Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics deals with character and its proper development in the acquisition of thoughtful habits directed toward appropriate ends. The articles in this unique collection, many new or not readily available, form a continuos commentary on the Ethics. Philosophers and classicists alike will welcome them.
Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics deals with character and its proper development in the acquisition of thoughtful habits directed toward appropriate ends. The articles in this unique collection, many new or not readily available, form a continuos com
S. Jonathan Singer
The Splendid Feast of Reason
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Jonathan Singer's witty, erudite book is a celebration of rationality and an urgent call to make use of intelligence and reason to better cope with human problems. Emphasizing the importance of rationality's greatest achievement, modern science, Singer—one of the foremost biologists of our era—argues that for the first time in several million years humanity has at its disposal the tools for an objective understanding of the external world. Singer demonstrates that, today more than ever, the fullest exercise of rationality is essential if humanity is to rein in a runaway technology and control an explosion of the human population that together threaten to devastate life on this planet within only a few more generations.
The intrusion of reason and rationality into our largely irrational world has been painfully slow, uneven, and often unwelcome. Singer explains that for rationalists the founding of modern science—which took place only a few hundred years ago—has overthrown many of the myths of conventional wisdom and dogmas of traditional religions. Yet these beliefs still hold sway over the irrational world, obstructing efforts to deal sensibly with the problematic future of mankind.
The core of The Splendid Feast of Reason is an engaging and accessible account of the knowledge that modern science provides. Singer offers an absorbing discussion of how life works, of the nature of reproduction, aging, and death, and of the necessary fragility of the individual life compared to the resilience of life itself. He emphasizes the primary role of the genes in determining the structural organization and the behaviors of living things, including humans. He also stresses the nature and mechanisms of biological evolution, mechanisms that have now been placed in jeopardy because of human ignorance and irrational appetites. Finally, Singer delves into the enigma of the real world with its irrational and chaotic operations and offers suggestions of how a rationalist can not only survive, but thrive in it.
Anna L. Peterson
Being Human
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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.
Ludwig Feuerbach
Thoughts on Death and Immortality
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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.
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 e
J. M. Dillon
The Question of Eclecticism
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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988.
Patrick A. Heelan
Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science
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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.
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.
Frederic
History and Will
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History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung's Thought delves into the ideological, philosophical, and historical dimensions of Mao Tse-tung's revolutionary vision, focusing on the unique interplay between historical determinism and subjective will in his thought. Against the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, the book explores Mao's departure from orthodox Marxist-Leninist doctrine, emphasizing his provocative embrace of ongoing revolution and grassroots dynamism over the institutional stability of his own Communist Party.
Through a series of thematic essays, the author investigates Mao's intellectual roots, including his exposure to Kantian idealism, Marxist romanticism, and traditional Chinese metaphysical frameworks. The book juxtaposes Western philosophical constructs with Mao’s adaptations, arguing that his dialectic diverges fundamentally from European rationalist categories. By examining thinkers like K'ang Yu-wei and Rousseau alongside Mao, the work sheds light on how Maoism emerged as a hybrid intellectual language, uniquely blending Chinese and Western traditions. Ultimately, History and Will offers a nuanced perspective on the ideological tensions that shaped China's revolutionary trajectory, culminating in the dramatic contradictions of the Cultural Revolution.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.
Johann Gottfried Herder
Song Loves the Masses
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Distinguished ethnomusicologist Philip V. Bohlman compiles Johann Gottfried Herder’s writings on music and nationalism, from his early volumes of Volkslieder through sacred song to the essays on aesthetics late in his life, shaping them as the book on music that Herder would have written had he gathered the many strands of his musical thought into a single publication. Framed by analytical chapters and extensive introductions to each translation, this book interprets Herder’s musings on music to think through several major questions: What meaning did religion and religious thought have for Herder? Why do the nation and nationalism acquire musical dimensions at the confluence of aesthetics and religious thought? How did his aesthetic and musical thought come to transform the way Herder understood music and nationalism and their presence in global history? Bohlman uses the mode of translation to explore Herder’s own interpretive practice as a translator of languages and cultures, providing today’s readers with an elegantly narrated and exceptionally curated collection of essays on music by two major intellectuals.
Stephen C. Pepper
World Hypotheses
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"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.
"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, m
Himerius
Man and the Word
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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.
Jaan Puhvel
Substance and Structure of Language
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Substance and Structure of Language, edited by Jaan Puhvel, brings together a landmark series of lectures from the 1966 Linguistic Institute at UCLA, capturing the intellectual vitality of a summer that gathered some of the field’s most influential voices. While two specialized series—the Indo-European and the Mathematical-Computational—were designed as more ephemeral explorations, the General Series was conceived from the outset for publication. This volume codifies those lectures into a lasting record, offering both participants and later readers access to the central questions and methods animating linguistics in the mid-twentieth century. From psycholinguistic experimentation and oral tradition to idioms, semantic structure, and the nature of dynamic comparison, the book reflects the cross-disciplinary currents that have since become central to the study of language.
The collection includes revised versions of lectures by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, Uriel Weinreich, Wallace Lambert, Shlomo Morag, and Joseph Greenberg, as well as the traditional Collitz Lecture delivered by Werner Winter, the Institute’s Collitz Professor of Comparative Indo-European Grammar. Notably absent—though fondly remembered—are Roman Jakobson’s brilliant presentations on meaning and reference, which could not be prepared for publication in time. Together these essays trace a vivid picture of linguistics as a field negotiating the balance between formal rigor, historical depth, and cognitive insight. Essential for scholars of language history, semantics, and comparative grammar, Substance and Structure of Language stands as both a tribute to a transformative moment in linguistic scholarship and a resource that continues to inform contemporary debates.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.
James Schmidt
What Is Enlightenment?
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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.
Larry Laudan
Science and Values
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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.
Davis Baird
Thing Knowledge
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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.
Christoph Cox
Nietzsche
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Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation offers a resolution of one of the most vexing problems in Nietzsche scholarship. As perhaps the most significant predecessor of more recent attempts to formulate a postmetaphysical epistemology and ontology, Nietzsche is considered by many critics to share this problem with his successors: How can an antifoundationalist philosophy avoid vicious relativism and legitimate its claim to provide a platform for the critique of arguments, practices, and institutions?
Christoph Cox argues that Nietzsche successfully navigates between relativism and dogmatism, accepting the naturalistic critique of metaphysics and theology provided by modern science, yet maintaining that a thoroughgoing naturalism must move beyond scientific reductionism. It must accept a central feature of aesthetic understanding: acknowledgment of the primacy and irreducibility of interpretation. This view of Nietzsche's doctrines of perspectivism, becoming, and will to power as products of an overall naturalism balanced by a reciprocal commitment to interpretationism will spur new discussions of epistemology and ontology in contemporary thought.
Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation offers a resolution of one of the most vexing problems in Nietzsche scholarship. As perhaps the most significant predecessor of more recent attempts to formulate a postmetaphysical epistemology and ontology,
R.M. Hare
Essays on Philosophical Method
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Essays on Philosophical Method by R. M. Hare gathers together seminal essays from one of the twentieth century’s leading moral philosophers. Best known for his influential defense of prescriptivism, Hare here turns his attention to the methods of philosophy itself, examining how ethical theory can and should be pursued. The collection includes explorations of topics ranging from Plato’s theory of Ideas to the relevance of philosophy for practical life, combining close textual scholarship with sustained reflection on the discipline’s aims and boundaries. In addressing both classical figures such as Aristotle and Plato and contemporary interlocutors in analytic ethics, Hare demonstrates how methodological clarity is indispensable for progress in moral philosophy.
At once historical and programmatic, this volume situates Hare’s prescriptivism against competing traditions, particularly intuitionism and descriptivism, while also defending the broader analytic project of conceptual clarification. Several essays challenge the assumption that philosophy is divorced from practical concerns, arguing instead that rigor in analysis yields tangible benefits for moral deliberation. Published as part of the New Studies in Practical Philosophy series, Essays on Philosophical Method illuminates the intellectual scaffolding behind Hare’s major works, The Language of Morals and Freedom and Reason, while offering fresh contributions on its own terms. It is essential reading for scholars of ethics, philosophy of language, and anyone interested in how philosophical practice itself can shape moral understanding.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.
Brian P. McLaughlin
Perspectives on Self-Deception
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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.
Nicholas Rescher
Ethical Idealism
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Ethical Idealism: An Inquiry into the Nature and Function of Ideals explores the role of ideals in guiding human thought and action. The book argues that although ideals are often unrealistic and unachievable, they play an essential and productive role in human affairs. The first chapter contends that pursuing unattainable goals is rational if these goals bring about positive results. The second chapter extends this argument by asserting that an obligation remains valid even if its fulfillment is impossible, challenging the traditional ought implies can principle within the confines of real-world limitations. The third chapter critiques the idea that rationality should focus solely on maximization, arguing instead that human goods are too varied to be standardized.
