigating the deepest foundations of every major Western institution and discourse.

This single book brings together for the first time all nine volumes that make up this groundbreaking project. Each volume takes a seemingly obscure and outdated issue as its starting point—an enigmatic figure in Roman law, or medieval debates about God's management of creation, or theories about the origin of the oath—but is always guided by questions with urgent contemporary relevance.

The Omnibus Homo Sacer includes:

1.Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

2.1.State of Exception

2.2.Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm

2.3.The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath

2.4.The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Glory

2.5.Opus Dei: An Archeology of Duty

3.Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive

4.1.The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life

4.2.The Use of Bodies

Beyond Good and Evil is Nietzsche's first sustained philosophical treatment of issues important to him. Unlike the expository prose of the essayistic period (1872-76), the stylized forays and jabs of the aphoristic period (1878-82), and the lyrical-philosophical rhetoric of the Zarathustra-period (1882-85), Beyond Good and Evil inscribes itself boldly into the history of philosophy, challenging ancient and modern notions of philosophy's achievements and insisting on a new task for "new philosophers." This is a watershed book for Nietzsche and for philosophy in the modern era. On the Genealogy of Morality applies Nietzsche's celebrated genealogical method, honed in the earlier aphoristic writings, to the problem of morality's influence on the human species. In three treatises that strikingly anticipate insights appearing much later in Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Nietzsche provides an anthropological psychograph of our species, revealing the origins of the concepts of good and evil, the roles played by guilt and bad conscience, and the persistence of ascetic ideals. Manifesting a hopeful yet unsentimental assessment of the human condition, these books resonated throughout the 20th century and continue to exert broad appeal.

How can various religious traditions interact with the state and how can they engage with each other? Kyle Wisdom addresses this question via a dialog between the Muslim Indonesian philosopher Nurcholish Madjid and classical Western political philosophy.

Rather than accept a classical liberal position, Kyle Wisdom proposes Civil Religious Pluralism as a contribution to political philosophy. To develop this argument the author engages with three ideal types from Western political theory to show how the negotiation of authority has developed.

The argument for civil religious pluralism engages with classical theorists like Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza and Rousseau; contemporary philosophers like Charles Taylor, Ronald Beiner, and John Rawls; as well as Islamic scholars like Maududi, Abdolkarim Soroush, Fazlur Rahman, and Nurcholish Madjid.

The author uses concepts and texts from these various writers to make his case following integrated themes that compare diverse approaches to political issues. Following themes of selfhood and identity, moral orders and social imaginaries, civil society and pluralism, and the administration of justice, the book proposes a robust engagement between traditions of all kinds which must necessarily inform the state.

This volume provides the first English translation of Nietzsche's unpublished notes from late 1879 to early 1881, the period in which he authored Dawn, the second book in the trilogy that began with Human, All Too Human and concluded with The Joyful Science.

  In these fragments, we see Nietzsche developing the conceptual triad of morals, customs, and ethics, which undergirds his critique of morality as the reification into law or dogma of conceptions of good and evil. Here, Nietzsche assesses Christianity's role in the determination of moral values as the highest values and of redemption as the representation of humanity's highest aspirations. These notes show the resulting tension between Nietzsche's contrasting thoughts on modernity, which he critiques as an unrecognized aftereffect of the Christian worldview, but also views as the springboard to "the dawn" of a transformed humanity and culture. The fragments further allow readers insight into Nietzsche's continuous internal debate with exemplary figures in his own life and culture—Napoleon, Schopenhauer, and Wagner—who represented challenges to hitherto existing morals and culture—challenges that remained exemplary for Nietzsche precisely in their failure.

  Presented in Nietzsche's aphoristic style, Dawn is a book that must be read between the lines, and these fragments are an essential aid to students and scholars seeking to probe this work and its partners.

The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche will publish in its entirety, for the first time, an English translation of the full contents of the Kritische Studienausgabe.

  This volume of the Complete Works provides the first English translation of Nietzsche's unpublished notes from Summer 1886 through Fall 1887. In these writings we find drafts of new prefaces for the second editions of his earlier works, notes for the soon-to-appear On the Genealogy of Morality, and crucially, fragments and plans for an anticipated "master work" under the title "The Will to Power." This projected work, as is now well-known, was never written by Nietzsche; instead, it was fraudulently assembled by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and his friend Heinrich Köselitz (a.k.a. Peter Gast) and published under Nietzsche's name after his death. Only now, with the publication of this volume and the ones that precede and follow it, are English readers able to examine for themselves the full set of unpublished writings of the last creative period of Nietzsche's life. Taking into account the latest editorial work on his final notebooks, and including a detailed account by Mazzino Montinari of Nietzsche's decision not to complete a "master work," this volume documents the evolution of Nietzsche's thinking on such important themes as nihilism, eternal recurrence, and the revaluation of all values as it presents his late Nachlass free from the distortions perpetrated against it over a century ago.

In this new book, Florian Klinger gives readers a basic action-theoretical account of the aesthetic. While normal action fulfills a determinate concept, Klinger argues, aesthetic action performs an indeterminacy by suspending the action's conceptual resolution. Taking as examples work by Tino Sehgal, Kara Walker, Mazen Kerbaj, Marina Abramović, Cy Twombly, and Franz Kafka, the book examines indeterminacy in such instances as a walk that is at once leisurely and purposeful, a sound piece that is at once joyous and mournful and mechanical, or a sculpture that at once draws one in and shuts one out. Because it has irresolution as its point, aesthetic action presents itself as an unsettling of ourselves, our ways, our very sense of who we are. As performers of such action, we don't recognize one another as bearers of a shared human form as we normally would, but find ourselves tasked anew with figuring out what sharing a form would mean.

In conversation with philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Anscombe; political thinkers such as Marx and Lorde; and contemporary interlocutors such as Michael Thompson, Sebastian Rödl, and Thomas Khurana, Klinger's book makes a case for a conception of the human form that systematically includes the aesthetic: an actualization of the form that is indeterminate and nevertheless rational. The book gives the project of Western philosophical aesthetics a long-overdue formulation for our present that aims to do justice to contemporary aesthetic production as it actually exists. It will appeal to those working in philosophy, art, and political thought.

Democracy has become disentangled from our ordinary lives. Mere cooperation or ethical consumption now often stands in for a robust concept of solidarity that structures the entirety of sociality and forms the basis of democratic culture. How did democracy become something that is done only at ballot boxes and what role can solidarity play in reviving it? In Solidarity in Conflict, Rochelle DuFord presents a theory of solidarity fit for developing democratic life and a complementary theory of democracy that emerges from a society typified by solidarity.

DuFord argues that solidarity is best understood as a set of relations, one agonistic and one antagonistic: the solidarity groups' internal organization and its interactions with the broader world. Such a picture of solidarity develops through careful consideration of the conflicts endemic to social relations and solidarity organizations. Examining men's rights groups, labor organizing's role in recognitional protections for LGBTQ members of society, and the debate over trans inclusion in feminist praxis, DuFord explores how conflict, in these contexts, becomes the locus of solidarity's democratic functions and thereby critiques democratic theorizing for having become either overly idealized or overly focused on building and maintaining stability. Working in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, DuFord makes a provocative case that the conflict generated by solidarity organizations can address a variety of forms of domination, oppression, and exploitation while building a democratic society.

To follow your Tao is to live in accordance with your own meaning, values and energy: to discover your true self, nurture your growth and enjoy a harmonious and healthy life.

Drawing from the disciplines of Chinese Medicine, qigong, Five Element theory and Buddhism, Stephanie Nosco explains how your body's energy (or qi) can help you reconnect with your natural energetic flow.

Each chapter is devoted to one of the five major yin organs - the heart, liver, spleen, kidneys and lungs - showing you how to identify when they are out of balance and giving you ways to rebalance them. Along with the organ's associations and attributes, there are descriptions of their physical, emotional and spiritual properties and functions. Each chapter ends with 'soul work' exercises to help counteract anything that is holding you back, whether that is anxiety, anger, inconsistency, pain, fear or the inability to let go.

With these thoughtful practices, you will learn to trust your inner compass, have the motivation to realise your dreams, live with intention and courage and achieve deeper self-knowledge.

The immanent dialectic of the ancient Greek materialist philosopher, Epicurus (341-270 BCE), helped inspire the nineteenth-century ideas of Karl Marx, forming the subject of his doctoral dissertation. Marx’s detailed study of Epicurus led him to develop his own materialist dialectic in distinction to the idealist philosophy of G. W.F. Hegel. Until now, however, there has been no full scholarly treatment of the relation of Epicurus to Marx, paying equal attention to both thinkers and examining the long-term impact of Epicureanism on Marxist thought.
Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus and Marx fills this gap. Taking into consideration today’s revolution in the understanding of Epicurus—resulting from the recovery of fragments of his major work On Nature in the carbonized papyri that survived the burying in volcanic ash of the Roman town Herculaneum when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE—it demonstrates that this new interpretation corresponds closely to Marx’s nineteenth-century treatment of Epicurus. The result is to fundamentally transform our contemporary understanding of both Epicurus and Marx.

The last (though logically the first) book to be written in a trilogy that also includes John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (2000) and his The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (2020), Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus and Marx provides a detailed historical and textual analysis grounding the argument of all three works. Not only does this clarify Marx’s relation to materialism and ecology, but also his analysis of freedom and necessity. Both Epicurus’ philosophy and that of Marx are given new meaning in our time, highlighting questions of substantive equality, dialectical naturalism, and sustainable community.

