Name: The Rule of Law Under Siege
Brand: William E. Scheuerman, editor
Price: 63.0 USD
Availability: InStock

William E. Scheuerman, editor

The Rule of Law Under Siege

$63.00

In the pathbreaking essays collected here, Neumann and Kirchheimer demonstrate that the death of democracy and the rise of fascism during the first half of the twentieth century suggest crucial lessons for contemporary political and legal scholars. The volume includes writings on constitutionalism, political freedom, Nazism, sovereignty, and both Nazi and liberal law. Most important, the Frankfurt authors point to the continuing efficacy of the rule of law as an instrument for regulating and restraining state authority, as well as ominous evidence of the rule of law's fragility in modern liberal democracy.

James Schmidt, editor

What Is Enlightenment?

$41.95

This collection contains the first English translations of a group of important eighteenth-century German essays that address the question, "What is Enlightenment?" The book also includes newly translated and newly written interpretive essays by leading historians and philosophers, which examine the origins of eighteenth-century debate on Enlightenment and explore its significance for the present.

In recent years, critics from across the political and philosophical spectrum have condemned the Enlightenment for its complicity with any number of present-day social and cultural maladies. It has rarely been noticed, however, that at the end of the Enlightenment, German thinkers had already begun a scrutiny of their age so wide-ranging that there are few subsequent criticisms that had not been considered by the close of the eighteenth century. Among the concerns these essays address are the importance of freedom of expression, the relationship between faith and reason, and the responsibility of the Enlightenment for revolutions.

Included are translations of works by such well-known figures as Immanuel Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Johann Georg Hamann, as well as essays by thinkers whose work is virtually unknown to American readers. These eighteenth-century texts are set against interpretive essays by such major twentieth-century figures as Max Horkheimer, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault.

Theodore Kisiel

The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time

$39.95

This book, ten years in the making, is the first factual and conceptual history of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927), a key twentieth-century text whose background until now has been conspicuously absent. Through painstaking investigation of European archives and private correspondence, Theodore Kisiel provides an unbroken account of the philosopher's early development and progress toward his masterwork.

Beginning with Heidegger's 1915 dissertation, Kisiel explores the philosopher's religious conversion during the bleak war years, the hermeneutic breakthrough in the war-emergency semester of 1919, the evolution of attitudes toward his phenomenological mentor, Edmund Husserl, and the shifting orientations of the three drafts of Being and Time. Discussing Heidegger's little-known reading of Aristotle, as well as his last-minute turn to Kant and to existentialist terminology, Kisiel offers a wealth of narrative detail and documentary evidence that will be an invaluable factual resource for years to come.

A major event for philosophers and Heidegger specialists, the publication of Kisiel's book allows us to jettison the stale view of Being and Time as a great book "frozen in time" and instead to appreciate the erratic starts, finite high points, and tentative conclusions of what remains a challenging philosophical "path."

The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time

Steven E. Aschheim

The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany

$33.95

Countless attempts have been made to appropriate the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche for diverse cultural and political ends, but nowhere have these efforts been more sustained and of greater consequence than in Germany. Aschheim offers a magisterial chronicle of the philosopher's presence in German life and politics.

Thomas H. Murray

The Worth of a Child

$52.95

Thomas Murray's graceful and humane book illuminates one of the most morally complex areas of everyday life: the relationship between parents and children. What do children mean to their parents, and how far do parental obligations go? What, from the beginning of life to its end, is the worth of a child?

Ethicist Murray leaves the rarefied air of abstract moral philosophy in order to reflect on the moral perplexities of ordinary life and ordinary people. Observing that abstract moral terms such as altruism and selfishness can be buried in the everyday doings of families, he maintains that ethical theory needs a richer description than it now has of the moral life of parents and children. How far should adults go in their quest for children? What options are available to women who do not want to bear a child now? Should couples be allowed to reject a child because of genetic disability or "wrong" gender? How can we weigh the competing claims of the genetic and the rearing parents to a particular child?

The Worth of a Child couples impressive learning with a conversational style. Only by getting down to cases, Murray insists, can we reach moral conclusions that are unsentimental, farsighted, and just. In an era of intense public and private acrimony about the place and meaning of "family values," his practical wisdom about extraordinary difficult moral issues offers compelling reading for both experienced and prospective parents, as well as for ethicists, social and behavioral scientists, and legal theorists.

John E. Atwell

Schopenhauer on the Character of the World

$63.00

The most extensive English-language study of Schopenhauer's metaphysics of the will yet published, this book represents a major contribution to Schopenhauer scholarship. Here, John E. Atwell critically but sympathetically examines the philosopher's main work, The World as Will and Representation, demonstrating that the philosophical system it puts forth does constitute a consistent whole. The author holds that this system is centered on a single thought, "The world is self-knowledge of the will." He then traces this unifying concept through the four books of The World as Will and Representation, and, in the process, dissolves the work's alleged inconsistencies.

Schopenhauer on the Character of the World

Timothy F. Murphy

Ethics in an Epidemic

$52.95

AIDS strikes most heavily at those already marginalized by conventional society. With no immediate prospect of vaccination or cure, how can liberty, dignity, and reasoned hope be preserved in the shadow of an epidemic? In this humane and graceful book, philosopher Timothy Murphy offers insight into our attempts—popular and academic, American and non-American, scientific and political—to make moral sense of pain.

Murphy addresses the complex moral questions raised by AIDS for health-care workers, politicians, policy makers, and even people with AIDS themselves. He ranges widely, analyzing contrasting visions of the origin and the future of the epidemic, the moral and political functions of obituaries, the uncertain value of celebrity involvement in anti-AIDS education, the functional uses of AIDS in the discourse of presidential campaigns, the exclusionary function of HIV testing for immigrants, the priority given to AIDS on the national health agenda, and the hypnotic publicity given to "innocent" victims.