Subsequent chapters delve deeper into the utility of ideals in human life. Chapter IV supports the value of optimism, even in seemingly hopeless situations, for its positive influence on actions and outcomes. Chapter V draws parallels between ideals and other abstract concepts like the equator or the prime meridian, which, though unattainable in a literal sense, are crucial for navigation and orientation. The final chapter emphasizes that ideals, despite their impractical nature, serve to give meaning to human endeavors and structure our actions toward higher goals. Throughout the book, the central theme is the harmonious relationship between the real and the ideal, with ideals serving as practical tools for guiding behavior and achieving values. The book thus defends the rationality of maintaining ideals, not as literal goals, but as essential instruments for human practice and moral understanding.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.
Benson Mates
Stoic Logic
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Stoic Logic by Benson Mates is a groundbreaking study that reconstructs the logical system of the early Stoic philosophers, particularly Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus. Long overshadowed by Aristotelian syllogistic, Stoic logic was in fact a distinct and highly sophisticated propositional system. Mates demonstrates how the Stoics developed truth-functional accounts of logical connectives, distinguished arguments from conditionals, and built a calculus of inference rules from five basic undemonstrated forms. He also provides a clearer account of the much-debated Diodorean implication, explains the Stoic principle of conditionalization in relation to modern deduction theorems, and investigates the school’s claim that their logic was complete.
Drawing on fragments preserved in Sextus Empiricus, Diogenes Laertius, Galen, and others, Mates offers a rigorous yet accessible reconstruction that has reshaped scholarly understanding of ancient logic. The book includes new translations of key fragments and a glossary of technical terms, making it an indispensable resource for both philosophers and classicists. By carefully comparing Stoic theories with modern semantics and propositional logic, Mates reveals how much the Stoics anticipated later developments in logic and philosophy of language. Stoic Logic remains a foundational text for anyone interested in the history of logic, Hellenistic philosophy, or the conceptual roots of modern analytic thought.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.
R.M. Hare
Practical Inferences
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Practical Inferences is an essential collection of papers by R. M. Hare, the leading advocate of prescriptivism, an influential ethical theory that examines the logical nature of moral language. Expanding upon the ideas presented in The Language of Morals (1952) and Freedom and Reason (1963), this volume offers deeper engagement with core issues in moral philosophy while introducing new discussions that further illuminate the ongoing debate between prescriptivists and their critics, the descriptivists. Through these essays, Hare provides a rigorous defense of his views, demonstrating how moral statements function as action-guiding prescriptions rather than mere descriptions of the world.
This collection is indispensable for those interested in contemporary ethical theory and the linguistic analysis of moral discourse. Hare's work has shaped modern debates in metaethics, and this volume presents a crucial resource for philosophers, scholars, and students seeking to understand the implications of prescriptivism for moral reasoning, autonomy, and ethical decision-making. With the inclusion of previously unpublished materials and a comprehensive bibliography, Practical Inferences stands as a definitive reference for those exploring the intersection of language, logic, and moral philosophy.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.
Stephen C. Pepper
The Sources of Value
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The Sources of Value by Stephen C. Pepper offers a comprehensive exploration of how human beings ground their judgments of good and bad, weaving together insights from psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and biology. Beginning with common-sense notions of value and systematically refining them, Pepper critiques reductive theories while developing an empirical framework that treats value as emerging from purposive behavior, selective systems, and the dynamics of decision-making. His analysis spans from appetition and aversion to cultural patterns, social integration, and biological evolution, resulting in a panoramic study of the ways value operates across individual, social, and natural domains.
Balancing philosophical reflection with empirical findings, Pepper builds on and extends R. B. Perry’s General Theory of Value while bringing in contemporary psychological and behavioral research. The book not only dissects the mechanics of conation, achievement, and affection, but also considers how values are mediated in life-spaces, personalities, and cultural systems, ultimately confronting the challenges of survival value in evolution. Richly integrative and ambitious in scope, The Sources of Value positions itself as both a critical commentary on past theories and a bold hypothesis for understanding the complex interrelations of values in human life.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1958.
Allan Megill
Prophets of Extremity
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In this book, the author presents an interpretation of four thinkers: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. In an attempt to place these thinkers within the wider context of the crisis-oriented modernism and postmodernism that have been the source of much of what is most original and creative in twentieth-century art and thought.
In this book, the author presents an interpretation of four thinkers: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. In an attempt to place these thinkers within the wider context of the crisis-oriented modernism and postmodernism that have been the source
Adolf Grunbaum
The Foundations of Psychoanalysis
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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.
Desmond Manderson
Songs without Music
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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.
Prof. Mark Robert Rank Prof.
The Random Factor
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A poverty expert reveals how truly random the world is—including how economic inequality is experienced—and how we can learn to acknowledge chance and appreciate it.
It’s comforting to think that we can be successful because we work hard, climb ladders, and get what we deserve, but each of us has been profoundly touched by randomness. Chance is shown to play a crucial role in shaping outcomes across history, throughout the natural world, and in our everyday lives. In The Random Factor, Mark Robert Rank draws from a wealth of evidence, including interviews and research, to explain how luck and chance play out and reveals how we can use these lessons to guide our personal lives and public policies.
The Random Factor traverses luck from macro to micro, from events like the Cuban Missile Crisis to our personal encounters and relationships. From his perspective as a scholar of poverty, Rank also delves into the class and race dynamics of chance, emphasizing the stark disparities it brings to light. This transformative book prompts a new understanding of the twists and turns in our daily lives and encourages readers to fully appreciate the surprising world of randomness in which we live.
Mary Warnock
Imagination
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Imagination is an outstanding contribution to a notoriously elusive and confusing subject. It skillfully interrelates problems in philosophy, the history of ideas and literary theory and criticism, tracing the evolution of the concept of imagination from Hume and Kant in the eighteenth century to Ryle, Sartre and Wittgenstein in the twentieth. She strongly belies that the cultivation of imagination should be the chief aim of education and one of her objectives in writing the book has been to put forward reasons why this is so. Purely philosophical treatment of the concept is shown to be related to its use in the work of Coleridge and Wordsworth, who she considers to be the creators of a new kind of awareness with more than literary implications. The purpose of her historical account is to suggest that the role of imagination in our perception and thought is more pervasive than may at first sight appear, and that the thread she traces is an important link joining apparently different areas of our experience. She argues that imagination is an essential element in both our awareness of the world and our attaching of value to it.
Imagination is an outstanding contribution to a notoriously elusive and confusing subject. It skillfully interrelates problems in philosophy, the history of ideas and literary theory and criticism, tracing the evolution of the concept of imagination from
Peter Gordon
Rosenzweig and Heidegger
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Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) is widely regarded today as one of the most original and intellectually challenging figures within the so-called renaissance of German-Jewish thought in the Weimar period. The architect of a unique kind of existential theology, and an important influence upon such philosophers as Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, Leo Strauss, and Emmanuel Levinas, Rosenzweig is remembered chiefly as a "Jewish thinker," often to the neglect of his broader philosophical concerns. Cutting across the artificial divide that the traumatic memory of National Socialism has drawn between German and Jewish philosophy, this book seeks to restore Rosenzweig's thought to the German philosophical horizon in which it first took shape. It is the first English-language study to explore Rosenzweig's enduring debt to Hegel's political theory, neo-Kantianism, and life-philosophy; the book also provides a new, systematic reading of Rosenzweig's major work, The Star of Redemption.
Most of all, the book sets out to explore a surprising but deep affinity between Rosenzweig’s thought and that of his contemporary, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Resisting both apologetics and condemnation, Gordon suggests that Heidegger’s engagement with Nazism should not obscure the profound and intellectually compelling bond in the once-shared tradition of modern German and Jewish thought. A remarkably lucid discussion of two notably difficult thinkers, this book represents an eloquent attempt to bridge the forced distinction between modern Jewish thought and the history of modern German philosophy—and to show that such a distinction cannot be sustained without doing violence to both.
David B. Wong
Moral Relativity
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Moral Relativity: Reconciling Objectivity and Subjectivity provides a compelling framework for understanding moral experience through the lens of relativism. The book contends that there is no single true morality and argues that this perspective best explains the dual nature of moral experience, which combines elements of objectivity—such as truth claims and rational argumentation—with elements of subjectivity, including deep cultural and individual disagreements. By exploring the nature of moral language and its relationship to truth, facts, and human behavior, the book examines how moral statements and values are influenced by diverse cultural, philosophical, and linguistic contexts. This approach critiques absolutist claims of a singular moral truth while offering a nuanced explanation of moral plurality that embraces the complexity of moral discourse.
The book also integrates contemporary developments in the philosophy of language to address long-standing challenges in metaethics. By building on advancements in theories of truth, reference, and translation, it critiques older approaches rooted in verificationism and the analytic-synthetic distinction. Instead, it proposes a new relativist framework that bridges the perceived gap between the objective and subjective dimensions of morality. Drawing on examples from moral philosophy, comparative ethics, and sociocultural analysis, the book demonstrates how relativist theories can provide a coherent reconciliation of moral diversity with the shared human pursuit of ethical understanding. This innovative perspective challenges traditional moral paradigms, offering a robust theoretical foundation for analyzing the interplay between cultural relativism and moral objectivity.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.