In Prophetic Statesmanship: Harry V. Jaffa, Abraham Lincoln, and the Gettysburg Address, Edward J. Erler presents the lesser-known, late-life scholarship of renowned Lincoln scholar, Harry Victor Jaffa. Through a deep reading of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural, Erler considers some of Jaffa’s startling discoveries about Lincoln, Aquinas, Aristotle, and America’s political founding—discoveries that sometimes seem to contradict Jaffa’s own prior writing and often contradict the existing scholarly consensus. 

In 1959, Jaffa established himself as a foremost Lincoln scholar when he published Crisis of the House Divided, a revolutionary breakthrough in the understanding of Lincoln’s political philosophy. But by the time Jaffa published A New Birth of Freedom (2000), he had developed a deeper understanding of what is known as the “theological-political question,” the conflict between theology and politics in philosophical thought. Jaffa referred to this development as his “second sailing.” 

Jaffa was never able to flesh out his evolving ideas about the “theological-political question,” as it concerns Abraham Lincoln, while he was alive. At the behest of Jaffa, his student Edward Erler wrote this book to do just that.

With his own scholarly aplomb Erler explores Jaffa’s scholarship on Aristotle’s presence in the American founding; Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Aquinas’s surprising, shared—albeit concealed—vision of participatory government; the union of divine law and natural law in the American founding; and the primacy of prudence as supreme political virtue; among other topics. 

This is a book for anyone interested in the past and future of American political thought. 

The Hatata Inquiries are two extraordinary texts of African philosophy composed in Ethiopia in the 1600s. Written in the ancient African language of Geʿez (Classical Ethiopic), these explorations of meaning and reason are deeply considered works of rhetoric. They advocate for women’s rights and rail against slavery. They offer ontological proofs for God and question biblical commands while delighting in the language of Psalms. They advise on right living. They put reason above belief, desire above asceticism, love above sectarianism, and the natural world above the human. They explore the nature of being as well as the nature of knowledge, the human, ethics, and the human relation with the divine. They are remarkable examples of something many assume doesn’t exist: early written African thought.

This accessible English translation of the Hatata Inquiries, along with extensive footnotes documenting the cultural and historical context and the work’s many textual allusions, enables all to read it and scholars to teach with it. The Hatata Inquiries are essential to understanding the global history of philosophy, being among the early works of rational philosophy.

The book includes a translation by Ralph Lee with Mehari Worku and Wendy Laura Belcher of the Hatata Zara Yaqob and the Hatata Walda Heywat. The appendices by Jeremy R. Brown provide information on the scribal interventions in and the differences between the manuscripts of the two Hatatas. The book also includes a map, chronology, summary of the translation principles, and a discussion of the authorship debate about the Hatata Inquiries.

Curiosity is the instinct that prompts us to act, and a book about curiosity should tell us how to live. This is the first to do so, with its twelve rules for life.

While a fatal sin in Eden, curiosity is a necessary virtue in our world. It asks us to search for new experiences, to create, to invent. It tells us to look inward, to be curious about the needs of other people and about our own motives. It tells us not to be a stick in the mud or a bore. In particular, curiosity asks us to examine the most fundamental questions of our existence. When you put all this together, curiosity tells you how to live a life in full.

While there's a natural desire to explore, there's also a natural desire to stay home. We have a dark side that wants to hide from the world. We've also been made incurious by the rise of bitter partisanships and narrow ideologies that have sent things and people we should care about to our mental trash folders. That’s why this book is needed today.

For a world mired in catastrophe, nothing could be more urgent than the question of survival. In this theoretically and methodologically groundbreaking book, Adam Y. Stern calls for a critical reevaluation of survival as a contemporary regime of representation.

In Survival, Stern asks what texts, what institutions, and what traditions have made survival a recognizable element of our current political vocabulary. The book begins by suggesting that the interpretive key lies in the discursive prominence of "Jewish survival." Yet the Jewish example, he argues, is less a marker of Jewish history than an index of Christianity's impact on the modern, secular, political imagination. With this inversion, the book repositions Jewish survival as the supplemental effect and mask of a more capacious political theology of Christian survival.

The argument proceeds by taking major moments in twentieth-century philosophy, theology, and political theory as occasions for collecting the scattered elements of survival's theological-political archive. Through readings of canonical texts by secular and Jewish thinkers—Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Sigmund Freud—Stern shows that survival belongs to a history of debates about the sovereignty and subjection of Christ's body. Interrogating survival as a rhetorical formation, the book intervenes in discussions about biopolitics, secularism, political theology, and the philosophy of religion.

Questions and answers from two great philosophers

Why is laughter contagious? Why do mountains exist? Why do we long for the past, even if it is scarred by suffering? Spanning a vast array of subjects that range from the philosophical to the theological, from the philological to the scientific, The Philosopher Responds is the record of a set of questions put by the litterateur Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi to the philosopher and historian Abu 'Ali Miskawayh. Both figures were foremost contributors to the remarkable flowering of cultural and intellectual life that took place in the Islamic world during the reign of the Buyid dynasty in the fourth/tenth century.

The correspondence between al-Tawhidi and Miskawayh holds a mirror to many of the debates and preoccupations of the time and reflects the spirit of rationalistic inquiry that animated their era. It also provides insight into the intellectual outlooks of two thinkers who were divided as much by their distinctive temperaments as by the very different trajectories of their professional careers.

Alternately whimsical and tragic, wondering and brooding, trivial and profound, al-Tawhidi’s questions provoke an interaction as interesting in its spiritedness as in its content. This new edition of The Philosopher Responds is accompanied by the first full-length English translation of this important text, bringing this interaction to life for the English reader.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

In three comprehensive volumes divided into five books, Logic of the Future presents a full panorama of Charles S. Peirce's important late writings. Among the most influential American thinkers, Peirce took his existential graphs to be his greatest contribution to human thought. The manuscripts and letters from 1895–1913, most of which are published here for the first time, testify the richness and open-endedness of his theory of logic and its applications. They also invite us to reconsider our ordinary conceptions of reasoning as well as the conventional stories told about the evolution of modern logic.

This first part of the third volume (Volume 3/1) of the Logic of the Future series contains Peirce's 1904–1909 writings on his mature philosophy of pragmaticism, which is grounded upon the principles of logical analysis as provided by existential graphs.

"This exquisite book offers guidance to us all.” — Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple

With beautifully crafted words and exuberant watercolor illustrations, Random Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty offers a poetic and empowering message for world peace. Recognizing "we are right on the edge of destroying ourselves," this modern allegory inspires taking joyful steps to end violence. It expands upon the idea that "we are all in the circle together," and presents a timeless parable for readers of all ages. The Haiku-like text delivers a call to "make a new earth grow beneath our feet."

In the playful style of 12th century Japanese picture scrolls, Mayumi Oda's art depicts humans as animals who lose their way when their leaders become confused and drawn to violence. It is up to each individual? The frog who plants a thriving garden, the cat who supports an elderly neighbor as they walk?to create a better world through simple acts of kindness. The message of this book is the sweet realization that each person can become an agent of goodness and beauty.

This thirtieth-anniversary, full-color edition, begins with the foreword by the late, venerable peacemaker Desmond Tutu.

Written on the threshold of Thus Spoke Zarathustra during a high point of social, intellectual and psychic vibrancy, The Joyful Science (frequently translated as The Gay Science) is one of Nietzsche's thematically tighter books. Here he debuts and practices the art of amor fati, love of fate, to explore what is "species preserving" in relation to happiness (Book One); inspiration and the role of art as they keep us mentally fit for inhabiting a world dominated by science (Book Two); the challenges of living authentically and overcoming after the death of God (Book Three); and the crescendo of life affirmation in which Nietzsche revealed the doctrine of eternal recurrence and previewed the figure of Zarathustra (Book Four). Invigorated and motivated by Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche in 1887 added a new preface, an appendix of poems, and Book Five, where he deepened the critique of science and displayed a more genealogical approach.

  This volume provides the first English translation of the Idylls from Messina and, more importantly, it includes the first English translation of the notebooks of 1881–1882, in which Nietzsche first formulated the eternal recurrence. Structurally and stylistically, The Joyful Science remains Nietzsche's most effective book of aphorisms, immediately after which he took on the voice and alter ego of Zarathustra in order to push beyond the boundaries of even the most liberating prose.

The year 1888 marked the last year of Friedrich Nietzsche's intellectual career and the culmination of his philosophical development. In that final productive year, he worked on six books, all of which are now, for the first time, presented in English in a single volume. Together these new translations provide a fundamental and complete introduction to Nietzsche's mature thought and to the virtuosity and versatility of his most fully developed style.

  The writings included here have a bold, sometimes radical tone that can be connected to Nietzsche's rising profile and growing confidence. In The Antichrist, we are offered an extended critique of Christianity and Christian morality alongside blunt diagnoses of contemporary Europe's cultural decadence. In Dionysus Dithyrambs we are presented with his only work composed exclusively of poetry, and in Twilight of the Idols we find a succinct summary of his mature philosophical views. At times the works are also openly personal, as in The Case of Wagner, which presents Nietzsche's attempt to settle accounts with his former close friend, German composer Richard Wagner, and in his provocative autobiography, Ecce Homo, which sees Nietzsche taking stock of his past and future while also reflecting on many of his earlier texts.

  Scrupulously edited, this critical volume also includes commentary by esteemed Nietzsche scholar Andreas Urs Sommer. Through this new collection, students and scholars are given an essential introduction to Nietzsche's late thought.