Murphy's discussions of the many social and political confusions about AIDS are unified by his attempt to articulate the moral assumptions framing our interpretations of the epidemic. By understanding those assumptions, we will be in a better position to resist self-serving and invidious moralizing, reckless political response, and social censure of the sick and the dying.

Richard Madsen

China and the American Dream

$63.00

From the "Red Menace" to Tiananmen Square, the United States and China have long had an emotionally tumultuous relationship. Richard Madsen's frank and innovative examination of the moral history of U.S.-China relations targets the forces that have shaped this surprisingly strong tie between two strikingly different nations. Combining his expertise as a sinologist with the vision of America developed in Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, Madsen studies the cultural myths that have shaped the perceptions of people of both nations for the past twenty-five years.

The dominant American myth about China, born in the 1960s, foresaw Western ideals of economic, intellectual, and political freedom emerging triumphant throughout the world. Nixon's visit to China nurtured this idea, and by the 1980s it was helping to sustain America's hopefulness about its own democratic identity. Meanwhile, Chinese popular culture has focused on the U.S., especially American consumer goods—Coca-Cola was described by the People's Daily as "capitalism concentrated in a bottle."

Today we face a new global institutional and cultural environment in which the old myths no longer work for either Americans or Chinese. Madsen provides a framework for us to think about the relationship between democratic ideals and economic/political realities in the post-Cold War world. What he proposes is no less than the foundation for building a public philosophy for the emerging world order.

Joseph Margolis

Interpretation Radical but Not Unruly

$63.00

With this challenging work, Joseph Margolis continues the project begun in The Flux of History and the Flux of Science (California, 1993). Tackling one of philosophy's master themes, he develops the controversial thesis that the world is a flux. Here he applies this doctrine to Western theories of history and the interpretation of cultural phenomena—offering the first sustained analysis of the logic, methodology, and metaphysics of interpretation committed to a thoroughgoing relativism and the historicized structure of cultural phenomena. Versed in Anglo-American and Continental philosophy, Margolis draws on the best views of Western philosophy to investigate a topic regularly ignored in that tradition. The result is the surprising synthesis of two historically antipathetic approaches to philosophy.

Richard Wolin

Walter Benjamin

$41.95

Few twentieth-century thinkers have proven as influential as Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural and literary critic. Richard Wolin's book remains among the clearest and most insightful introductions to Benjamin's writings, offering a philosophically rich exposition of his complex relationship to Adorno, Brecht, Jewish Messianism, and Western Marxism. Wolin provides nuanced interpretations of Benjamin's widely studied writings on Baudelaire, historiography, and art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In a new Introduction written especially for this edition, Wolin discusses the unfinished Arcades Project, as well as recent tendencies in the reception of Benjamin's work and the relevance of his ideas to contemporary debates about modernity and postmodernity.

Norman Frohlich

Choosing Justice

$30.95

This book presents an entirely new answer to the question: “What is fair?” In their radical approach to ethics, Frohlich and Oppenheimer argue that much of the empirical methodology of the natural sciences should be applied to the ethical questions of fairness and justice.

Oscar Kenshur

Dilemmas of Enlightenment

$63.00

Oscar Kenshur combines trenchant analyses of important early-modern texts with a powerful critique of postmodern theories of ideology. He thereby contributes both to our understanding of Enlightenment thought and to contemporary debates about cultural studies and critical theory.

While striving to resolve "dilemmas" occasioned by conflicting intellectual and political commitments, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers often relied upon ideas originally used by their enemies to support very different claims. Thus, they engaged in what Kenshur calls "intellectual co-optation." In exploring the ways in which Dryden, Bayle, Voltaire, Johnson, and others used this technique, Kenshur presents a historical landscape distinctly different from the one constructed by much contemporary theory.

Peter Caws

Yorick's World

$63.00

Peter Caws provides a fresh and often iconoclastic treatment of some of the most vexing problems in the philosophy of science: explanation, induction, causality, evolution, discovery, artificial intelligence, and the social implications of technological rationality.

Caws's work has been shaped equally by the insights of Continental philosophy and a concern with scientific practice. In these twenty-eight essays spanning more than a quarter of a century, he ranges from discussions of the work of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, to relations between science and surrealism, to the concept of intentionality, to the limits of quantitative description. A lively mix of history, theory, speculation, and analysis, Yorick's World presents a vision of science that includes human history and social life. It will interest professional philosophers and scientists, and at the same time its directness will make it readily accessible to nontechnical readers.

Donald Chisholm

Coordination Without Hierarchy

$31.95

The organizational history of American government during the past 100 years has been written principally in terms of the creation of larger and larger public organizations. Beginning with the Progressive movement, no matter the goal, the reflexive response has been to consolidate and centralize into formal hierarchies. That efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability, and the coordination necessary to achieve them, are promoted by such reorganizations has become widely accepted.

Borrowing from social psychology, sociology, political science, and public administration, and using the public transit system of the San Francisco Bay area for illustrative purposes, Donald Chisholm directly challenges this received wisdom. He argues that, contrary to contemporary canons of public administration, we should actively resist the temptation to consolidate and centralize our public organizations. Rather, we should carefully match organizational design with observed types and levels of interdependence, since organizational systems that on the surface appear to be tightly linked webs of interdependence on closer examination often prove decomposable into relatively simpler subsystems that may be coordinated through decentralized, informal organizational arrangements.

Chisholm finds that informal channels between actors at different organizations prove remarkably effective and durable as instruments of coordination. Developed and maintained as needed rather than according to a single preconceived design, informal channels, along with informal conventions and contracts, tend to match interorganization interdependence closely and to facilitate coordination. Relying on such measures reduces the cognitive demands and obviates the necessity for broadscale political agreement typical of coordination by centralized, formal organizations. They also advance other important values that are frequently absent in formally consolidated organizations, such as reliability, flexibility, and the representation of varied interests.