S. Paul Kashap
Studies in Spinoza
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Studies in Spinoza: Critical and Interpretive Essays, edited by S. Paul Kashap, gathers leading Anglophone scholarship to illuminate why Spinoza’s “impenetrable abstractions” continue to shape debates in metaphysics, mind, action, and ethics. Framed by the conviction—echoing Santayana—that Spinoza’s stature only grows with time, the volume offers clear, contemporary vocabulary and argumentation to guide readers through the Ethics and its afterlives. The contributors balance rigorous exposition with pointed critique, making the collection equally valuable for specialists and advanced students seeking lucid entry points into persistent controversies. With most essays written after 1937 (and Kashap’s own previously unpublished contribution), the book updates a classic canon while respecting its historical texture.
Spanning substance, attributes, universals, time, knowledge, language, and freedom, the essays range from T. M. Forsyth’s reconsideration of self-causation and immanent causality to A. Wolf’s foundational analysis of attributes, F. S. Haserot’s twin studies on attribute and universals, and Samuel Alexander’s seminal “Spinoza and Time.” Ruth L. Saw challenges assumptions about individuality and cognition; Henry Barker, H. F. Hallett, and G. H. R. Parkinson probe idea/ideatum, mind–body parallelism, and truth; David Savan and Guttorm Floistad reopen questions of language, imagination, and intuition; while Raphael Demos, A. E. Taylor, and Stuart Hampshire test the bounds of moral judgment and freedom. The result is a self-contained suite of interpretive and critical engagements that model how to read Spinoza philosophically: historically grounded, analytically precise, and alert to the live stakes of his system—from the coherence of universals to the possibility of purposive action and the “intellectual love of God.”
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.
Daniel D. McGarry
The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury
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Metalogicon of John of Salisbury: A Twelfth-Century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium stands as a seminal work in the history of medieval educational theory. Completed in 1159, this treatise passionately defends the liberal arts, specifically the Trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—arguing for their fundamental role in intellectual development and societal progress. Written against the backdrop of the twelfth-century intellectual renaissance, the Metalogicon champions the application of reason and eloquence in education, advocating a rigorous and systematic study of these disciplines. John of Salisbury’s insights resonate as he critiques pedagogical shortcomings of his era while providing a robust framework for intellectual inquiry, which later shaped scholasticism and informed modern scientific reasoning.
Beyond its educational arguments, the Metalogicon is a treasure trove of historical and philosophical reflection. It offers a vivid snapshot of twelfth-century academic and intellectual life, interweaving classical and early Christian thought with medieval perspectives. John’s erudition and stylistic grace illuminate his vision of education as a blend of theoretical knowledge and practical wisdom, vital for cultivating not only intellectual excellence but also moral and civic virtues. This work not only marks a turning point in Western pedagogy but also cements John’s legacy as a critical figure in the evolution of educational and philosophical traditions.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1955.
Alphonso Lingis
Dangerous Emotions
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Alphonso Lingis is an original among American philosophers. An eloquent and insightful commentator on continental philosophers, he is also a phenomenologist who has gone to live in many lands. Dangerous Emotions continues the line of inquiry begun in Abuses, taking the reader to Easter Island, Japan, Java, and Brazil as Lingis poses a new range of questions and brings his extraordinary descriptive skills to bear on innocence and the love of crime, the relationships of beauty with lust and of joy with violence and violation. He explores the religion of animals, the force in blessings and in curses. When the sphere of work and reason breaks down, and in catastrophic events we catch sight of cosmic time, our anxiety is mixed with exhilaration and ecstasy. More than acceptance of death, can philosophy understand joy in dying? Haunting and courageous, Lingis's writing has generated intense interest and debate among gender and cultural theorists as well as philosophers, and Dangerous Emotions is certain to introduce his work to an ever broader circle of readers.
Anthony Cunningham
The Heart of What Matters
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The Heart of What Matters shows that literature has a powerful and unique role to play in understanding life's deepest ethical problems. Anthony Cunningham provides a rigorous critique of Kantian ethics, which has enjoyed a preeminent place in moral philosophy in the United States, arguing that it does not do justice to the reality of our lives. He demonstrates how fine literature can play an important role in honing our capacity to see clearly and choose wisely as he develops a moral philosophy that engages with our intimate emotional concerns. Written in an accessible style and drawing from a provocative body of contemporary literature, this book shows how moral philosophy can reach a far wider audience than it has.
In part one of this book, Cunningham sketches out the theoretical basis for a redefined conception of moral philosophy. In part two, he engages in extended analyses of novels that address significant life and character issues, specifically Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Seraph on the Suwanee. Cunningham shows exactly how works like these can inform moral philosophy. Drawing from film, history, psychology, and other social sciences in addition to literature, this book adds to the growing number of works that use literature for ethical analysis and to the growing controversy over Kantian ethics.
Richard Madsen
China and the American Dream
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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.
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
Norman Frohlich
Choosing Justice
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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.
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 fai
Jeanne Lorraine Schroeder
The Triumph of Venus
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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.
Roy J. Howard
Three Faces of Hermeneutics
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Three Faces of Hermeneutics introduces philosophical hermeneutics as a live response to the longstanding “two cultures” rift between sciences and humanities. Framed by the question of how purposes and intentions shape experience, reality, and knowledge, it pushes back on a mono-methodological ideal that treats scientific explanation as the only legitimate model. Against the presumption that neutrality and objectivity must minimize the individual, hermeneutics argues that in domains like history and literature, subjectivity isn’t a contaminant but part of the object of inquiry itself. Picking up where C. P. Snow’s debate left off, the author asks whether the humanities disclose ranges of truth that quantifying methods can’t reach—and, if so, what sort of rigor governs such “understanding.” The contemporary spark is Hans-Georg Gadamer’s *Truth and Method*, which reworks hermeneutics beyond a toolbox for deciphering difficult texts into a general account of understanding: meanings are lived before they are thought; human beings are already interpreters by virtue of their existence. That shift, indebted to phenomenology and Heidegger, recasts interpretation as constitutive of knowledge rather than merely ancillary to it.
The project maps three modern “faces” of hermeneutics, each rejecting positivist mono-methodology while avoiding psychologism. Chapter 1 tracks an analytic strand shaped by early and late Wittgenstein: understanding language shows why explanation cannot exhaust meaning, and why “subjective” input is inescapable without collapsing into mere inner states. Chapter 2 presents Jürgen Habermas’s evolved Marxism, which integrates critique, ideology analysis, and Freudian insights to expand what counts as rational inquiry. Chapter 3 returns to Gadamer’s phenomenological hermeneutics, where understanding is historically effected and dialogical. The book deliberately brackets structuralism (Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Chomsky), viewing its transcendental grammars as sidelining the agent. It also argues—via Apel and von Wright—that anti-positivist analytic philosophy converges with Continental hermeneutics, hinting at a path to dismantle the analytic/Continental wall and to rehabilitate the humanities as knowledge-bearing, not ornamental.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.
David Couzens Hoy
The Critical Circle
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The Critical Circle investigates the celebrated hermeneutic circle, especially as it manifests itself in historical inquiry and literary criticism. Formulated variously in different theories of hermeneutics, the circle generally describes how, in the process of understanding an interpretation, part and whole are related in a circular way: in order to understand the while, it is necessary to understand the parts, while to understand the parts it is necessary to have some comprehension of the whole. --from the Foreword
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.
David L. Norton
Democracy and Moral Development
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At a time when politics and virtue seem less compatible than oil and water, Democracy and Moral Development shows how to bring the two together. Philosopher David Norton applies classical concepts of virtue to the premises of modern democracy. The centerpiece of the book is a model of organizational management applicable to the state, business, the professions, and voluntary communities.
At a time when politics and virtue seem less compatible than oil and water, Democracy and Moral Development shows how to bring the two together. Philosopher David Norton applies classical concepts of virtue to the premises of modern democracy. The
John W. Chapman
The Western University on Trial
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The Western University on Trial, edited by John W. Chapman, examines the moral, political, and intellectual crises facing higher education across Europe and North America. Originating in the deliberations of the International Council on the Future of the University, the volume gathers leading scholars to assess how universities—traditionally devoted to the pursuit of truth—have been destabilized by politicization, democratization, and declining professional standards. Contributors trace the history of the “university emergency” from student unrest in the 1960s to contemporary debates over tenure, academic freedom, research funding, and the proper relationship between universities and governments. Their shared concern is the erosion of competitive merit and intellectual autonomy, which they argue must remain the defining principles of the Western academic tradition.
Organized in three parts, the book moves from philosophical reflections on the university’s purpose to analyses of research policy and institutional organization, and finally to the practical challenge of restoring academic standards. Essays engage classic liberal thinkers such as Mill and Tocqueville while probing contemporary dilemmas ranging from grade inflation and faculty unionization to federal regulation and the pressures of vocationalism. Chapman’s introduction frames the volume around the concept of an “academic constitution”—a set of principles and procedures designed to safeguard intellectual progress against factionalism, political intrusion, and professional complacency. By diagnosing the trials of the Western university as both cultural and structural, The Western University on Trial offers not only a critique of current failures but also a prescription for constitutional renewal. It is an essential work for scholars, administrators, and policymakers concerned with the future of higher education.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1983.