Questions and answers from two great philosophers

Why is laughter contagious? Why do mountains exist? Why do we long for the past, even if it is scarred by suffering? Spanning a vast array of subjects that range from the philosophical to the theological, from the philological to the scientific, The Philosopher Responds is the record of a set of questions put by the litterateur Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi to the philosopher and historian Abu 'Ali Miskawayh. Both figures were foremost contributors to the remarkable flowering of cultural and intellectual life that took place in the Islamic world
during the reign of the Buyid dynasty in the fourth/tenth century.

The correspondence between al-Tawhidi and Miskawayh holds a mirror to many of the debates and preoccupations of the time and reflects the spirit of rationalistic inquiry that animated their era. It also provides insight into the intellectual outlooks of two thinkers who were divided as much by their distinctive temperaments as by the very different trajectories of their professional careers.

Alternately whimsical and tragic, wondering and brooding, trivial and profound, al-Tawhidi’s questions provoke an interaction as interesting in its spiritedness as in its content. This new edition of The Philosopher Responds is accompanied by the first full-length English translation of this important text, bringing this interaction to life for the English reader.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

This volume provides the first English translation of Nietzsche's unpublished notes from the spring of 1884 through the winter of 1884–85, the period in which he was composing the fourth and final part of his favorite work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. These notebooks therefore provide special insight into Nietzsche's philosophical concept of superior humans,as well as important clues to the identities of the famous nineteenth-century European figures who inspired Nietzsche's invention of fictional characters such as "the prophet," "the sorcerer," and "the ugliest human."In these notebooks, Nietzsche also further explores ideas that were introduced in the first three parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Zarathustra's teaching about the death of God; his proclamation that it is time for humankind to overcome itself and create the superhumans; his discovery that the secret of life is the will to power; and his most profound thought—that the entire cosmos will eternally return.

Readers will encounter here a wealth of material that Nietzsche would include in his next book, Beyond Good and Evil, as he engages the ideas of Kant and Schopenhauer, challenges cultural icons like Richard Wagner, and mercilessly exposes the foibles of his contemporaries, especially of his fellow Germans. Readers will also discover an extensive collection of Nietzsche's poetry. Richly annotated and accompanied by a detailed translators' afterword, this volume showcases the cosmopolitanism at work in Nietzsche's multifaceted and critical exploration of aesthetic and cultural influences that transcend national (and nationalist) notions of literature, music, and culture.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

The Presocratic philosophers, writing in Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, invented new ways of thinking about human life, the natural world, and structures of reality. They also developed novel ways of using language to express their thought. In this book, Victoria Wohl examines these innovations and the productive relation between them in the work of five figures: Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus.
 
Bringing these thinkers into conversation with modern critical theorists on questions of shared concern, Wohl argues for the poetic sophistication of their work and the inextricable convergence of their aesthetic form and philosophical content. In addition to offering original readings of these fascinating figures and robust strategies for interpreting their fragmentary, rebarbative texts, this book invites readers to communicate across entrenched divisions between literature and philosophy and between antiquity and modernity.
 

In this volume, noted philosopher Lenn E. Goodman shares the insights gained over a lifetime of pondering the meaning and purpose of Maimonides' celebrated Guide to the Perplexed. Written in the late twelfth century, Maimonides' Guide aims to help religiously committed readers who are alive to the challenges posed by reason and the natural sciences to biblical and rabbinic tradition. Keyed to the new translation and commentary by Lenn E. Goodman and Phillip I. Lieberman, this volume follows Maimonides' life and learning and delves into the text of the Guide, clearly explaining just what Maimonides means by identifying the Talmudic Ma'aseh Bereshit and Ma'aseh Merkavah with physics and metaphysics (to Maimonides, biblical cosmology and theology). Exploring Maimonides' treatments of revelation, religious practice and experience, law and ritual, the problem of evil, and the rational purposes of the commandments, this guide to the Guide explains the tactics Maimonides deployed to ensure that readers not get in over their heads when venturing into philosophical deep waters.

This volume in The Complete Works presents the first English translations of Nietzsche's unpublished notebooks from Winter 1874/1875 through 1878, the period in which he developed the mixed aphoristic-essayistic mode that continued across the rest of his career. These notebooks comprise a range of different materials, including early drafts and near-final versions of aphorisms that would appear in both volumes of Human, All Too Human. Additionally, there are extensive notes for a never-completed Unfashionable Observation that was to be titled "We Philologists," early drafts for the final sections of "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth," plans for other possible publications, and detailed reading notes on philologists, philosophers, and historians of his era, including Friedrich August Wolf, Eugen Dühring, and Jacob Burckhardt.

Through this volume, readers gain insight into Nietzsche's emerging sense of himself as a composer of complexly orchestrated, stylistically innovative philosophical meditations—influenced by, but moving well beyond, the modes used by aphoristic precursors such as Goethe, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, and Schopenhauer. Further, these notebooks allow readers to trace more closely Nietzsche's development of ideas that remain central to his mature philosophy, such as the contrast between free and constrained spirits, the interplay of national, supra-national, and personal identities, and the cultural centrality of the process of Bildung as formation, education, and cultivation.

With this latest book in the series, Stanford continues its English-language publication of the famed Colli-Montinari edition of Nietzsche's complete works, which include the philosopher's notebooks and early unpublished writings. Scrupulously edited so as to establish a new standard for the field, each volume includes an Afterword that presents and contextualizes the material it contains.

Within the Western tradition, it was the philosophers Henri Bergson and Max Scheler who laid out and explored the nonrational power of "intuition" at work in human beings that plays a key role in orienting their thinking and action within the world. As author Adriana Alfaro Altamirano notes, Bergon's and Scheler's philosophical explorations, which paralleled similar developments by other modernist writers, artists, and political actors of the early twentieth century, can yield fruitful insights into the ideas and passions that animate politics in our own time.

The Belief in Intuition shows that intuition (as Bergson and Scheler understood it) leads, first and foremost, to a conception of freedom that is especially suited for dealing with hierarchy, uncertainty, and alterity. Such a conception of freedom is grounded in a sense of individuality that remains true to its "inner multiplicity," thus providing a distinct contrast to and critique of the liberal notion of the self.

Focusing on the complex inner lives that drive human action, as Bergson and Scheler did, leads us to appreciate the moral and empirical limits of liberal devices that mean to regulate our actions "from the outside." Such devices, like the law, may not only carry pernicious effects for freedom but, more troublingly, oftentimes "erase their traces," concealing the very ways in which they are detrimental to a richer experience of subjectivity.

According to Alfaro Altamirano, Bergson's and Scheler's conception of intuition and personal authority puts contemporary discussions about populism in a different light: It shows that liberalism would only at its own peril deny the anthropological, moral, and political importance of the bearers of charismatic authority. Personal authority thus understood relies on a dense, but elusive, notion of personality, for which personal authority is not only consistent with freedom, but even contributes to it in decisive ways.

This volume looks to core ideas defining Goethe’s work and his influence on his contemporaries and inheritors. Contributions to this volume explore his impact through ideas of organic and aesthetic formation; methods of biology, reason, becoming, and Bildung; modes of self-conscious comportment to nature, art, and the self; and conceptions of finitude and divinity. This volume underscores the interdisciplinary impact of Goethe’s thought and work. Of particular note is Goethe's unified and non-reductive account of nature, human education, social life, and reason. These contributions shed light on how Goethe's thought furthers the methodological sciences of his day while yielding resources for the grounding of theories of art in principles of idealism as well as imminent critiques of idealism through insights about organic formation and activity. The result is a compelling sense of unity through plurality. Contributors: James Conant, Richard Eldridge, Camilla Flodin, Michael Forster, Gerad Gentry, Keren Gorodeisky, Johannes Haag, Joel Lande, Lara Ostaric, Mattias Pirholt, Anne Pollok, Karin Schutjer, Allen Speight, Joan Steigerwald, Violetta Waibel, David Wellbery.

Weingartner compares criteria and basic assumptions for the credibility of scientific and religious belief systems. It is shown that mankind has access to basic knowledge about a higher spiritual power and knowledge by conscience about what is obligatory or forbidden. This is defended by further axiomatizations on basic terms as natural goods, natural and moral law, and conscience. Scientific and religious belief systems are then compared thoroughly and by logical deduction and verisimilitude. One main argument is that every kind of belief system has an upper and a lower bound of credibility, yet a degree of credibility that leads to the impossibility of rational justification for scientific belief systems must not be required from religious belief systems. Further topics are internal and external consistency, local refutation, mutual complementation between religion and theory of evolution as well as a comparison of the five world religions leading to general features of religion. It is shown that one main yet basic axiom of morality is the principle of charity. Finally, the book concludes with the credibility-requirements of science towards religion and those of religion towards science.

Der erste Band teilt zunächst die Editionsprinzipien für die gesamte erste Abteilung mit. Er enthält zudem die Schriften aus den Jahren 1747 bis 1756, darunter Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte (hg. von Helmut Pulte), Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels (hg. von Thomas Sturm und Fabian Burt) sowie eine Reihe kleiner Schriften, herausgegeben von Hansmichael Hohenegger, Antonio Lamarra, Konstantin Pollok, Riccardo Pozzo und Thomas Sturm. Dem Text der lateinischen Schriften wird eine deutsche Übersetzung zur Seite gestellt.
Im Anschluss an ein Inhaltsverzeichnis für diesen Band und die edierten kantischen Texte mit dem jeweiligen textkritischen Apparat folgen in dem hinteren Teil "Ergänzende Materialien" - Berichte, Sachanmerkungen und Register, die für die kritische Lektüre dieser Texte nötig sind.
Ergänzt werden Apparate und Berichte durch zusätzliche Dokumentationen, die online abrufbar sind.

Zur Affiliation der Herausgeber der einzelnen Schriften: https://kant-digital.bbaw.de/herausgeber.html.