Coordination Without Hierarchy is an incisive, penetrating work whose conclusions apply to a wide range of public organizations at all levels of government. It will be of interest to a broad array of social scientists and policymakers.

In an earlier version, Coordination Without Hierarchy received the American Political Science Association 1985 Leonard D. White Award for the best doctoral dissertation in the field of public administration, including broadly related problems of policy formation and administrative theory.

Ian Shapiro

Political Criticism

$30.95

Since the 1960s a resurgence of interest in the moral foundations of politics has fueled debates about the appropriate sources of our political judgments. Ian Shapiro analyzes and advances these debates, discussing them in an accessibly style. He defends a view of politics called critical naturalism as a third way between the neo-Kantian theory of John Rawl's and the contextual arguments of Richard Rorty, Michael Walzer, Alasdair MacIntyre and others. He formulates a new justification for democratic politics and an innovative account of the nature of political argument.

David Rothenberg

Hand's End

$31.95

Hand's End offers a new philosophy of technology as the fundamental way in which humans experience and define nature—the tool as humanity extended. Rothenberg examines human inventions from the water wheel to the nuclear bomb and discusses theories of technology in the thought of philosophers including Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Marx, Heidegger, Spinoza, Mumford, and McLuhan.

Roger Friedland

NowHere

$36.95

The fall of the Berlin wall, the uprising at Tiananmen Square, the war in the Persian Gulf, the conflict in Bosnia—such events have been fundamentally affected by modern technology. As we become instant spectators of war, famine, and revolution, time and space assume new global meanings. This provocative volume presents an eclectic group of contributors who attempt to make sense of the "now" and the "here" that define the modern age.

The essays, by anthropologists, religionists, geographers, linguists, sociologists, and historians, explore the temporal and spatial facets of social life. Their range is remarkable and includes English landscape painting, talk in corporations, agoraphobic women, the ecological structure of Los Angeles, the cosmology of the Holocaust, and the ritual spaces of Buddhist Japan and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The editors' introduction addresses the diversity of these empirical concerns and positions them within a rapidly expanding theoretical landscape.

David Hockney's striking painting on the book jacket captures the tension between somewhere and everywhere, between space and place, now and just a moment ago—hence "nowhere" or "now/here."

Azade Seyhan

Representation and Its Discontents

$28.95

Azade Seyhan provides a concise, elegantly argued introduction to the critical theory of German Romanticism and demonstrates how its approach to the metaphorical and linguistic nature of knowledge is very much alive in contemporary philosophy and literary theory. Her analysis of key thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis explores their views on rhetoric, systematicity, hermeneutics, and cultural interpretation. Seyhan examines German Romanticism as a critical intervention in the debates on representation, which developed in response to the philosophical revolution of German Idealism.

Facing a chaotic political and intellectual landscape, the eighteenth-century theorists sought new models of understanding and new objectives for criticism and philosophy. Representation and Its Discontents identifies the legacy of this formative moment in modern criticism and suggests its relevance to contemporary discussions of post-structuralism, orientalism, theories of textuality, and the nature of philosophical discourse.

Brian Barry

Theories of Justice

$39.95

What is social justice? In Theories of Justice Brian Barry provides a systematic and detailed analysis of two kinds of answers. One is that justice arises from a sense of the advantage to everyone of having constraints on the pursuit of self-interest. The other answer connects the idea of justice with that of impartiality. Though the first book of a trilogy, Theories of Justice stands alone and constitutes a major contribution to the debate about social justice that began in 1971 with Rawls's A Theory of Justice.

Roger Smith

Inhibition

$63.00

In everyday parlance, "inhibition" suggests repression, tight control, the opposite of freedom. In medicine and psychotherapy the term is commonplace, its definition understood. Relating how inhibition—the word and the concept—became a bridge between society at large and the natural sciences of mind and brain, Smith constructs an engagingly original history of our view of ourselves.

Not until the late nineteenth century did the term "inhibition" become common in English, connoting the dependency of reason and of civilization itself on the repression of "the beast within." This usage followed a century of Enlightenment thought about human nature and the nature of the human mind. Smith traces theories of inhibitory control from the moralistic psychologies of the early nineteenth century to the famous twentieth-century schools of Sherrington, Pavlov, and Freud. He finds that the meanings of "inhibition" cross disciplinary boundaries and outline the growth of our belief in the self-regulated person.

Randolph Bourne

The Radical Will

$36.95

Randolph Bourne was only thirty-two when he died in 1918, but he left a legacy of astonishingly mature and incisive writings on politics, literature, and culture, which were of enormous influence in shaping the American intellectual climate of the 1920s and 1930s. This definitive collection, back in print at last, includes such noted essays as "The War and the Intellectuals," "The Fragment of the State," "The Development of Public Opinion," and "John Dewey's Philosophy." Bourne's critique of militarism and advocacy of cultural pluralism are enduring contributions to social and political thought, sure to have an equally strong impact in our own time. In their introduction and preface, Olaf Hansen and Christopher Lasch provide biographical and historical context for Bourne's work.

G.S. Rousseau, editor

The Languages of Psyche

$38.95

The Languages of Psyche traces the dualism of mind and body during the "long eighteenth century," from the Restoration in England to the aftermath of the French Revolution. Ten outstanding scholars investigate the complex mind-body relationship in a variety of Enlightenment contexts—science, medicine, philosophy, literature, and everyday society. No other recent book provides such an in-depth, suggestive resource for philosophers, literary critics, intellectual and social historians, and all who are interested in Enlightenment studies.

Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin

The Abuse of Casuistry

$33.95

In this engaging study, the authors put casuistry into its historical context, tracing the origin of moral reasoning in antiquity, its peak during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, and its subsequent fall into disrepute from the mid-seventeenth century.