Alan Sica
Weber, Irrationality, and Social Order
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Despite immediate appearances, this book is not primarily a hermeneutical exercise in which the superiority of one interpretation of canonical texts is championed against others. Its origin lies elsewhere, near the overlap of history, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and social theory of the usual kind. Weber, Pareto, Freud, W. I. Thomas, Max Scheler, Karl Mannheim, and many others of similar stature long ago wondered and wrote much about the interplay between societal rationalization and individual rationality, between collective furor and private psychopathology—in short, about the strange and worrisome union of “character and social structure” (to recall Gerth and Mills). Pondering the history of social thought in this century can lead to the unpleasant realization that such large-scale questions slipped away, especially from sociologists, sometime before World War II. Or, if not entirely lost, they were so transformed in range and rhetoric that a gap opened between contemporary theorizing and its European background. Perhaps this partly explains Weber’s continuing appeal. By dealing with him, one might again broach topics long at odds with “social science” of the last forty years.—From the Preface This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988.
Beatrice Hanssen
Walter Benjamin's Other History
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Long considered to be an impenetrable, hermetic treatise, Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama has rarely received the attention it deserves as a key text, central to a full understanding of his work. In this critically acclaimed study, distinguished Benjamin scholar Beatrice Hanssen unlocks the philosophical and ethical dimensions of his thought with great clarity and sophisitication.
Norman O. Brown
Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis
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Here is the final volume of Norman O. Brown's trilogy on civilization and its discontents, on humanity's long struggle to master its instincts and the perils that attend that denial of human nature. Following on his famous books Life Against Death and Love's Body, this collection of eleven essays brings Brown's thinking up to 1990 and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe.
Brown writes that "the prophetic tradition is an attempt to give direction to the social structure precipitated by the urban revolution; to resolve its inherent contradictions; to put an end to its injustice, inequality, anomie, the state of war . . . that has been its history from start to finish." Affiliating himself with prophets from Muhammad to Blake and Emerson, Brown offers further meditations on what's wrong with Western civilization and what we might do about it. Thus the duality in his title: crisis and the hope for change. In pieces both poetic and philosophical, Brown's attention ranges over Greek mythology, Islam, Spinoza, and Finnegan's Wake. The collection includes an autobiographical essay musing on Brown's own intellectual development. The final piece, "Dionysus in 1990," draws on Freud and the work of Georges Bataille to link the recent changes in the world's economies with mankind's primordial drive to accumulation, waste, and death.
Here is the final volume of Norman O. Brown's trilogy on civilization and its discontents, on humanity's long struggle to master its instincts and the perils that attend that denial of human nature. Following on his famous books Life Against Death
Bernard Yack
The Problems of a Political Animal
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A bold new interpretation of Aristotelian thought is central to Bernard Yack's provocative new book. He shows that for Aristotle, community is a conflict-ridden fact of everyday life, as well as an ideal of social harmony and integration. From political justice and the rule of law to class struggle and moral conflict, Yack maintains that Aristotle intended to explain the conditions of everyday political life, not just, as most commentators assume, to represent the hypothetical achievements of an idealistic "best regime."
By showing how Aristotelian ideas can provide new insight into our own political life, Yack makes a valuable contribution to contemporary discourse and debate. His work will excite interest among a wide range of social, moral, and political theorists.
A bold new interpretation of Aristotelian thought is central to Bernard Yack's provocative new book. He shows that for Aristotle, community is a conflict-ridden fact of everyday life, as well as an ideal of social harmony and integration. From political j
Nathaniel Lawrence
Whitehead's Philosophical Development
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Whitehead’s Philosophical Development: A Critical History of the Background of Process and Reality by Nathaniel Lawrence offers the first systematic map of Alfred North Whitehead’s intellectual trajectory, culminating in his famously difficult Gifford Lectures. With a foreword by Stephen C. Pepper, the book argues that Process and Reality cannot be read in isolation: its dense arguments grow directly out of decades of prior philosophical work. By reconstructing that path, Lawrence supplies both orientation and interpretive keys for one of the twentieth century’s most challenging metaphysical projects.
Tracing Whitehead’s shift from mathematical natural philosophy to speculative cosmology, Lawrence identifies two persistent strands—realism, affirming the independence of experienced elements, and conceptualism, emphasizing the perceiver’s contribution. The tension between them, he shows, fuels Whitehead’s revisions as he moves from early analyses of events, objects, and causality, through the challenges of relativity and epistemology, to a late philosophy of “actual occasions” and value as intrinsic to experience. Obscurity, in this light, reflects honest intellectual growth rather than muddle. Organized chronologically, the book walks readers through Whitehead’s early cosmology, transitional writings, and eventual synthesis, demonstrating how seemingly inconsistent moves become coherent stages in development. Lawrence thus rescues Process and Reality from superficial readings by embedding it in its genealogy.
For philosophers, historians of science, and advanced students, Whitehead’s Philosophical Development provides a reliable on-ramp to one of modern philosophy’s most forbidding texts. It repositions Whitehead’s dense prose as a record of expansion rather than confusion and equips readers with a structured path into his evolving lexicon and aims.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1956.
Riccardo Strobino
Avicenna's Theory of Science
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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.
Robert J. Swartz
Perceiving, Sensing, and Knowing
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Perceiving, Sensing, and Knowing: A Book of Readings from Twentieth-Century Sources in the Philosophy of Perception offers an insightful collection of writings that examine perception's intricate relationship with knowledge. This anthology delves into the predominant views of English-speaking philosophers on the challenges of understanding how humans perceive and interpret the external world. By addressing traditional questions about the reliability and mechanisms of the senses, it reveals how the philosophy of perception has evolved, especially under the influence of post-Renaissance thought and the epistemological foundations laid by figures like Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.
The book is meticulously curated to present the interplay between classical theories and modern critiques, touching on pivotal debates such as the sense-datum theory, phenomenalism, and causal theories of perception. Divided into four parts, it explores the nature of perceiving, the objects of perception, and the justification of empirical beliefs. Each section juxtaposes traditional perspectives with contemporary critiques, fostering a rich dialogue on the epistemological and ontological dimensions of sensory experience. This anthology is an essential resource for anyone interested in the philosophical underpinnings of how we perceive and know the world, offering both historical depth and critical engagement with ongoing debates in modern philosophy.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.
Michael E. Zimmerman
Contesting Earth's Future
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Radical ecology typically brings to mind media images of ecological activists standing before loggers' saws, staging anti-nuclear marches, and confronting polluters on the high seas. Yet for more than twenty years, the activities of organizations such as the Greens and Earth First! have been influenced by a diverse, less-publicized group of radical ecological philosophers. It is their work—the philosophical underpinnings of the radical ecological movement—that is the subject of Contesting Earth's Future.
The book offers a much-needed, balanced appraisal of radical ecology's principles, goals, and limitations. Michael Zimmerman critically examines the movement's three major branches—deep ecology, social ecology, and ecofeminism. He also situates radical ecology within the complex cultural and political terrain of the late twentieth century, showing its relation to Martin Heidegger's anti-technological thought, 1960s counterculturalism, and contemporary theories of poststructuralism and postmodernity.
An early and influential ecological thinker, Zimmerman is uniquely qualified to provide a broad overview of radical environmentalism and delineate its various schools of thought. He clearly describes their defining arguments and internecine disputes, among them the charge that deep ecology is an anti-modern, proto-fascist ideology. Reflecting both the movement's promise and its dangers, this book is essential reading for all those concerned with the worldwide ecological crisis.
Radical ecology typically brings to mind media images of ecological activists standing before loggers' saws, staging anti-nuclear marches, and confronting polluters on the high seas. Yet for more than twenty years, the activities of organizations such as
G. S. Rousseau
The Languages of Psyche
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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.
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
John Earman
Inference, Explanation, and Other Frustrations
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These provocative essays by leading philosophers of science exemplify and illuminate the contemporary uncertainty and excitement in the field. The papers are rich in new perspectives, and their far-reaching criticisms challenge arguments long prevalent in classic philosophical problems of induction, empiricism, and realism. By turns empirical or analytic, historical or programmatic, confessional or argumentative, the authors' arguments both describe and demonstrate the fact that philosophy of science is in a ferment more intense than at any time since the heyday of logical positivism early in the twentieth century.
Contents:
“Thoroughly Modern Meno,” Clark Glymour and Kevin Kelly “The Concept of Induction in the Light of the Interrogative Approach to Inquiry,” Jaakko Hintikka “Aristotelian Natures and Modern Experimental Method,” Nancy Cartwright “Genetic Inference: A Reconsideration of “David Hume's Empiricism,” Barbara D. Massey and Gerald J. Massey “Philosophy and the Exact Sciences: Logical Positivism as a Case Study,” Michael Friedman “Language and Interpretation: Philosophical Reflections and Empirical Inquiry,” Noam Chomsky “Constructivism, Realism, and Philosophical Method,” Richard Boyd “Do We Need a Hierarchical Model of Science?” Diderik Batens “Theories of Theories: A View from Cognitive Science,” Richard E. Grandy “Procedural Syntax for Theory Elements,” Joseph D. Sneed “Why Functionalism Didn't Work,” Hilary Putnam “Physicalism,” Hartry Field This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.