The present book is the first to undertake a systematic study of Peirce’s

conception of historical knowledge and of its value for philosophy. It does

so by both reconstructing in detail Peirce’s arguments and giving a

detailed account of the many ways in which history becomes an object of

explicit reflection in his writings.

The book’s leading idea may be stated as follows: Peirce manages to put

together an exceptionally compelling argument about history’s bearing on

philosophy not so much because he derives it from a well-articulated and

polished conception of the relation between the two disciplines; but on

the contrary, because he holds on to this relation while intuiting that it

can easily turn into a conflict. This potential conflict acts therefore as a

spur to put forth an unusually profound and multi-faceted analysis of

what it means for philosophy to rely on historical arguments.

Peirce looks at history as a way to render philosophical investigations

more detailed, more concrete and more sensitive to the infinite and

unforeseeable nuances that characterize human experience. In this way,

he provides us with an exceptionally valuable contribution to a question

that has remained gravely under-theorized in contemporary debates.

The Spirit of the Laws not only systematizes the foundational ideas of “separation of powers” and “balances and checks,” it provides the decisive response to the question of whether power in the nation-state can be limited in the aftermath of the Westphalian settlement of 1648. It describes a civilizational change through which power becomes domesticated, with built-in resistance to attempts to absolutize (or make total) political power. As such, it is the Bible of modern politics, now made more accessible to English readers than it ever has been.

There have been in English only two prior translations of this work that first appeared in 1748. The deficiencies of those two efforts have been broadly identified in the scholarship. Although the text is still used with regularity in university instruction (having been recovered after a lull in the 1950s and 60s), it deserves – and now receives – a presentation that enhances its usefulness in the analysis both of politics and the philosophical foundations of human life.

Montesquieu’s singularity – the first secular argument against race-based slavery and only the second secular argument against the servitude of women – provides a special heritage for the modern word to preserve and a key to making operational those fundamental insights within the context of sustained political and cultural development. The replacement of blood and tribe with the universal attributes of humanity (while recognizing the highly variable ecologies of communities) constitutes the single-most important moral and political development of the modern world. And The Spirit of the Laws bears a primary responsibility for that accomplishment.

A practical and playful guide to balancing and maintaining physical and mental harmony.

The modern world can present the body as a machine that just needs to be regularly exercised. However, it is a remarkably sensitive organ in which a lot of our pain and hope is stored and that we need to interpret and handle with subtlety. This impact of our body upon our mind is something which needs to be explored as it is easy to pay attention to one more than the other and to ignore the crucial balance between the two.

This is a book filled with reflections and exercises designed to help us live more harmoniously and maturely within both mind and body. It gives guidance on how to calm our minds with bodily exercises that work on the real sources of our anxieties. It suggests how to be less rigid in, and timid about, our bodies and how to relax into them in a way we might not have done for far too long. It offers ideas on how to accept the way we look, and how to treat the body in order for it to assist the mind in yielding its very best ideas. The impacts of activities such as singing, dancing and art are explored along with the liberation of spirit that these might offer.

This is a book, both theoretical and practical, that will improve our relationship between our physical and mental selves and allow us a route to a life of greater self-assurance, wisdom, and freedom to be ourselves.

*Contains explicit/adult content

• BLENDING THE PRACTICAL AND THEORETICAL with playful exercises backed by research.
• A RANGE OF EXERCISES you can do anytime, anywhere.
• DISCOVER THE POWER OF THE MIND-BODY CONNECTION and tap into your body’s innate wisdom.
• CULTIVATE CALM by connecting to your body and surroundings.
• BODY NEUTRALITY learn to accept and feel comfortable with how you look.

An incisive exploration of the way Greek myths empower us to defeat tyranny.

As tyrannical passions increasingly plague twenty-first-century politics, tales told in ancient Greek epics and tragedies provide a vital antidote. Democracy as a concept did not exist until the Greeks coined the term and tried the experiment, but the idea can be traced to stories that the ancient Greeks told and retold. From the eighth through the fifth centuries BCE, Homeric epics and Athenian tragedies exposed the tyrannical potential of individuals and groups large and small. These stories identified abuses of power as self-defeating. They initiated and fostered a movement away from despotism and toward broader forms of political participation.

Following her highly praised book Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths, the classicist Emily Katz Anhalt retells tales from key ancient Greek texts and proceeds to interpret the important message they hold for us today. As she reveals, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Aeschylus's Oresteia, and Sophocles's Antigone encourage us—as they encouraged the ancient Greeks—to take responsibility for our own choices and their consequences. These stories emphasize the responsibilities that come with power (any power, whether derived from birth, wealth, personal talents, or numerical advantage), reminding us that the powerful and the powerless alike have obligations to each other. They assist us in restraining destructive passions and balancing tribal allegiances with civic responsibilities. They empower us to resist the tyrannical impulses not only of others but also in ourselves.

In an era of political polarization, Embattled demonstrates that if we seek to eradicate tyranny in all its toxic forms, ancient Greek epics and tragedies can point the way.

This is the second volume to appear in an edition that will be the first complete, critical, and annotated English translation of all of Nietzsche’s work. Volume 2: Unfashionable Observations, translated by Richard T. Gray, was published in 1995. The edition is a new English translation, by various hands, of the celebrated Colli-Montinari edition, which has been acclaimed as one of the most important works of scholarship in the humanities in the last quarter century. The original Italian edition was simultaneously published in French, German, and Japanese.

  This volume of Human, All Too Human, the first of two parts, is the earliest of Nietzsche’s works in which his philosophical concerns and methodologies can be glimpsed. In this work Nietzsche began to establish the intellectual difference from his own cultural milieu and time that makes him our contemporary. Published in 1878, it marks both a stylistic and an intellectual shift away from Nietzsche’s own youthful affiliation with Romantic excesses of German thought and culture typified by Wagnerian opera.

Hannah Arendt was one of the foremost political theorists of the twentieth century to wrestle with the role of violence in public life. Yet remarkably, despite the fact that it was perhaps the most pressing issue of her era, this theme in her work has rarely been explored. In Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt, Caroline Ashcroft deepens our understanding of Arendt's conception of the role of violence, offering a critical reading of her work and using it as a provocation to think about how we might engage with contemporary ideas.

Arendt has generally been thought to exclude acts of violence from "the political," based on her supposed idealization of ancient democratic politics. Ashcroft argues that Arendt has been widely misunderstood by both critics and advocates on this. By examining Arendt's thought on violence in key examples of political practice such as modern Jewish politics, the politics of Greece and Rome, and the French and American revolutions, Ashcroft reveals a more pragmatic notion of the place of violence in the political. She argues that what Arendt opposes in political violence is the use of force to determine politics, an idea central to modern sovereignty. What Arendt criticizes is not violence as such, but the misuse of violence and misunderstandings of politics which exclude participatory power altogether.

This work also engages with a wider set of concerns in political theory by obliging us to rethink the relations between violence and politics. Arendt's work offers a way to bridge the gulf between sovereign or realist politics and nonhierarchical, nonviolent participatory politics, and thus offers valuable resources for contemporary political theory.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) transformed the philosophical, cultural, and religious landscape of modern Europe. Emphasizing the priority of practical reason and moral autonomy, Kant's radically original account of human subjectivity announced new ethical imperatives and engendered new political hopes. This collection of essays investigates the centrality of progress to Kant's philosophical project and the contested legacy of Kant's faith in reason's capacity to advance not only our scientific comprehension and technological prowess, but also our moral, political, and religious lives. Accordingly, the first half of the volume explores the many facets of Kant's thinking about progress, while the remaining essays each focus on one or two thinkers who play a crucial role in post-Kantian German philosophy: J. G. Herder (1744-1803), J. G. Fichte (1762-1814), G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). This two-part structure reflects the central thesis of the volume that Kant inaugurates a distinctive theoretical tradition in which human historicity is central to political philosophy.

By exploring the origins and metamorphoses of this tremendously influential tradition, the volume offers a timely perspective on fundamental questions in an age increasingly suspicious of the Enlightenment's promise of universal rational progress. It aims to help us face three sets of questions: (1) Do we still believe in the possibility of progress? If we do, on what grounds? If we do not, why have we lost the hope for a better future that animated previous generations? (2) Is the belief in progress necessary for the maintenance of today's liberal democratic order? Does a cosmopolitan vision of politics ultimately depend on a faith in humanity's gradual, asymptotic realization of that lofty aim? (3) And, if we no longer believe in progress, can we dispense with hope without succumbing to despair?

In 1484, humanist philosopher and theologian Marsilio Ficino published the first complete Latin translation of Plato's extant works. Students of Plato now had access to the entire range of the dialogues, which revealed to Renaissance audiences the rich ancient landscape of myths, allegories, philosophical arguments, etymologies, fragments of poetry, other works of philosophy, aspects of ancient pagan religious practices, concepts of mathematics and natural philosophy, and the dialogic nature of the Platonic corpus's interlocutors. By and large, Renaissance readers in the Latin West encountered Plato's text through Ficino's translations and interpretation.

In Plato's Persona, Denis J.-J. Robichaud provides the first synthetic study of Ficino's interpretation of the Platonic corpus. Robichaud analyzes Plato's works in their original Greek and in Ficino's Latin translations, as well as Ficino's non-Platonic writings and correspondence, in the process uncovering new aspects of Ficino's intellectual work habits. In his letters and works, Ficino self-consciously imitated a Platonic style of prose, in effect devising a persona for himself as a Platonic philosopher. Plato's dialogues are populated with a wealth of literary characters with whom Plato interacts and against whom Plato refines his own philosophies. Reading through Ficino's translations, Robichaud finds that the Renaissance philosopher seeks an understanding of Plato's persona(e) among all the dialogues' interlocutors. In effect, Ficino assumed the role of Plato's Latin spokesperson in the Renaissance.