W.V. Quine and Rudolf Carnap

Dear Carnap, Dear Van

$68.95

Rudolf Carnap and W. V. Quine, two of the twentieth century's most important philosophers, corresponded at length—and over a long period of time—on matters personal, professional, and philosophical. Their friendship encompassed issues and disagreements that go to the heart of contemporary philosophic discussions. Carnap (1891-1970) was a founder and leader of the logical positivist school. The younger Quine (1908-) began as his staunch admirer but diverged from him increasingly over questions in the analysis of meaning and the justification of belief. That they remained close, relishing their differences through years of correspondence, shows their stature both as thinkers and as friends. The letters are presented here, in full, for the first time.

The substantial introduction by Richard Creath offers a lively overview of Carnap's and Quine's careers and backgrounds, allowing the nonspecialist to see their writings in historical and intellectual perspective. Creath also provides a judicious analysis of the philosophical divide between them, showing how deep the issues cut into the discipline, and how to a large extent they remain unresolved.

Brian P. McLaughlin

Perspectives on Self-Deception

$39.95

Students of philosophy, psychology, sociology, and literature will welcome this collection of original essays on self-deception and related phenomena such as wishful thinking, bad faith, and false consciousness. The book has six sections, each exploring self-deception and related phenomena from a different perspective.

Robert A. Dahl

A Preface to Economic Democracy

$29.95

Tocqueville pessimistically predicted that liberty and equality would be incompatible ideas. Robert Dahl, author of the classic A Preface to Democratic Theory, explores this alleged conflict, particularly in modern American society where differences in ownership and control of corporate enterprises create inequalities in resources among Americans that in turn generate inequality among them as citizens.

Arguing that Americans have misconceived the relation between democracy, private property, and the economic order, the author contends that we can achieve a society of real democracy and political equality without sacrificing liberty by extending democratic principles into the economic order. Although enterprise control by workers violates many conventional political and ideological assumptions of corporate capitalism as well as of state socialism. Dahl presents an empirically informed and philosophically acute defense of "workplace democracy." He argues, in the light of experiences here and abroad, that an economic system of worker-owned and worker-controlled enterprises could provide a much better foundation for democracy, political equality, and liberty than does our present system of corporate capitalism.

Patrick A. Heelan

Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science

$33.95

Drawing on the phenomenological tradition in the philosophy of science and philosophy of nature, Patrick Heelan concludes that perception is a cognitive, world-building act, and is therefore never absolute or finished.

Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science

Amelie O. Rorty, editor

Essays on Descartes' Meditations

$41.95

The essays in this volume form a commentary on Descartes' Meditations. Following the sequence of the meditational stages, the authors analyze the function of each stage in transforming the reader, to realize his essential nature as a rational inquirer, capable of scientific, demonstrable knowledge of the world. There are essays on the genre of meditational writing, on the implications of the opening cathartic section of the book on Descartes' theory of perception and his use of skeptical arguments; essays on the theory of ideas and their role of Descartes' reconstructive analytic method; essays on the proofs for the existence of God, on the role of the will in the formation and malformation of judgments; and the essays on the foundations of the science of extension and on Descartes' account of the union of mind and body.

Ludwig Feuerbach

Thoughts on Death and Immortality

$33.95

Never translated before, 'Thoughts on Death and Immortality' was the first published work of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872). The scandal created by portrayal of Christianity as an egoistic and inhumane religion cost the young Hegelian his job and, to some extent, his career. Joining philosophical argument to epigram, lyric, and satire, the work has three central arguments: first, a straightforward denial of the Christian belief in personal immortality; second, a plea for recognition of the inexhaustible quality of the only life we have; and third, a derisive assault on the posturings and hypocrisies of the professional theologians of nineteenth-century Germany.

James Miller

History and Human Existence—From Marx to Merleau-Ponty

$33.95

From the Introduction:

The present essay provides an introduction to the treatment of human existence and individuality in Marxist thought. The work will be primarily concerned with two related topics: the evaluation by Marxists of individual emancipation and their assessment of subjective factors in social theory.

By taking up these taking up these topics within a systematic and historical framework, I hope to generate some fresh light on several familiar issues. First, I pursue a reading of Marx focused on his treatment of subjectivity, individuation, and related methodological and practical matters; second, I apply this interpretation to analyzing the dispute between Marxist orthodoxy and heterodoxy over such matters as class consciousness and the philosophy of materialism; finally, I employ this historical context to clarify the significance of "existential Marxism," Maurice Merleau-Ponty's and Jean-Paul Sartre's contribution to Marxist thought.

History and Human Existence—From Marx to Merleau-Ponty

Richard H. Popkin

The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza

$33.95

"I had read the book before in the shorter Harper Torchbook edition but read it again right through--and found it as interesting and exciting as before. I regard it as one of the seminal books in the history of ideas. Based on a prodigious amount of original research, it demonstrated conclusively and in fascinating details how the transmission of ancient skepticism was a bital factor in the formation of modern thought. The story is rich in implications for th history of philosophy, the history of science, and the history of religious thought. Popkin's work has already inspired further work by others--and the new edition takes account of this, most importantly the work of Charles Schmitt. The two new chapters extend the story as far as Spinoza, with special reference to the beginnings of biblical criticism. . . . Popkin's history is of great potential interest to a wide readership--wider than most specialist publications and wider than it has (so far as I can tell) reached hitherto."

--M.F. Burnyeat, Professor of Philosophy, University College London

The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza

Montesquieu

The Spirit of Laws

$39.95

Montesquieu's The Spirit of Laws is an enduring classic of social and political theory deserving a fresh reading every generation. The modern reader, however, is likely to find a work that ran to over a thousand pages in its two-volume first edition a bit overwhelming. Presented here, therefore, is the first English-language compendium of The Spirit of Laws, together with the first English translation of the posthumously published treatise containing the physiological theory underlying Montesquieu's theory of climate.

Edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty

The Identities of Persons

$33.95

In this volume, thirteen philosophers contribute new essays analyzing the criteria for personal identity and their import on ethics and the theory of action: it presents contemporary treatments of the issues discussed in Personal Identity, edited by John Perry (University of California Press, 1975)

David Held

Introduction to Critical Theory

$37.95

The writings of the critical theorists caught the imagination of students and intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s. They became a key element in the formation and self-understanding of the New Left, and have been the subject of continuing controversy. Partly because of their rise to prominence during the political turmoil of the sixties, and partly because they draw on traditions rarely studied in the Anglo-American world, the works of these authors are often misunderstood.

In this book David Held provides a much-needed introduction to, and evaluation of, critical theory. He is concerned mainly with the thought of the Frankfurt school—Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, in particular—and with Habermas, one of Europe's leading contemporary thinkers. Several of the major themes considered are critical theory's relation to Marx's critique of the political economy, Freudian psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and the philosophy of history. There is also a discussion of critical theory's substantive contribution to the analysis of capitalism, culture, the family, and the individual, as well as its contribution to epistemology and methodology.

Held's book will be necessary reading for all concerned with understanding and evaluating one of the most influential intellectual movements of our time.

Lawrence Sklar

Space, Time, and Spacetime

$34.95

In this book, Lawrence Sklar demonstrates the interdependence of science and philosophy by examining a number of crucial problems on the nature of space and time—problems that require for their resolution the resources of philosophy and of physics.

The overall issues explored are our knowledge of the geometry of the world, the existence of spacetime as an entity over and above the material objects of the world, the relation between temporal order and causal order, and the problem of the direction of time. Without neglecting the most subtle philosophical points or the most advanced contributions of contemporary physics, the author has taken pains to make his explorations intelligible to the reader with no advanced training in physics, mathematics, or philosophy. The arguments are set forth step-by-step, beginning from first principles; and the philosophical discussions are supplemented in detail by nontechnical expositions of crucial features of physical theories.

Stephen C. Pepper

World Hypotheses

$33.95

"World hypotheses" correspond to metaphysical systems, and they may be systematically judged by the canons of evidence and corroboration.

In setting forth his root-metaphor theory and examining six such hypotheses—animism, mysticism, formism, mechanism, contextualism, and organicism—Pepper surveys the whole field of metaphysics. Because this book is an analytical study, it stresses issues rather than men. It seeks to exhibit the sources of these issues and to show that some are unnecessary; that the rest gather into clusters and are interconnected in systems corresponding closely to the traditional schools of philosophy. The virtue of the root-metaphor method is that it puts metaphysics on a purely factual basis and pushes philosophical issues back to the interpretation of evidence.

This book was written primarily as a contribution to the field, but its plan excellently suits it for use as a text in courses in metaphysics, types of philosophical theory, or present tendencies in philosophy.

Frits Staal

Exploring Mysticism

$33.95

Until less than a century ago, the two prevailing views of dreams as well as of souls were that they are inconsequential (the scientific view) or of divine origin (the religious view). In either case it was assumed that they cannot be objects of rational inquiry. Similar views still prevail regarding mystical experiences and mysticism in general. Modern Western opinion, whether friendly or hostile, holds that the mystical falls squarely within the domain of the irrational.

Mr. Staal argues that mysticism can be studied rationally, and that without such study no theory of mind is complete. He exposes the grounds for the belief that mysticism cannot be studied, and shows them to be prejudices issuing from a particular historical development. While his contention has unflattering implications for the contemporary study of the humanities in general, it reveals in particular that existing academic approaches to the study of mysticism, even those that appear sound, are in fact inadequate. This conclusion applies to a variety of dogmatic inquiries and, as becomes clear in these pages, to philological, historical, phenomenological, sociological, physiological, and psychological ones as well.

The illustrations in Exploring Mysticism are drawn mainly from Indian forms of mysticism such as Yoga, supplemented with Buddhist, Taoist, Muslim and Christian examples.

Hanna F. Pitkin

The Concept of Representation

$31.95

Being concerned with representation, this book is about an idea, a concept, a word. It is primarily a conceptual analysis, not a historical study of the way in which representative government has evolved, nor yet an empirical investigation of the behavior of contemporary representatives or the expectations voters have about them. Yet, although the book is about a word, it is not about mere words, not merely about words. For the social philosopher, for the social scientist, words are not "mere"; they are the tools of his trade and a vital part of his subject matter. Since human beings are not merely political animals but also language-using animals, their behavior is shaped by their ideas. What they do and how they do it depends upon how they see themselves and their world, and this in turn depends upon the concepts through which they see. Learning what "representation" means and learning how to represent are intimately connected. But even beyond this, the social theorist sees the world through a network of concepts. Our words define and delimit our world in important ways, and this is particularly true of the world of human and social things. For a zoologist may capture a rare specimen and simply observe it; but who can capture an instance of representation (or of power, or of interest)? Such things, too, can be observed, but the observation always presupposes at least a rudimentary conception of what representation (or power, or interest) is, what counts as representation, where it leaves off and some other phenomenon begins. Questions about what representation is, or is like, are not fully separable from the question of what "representation" means. This book approaches the former questions by way of the latter.

Hans Reichenbach

The Rise of Scientific Philosophy

$31.95

This book represents a new approach to philosophy. It treats philosophy as not a collection of systems, but as a study of problems. It recognizes in traditional philosophical systems the historical function of having asked questions rather than having given solutions. Professor Reichenbach traces the failures of the systems to psychological causes.