Michel Rosenfeld
Habermas on Law and Democracy
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In the first essay, Habermas himself succinctly presents the centerpiece of his theory: his proceduralist paradigm of law. The following essays comprise elaborations, criticisms, and further explorations by others of the most salient issues addressed in his theory. The distinguished group of contributors—internationally prominent scholars in the fields of law, philosophy, and social theory—includes many who have been closely identified with Habermas as well as some of his best-known critics. The final essay is a thorough and lengthy reply by Habermas, which not only engages the most important arguments raised in the preceding essays but also further elaborates and refines some of his own key contributions in Between Facts and Norms. This volume will be essential reading for philosophers, legal scholars, and political and social theorists concerned with understanding the work of one of the leading philosophers of our age.
These provocative, in-depth debates between Jürgen Habermas and a wide range of his critics relate to the philosopher's contribution to legal and democratic theory in his recently published Between Facts and Norms. Drawing upon his discourse theory, Habermas has elaborated a novel and powerful account of law that purports to bridge the gap between democracy and rights, by conceiving law to be at once self-imposed and binding.
In the first essay, Habermas himself succinctly presents the centerpiece of his theory: his proceduralist paradigm of law. The following essays comprise elaborations, criticisms, and further explorations by others of the most salient issues addressed in h
Richard Wolin
Walter Benjamin
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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.
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, offerin
James J. Sheehan
The Boundaries of Humanity
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To the age-old debate over what it means to be human, the relatively new fields of sociobiology and artificial intelligence bring new, if not necessarily compatible, insights. What have these two fields in common? Have they affected the way we define humanity? These and other timely questions are addressed with colorful individuality by the authors of The Boundaries of Humanity.
Leading researchers in both sociobiology and artificial intelligence combine their reflections with those of philosophers, historians, and social scientists, while the editors explore the historical and contemporary contexts of the debate in their introductions. The implications of their individual arguments, and the often heated controversies generated by biological determinism or by mechanical models of mind, go to the heart of contemporary scientific, philosophical, and humanistic studies.
Contributors: Arnold I. Davidson, John Dupré, Roger Hahn, Stuart Hampshire, Evelyn Fox Keller, Melvin Konner, Alan Newell, Harriet Ritvo, James J. Sheehan, Morton Sosna, Sherry Turkle, Bernard Williams, Terry Winograd
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.
Tom Regan
The Case for Animal Rights
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More than twenty years after its original publication, The Case for Animal Rights is an acknowledged classic of moral philosophy, and its author Tom Regan is recognized as the intellectual leader of the animal rights movement. In a new and fully considered preface, Regan responds to his critics and defends the book's revolutionary position.
C. Wade Savage
The Measurement of Sensation
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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970.
Bruce Krajewski
Gadamer’s Repercussions
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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.
W. T. Jones
The Sciences and the Humanities
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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.
Steven E. Aschheim
The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany
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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.
J. Baird Callicott
Earth's Insights
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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?
Gene I. Rochlin
Plutonium, Power, and Politics
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In the early 1970s, the major industrial states were preparing to shift to nuclear fission as their principal source of electrical power. But that change has not occurred. In part, this is due to a growing public recognition that techniques and institutions for management of spent nuclear fuel, separated plutonium, and long-lived radioactive wastes are not yet fully developed. The consequent pressures for resolution have spurred a series of often ill-defined and sometimes contradictory attempts to promote international cooperation and control of hazardous activities. How are these varied suggestions to be compared and evaluated? By what criteria can plans be selected that are likely to be both effective and negotiable?
In this study, Gene I. Rochlin, physicist and social scientist, explores the technical, political, and institutional aspects of international nuclear export and fuel cycle policies. He categorizes existing proposals and suggests way to develop new ones that better promote both national and international goals.
Dr. Rochlin argues neither for nor against the use of nuclear power or plutonium fuels. Instead, he addresses the question of how international arrangements could be reached that might jointly satisfy the objective of the several key nations, yet not be too difficult to negotiate.
He concludes that a major fault has been the tendency to improvise arrangements for specific technical or industrial operations. As a result, overall social and political goals have become the bargaining points for compromise. Yet attempts to simultaneously resolve all problems are unlikely to prove fruitful.
Dr. Rochlin suggests instead the formation of institutions organized around more limited social, political, and technical objectives, even at the expense of excluding some nations or omitting some aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle. Only by so doing, he argues, can immediate agreements be reached that preserve the potential for more comprehensive future arrangements without sacrificing industrial, environmental, or nonproliferation goals.
This important book will be of interest to scientists, social scientists, government officials, and others concerned with the problems of plutonium management and nuclear wastes. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.
Lawrence Sklar
Space, Time, and Spacetime
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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.
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.
John E. Atwell
Schopenhauer on the Character of the World
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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.
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 w
George W. Harris
Agent-Centered Morality
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What kinds of persons do we aspire to be, and how do our aspirations fit with our ideas of rationality? In Agent-Centered Morality, George Harris argues that most of us aspire to a certain sort of integrity: We wish to be respectful of and sympathetic to others, and to be loving parents, friends, and members of our communities. Against a prevailing Kantian consensus, Harris offers an Aristotelian view of the problems presented by practical reason, problems of integrating all our concerns into a coherent, meaningful life in a way that preserves our integrity. The task of solving these problems is "the integration test." Systematically addressing the work of major Kantian thinkers, Harris shows that even the most advanced contemporary versions of the Kantian view fail to integrate all of the values that correspond to what we call a moral life. By demonstrating how the meaning of life and practical reason are internally related, he constructs from Aristotle's thought a conceptual scheme that successfully integrates all the characteristics that make a life meaningful, without jeopardizing the place of any. Harris's elucidation of this approach is a major contribution to debates on human agency, practical reason, and morality.
What kinds of persons do we aspire to be, and how do our aspirations fit with our ideas of rationality? In Agent-Centered Morality, George Harris argues that most of us aspire to a certain sort of integrity: We wish to be respectful of and sympathetic to
David Michael Levin
Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision
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This collection of original essays by preeminent interpreters of continental philosophy explores the question of whether Western thought and culture have been dominated by a vision-centered paradigm of knowledge, ethics, and power. It focuses on the character of vision in modern philosophy and on arguments for and against the view that contemporary life and thought are distinctively "ocularcentric." The authors examine these ideas in the context of the history of philosophy and consider the character of visual discourse in the writings of Plato, Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Benjamin, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and Habermas. With essays on television, the visual arts, and feminism, the book will interest readers in cultural studies, gender studies, and art history as well as philosophers.
Dennis Ford
The Search for Meaning
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In The Search for Meaning: A Short History, Dennis Ford explores eight approaches human beings have pursued over time to invest life with meaning and to infuse order into a seemingly chaotic universe. These include myth, philosophy, science, postmodernism, pragmatism, archetypal psychology, metaphysics, and naturalism. In engaging, companionable prose, Ford boils down these systems to their bare essentials, showing the difference between viewing the world from a religious point of view and that of a naturalist, and comparing a scientific worldview to a philosophical one. Ford investigates the contributions of the Greeks, Kant, and William James, and brings the discussion up to date with contemporary thinkers. He proffers the refreshing idea that in today's world, the answers provided by traditional religions to increasingly difficult questions have lost their currency for many and that the reductive or rationalist answers provided by science and postmodernism are themselves rife with unexamined assumptions.
David Sedley
Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity
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The world is configured in ways that seem systematically hospitable to life forms, especially the human race. Is this the outcome of divine planning or simply of the laws of physics? Ancient Greeks and Romans famously disagreed on whether the cosmos was the product of design or accident. In this book, David Sedley examines this question and illuminates new historical perspectives on the pantheon of thinkers who laid the foundations of Western philosophy and science. Versions of what we call the "creationist" option were widely favored by the major thinkers of classical antiquity, including Plato, whose ideas on the subject prepared the ground for Aristotle's celebrated teleology. But Aristotle aligned himself with the anti-creationist lobby, whose most militant members—the atomists—sought to show how a world just like ours would form inevitably by sheer accident, given only the infinity of space and matter. This stimulating study explores seven major thinkers and philosophical movements enmeshed in the debate: Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Socrates, Plato, the atomists, Aristotle, and the Stoics.
Moshe Perlmann
Ibn Kammuna's Examination of the Three Faiths
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Ibn Kammuna's Examination of the Three Faiths: A Thirteenth-Century Essay in the Comparative Study of Religion offers a rare glimpse into the philosophical and theological debates of medieval Baghdad, where Judaism, Christianity, and Islam intersected intellectually and culturally. Written by Sa'd Ibn Mansur Ibn Kammuna, a Jewish philosopher, physician, and scholar, this 1280 work systematically examines the principles and arguments of the three monotheistic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—through the lens of rational inquiry and philosophical skepticism. With a focus on the nature of prophecy, the authenticity of sacred texts, and the societal roles of religion, Ibn Kammuna presents a balanced yet critical analysis, allocating the most extensive treatment to Islam, the majority faith of his milieu. His approach demonstrates remarkable objectivity, emphasizing shared human experiences while scrutinizing doctrinal claims and logical inconsistencies across all three faiths.