Plato's Persona is grounded in an extensive study of scholarship in Renaissance humanism, classics, philosophy, and intellectual history, and contextualizes Ficino's intellectual achievements within the contemporary Christian orthodox view of Platonism. Ficino was an influential figure in the early Italian Renaissance: the key intermediary between Greek and Latin, and between manuscript and print, giving voice to Plato and access to the ancient frameworks needed to interpret his dialogues.

When political theorists teach the history of political philosophy, they typically skip from the ancient Greeks and Cicero to Augustine in the fifth century and Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth, and then on to the origins of modernity with Machiavelli and beyond. Paul Stern aims to change this settled narrative and makes a powerful case for treating Dante Alighieri, arguably the greatest poet of medieval Christendom, as a political philosopher of the first rank.

In Dante's Philosophical Life, Stern argues that Purgatorio's depiction of the ascent to Earthly Paradise, that is, the summit of Mount Purgatory, was intended to give instruction on how to live the philosophic life, understood in its classical form as "love of wisdom." As an object of love, however, wisdom must be sought by the human soul, rather than possessed. But before the search can be undertaken, the soul needs to consider from where it begins: its nature and its good. In Stern's interpretation of Purgatorio, Dante's intense concern for political life follows from this need, for it is law that supplies the notions of good that shape the soul's understanding and it is law, especially its limits, that provides the most evident display of the soul's enduring hopes.

According to Stern, Dante places inquiry regarding human nature and its good at the heart of philosophic investigation, thereby rehabilitating the highest form of reasoned judgment or prudence. Philosophy thus understood is neither a body of doctrines easily situated in a Christian framework nor a set of intellectual tools best used for predetermined theological ends, but a way of life. Stern's claim that Dante was arguing for prudence against dogmatisms of every kind addresses a question of contemporary concern: whether reason can guide a life.

Avicenna is the most influential figure in the intellectual history of the Islamic world. This book is the first comprehensive study of his theory of science, which profoundly shaped his philosophical method and indirectly influenced philosophers and theologians not only in the Islamic world but also throughout Christian Europe and the medieval Jewish tradition. 

A sophisticated interpreter of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, Avicenna took on the ambitious task of reorganizing Aristotelian philosophy of science into an applicable model of scientific reasoning, striving to identify conditions of certainty for scientific assertions and conditions of adequacy for real definitions. Riccardo Strobino combines philosophical and textual analysis to explore the scope and nature of Avicenna’s contributions to the logic of scientific reasoning in his effort to recalibrate Aristotle’s model and overcome some of its internal limitations. Focusing on a broad array of philosophical innovations at the intersection of logic, metaphysics, and epistemology, this book casts light on an essential aspect of the thought of the preeminent philosopher and physician of the Islamic world.
 

The role of humor as helpful in our individual lives has long been touted. Satirists and comics have also been known to play important roles in our society. But what hasn't been explored is why and how humor and mirth are important to the overall health of the public. This book explores the idea of humor as a public good. A good the promotes the health and well-being of the society and its individual members. The book begins with an exploration of the notion of a public good and then argues for a particular view of what a public good is. Topics covered will include the importance of humor and mirth to an individual's happiness, the role of satire and the comic in our world, and how these two pieces together work to promote the public good. Content will be devoted to covering what humor is and how it works and why the way it works is also important to the public good. Ultimately, the argument for humor as a public good is to help grow the purview of humor studies more generally as well as provide and novel argument about the relevance and importance of humor in our public and private lives.

Der Mathematiker Kurt Gödel hat über einen Zeitraum von 22 Jahren (1934-1955) philosophische Bemerkungen, die so genannten Maximen Philosophie (Max Phil), niedergeschrieben. Sie sind in 15 Notizbüchern in der Kurzschrift Gabelsberger überliefert.

Erstmals wird nun an der Kurt-Gödel-Forschungsstelle der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften eine vollständige, historisch-kritische Edition von Gödels Philosophischen Notizbüchern vorgelegt. Im Rahmen dieser Edition erscheint jährlich ein Band.

In Band 7 befasst sich Gödel mit dem Thema ›Sprache‹. Ausgehend von seinen intensiven Studien der Werke Gottlob Freges, Bertrand Russells und Ludwig Wittgensteins liegt das Hauptaugenmerk in diesem Notizbuch auf sprachphilosophischen Untersuchungen in dieser Tradition sowie auf den damit zusammenhängenden Überlegungen zu Logik und Mathematik.

Die Verschiedenheit des Zugangs eines wissenschaftlichen und eines theologischen Weltbildes zur Welt und zum Leben stellt einen weiteren Schwerpunkt dieses Buches dar. Daneben setzt Gödel unter anderem seine Überlegungen dazu fort, wie der Mensch die Welt wahrnimmt und erfasst.

Hannah Arendt’s claim that she brings Immanuel Kant’s unwritten political philosophy to fruition is controversial. For one, it is inconsistent with Kant’s thought, as he separates aesthetic and political judgments. Moreover, Arendt’s appropriation of reflective judgment conflicts with her sharp distinction between the public and private realms. Whereas reflective judgment is a reflective ability, political judgment is a public ability.

This book justifies Arendt’s claim that reflective judgment has political potential – while remaining consistent with Kant’s aesthetics and Arendt’s politics. By developing an Arendtian phenomenology of privacy, I offer a new reading of her public-private distinction. I uncover non-privacy as the space of withdrawal where the life of the mind unfolds.

What is more, I show that reflective activities constitute the necessary but not sufficient conditions for the emergence of the public realm. Reflective judgment is one of these activities. For Arendt attributes to enlarged mentality the public communicability of political judgments. Enlarged mentality thus gives persons the ability to insert themselves into the world. Therefore, Arendt is right to locate political potential in reflective judgment.

James Kopf approaches the phenomenon of music from the level of perception, as opposed to presuming a definition of music as either prima facie known or gleaned solely from a specific cultural tradition. Methodologically, this work draws from phenomenology, particularly the field of modern phenomenology as inaugurated by Edmund Husserl and its promulgation by Martin Heidegger, sound studies, and, in terms of rhetorical style, deconstruction, though it considers the work of thinkers from a wide variety of other fields, from Theodor Reik’s psychoanalysis to archaeology and beyond.

The author charts a path forward into a more ethical understanding of music and listening in the age of global capitalism, one that tolerates difference and uniqueness across the perceived divides of culture, time, species, and matter. In pursuing this path, the possibility of musical experiences to be emergent in aural spaces historically deemed "non-musical" is considered: the space between notes of a chorale, breaks between movements, aboriginal sonic practices ignored or scorned by colonial logic, a forest rent by fracking, and even bodily noises.

Mit Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne (1873) versucht Nietzsche, ein Jahr nach Publikation der Geburt der Tragödie, eine Auseinandersetzung mit zentralen Fragen der Sprachphilosophie durch die Hinterfragung der Möglichkeitsbedingungen des Denkens. Zunächst als private Gedankensammlung angelegt, wird diese Schrift im 20. Jahrhundert zu einem der prominentesten Paradigmen der sprachphilosophisch-ästhetischen Reflexion.

In the last years of his life, Henry David Thoreau created something new. Part blueprint for a major new work, part scientific chart, and part re-envisioning of the way we experience the passage of time, Thoreau’s Kalendar was more a tool than a text. Comprised of six multipage charts of “general phenomena,” the Kalendar was an instrument for recording not just natural and weather-related phenomena, but also the hidden relations among them—between the skies of one June and the skies of past and future Junes—relations we often feel but can’t quite hold, rooted as we typically are in our own brief moment of linear time. 

Combining reproductions of Thoreau’s hand-drawn charts with transcriptions of the Kalendar’s text and essays by acclaimed poet and scholar Kristen Case, this gorgeously crafted volume illuminates the final project of one of America’s most treasured writers and naturalists and offers a timeless, transformative vision of how to live harmoniously with the living world around us.

This is the first full-text English translation of a seminal book within the phenomenological movement.

The work was orginally published in 1922 in Edmund Husserl’s yearbook Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, and has had a wide impact on work in phenomenology (Husserl, Heideger, Stein) and social ontology. Gerda Walther broaches the topic of social ontology, i.e., a study of social communities. She carries out this task by using the phenomenological method, that is, a study of the first-person (both singular and plural) experience of being a part of a community, what it feels like internally (and its constitutive elements), how it relates to other individuals or other communities, and how unifications between individiuals and communities or between communities take place.

The book is an important contribution to the phenomenology of intersubjectivity or the study of social ontology. Social ontology has been an important and fruitful field of research in contemporary social theory, cognitive science, and other disciplines. It will be a crucial contribution to current research.

Also available as paperback: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/isbn/9783110764857/html

Few philosophers present themselves with as much complexity as Marcus Tullius Cicero. At once a philosopher, statesman, orator, and lawyer, Cicero consciously fashioned his own image for posterity and wrote philosophical texts as invitations for his readers to think for themselves. His philosophy has continued to unfold over the centuries, repeatedly inspiring new and independent philosophical positions. Since J.G.F. Powell’s pivotal contribution in 1995, we have witnessed countless translations and scholarly treatments of Cicero’s philosophy that emphasize his creativity and influence. In this tradition, the present volume offers fresh and incisive contributions that advance the ongoing renaissance in Cicero scholarship.