Speculative philosophers offered answers at a time when science had not yet provided the means to give true answers. Their search for certainty and for moral directives led them to accept pseudo-solutions. Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and many others are cited to illustrate the rationalist fallacy: reason, unaided by observation, was regarded as a source of knowledge, revealing the physical world and "moral truth." The empiricists could not disprove this thesis, for they could not give a valid account of mathematical knowledge.

Mathematical discoveries in the early nineteenth century cleared the way for modern scientific philosophy. Its advance was furthered by discoveries in modern physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology. These findings have made possible a new conception of the universe and of the atom. The work of scientists thus altered philosophy completely and brought into being a philosopher with a new attitude and training.

Instead of dictating so-called laws of reason to the scientist, this modern philosopher proceeds by analyzing scientific methods and results. He finds answers to the age-old questions of space, time, causality, and life; of the human observer and the external world. He tells us how to find our way through this world without resorting to unjustifiable beliefs or assuming a supernatural origin for moral standards. Philosophy thus is no longer a battleground of contradictory opinions, but a science discovering truth step by step.

Professor Reichenbach, known for his many contributions to logic and the philosophy of science, addresses this book to a wider audience. He writes for those who do not have the leisure or preparation to read in the fields of mathematics, symbolic logic, or physics. Besides showing the principal foundations of the new philosophy, he has been careful to provide the necessary factual background. He has written a philosophical study, not a mere popularization. It contains within its chapters all the necessary scientific material in an understandable form—and, therefore, conveys all the information indispensable to a modern world-view.

The late Hans Reichenbach was Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. His previous books include

Hanna F. Pitkin

Wittgenstein and Justice

$36.95

Hanna Pitkin argues that Wittgenstein's later philosophy offers a revolutionary new conception of language, and hence a new and deeper understanding of ourselves and the world of human institutions and action.

Andrew Mason

Plato

$34.95

Plato explores the thought of a man who, in a literary career of fifty years, generated ideas that have pervaded history from antiquity to today. After laying out the basics of Plato’s intellectual development and considering his complex relationship with Socrates, Andrew Mason offers a thematic approach to help readers navigate through an often challenging body of work. Throughout, this concise volume traces the development of continuing themes in Plato’s dialogues and considers the relevance of these themes for modern thought. Drawing on recent scholarship, this engaging introduction offers the ideal, up-to-date overview of a figure who remains essential reading in western history and philosophy.

J. Baird Callicott

Earth's Insights

$31.95

The environmental crisis is global in scope, yet contemporary environmental ethics is centered predominantly in Western philosophy and religion. Earth's Insights widens the scope of environmental ethics to include the ecological teachings embedded in non-Western worldviews. J. Baird Callicott ranges broadly, exploring the sacred texts of Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Zen Buddhism, as well as the oral traditions of Polynesia, North and South America, and Australia. He also documents the attempts of various peoples to put their environmental ethics into practice. Finally, he wrestles with a question of vital importance to all people sharing the fate of this small planet: How can the world's many and diverse environmental philosophies be brought together in a complementary and consistent whole?

Anna L. Peterson

Being Human

$31.95

Being Human examines the complex connections among conceptions of human nature, attitudes toward non-human nature, and ethics. Anna Peterson proposes an "ethical anthropology" that examines how ideas of nature and humanity are bound together in ways that shape the very foundations of cultures. Peterson discusses mainstream Western understandings of what it means to be human, as well as alternatives to these perspectives, and suggests that the construction of a compelling, coherent environmental ethics will revise our ideas not only about nature but also about what it means to be human.

María Pía Lara, editor

Rethinking Evil

$31.95

This innovative volume will be welcomed by moral and political philosophers, social scientists, and anyone who reflects seriously on the twentieth century's heavy burden of war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other evidence of people's desire to harm one another. María Pía Lara brings together a provocative set of essays that reexamine evil in the context of a "postmetaphysical" world, a world that no longer equates natural and human evil and no longer believes in an omnipotent God. The question of how and why God permits evil events to occur is replaced by the question of how and why humans perform radically evil acts.

Norman O. Brown

Love's Body, Reissue of 1966 edition

$29.95

Originally published in 1966 and now recognized as a classic, Norman O. Brown's meditation on the condition of humanity and its long fall from the grace of a natural, instinctual innocence is available once more for a new generation of readers. Love's Body is a continuation of the explorations begun in Brown's famous Life Against Death. Rounding out the trilogy is Brown's brilliant Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis.

Nel Noddings

Starting at Home

$33.95

Nel Noddings, one of the central figures in the contemporary discussion of ethics and moral education, argues that caring--a way of life learned at home--can be extended into a theory that guides social policy. Tackling issues such as capital punishment, drug treatment, homelessness, mental illness, and abortion, Noddings inverts traditional philosophical priorities to show how an ethic of care can have profound and compelling implications for social and political thought.

Instead of beginning with an ideal state and then describing a role for home and family, this book starts with an ideal home and asks how what is learned there may be extended to the larger social domain. Noddings examines the tension between freedom and equality that characterized liberal thought in the twentieth century and finds that--for all its strengths--liberalism is still inadequate as social policy. She suggests instead that an attitude of attentive love in the home induces a corresponding responsiveness that can serve as a foundation for social policy.

With her characteristic sensitivity to the individual and to the vulnerable in society, the author concludes that any corrective practice that does more harm than the behavior it is aimed at correcting should be abandoned. This suggests an end to the disastrous war on drugs. In addition, Noddings states that the caring professions that deal with the homeless should be guided by flexible policies that allow practitioners to respond adequately to the needs of very different clients. She recommends that the school curriculum should include serious preparation for home life as well as for professional and civic life.

Emphasizing the importance of improving life in everyday homes and the possible role social policy might play in this improvement, Starting at Home highlights the inextricable link between the development of care in individual lives and any discussion of moral life and social policy.