Ibn Kammuna's work, though scholarly and detached in tone, provoked considerable controversy, particularly for its critique of Islam, which led to mob violence against him and forced his exile to Hilla. Despite its contentious reception, the Examination stands as a testament to medieval rationalism and interfaith discourse. It reflects Ibn Kammuna's deist leanings and his pursuit of a universal understanding of faiths, stripping away parochial biases to highlight the humanizing and social functions of religion. His methodology—drawing from Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sources, including figures like Maimonides, Avicenna, and Ghazali—showcases an intellectual bridge between diverse traditions. Ultimately, the Examination not only challenges dogmatic perspectives but also anticipates Enlightenment-era values of tolerance, critical thought, and the search for common ground in humanity's spiritual aspirations.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.
Peter H. Reill
Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment
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This far-reaching study redraws the intellectual map of the Enlightenment and boldly reassesses the legacy of that highly influential period for us today. Peter Hanns Reill argues that in the middle of the eighteenth century, a major shift occurred in the way Enlightenment thinkers conceived of nature that caused many of them to reject the prevailing doctrine of mechanism and turn to a vitalistic model to account for phenomena in natural history, the life sciences, and chemistry. As he traces the ramifications of this new way of thinking through time and across disciplines, Reill provocatively complicates our understanding of the way key Enlightenment thinkers viewed nature. His sophisticated analysis ultimately questions postmodern narratives that have assumed a monolithic Enlightenment—characterized by the dominance of instrumental reason—that has led to many of the disasters of modern life.
Bernard Bolzano
Theory of Science
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Theory of Science: Attempt at a Detailed and in the main Novel Exposition of Logic by Bernard Bolzano and edited by Rolf George introduces Bolzano’s life, aims, and the architecture of his Wissenschaftslehre (“Theory of Science”). Born in Prague (1781), educated in the Josephinian Enlightenment, Bolzano combined devout faith with utilitarian ethics (“advance the common good”) and a rigorous, anti-Kantian logical program. Dismissed in 1819 for heterodoxy amid post-Napoleonic crackdowns, he spent the 1820s–30s composing the Wissenschaftslehre (1837) and advancing mathematics (early notions of limits, non-differentiable continuous functions, and insights on infinite sets later echoed by Cantor). The introduction traces his influence on Brentano and Husserl, notes the late revival of his legacy, and situates the planned critical edition.
Substantively, Bolzano reframes logic as a Wissenschaftslehre: (1) Theory of Fundamentals (there are truths-in-themselves and we can know some); (2) Theory of Elements (ideas/propositions-in-themselves, without psychological or linguistic dependence; “logical Platonism” tempered by denying existential commitment and favoring a pragmatic “there are”); (3) Heuretics (methods for discovery); and (4) Theory of Presentation (how to structure sciences). He offers an early formal account of logical consequence (deducibility via truth-preserving substitutions), distinguishes it from ground–consequence (an asymmetric explanatory relation paralleling causation), and treats probability vs. confidence as objective vs. subjective. His single base form “A has b” and lack of explicit variables limit later calculational development, yet his semantic stance (objective propositions, anti-psychologism) anticipates twentieth-century logic and phenomenology. The editor’s introduction maps these moves, clarifies terminology, and highlights where Bolzano’s program both prefigures and diverges from Tarskian consequence and modern formalism.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.
Dorothea Olkowski
Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation
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Dorothea Olkowski's exploration of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze clarifies the gifted French thinker's writings for specialists and nonspecialists alike. Deleuze, she says, accomplished the "ruin of representation," the complete overthrow of hierarchic, organic thought in philosophy, politics, aesthetics, and ethics, as well as in society at large. In Deleuze's philosophy of difference, she discovers the source of a new ontology of change, which in turn opens up the creation of new modes of life and thought, not only in philosophy and feminism but wherever creation is at stake.
The work of contemporary artist Mary Kelly has been central to Olkowski's thinking. In Kelly she finds an artist at work whose creative acts are in themselves the ruin of representation as a whole, and the text is illustrated with Kelly's art. This original and provocative account of Deleuze contributes significantly to a critical feminist politics and philosophy, as well as to an understanding of feminist art.
Joseph Margolis
Interpretation Radical but Not Unruly
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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.
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. He
George W. Harris
Dignity and Vulnerability
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In this significant addition to moral theory, George W. Harris challenges a view of the dignity and worth of persons that goes back through Kant and Christianity to the Stoics. He argues that we do not, in fact, believe this view, which traces any breakdowns of character to failures of strength. When it comes to what we actually value in ourselves and others, he says, we are far more Greek than Christian. At the most profound level, we value ourselves as natural organisms, as animals, rather than as godlike beings who transcend nature.
The Kantian-Christian-Stoic tradition holds that if we were fully able to realize our dignity as Kantians, Christians, or Stoics, we would be better, stronger people, and therefore less vulnerable to character breakdown. Dignity and Vulnerability offers an opposing view, that sometimes character breaks down not because of some shortcoming in it but because of what is good about it, because of the very virtues and features of character that give us our dignity. If dignity can make us fragile and vulnerable to breakdown, then breakdown can be benign as well as harmful, and thus the conceptions of human dignity embedded in the tradition leading up to Kant are deeply mistaken. Harris proposes a foundation for our belief in human dignity in what we can actually know about ourselves, rather than in metaphysical or theological fantasy. Having gained this knowledge, we can understand the source of real strength. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.
Randolph Bourne
The Radical Will
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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.
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 a
John M. Rist
The Stoics
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The Stoics, edited by John M. Rist, gathers leading scholarship to reassess one of antiquity’s most influential philosophical schools. Once dismissed as pedantic or derivative, the Stoics are now recognized as innovators whose contributions to logic, ethics, physics, and philosophical psychology rival those of Aristotle and Plato. This volume traces that reappraisal, showing how figures such as Chrysippus crafted a system of logic based on propositions rather than terms, developed a rich theory of signs and language, and articulated a vision of human rationality that shaped centuries of intellectual history. Essays range from technical studies of Stoic logic and grammar to explorations of their enduring ethical and metaphysical concerns, offering a multifaceted view of the school’s intellectual achievement.
Designed for both specialists and readers encountering Stoicism in depth for the first time, this collection captures the dynamism of current debates while consolidating the gains of twentieth-century scholarship. By situating Stoic thought alongside modern developments in logic and philosophy of language, the contributors reveal its continued philosophical relevance. The Stoics is not simply a survey but a set of arguments for why Stoicism must be taken seriously today: as a system of logic of startling originality, as a rigorous moral philosophy, and as a comprehensive worldview that continues to provoke, inspire, and challenge. This volume is indispensable for philosophers, classicists, and historians of ideas seeking to understand both the foundations and the lasting significance of Stoic thought.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.
Rudolf Carnap
Two Essays on Entropy
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Two Essays on Entropy by Rudolf Carnap (edited with an introduction by Abner Shimony) brings a major twentieth-century philosopher of science to the front lines of thermodynamics, probability, and inductive logic. Written during Carnap’s 1952–54 fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, these essays pursue an “abstract concept of entropy” usable for scientific inference while testing, with unusual clarity, the coherence of the physicists’ own statistical notion. Carnap’s guiding claim is bold and bracing: entropy belongs with temperature and pressure as an objective physical magnitude, not a merely logical or informational index. From this stance he scrutinizes the classical formulations of Boltzmann and Gibbs, rejects fashionable identifications of entropy with “negative information,” and articulates a principle of physical magnitudes to require that finer descriptions of a system accord with coarser, thermodynamic attributions. Shimony’s editorial introduction situates Carnap’s project within postwar debates on probability (frequency, propensity, and epistemic readings), ergodicity, and coarse- versus fine-grained ensembles, clarifying both the reach and the limits of Carnap’s proposal.
Presented together for the first time as Carnap had originally envisioned, the essays are lightly but thoughtfully edited: overlapping prefatory sections are removed, a concise “Brief Formulation” is foregrounded, and cross-references rationalized to reveal the architecture of the program as a whole. Readers see Carnap extend Boltzmann’s entropy beyond cell partitions, probe the logical pitfalls of description-dependent definitions, and sketch a continuous, geometry-based alternative aimed at eliminating arbitrary coarse-graining. The result is a rare conversation across philosophy and physics—historically grounded, methodologically incisive, and still sharply relevant to contemporary work in statistical mechanics, information theory, and the foundations of data-driven inference. A vital resource for scholars in philosophy of science, physics, and the history of analytic philosophy, Two Essays on Entropy restores a rigorous, physicalist account of order, randomness, and explanation to center stage.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.
Herbert Fingarette
Self-Deception
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With a new chapter
This new edition of Herbert Fingarette's classic study in philosophical psychology now includes a provocative recent essay on the topic by the author. A seminal work, the book has deeply influenced the fields of philosophy, ethics, psychology, and cognitive science, and it remains an important focal point for the large body of literature on self-deception that has appeared since its publication.
How can one deceive oneself if the very idea of deception implies that the deceiver knows the truth? The resolution of this paradox leads Fingarette to fundamental insights into the mind at work. He questions our basic ideas of self and the unconscious, personal responsibility and our ethical categories of guilt and innocence. Fingarette applies these ideas to the philosophies of Sartre and Kierkegaard, as well as to Freud's psychoanalytic theories and to contemporary research into neurosurgery. Included in this new edition, Fingarette's most recent essay, "Self-Deception Needs No Explaining (1998)," challenges the ideas in the extant literature.