Part One of the volume focuses on Cicero’s approaches to writing philosophy and on specific interpretive questions facing readers of his philosophical corpus. Part Two traces key moments in Cicero’s philosophical afterlife, from Augustine through the Scholastic period to the Renaissance, culminating in the rich and varied tradition of Ciceronian reception in the European Enlightenment. Throughout the volume, special attention is given to Cicero’s practical philosophy.

This volume collects 19 of the author’s essays on eighteenth-century accounts of self-consciousness, personal identity and related issues, covering over a hundred years of a philosophical debate that has shaped the way in which these topics are discussed today. After a detailed analysis of the seventeenth-century background, the essays analyze and critically evaluate French, British and German contributions, ranging from Claude Buffier early in the century to Kant and aspects of the Post-Kantian debate. The essays deal with a large number of diverse sources, including the views and arguments of well-known philosophers such as Hume and Kant, as well as lesser-known thinkers, such as LeLarge de Lignac and Thomas Cooper, organized around four, partly overlapping main themes: a) the self and its identity as a matter of a special 'feeling' (sentiment intime, Selbstgefühl) in thinkers such as Condillac, Rousseau and Feder, b) materialist treatments of these issues in, for example, Priestley and Hißmann, c) Scottish Common Sense accounts, with a special focus on Reid, and d) Kant’s analysis and the philosophical context in which it was developed, with a particular　emphasis on the German debate (Wolff and his critics, Lossius, Tetens and others).

Der Band 4.1 enthält den Kommentar zum ersten und zweiten Teil von Nietzsches Also sprach Zarathustra. Entstanden in den Jahren 1883 bis 1885, handelt es sich um das populärste Werk Nietzsches, das aufgrund seiner poetischen Form und seiner Rätselhaftigkeit enorme Strahlkraft entfaltet hat, aber auch, weil es mit dem "Übermenschen" und der "ewigen Wiederkunft" zentrale Konzepte Nietzsches vorstellt.

Nietzsches Schrift Der Wanderer und sein Schatten erschien als Nachtrag zu Menschliches Allzumenschliches. In jüngster Zeit wird sie in der Forschung zurecht als eigenständiges Werk betrachtet. Die detaillierte Kommentierung in einem eigenen Band innerhalb des Nietzsche-Kommentars trägt dieser gestiegenen Bedeutung Rechnung.

The contributors in this volume situate Wittgenstein’s philosophy within the context of Kant, Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling. They show how his philosophy both stands in the tradition of German idealism while breaking new ground. The topics of logic and language make this tension especially palpable and allow the authors to reveal new connections and offer critical perspectives.

Over a period of 22 years (1934-1955), the mathematician Kurt Gödel wrote down philosophical remarks, the so-called Maximen Philosophie (Max Phil). They are preserved in 15 notebooks in Gabelsberger shorthand. The first booklet contains general philosophical considerations, booklets two and three consist of Gödel's individual ethics. The following books show that Gödel developed a philosophy of science in which he places his discussions on physics, psychology, biology, mathematics, language, theology and history in the context of a metaphysics.

A complete, historical-critical edition of Gödel's Philosophical Notebooks is now being prepared for the first time at the Kurt Gödel Research Centre of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. One volume will be published each year as part of this edition.

Volume 6 is in some respects a continuation of 'Maximen V'. From a systematic point of view, three major subject areas in particular can be identified, namely: (I) spirit, soul, ego, consciousness, mind; (II) perception as sensory perception, but also perception through the mind or by means of feeling; and (III) language, in which Gödel deals with the word, the sentence, speech, the concept and judgement, among other things.

The book Ontological Proofs Today, apart from the introduction, consists of six parts. Part II comprises papers each of which pertains either to historical ontological arguments, or to some other, rather new, ontological arguments, but what makes them stand out from the other papers in this volume, is the fact that they all treat of the omniscience or the omnipotence of God. Part III includes papers which introduce new ontological arguments for the existence of God, without referring to omniscience and omnipotence as the transparent attributes of God. The issue of the type of necessity with which ontological proofs work or may work is raised in the articles of Part IV. In Part V the semantics for some ontological proofs are defined. Part VI consists of papers which, although quite different from each other in terms of content, all explore some ontological issues, and formal ontology may be considered the link between them. Part VII comprises two articles, by R. E. Maydole and G. Oppy, mutually controversial and different in their assessment of some ontological proofs.

This volume is devoted to problems within analytic metaphysics. It defends an ontology and theory of categories inspired by Aristotle, but revised in such a way as to be compatible with modern science. The ontology of both natural and social reality is addressed, starting out from the view that universals exist but only in the spatiotemporal world (immanent realism). In attempting to bring Aristotle's ontology up-to-date, the author relies very much on the thinking of Edmund Husserl, conceiving the cement of the universe as Husserlian relations of existential dependence and regarding intentionality as a non-reducible category in the ontology of mind. The work is thoroughly realistic in spirit, but large parts of it should nonetheless be of interest to conceptualists and nominalists, too.

Die Nuslehre Alexander von Aphrodisias‘ wird als eine erhellende, innovative und systematisierende Interpretation von Aristoteles rekonstruiert, die durch die Theorie der Integration der Potenzen die Konstitution komplexer Formen (wie der Seele) erklärt, ohne auf platonisierende Strukturen zurückzugreifen. Dafür wird einen Aktivität und Passivität integrierenden dynamis-Begriff herausgearbeitet, der die Entfaltung der prinzipiell unveränderlichen Form ermöglicht, sodass die Komplexität der Seele aus den Relationen zwischen deren Potenzen resultiert. Diese Theorie erreicht ihren spekulativen Höhepunkt in der Nuslehre, die den Intellekt als einen maximal integrierten, einheitlichen Ternar darstellt, dessen Strukturmomente der materielle, habituelle und wirkliche Nus sind. Diese sind weder verschiedene Vermögen noch Entwicklungsphasen, sondern die konstitutiven, sich ergänzenden Funktionen der einen Vernunft.

Die Lehre Alexanders ist relevant für aktuelle Debatten über Nus und sein Beitrag zur historischen Entwicklung der Idee der Vernunft originell. So erscheint Alexander als eine bereichernde Stimme, die sowohl in die spezialisierte Aristoteles-Forschung als auch in die systematische Diskussion über Geist und Seele einzubinden ist.

In this erudite new work, Elliot R. Wolfson explores philosophical gnosis in the writings of Susan Taubes, Gillian Rose, and Edith Wyschogrod. The juxtaposition of these three extraordinary, albeit relatively neglected, philosophers provides a prism through which Wolfson scrutinizes the interplay of ethics, politics, and theology. The bond that ties together the diverse and multifaceted worldviews promulgated by Taubes, Rose, and Wyschogrod is the mutual recognition of the need to enunciate a response to the calamities of the twentieth century based on an incontrovertible acknowledgment of the decadence and malevolence of human beings, without, however, succumbing to acrimony and despair. The speculation of each of these philosophers on melancholia and the tragicomedy of being is unquestionably intricate, exhibiting subtle variations and idiosyncrasies, but we can nevertheless identify a common denominator in their attempt to find the midpoint positioned between hope and hopelessness. As Wolfson articulates, Taubes, Rose, and Wyschogrod exemplify a philosophical sensibility informed by a nocturnal seeing, which is not merely a seeing in the night but rather a seeing of the night. Ultimately, the book reveals the potential for these thinkers' ideas to enhance our moral sensitivity and to encourage participation in the ongoing struggle for meaning and decency in the present.

Hannah Arendt's work inspires many to stand in solidarity against authoritarianism, racial or gender-based violence, climate change, and right-wing populism. But what if a careful analysis of her oeuvre reveals a darker side to this intellectual legacy? What if solidarity, as she conceives of it, is not oriented toward equality, freedom, or justice for all, but creates a barrier to intersectional coalition building?

In Arendt's Solidarity, David D. Kim illuminates Arendt's lifelong struggle with this deceptively straightforward yet divisive concept. Drawing upon her publications, unpublished documents, private letters, radio and television interviews, newspaper clippings, and archival marginalia, Kim examines how Arendt refutes solidarity as an effective political force against anti-Semitism, racial injustice, or social inequality. As Kim reveals, this conceptual conundrum follows the arc of Arendt's forced migration across the Atlantic and is directly related to every major concern of hers: Christian neighborly love, friendship, Jewish assimilation, Zionism, National Socialism, the American republic, Black Power, revolution, violence, and the human world. Kim places these thoughts in dialogue with dissenting voices, such as Thomas Mann, Gershom Scholem, Jean-Paul Sartre, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, James Forman, and Ralph Ellison. The result is a full-scale reinterpretation of Arendt's oeuvre.

This is the first of a two-volume edition of Alexander of Aphrodisias’ commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The new edition, which includes a philosophical and philological introduction, as well as notes on textcritical issues, is based on a critical evaluation of the entire manuscript tradition of the commentary. It also takes into account its indirect tradition and the Latin translation of Juan Ginès Sepúlveda.

Der Band 4.2 enthält den Kommentar zum dritten und vierten Teil von Nietzsches Also sprach Zarathustra. Entstanden in den Jahren 1883 bis 1885 handelt es sich um das populärste Werk Nietzsches, das aufgrund seiner poetischen Form und seiner Rätselhaftigkeit enorme Strahlkraft entfaltet hat, aber auch, weil es mit dem "Übermenschen" und der "ewigen Wiederkunft" zentrale Konzepte Nietzsches vorstellt.

The Heidelberg Academy of Sciences is undertaking the first comprehensive historical and critical commentary of Friedrich Nietzsche’s works. Although Nietzsche is one of the most influential thinkers of the modern age, until now, no general commentary on his oeuvre has been published that addresses the full spectrum of philosophical, historical, and literary contexts and sources that inform his work. This commentary on the works of Friedrich Nietzsche will be an invaluable foundation for future Nietzsche research.