J. M. Moore

Aristotle and Xenophon on Democracy and Oligarchy

$31.95

This collection contains:

Aristotle's The Constitution of Athens

Xenophon's The Politeia of the Spartans

The Constitution of the Athenians ascribed to Xenophon the Orator

The Boeotian Constitution from the Oxyrhynchus Historian

In bringing together, translating, and annotating these constitutional documents from ancient Greece thirty five years ago, J. M. Moore produced an authoritative work of the highest scholarship. An explanatory essay by classics scholar Kurt A. Raaflaub expands this indispensable collection.

Aristotle and Xenophon on Democracy and Oligarchy

Edited by Arthur Jacobson and Bernhard Schlink

Weimar

$34.95

This selection of the major works of constitutional theory during the Weimar period reflects the reactions of legal scholars to a state in permanent crisis, a society in which all bets were off. Yet the Weimar Republic's brief experiment in constitutionalism laid the groundwork for the postwar Federal Republic, and today its lessons can be of use to states throughout the world. Weimar legal theory is a key to understanding the experience of nations turning from traditional, religious, or command-and-control forms of legitimation to the rule of law.

Only two of these authors, Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt, have been published to any extent in English, but they and the others whose writings are translated here played key roles in the political and constitutional struggles of the Weimar Republic. Critical introductions to all the theorists and commentaries on their works have been provided by experts from Austria, Canada, Germany, and the United States. In their general introduction, the editors place the Weimar debate in the context of the history and politics of the Weimar Republic and the struggle for constitutionalism in Germany. This critical scrutiny of the Weimar jurisprudence of crisis offers an invaluable overview of the perils and promise of constitutional development in states that lack an entrenched tradition of constitutionalism.

Desmond Manderson

Songs without Music

$63.00

In this pathbreaking and provocative analysis of the aesthetics of law, the historian, legal theorist, and musician Desmond Manderson argues that by treating a text, legal or otherwise, as if it were merely a sequence of logical propositions, readers miss its formal and symbolic meanings. Creatively using music as a model, he demonstrates that law is not a sterile, rational structure, but a cultural form to be valued and enhanced through rhetoric and metaphors, form, images, and symbols. To further develop this argument, the book is divided into chapters, each of which is based on a different musical form.

Law, for Manderson, should strive for neither coherence nor integrity. Rather, it is imperfectly realized, constantly reinterpreted, and always in flux. Songs without Music is written in an original, engaging, and often humorous style, and exhibits a deep knowledge of both law and music. It successfully traverses several disciplines and builds an original and persuasive argument for a legal aesthetic. The book will appeal to a broad readership in law, political theory, literary criticism, and cultural studies.

Himerius

Man and the Word

$85.00

This fully annotated volume offers the first English translation of the orations of Himerius of Athens, a prominent teacher of rhetoric in the fourth century A.D. Man and the Word contains 79 surviving orations and fragments of orations in the grand tradition of imperial Greek rhetoric. The speeches, a rich source on the intellectual life of late antiquity, capture the flavor of student life in Athens, illuminate relations in the educated community, and illustrate the ongoing civic role of the sophist. This volume includes speeches given by Himerius in various cities as he traveled east to join the emperor Julian, customary declamations on imaginary topics, and a noteworthy monody on the death of his son. Extensive introductory notes and annotations place these translations in their literary and historical contexts.

Rainer Forst

Contexts of Justice

$31.95

Contexts of Justice, highly acclaimed when it was published in Germany, provides a significant new intervention into the important debate between communitarianism and liberalism. Rainer Forst argues for a theory of "contexts of justice" that leads beyond the narrow confines of this debate as it has been understood until now and posits the possibility of a new conception of social and political justice. This book brings refreshing clarity to a complex topic as it provides a synthesis of traditions and theories that leads to a truly original approach.

Forst makes a four-part distinction to decipher the debate between communitarianism and liberalism. These four parts concern the constitution of the self, the neutrality of law, the ethos of democracy, and the opposition between universalism and contextualism. He shows that a comprehensive theory of justice needs to take these different contexts adequately into account. He discusses recent debates about discursive democracy and feminist critiques of liberalism, and addresses such topics as multiculturalism and civil society.

Translated and with Commentary by Samuel Scolnicov

Plato's Parmenides

$63.00

Of all Plato’s dialogues, the Parmenides is notoriously the most difficult to interpret. Scholars of all periods have disagreed about its aims and subject matter. The interpretations have ranged from reading the dialogue as an introduction to the whole of Platonic metaphysics to seeing it as a collection of sophisticated tricks, or even as an elaborate joke. This work presents an illuminating new translation of the dialogue together with an extensive introduction and running commentary, giving a unified explanation of the Parmenides and integrating it firmly within the context of Plato's metaphysics and methodology.

Scolnicov shows that in the Parmenides Plato addresses the most serious challenge to his own philosophy: the monism of Parmenides and the Eleatics. In addition to providing a serious rebuttal to Parmenides, Plato here re-formulates his own theory of forms and participation, arguments that are central to the whole of Platonic thought, and provides these concepts with a rigorous logical and philosophical foundation. In Scolnicov's analysis, the Parmenides emerges as an extension of ideas from Plato's middle dialogues and as an opening to the later dialogues.

Scolnicov’s analysis is crisp and lucid, offering a persuasive approach to a complicated dialogue. This translation follows the Greek closely, and the commentary affords the Greekless reader a clear understanding of how Scolnicov’s interpretation emerges from the text. This volume will provide a valuable introduction and framework for understanding a dialogue that continues to generate lively discussion today.

Neal Wood

Cicero's Social and Political Thought

$33.95

In this close examination of the social and political thought of Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.), Neal Wood focuses on Cicero's conceptions of state and government, showing that he is the father of constitutionalism, the archetype of the politically conservative mind, and the first to reflect extensively on politics as an activity.