James Miller
History and Human Existence—From Marx to Merleau-Ponty
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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.
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
Gareth B. Matthews
The Augustinian Tradition
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Augustine, probably the single thinker who did the most to Christianize the classical learning of ancient Greece and Rome, exerted a remarkable influence on medieval and modern thought, and he speaks forcefully and directly to twentieth-century readers as well. The most widely read of his writings today are, no doubt, his Confessions—the first significant autobiography in world literature—and The City of God. The preoccupations of those two works, like those of Augustine's less well-known writings, include self-examination, human motivation, dreams, skepticism, language, time, war, and history—topics that still fascinate and perplex us 1,600 years later.
The Augustinian Tradition, like a number of recent single-authored books, expresses a new interest among contemporary philosophers in interpreting Augustine freshly for readers today. These articles, most of them written expressly for the book, present Augustine's ideas in a way that respects their historical context and the long history of their influence. Yet the authors, among whom are some of the best philosophers writing in English today, make clear the relevance of Augustine's ideas to present-day debates in philosophy, literary studies, and the history of ideas and religion. Students and scholars will find that these essays provide impressive evidence of the persisting vitality of Augustine's thought.
Augustine, probably the single thinker who did the most to Christianize the classical learning of ancient Greece and Rome, exerted a remarkable influence on medieval and modern thought, and he speaks forcefully and directly to twentieth-century readers as
John Wisdom
Other Minds
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The central aim of Other Minds is to indicate what it is about one person's knowledge of the mind of another which has led some philosophers to say that such knowledge is impossible, others to say that it is inevitably indirect and others to say that it is no more than knowledge of the reactions of an organism to its environment. The book is also concerned with what has led philosophers to say similar things about other sorts of knowledge: knowledge of the future, knowledge of the past, knowledge of the material world as opposed to knowledge of what at the moment appears to be so. Philosophy and Psychoanalysis treats of ethical and aesthetic judgement, probability, degrees of logical connection and other matters. But it has three main aims. The first is a better understanding of what is wanted by the philosopher who raises questions as to the nature of this or that sort of knowledge. The second is a better recognition of the power of thought to give us the knowledge we want, not only when we are asking questions as to what is or is not possible but also when we are concerned with what in fact is so. The third aim is a better recognition of our power to form new concepts, new habits of thought, when those we have already are inadequate.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.
Hans Kelsen
Pure Theory of Law
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Pure Theory of Law defines law as a system of coercive norms created by the state that rests on the validity of a generally accepted Grundnorm, or basic norm, such as the supremacy of the Constitution. Entirely self-supporting, it rejects any concept derived from metaphysics, politics, ethics, sociology, or the natural sciences. Beginning with the medieval reception of Roman law, traditional jurisprudence has maintained a dual system of "subjective" law (the rights of a person) and "objective" law (the system of norms). Throughout history this dualism has been a useful tool for putting the law in the service of politics, especially by rulers or dominant political parties. The pure theory of law destroys this dualism by replacing it with a unitary system of objective positive law that is insulated from political manipulation.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1967. Pure Theory of Law defines law as a system of coercive norms created by the state that rests on the validity of a generally accepted Grundnorm, or basic norm, such as the supremacy of the Constitution. Entirely self-supporting, it rejects any concept deri
Michael Frede
A Free Will
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Where does the notion of free will come from? How and when did it develop, and what did that development involve? In Michael Frede's radically new account of the history of this idea, the notion of a free will emerged from powerful assumptions about the relation between divine providence, correctness of individual choice, and self-enslavement due to incorrect choice. Anchoring his discussion in Stoicism, Frede begins with Aristotle--who, he argues, had no notion of a free will--and ends with Augustine. Frede shows that Augustine, far from originating the idea (as is often claimed), derived most of his thinking about it from the Stoicism developed by Epictetus.
Wallace I. Matson
Sentience
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"Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine," Gilbert Ryle has said. "He might, after all, be a sort of animal, namely a higher mammal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man." Wallace Matson has made the venture. Even though he finds no valid objection to the conception of mind as nothing over and above functioning of the nervous system, he argues that nevertheless no existing or imagined machine models the nature of that function. Sentience is not just reception of information, bit is what he calls "sizing up" -- picking out of a situation those features that are more important, apperceiving the whole which they compose, relating to this while to the creature's interest, and deciding what to do about it. Matson shows how sizing up makes possible free action in the positive sense of action to which conscious deliberation makes a difference. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.
Ermanno Bencivenga
A Theory of Language and Mind
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In his most recent book, Ermanno Bencivenga offers a stylistically and conceptually exciting investigation of the nature of language, mind, and personhood and the many ways the three connect. Bencivenga, one of the most iconoclastic voices to emerge in contemporary American philosophy, contests the basic assumptions of analytic (and also, to an extent, postmodern) approaches to these topics. His exploration leads through fascinating discussions of education, courage, pain, time and history, selfhood, subjectivity and objectivity, reality, facts, the empirical, power and transgression, silence, privacy and publicity, and play—all themes that are shown to be integral to our thinking about language. Relentessly bending the rules, Bencivenga frustrates our expectations of a "proper" theory of language. He invokes the transgressions of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein even as he appropriates the aphoristic style of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Written in a philosophically playful and experimental mode, A Theory of Language and Mind draws the reader into a sense of continual surprise, therapeutic discomfort, and discovery. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.
Alphonso Lingis
Abuses
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Part travelogue, part meditation, Abuses is a bold exploration of central themes in Continental philosophy by one of the most passionate and original thinkers in that tradition writing today. A gripping record of desires, obsessions, bodies, and spaces experienced in distant lands, Alphonso Lingis's book offers no less than a new approach to philosophy—aesthetic and sympathetic—which departs from the phenomenology of Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. "These were letters written to friends," Lingis writes, "from places I found myself for months at a time, about encounters that moved me and troubled me. . . . These writings also became no longer my letters. I found myself only trying to speak for others, others greeted only with passionate kisses of parting." Ranging from the elevated Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, to the living rooms of the Mexican elite, to the streets of Manila, Lingis recounts incidents of state-sponsored violence and the progressive incorporation of third-world peoples into the circuits of exchange of international capitalism. Recalling the work of such writers as Graham Greene, Kathy Acker, and Georges Bataille, Abuses contains impassioned accounts of silence, eros and identity, torture and war, the sublime, lust and joy, and human rituals surrounding carnival and death that occurred during his journeys to India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Bali, the Philippines, Antarctica, and Latin America. A deeply unsettling book by a philosopher of unusual imagination, Abuses will appeal to readers who, like its author, "may want the enigmas and want the discomfiture within oneself." This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.
R.M. Hare
Essays on the Moral Concepts
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Essays on the Moral Concepts compiles a collection of his most significant contributions to ethical theory, many of which were previously scattered in academic journals. The volume serves as a convenient collection for students of moral philosophy, offering an expanded view of the perspective presented in his earlier works The Language of Morals and Freedom and Reason. Included is the previously unpublished paper Wrongness and Harm, which engages in the ongoing debate between prescriptivists, like Hare, and descriptivists, such as Mr. Warnock and Mrs. Foot. This paper is a noteworthy addition, as it seeks to identify common ground between Hare and his critics, making it an essential piece for anyone studying contemporary analytical philosophy.
In the preface, Hare reflects on his work and the shifting nature of his philosophical views, acknowledging that his positions are not fixed. While much of the volume consists of critical responses to philosophical positions he disagrees with, Hare also aims to find common ground with those he has previously contested. The inclusion of Wrongness and Harm exemplifies this effort, offering a more provisional and open-minded approach to the moral discussions at hand. This paper, part of a broader seminar on Utilitarianism, benefits from the insights and critiques of philosophers like Professor J. J. C. Smart, Professor Narveson, and Mr. Parfit, whose influence is evident in the evolving arguments presented in the text.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.
Arthur Collins
Possible Experience
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Arthur Collins's succinct, revisionist exposition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason brings a new clarity to this notoriously difficult text. Until recently most readers, ascribing broadly Cartesian assumptions to Kant, have concluded that the Critique advances an idealist philosophy, because Kant calls it "transcendental idealism" and because the work abounds in apparent confirmations of that interpretation.
Collins maintains not only that this reading of Kant is false but also that it conceals Kant's real achievements. To counter it, he addresses the themes and passages in the Critique that seem to require an idealist thesis and shows how they may be better understood without ascribing any idealist philosophy to Kant. His account coheres with Kant's explicit "refutations" of idealism, it fits Kant's rejection of the imputation of idealism to him by early critics and readers, and it validates Kant's contention that the second edition of the Critique changes the expression but not the doctrine of the first.
Arthur Jacobson
Weimar
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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.
R. Bracht Branham
The Cynics
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This collection of essays—the first of its kind in English—brings together the work of an international group of scholars examining the entire tradition associated with the ancient Cynics. The essays give a history of the movement as well as a state-of-the-art account of the literary, philosophical and cultural significance of Cynicism from antiquity to the present.