The edition offers a new critical text of De rerum natura. It has been established after fresh collation of the manuscripts and a critical evaluation of previous editorial scholarship. It is equipped with a critical apparatus, an apparatus of sources and an apparatus of repeated lines. The preface discusses the manuscript tradition of Lucretius and the way the text and apparatuses have been constructed.

Forms and Concepts is the first comprehensive study of the central role of concepts and concept acquisition in the Platonic tradition. It sets up a stimulating dialogue between Plato’s innatist approach and Aristotle’s much more empirical response. The primary aim is to analyze and assess the strategies with which Platonists responded to Aristotle’s (and Alexander of Aphrodisias’) rival theory. The monograph culminates in a careful reconstruction of the elaborate attempt undertaken by the Neoplatonist Proclus (6th century AD) to devise a systematic Platonic theory of concept acquisition.

In Greek Late Antiquity philosophy defined itself above all through the interpretation of authoritative texts such as Plato’s dialogues or the treatises of Aristotle.

This work looks at the last Late Antique commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics, the pagan Simplicius and the Christian Philoponus (both 6th cent. AD). Golitsis demonstrates how differently the two contemporaries interpreted the philosophical tradition and how this led them to deduce different routes to finding the truth.

The problem of body and soul has a long history that can be traced back to the beginnings of Greek culture. The existential question of what happened to the soul at the moment of death, whether and in what form there is life after death, and of the exact relationship between body and soul was answered in different ways in Greek philosophy, from the early days to Late Antiquity. The contributions in this volume not only do justice to the breadth of the topic, they also cover the entire period from the Pre-Socratics to Late Antiquity. Particular attention is paid to Plato, Aristotle and Hellenistic philosophers, that is the Stoics and the Epicureans.

In 2021, a previously unknown treatise by Porphyry of Tyre, which has been preserved in a Syriac translation, was made available to historians of philosophy: Porphyry, On Principles and Matter (De Gruyter, 2021). This text not only enlarges our knowledge of the legacy of the most prominent disciple of Plotinus but also serves as an important witness to Platonist discussions of first principles and of Plato’s concept of prime matter in the Timaeus.

The aim of the present volume of collected studies is two-fold. On the one hand, it brings up an update to the state of the art of our knowledge of Porphyry’s philosophy and of his role in the transmission of the earlier philosophical materials, especially those of the Middle Platonic works. On the other hand, it focuses on the questions of the reception of Porphyry’s legacy, both by Greek and Latin Platonists (with special interest in Calcidius) and by Christian Oriental authors (with particular focus on the Syriac tradition).

The primary audience of the book will be scholars and graduate students in ancient and late ancient Greek philosophy, Orientalists and scholars interested in the Christian reception of Greek philosophy, in the studies of the Christian Orient, as well as in Greek, Latin, and Syriac philology.

Widmer sheds light on a neglected aspect of the Western philosophical tradition. Following an era of Hegelianism, the members of the neo-Kantian "Marburg School," such as Friedrich Albert Lange, Hermann Cohen, Rudolf Stammler, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer defended socialism or left-wing ideals on Kantian principles.

In doing so, Widmer breaks with two mistaken assumptions. First, Widmer demonstrates that the left-Hegelian and Marxist traditions were not the only significant philosophical sources of socialist critique in nineteenth-century Germany, as the left-Kantians identified problems of normativity that the left-Hegelians could not adequately address.

Second, Widmer challenges the prevailing assumption that the political philosophies developed in the Marburg School can be comprehensively characterized as a unified school of "ethical socialism." By showing that they varied fundamentally regarding their political views and their philosophical foundations of socialism, Widmer fills a gap in the studies of neo-Kantianism that is long overdue.

Over a period of 22 years (1934-1955), the mathematician Kurt Gödel wrote down philosophical remarks, the so-called Maximen Philosophie (Max Phil). They are preserved in 15 notebooks in Gabelsberger shorthand. The first booklet contains general philosophical considerations, booklets two and three consist of Gödel's individual ethics. The following books show that Gödel developed a philosophy of science in which he places his discussions on physics, psychology, biology, mathematics, language, theology and history in the context of a metaphysics.

A complete, historical-critical edition of Gödel's Philosophical Notebooks is now being prepared for the first time at the Kurt Gödel Research Centre of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. One volume will be published each year as part of this edition.

Volume 5 is particularly interesting because Gödel reveals his satisfaction with it at the beginning of 'Maximen V'. He states that he has arrived at independent thought here, which has not primarily come about through discussion with other authors. Furthermore, in addition to numerous remarkable philosophical considerations, there is a previously unknown interpretation of his (second) incompleteness theorem that goes beyond the mathematical one.

In der 1886 verfassten Vorrede zur Neuausgabe der Fröhlichen Wissenschaft schreibt Nietzsche über sich selbst: „Ein Philosoph, der den Gang durch viele Gesundheiten gemacht hat und immer wieder macht, ist auch durch ebenso viele Philosophien hindurchgegangen“. Der vorliegende Band erschließt dieses ‚Hindurchgegangensein‘ durch verschiedene Philosophien in einem bewusst weitgefassten Sinn: Die Beiträger*innen widmen sich aus wechselnden Perspektiven dem vielschichtigen Philosophieren Nietzsches selbst, seiner Auseinandersetzung mit anderen – älteren und zeitgenössischen – Philosophen und nicht zuletzt seiner weltweiten Nachwirkung in der Philosophie der Moderne.

This book investigates a number of central problems in the philosophy of Charles Peirce grouped around the realism of his semiotics: the issue of how sign systems are developed and used in the investigation of reality.

Thus, it deals with the precise character of Peirce's realism; with Peirce's special notion of propositions as signs which, at the same time, denote and describe the same object. It deals with diagrams as signs which depict more or less abstract states-of-affairs, facilitating reasoning about them; with assertions as public claims about the truth of propositions. It deals with iconicity in logic, the issue of self-control in reasoning, dependences between phenomena in their realist descriptions.

A number of chapters deal with applied semiotics: with biosemiotic sign use among pre-human organisms: the multimedia combination of pictorial and linguistic information in human semiotic genres like cartoons, posters, poetry, monuments.

All in all, the book makes a strong case for the actual relevance of Peirce's realist semiotics.

Over a period of 22 years (1934-1955), the mathematician Kurt Gödel wrote down philosophical remarks, the so-called Maximen Philosophie (Max Phil). They are preserved in 15 notebooks in Gabelsberger shorthand. The first booklet contains general philosophical considerations, booklets two and three consist of Gödel's individual ethics. The following volumes show that Gödel developed a philosophy of science in which he places his discussions on physics, psychology, biology, mathematics, language, theology and history in the context of a metaphysics.

A complete, historical-critical edition of Gödel's Philosophical Notebooks is now being prepared for the first time at the Kurt Gödel Research Centre of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. One volume will be published each year as part of this edition.

In volume 4, Gödel deals with fundamental questions of mathematics and logic as well as the philosophy of mathematics. In addition, the relationship between different scientific disciplines and their specific questions are at the centre of his considerations. These include, in particular, philosophy, psychology and theology.

Over a period of 22 years (1934–1955), mathematician Kurt Gödel put down a series of philosophical remarks – the so-called Philosophical Maxims (Max Phil) – in writing. They have been passed down in 15 notebooks written in Gabelsberger shorthand. The first notebook contains general philosophical reflections, while the second and third notebooks consist of Gödel’s applied individual ethics. The notebooks that follow show that Gödel developed a philosophy of science in which he placed his considerations of physics, psychology, biology, mathematics, language, theology, and history within the context of a particular metaphysics. Now for the first time ever, a complete, historical-critical edition of Gödel’s philosophical notebooks is being prepared by the Kurt Gödel Research Center of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. One volume will be published yearly as part of this series.

With the notebook "Maxims III," a new section of Gödel’s philosophical notebooks begins. This notebook sheds light on the relationship between various disciplines – in particular psychology, mathematics (specifically logic), and theology – and their respective significance for both the thinking and working scholar and for the knowledge system. It also contains considerations on heuristics and scholarly methods. The role of fundamental or simple concepts in thinking also becomes apparent.

Safronov’s Nietzsche’s Political Economy is a pioneering appraisal of Nietzsche’s critique of industrial culture and its unfolding crisis. The author contends that Nietzsche remains unique in conceptualizing the upheavals of modern political economy in terms of the crisis of its governing values. Nietzsche scrutinises the norms which, not only preside over the unfathomable build-up in debt, the proliferation of meaningless, impersonal slavery and the rise of increasingly repressive social control systems, but inevitably set these precarious tendencies of modern political economy on a collision course liable to culminate in an unprecedented human and environmental catastrophe. Safronov explores the core themes of Nietzsche’s political economy—debt, slavery, and the division of labour—with reference to the influential views of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, as well as against the backdrop of the Long Depression (1873–1896), the first truly international crisis of industrial capitalism, during which most of Nietzsche’s work was completed.

In Nietzsche’s assessment, modern political economy is predicated on the valuations that diminish humankind’s prospects and harm the planet’s future by consistently enfeebling the present, as long as there is profit to be made from it. Nietzsche’s critical insight, which challenges the most fundamental tenet of modern economics and finance, is that in order to build a stronger and intrinsically more valuable future in lieu of simply speculating on it, as though the liberal Promised Land could descend upon us like the manna from heaven at the wave of an invisible hand [of the market], it is necessary to walk from the future we dare to envisage resolutely back to the present we inhabit to determine what demands achieving such a vision would impose upon us, instead of embellishing the ‘here and now’ by cynically discounting the future to the [net] value of the present while disparaging, disowning and rewriting the past to unburden ourselves of its troubling legacy, as we continue to frivolously squander its capital to the alluring tunes of the ‘sirens who in the marketplace sing to us of the future’. The enabling mechanism for changing our valuing perspectives, Nietzsche tells us, lies dormant in us and it must be unlocked before it is too late.