Davis Baird

Thing Knowledge

$85.00

Western philosophers have traditionally concentrated on theory as the means for expressing knowledge about a variety of phenomena. This absorbing book challenges this fundamental notion by showing how objects themselves, specifically scientific instruments, can express knowledge. As he considers numerous intriguing examples, Davis Baird gives us the tools to "read" the material products of science and technology and to understand their place in culture. Making a provocative and original challenge to our conception of knowledge itself, Thing Knowledge demands that we take a new look at theories of science and technology, knowledge, progress, and change. Baird considers a wide range of instruments, including Faraday's first electric motor, eighteenth-century mechanical models of the solar system, the cyclotron, various instruments developed by analytical chemists between 1930 and 1960, spectrometers, and more.

Theodor Adorno

Essays on Music

$78.95

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), one of the principal figures associated with the Frankfurt School, wrote extensively on culture, modernity, aesthetics, literature, and—more than any other subject—music. To this day, Adorno remains the single most influential contributor to the development of qualitative musical sociology which, together with his nuanced intertextual readings of musical works, gives him broad claim as a continuing force in the study of music. This long-awaited collection of twenty-seven essays represents the full range of Adorno's music writing. Nearly half of the essays appear in English for the first time; all of the essays are fully annotated; and the previously translated essays have been corrected and missing text restored, making this volume the definitive resource on Adorno's musical thought.

Adolf Grunbaum

The Foundations of Psychoanalysis

$33.95

This study is a philosophical critique of the foundations of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. As such, it also takes cognizance of his claim that psychoanalysis has the credentials of a natural science. It shows that the reasoning on which Freud rested the major hypotheses of his edifice was fundamentally flawed, even if the probity of the clinical observations he adduced were not in question. Moreover, far from deserving to be taken at face value, clinical data from the psychoanalytic treatment setting are themselves epistemically quite suspect.

Ernest B. Hook, Editor

Prematurity in Scientific Discovery

$34.95

For centuries, observers have noted the many obstacles to intellectual change in science. In a much-discussed paper published in Scientific American in 1972, molecular biologist Gunther Stent proposed an explicit criterion for one kind of obstacle to scientific discovery. He denoted a claim or hypothesis as "premature" if its implications cannot be connected to canonical knowledge by a simple series of logical steps. Further, Stent suggested that it was appropriate for the scientific community to ignore such hypotheses so that it would not be overwhelmed by vast numbers of false leads. In this volume, eminent scientists, physicians, historians, social scientists, and philosophers respond to Stent's thesis.

Chu Hsi

Learning to Be A Sage

$30.95

Students and teachers of Chinese history and philosophy will not want to miss Daniel Gardner's accessible translation of the teachings of Chu Hsi (1130-1200)—a luminary of the Confucian tradition who dominated Chinese intellectual life for centuries. Homing in on a primary concern of our own time, Gardner focuses on Chu Hsi's passionate interest in education and its importance to individual development.

For hundreds of years, every literate person in China was familiar with Chu Hsi's teachings. They informed the curricula of private academies and public schools and became the basis of the state's prestigious civil service examinations. Nor was Chu's influence limited to China. In Korea and Japan as well, his teachings defined the terms of scholarly debate and served as the foundation for state ideology.

Chu Hsi was convinced that through education anyone could learn to be fully moral and thus travel the road to sagehood. Throughout his life, he struggled with the philosophical questions underlying education: What should people learn? How should they go about learning? What enables them to learn? What are the aims and the effects of learning?

Part One of Learning to Be a Sage examines Chu Hsi's views on learning and how he arrived at them. Part Two presents a translation of the chapters devoted to learning in the Conversations of Master Chu.

Bruce Krajewski

Gadamer’s Repercussions

$85.00

Certainly one of the key German philosophers of the twentieth century, Hans-Georg Gadamer also influenced the study of literature, art, music, sacred and legal texts, and medicine. Indeed, while much attention has been focused on Gadamer's writings about ancient Greek and modern German philosophy, the relevance of his work for other disciplines is only now beginning to be properly considered and understood. In an effort to address this slant, this volume brings together many prominent scholars to assess, re-evaluate, and question Hans-Georg Gadamer's works, as well as his place in intellectual history. The book includes a recent essay by Gadamer on "the task of hermeneutics," as well as essays by distinguished contributors including Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, Gerald Bruns, Georgia Warnke, and many others.

The contributors situate Gadamer's views in surprising ways and show that his writings speak to a range of contemporary debates—from constitutional questions to issues of modern art. A controversial final section attempts to uncover and clarify Gadamer's history in relation to National Socialism. More an investigation and questioning than a celebration of this venerable and profoundly influential philosopher, this collection will become a catalyst for any future rethinking of philosophical hermeneutics, as well as a significant starting place for rereading and reviewing Hans-Georg Gadamer.

Larry Laudan

Science and Values

$31.95

Laudan constructs a fresh approach to a longtime problem for the philosopher of science: how to explain the simultaneous and widespread presence of both agreement and disagreement in science. Laudan critiques the logical empiricists and the post-positivists as he stresses the need for centrality and values and the interdependence of values, methods, and facts as prerequisites to solving the problems of consensus and dissent in science.

Jeanne Lorraine Schroeder

The Triumph of Venus

$85.00

The theory of law and economics that dominates American jurisprudence today views the market as rational and individuals as driven by the desire to increase their wealth. It is a view riddled with misconceptions, as Jeanne Lorraine Schroeder demonstrates in this challenging work, which looks at contemporary debates in legal theory through the lens of psychoanalysis and continental philosophy. Through metaphors drawn from classical mythology and interpreted via Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian philosophy, Schroeder exposes the hidden and repressed erotics of the market. Her work shows how the predominant economic analysis of markets and the standard romantic critique of markets are in fact mirror images, reflecting the misconception that reason and passion are inalterably opposed.