The Syriac treatise published in the present volume is in many respects a unique text. Though it has been preserved anonymously, there remains little doubt that it belongs to Porphyry of Tyre. Accordingly, it enlarges our knowledge of the views of the most famous disciple of Plotinus. The text is an important witness to Platonist discussions on First Principles and on Plato’s concept of Prime Matter in the Timaeus. It contains extensive quotations from Atticus, Severus, and Boethus. This text thus provides us with new textual witnesses to these philosophers, whose legacy remains very poorly attested and little known. Additionally, the treatise is a rare example of a Platonist work preserved in the Syriac language. The Syriac reception of Plato and Platonic teachings has left rather sparse textual traces, and the question of what precisely Syriac Christians knew about Plato and his philosophy remains a debated issue. The treatise provides evidence for the close acquaintance of Syriac scholars with Platonic cosmology and with philosophical commentaries on Plato’s Timaeus.

Im Zentrum des Bandes stehen zwei umfangreichere Druckschriften von 1845 und ein undatiertes Manuskript: Die von Marx und Engels verfasste „Heilige Familie“ sowie die „Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England“ von Engels mit ihrer bis heute bemerkenswerten Auseinandersetzung mit den wirtschaftlichen und sozialen Wirkungen der Industrialisierung am Beispiel Großbritanniens. Bei dem nicht datierten, fragmentarischen „Entwurf über Friedrich List“ handelt es sich um eine Handschrift von Marx, in der er ausgehend von einer Kritik an List, ökonomische Grundbegriffe erörtert. Nach den Pariser Manuskripten ist dies eines der ersten Manuskripte, in denen Marx Grundlagen für zentrale ökonomische Konzepte wie Tauschwert, Arbeitslohn, Grundrente oder produktive Kräfte schafft. Hinzu kommen 21 Artikel von Engels, darunter die „Elberfelder Reden“, sowie drei Artikel und eine Erklärung von Marx. Sämtliche Werke und Texte werden hier erstmals historisch-kritisch ediert, wobei die Identifikation benutzter Quellen einen Schwerpunkt bildet.

In Weiterführung des Bandes I/7 enthält auch dieser Band die publizistischen Arbeiten, die von Marx und Engels in der "Neuen Rheinischen Zeitung" veröffentlicht wurden. Durch neue Autorschaftsanalysen konnte erstmals ein sicherer Textkorpus hergestellt werden. Auf erweiterter Textgrundlage wird damit das Wirken von Marx und Engels als Autoren, Redakteure, Herausgeber und Politiker in der Revolution von 1848/49 neu bestimmt. Damit wird zugleich ein wesentlicher Beitrag zur europäischen Revolutions- und Pressegeschichte geleistet.

In den vier "Unzeitgemässen Betrachtungen" verbindet Nietzsche kritische Zeitdiagnosen mit konstruktivem Zukunftsengagement. Krisensymptome der modernen Zivilisation reflektiert er hier ebenso wie problematische Bildungs- und Wissenschaftskonzepte seiner Epoche.

Vor diesem Hintergrund avancieren Schopenhauer und Wagner in der dritten und vierten "Betrachtung" zu ‚unzeitgemäßen‘ Vorbildern. Während Nietzsche das philosophische Ethos Schopenhauers als zukunftsweisendes Gegenmodell zur Gelehrtenkultur und zum Historismus seiner Zeitgenossen darstellt, begreift er Wagners Bayreuth-Projekt als paradigmatischen Impuls für eine Utopie kultureller Erneuerung.

Erstmals kommentiert dieser Band beide Werke umfassend in ihrem Kontext. Durch gründliche Quellenstudien rekonstruiert der Kommentar die für sie maßgeblichen Denktraditionen. Dadurch ermöglicht er neue Einsichten in kulturhistorische Horizonte und Diskurse. Zugleich tragen auch wirkungsgeschichtliche Recherchen zu einem vertieften Werkverständnis bei.

In three comprehensive volumes, Logic of the Future presents a full panorama of Charles S. Peirce’s most important late writings. Among the most influential American thinkers, Peirce took his existential graphs to be a significant contribution to human thought. The manuscripts from 1895–1913, with many of them being published here for the first time, testify to the richness and open-endedness of his theory of logic and its applications. They also invite us to reconsider our ordinary conceptions of reasoning as well as the conventional stories concerning the evolution of modern logic.

This first volume of Logic of the Future is on the historical development, theory and application of Peirce’s graphical method and diagrammatic reasoning. It also illustrates the abundant further developments and applications Peirce envisaged existential graphs to have on the analysis of mathematics, language, meaning and mind.

»Das durchgehende Thema der vorliegenden Untersuchung ist die zeitliche Konstitution eines reinen Empfindungsdatums und die einer solchen Konstitution zugrunde liegende Selbstkonstitution der "phänomenologischen Zeit". Entscheidend wird dabei die Herausstellung des intentionalen Charakters des Zeitbewußtseins und die wachsende grundsätzliche Klärung der Intentionalität überhaupt. Das allein macht schon, von dem besonderen Inhalt der einzelnen Analysen abgesehen, die folgenden Studien zu einer unentbehrlichen Ergänzung der in den »Logischen Untersuchungen« zum erstenmal aufgenommenen grundsätzlichen Erhellung der Intentionalität. Auch heute noch ist dieser Ausdruck kein Losungswort, sondern der Titel eines zentralen Problems.« Martin Heidegger, 1928

How do people and institutions manage to bring their different perspectives into an effective and productive interplay? How can we overcome obstacles for the creative potentials of distributed perspectives? Traditionally, the perspectives of people and institutions are considered to be fixed and isolated points of view. In such a picture, the perspectives seem determined in advance by positions and persons seem trapped within their perspectival horizons. In contrast, the new approach of this volume’s contributions focuses on the simple but fundamental fact that people (in their perceiving, speaking, thinking, and acting) always already refer to fellow human beings and coordinate their own perspectives with those of other persons and institutions. The contributions of the present volume concentrate on the structures, mechanisms, and dynamics of the interplays of different perspectives of interacting, communicating, and cooperating persons and institutions. The volume focuses on how the creative potentials as well as the organizational effectiveness of distributed perspectives can be set free.

Seit der ersten Auflage hat die Forschung die Kenntnis der mittelalterlichen nordischen Rechtsquellen erweitert und vertieft. Dementsprechend ist die neue Auflage vollständig durchsehen, erheblich überarbeitet und erweitert worden.
Neu sind Ausführungen über Runensteine als Rechtsquellen, die Eroberungen der Dänen und Schweden im Baltikum, vor allem in Estland, und ihre dortige Verwaltung. Strauch hat nunmehr auch den Einfluss der Chasaren in Russland auf die dortige Herrschaft der Waräger berücksichtigt.
Erhebliche Änderungen ergaben sich bei Jyske Lov, im älteren und jüngeren Västgötalag und im schwedischen Landslag. Erweitert und vertieft behandelt werden nunmehr die Rolle des kanonischen Rechts und der kirchlichen Landbücher Norwegens, der Begriff "Folklande" in Uppland und des crimen laesae maiestatis in Schweden. Auch die beigefügten Karten sind überarbeitet worden. Die Literaturnachweise sind auf den neuesten Stand gebracht und erheblich erweitert worden.
Somit ist die Neuauflage wieder ein unentbehrliches Referenzwerk für Skandinavisten und Rechtshistoriker.

This collection demonstrates the range of approaches that some of the leading scholars of our day take to basic questions at the intersection of the natural and human worlds. The essays focus on three interlocking categories: Reason stakes a bigger territory than the enclosed yard of universal rules. Nature expands over a far larger region than an eternal category of the natural. And history refuses to be confined to claims of an unencumbered truth of how things happened.

Die Revolution von 1848/49 gehört zur politisch aktivsten Zeit von Marx und Engels. In Köln gaben sie von Juni 1848 bis Mai 1849 die Tageszeitung „Neue Rheinische Zeitung“ als „Organ der Demokratie“ heraus. Der Band zeigt ihr Wirken in der Revolution als radikale Politiker und als Herausgeber und Autoren der Zeitung. Sie treten zugleich als Leitartikelschreiber und Redakteure hervor, die tägliche Nachrichtenarbeit leisten. Der Band dokumentiert eine Vielzahl neu nachgewiesener Artikel, die erstmals in einer Marx-Engels-Edition erscheinen.

The purpose of the conference “On Pythagoreanism”, held in Brasilia in 2011, was to bring together leading scholars from all over the world to define the status quaestionis for the ever-increasing interest and research on Pythagoreanism in the 21st century. The papers included in this volume exemplify the variety of topics and approaches now being used to understand the polyhedral image of one of the most fascinating and long-lasting intellectual phenomena in Western history. Cornelli’s paper opens the volume by charting the course of Pythagorean studies over the past two centuries. The remaining contributions range chronologically from Pythagoras and the early Pythagoreans of the archaic period (6th-5th centuries BCE) through the classical, hellenistic and late antique periods, to the eighteenth century. Thematically they treat the connections of Pythagoreanism with Orphism and religion, with mathematics, metaphysics and epistemology and with politics and the Pythagorean way of life.