Arguably the most original and influential branch of the Socratic tradition, Cynicism has become the focus of renewed scholarly interest in recent years, thanks to the work of Sloterdijk, Foucault, and Bakhtin, among others. The contributors to this volume—classicists, comparatists, and philosophers—draw on a variety of methodologies to explore the ethical, social and cultural practices inspired by the Cynics. The volume also includes an introduction, appendices, and an annotated bibliography, making it a valuable resource for a broad audience.
This collection of essays—the first of its kind in English—brings together the work of an international group of scholars examining the entire tradition associated with the ancient Cynics. The essays give a history of the movement as well as a state-of-th
María Pía Lara
Rethinking Evil
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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.
James D. Tracy
Erasmus of the Low Countries
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Few historical figures have been more important in modeling the ideal of impartial critical scholarship than Erasmus of Rotterdam (1469-1536). Yet his critical scholarship, though beholden to no one, was not dispassionate. James Tracy shows how Erasmus the scholar sought through his writings to promote the moral and religious renewal of Christian society.
Tracy finds the genesis of the humanist's notion of a "Christian republic" of pious and learned individuals in his "Burgundian," or Low Countries, roots. Erasmus's vision of reform, Tracy argues, sprung from a humanist tradition focusing on the importance of teaching (doctrina), a tradition from which Erasmus departed in his optimism about human nature and his deep suspicion of the powers that be. Amid the storms of Reformation controversy, he pruned back the "dissimulation" by which he had thought to convey different meanings to different readers, yet in the end he could not control the way his words were read. If Erasmus's scholarly ideal carries an enduring fascination, so too does his dilemma as a man of circumspection who would also be a reformer.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1966.
William Rehg
Insight and Solidarity
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Discourse ethics represents an exciting new development in neo-Kantian moral theory. William Rehg offers an insightful introduction to its complex theorization by its major proponent, Jürgen Habermas, and demonstrates how discourse ethics allows one to overcome the principal criticisms that have been leveled against neo-Kantianism.
Addressing both "commun-itarian" critics who argue that universalist conceptions of justice sever moral deliberation from community traditions, and feminist advocates of the "ethics of care" who stress the moral significance of caring for other individuals, Rehg shows that discourse ethics combines impartiality with solidarity. He provides the first systematic reconstruction of Habermas's theory and explores its relationship to the work of such contemporary philosophers as Charles Taylor. His book articulates a bold alternative to the split between the "right" and the "good" in moral theory and will greatly interest philosophers, social and legal scholars, and political theorists.
Discourse ethics represents an exciting new development in neo-Kantian moral theory. William Rehg offers an insightful introduction to its complex theorization by its major proponent, Jürgen Habermas, and demonstrates how discourse ethics allows one to ov
Neal Wood
Cicero's Social and Political Thought
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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.
Harry Redner
In the Beginning was the Deed
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Now that the collective death of mankind has become a possibility, no other thought can remain unimpaired. Harry Redner traces historically the onset of this acute state of Nihilism from what might be called the Faustian revolution, symbolized by Faust's pronouncement “In the beginning was the Deed.” Redner reflects on the passage of the three main Fausts, from Marlowe’s to Goethe’s to Thomas Mann’s, and this reflection serves as the dramatic metaphor for a review of the relationship of Progress to Nihilism in modern civilization.
Starting with an exposition of the key Faustian thinkers—Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger—the book proceeds by examining the dominant modern ideas on Man, Time, and Nihilism with reference to Foucault, Derrida, and Althusser. It focuses on Language, which is a key preoccupation of all these thinkers but has not yet been taken far enough to afford a basis for the explanation of fundamental changes in civilization. Language in its creative and destructive functions, as constituting both the conscious and unconscious of a culture, is reconceived so as to account for the hidden link between Progress and Nihilism. The author then explores sociologically the dominant aspects of Progress in terms of the ideas of Weber, Adorno, and Marcuse on Technology, Subjectivity, and Activism. Finally, an extensive literary study of the three main Fausts concludes with a coda on the future of music.
In the Beginning Was the Deed is lucid and direct, tinged with wry humor. Redner represent Man in the nuclear age and reflects on that representation, seeking to comprehend our era, draw ethical and political conclusions, and explore action as a response to the threat of annihilation.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.
K. S. Shrader-Frechette
Risk and Rationality
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Risk and Rationality: Philosophical Foundations for Populist Reforms offers a rigorous philosophical reconstruction of how societies should evaluate and govern technological hazards. K. S. Shrader-Frechette charts a “middle path” between cultural relativism and naive positivism, demonstrating why risk evaluation is neither a mere social construct nor a value-free technical exercise. After situating modern risk analysis in its institutional history (NEPA, OSHA, RARADA), she dissects the value judgments embedded in all three stages of assessment—identification, estimation, and evaluation—showing how methodological choices shape policy outcomes. Through targeted critiques of prevailing strategies—expert/lay splits between “perceived” and “actual” risk, probability-only decision rules, Bayesian–utilitarian maximization under deep uncertainty, producer-favoring default choices, and the “isolationist” discounting of Third-World harms—Shrader-Frechette argues that lay aversion to involuntary, catastrophic, or inequitably distributed risks is often more rational than experts concede.
The book’s constructive core advances “scientific proceduralism,” a normative framework that weds empirical objectivity to democratic ethics. Risk evaluations, Shrader-Frechette contends, can be objective—insofar as they are probabilistically revisable and open to critical testing—while also answerable to principles of equity, consent, and due process. She proposes methodological reforms (ethically weighted risk–cost–benefit analysis; performance-based ranking of expert judgments by predictive accuracy) and procedural reforms (free, informed consent for imposed risks; compensation and due-process rights; market-share liability) that realign assessment and management with public reason. Bridging philosophy of science, environmental ethics, and policy analysis, Risk and Rationality supplies scholars and practitioners with a defensible account of rational risk governance—one that explains persistent public opposition to hazardous sitings without pathologizing citizens, and that equips analysts to design evaluations and institutions capable of earning democratic legitimacy.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.
W. V. Quine
Dear Carnap, Dear Van
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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.
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 th
Richard Schacht
Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality
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Written at the height of the philosopher's intellectual powers, Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals has become one of the key texts of recent Western philosophy. Its essayistic style affords a unique opportunity to observe many of Nietzsche's persisting concerns coming together in an illuminating constellation. A profound influence on psychoanalysis, antihistoricism, and poststructuralism and an abiding challenge to ethical theory, Nietzsche's book addresses many of the major philosophical problems and possibilities of modernity.
In this unique collection focusing on the Genealogy, twenty-five notable philosophers offer diverse discussions of the book's central themes and concepts. They explore such notions as ressentiment, asceticism, "slave" and "master" moralities, and what Nietzsche calls "genealogy" and its relation to other forms of inquiry in his work. The book presents a cross section of contemporary Nietzsche scholarship and philosophical investigation that is certain to interest philosophers, intellectual and cultural historians, and anyone concerned with one of the master thinkers of the modern age.
Written at the height of the philosopher's intellectual powers, Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals has become one of the key texts of recent Western philosophy. Its essayistic style affords a unique opportunity to observe many of Niet
Paul Lawrence Farber
The Temptations of Evolutionary Ethics
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Evolutionary theory tells us about our biological past; can it also guide us to a moral future? Paul Farber's compelling book describes a century-old philosophical hope held by many biologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and social thinkers: that universal ethical and social imperatives are built into human nature and can be discovered through knowledge of evolutionary theory.
Farber describes three upsurges of enthusiasm for evolutionary ethics. The first came in the early years of mid-nineteenth century evolutionary theories; the second in the 1920s and '30s, in the years after the cultural catastrophe of World War I; and the third arrived with the recent grand claims of sociobiology to offer a sound biological basis for a theory of human culture.
Unlike many who have written on evolutionary ethics, Farber considers the responses made by philosophers over the years. He maintains that their devastating criticisms have been forgotten—thus the history of evolutionary ethics is essentially one of oft-repeated philosophical mistakes.
Historians, scientists, social scientists, and anyone concerned about the elusive basis of selflessness, altruism, and morality will welcome Farber's enlightening book.
Timothy F. Murphy
Ethics in an Epidemic
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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.
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, ph
Bernard Williams
Shame and Necessity, Second Edition
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We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the ancients than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery.
The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours.
Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves, but about ourselves. In a new foreword A.A. Long explores the impact of this volume in the context of Williams's stunning career.
We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions
Albrecht Dihle
The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity
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In this landmark volume of the Sather Classical Lectures, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, Albrecht Dihle traces how ancient Greek and early Christian thinkers grappled with the problem of human volition. Beginning with cosmological frameworks in Galen and Celsus, Dihle shows how Greek philosophy long resisted formulating a distinct theory of will, preferring to ground human action in knowledge, reason, and harmony with cosmic order. He contrasts this intellectualism with the Biblical and early Christian emphasis on obedience, divine command, and freedom of will, culminating in the pivotal innovations of St. Augustine.
Bringing together philosophy, theology, and classical philology, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity maps the slow but decisive emergence of will as a concept distinct from reason and desire. Dihle demonstrates how debates among Platonists, Stoics, and early Christian authors shaped Western notions of freedom, responsibility, and moral agency. Richly erudite yet accessible, the book provides an essential genealogy of a category central to medieval and modern thought, showing how Augustine’s theology of will built on—and broke with—classical traditions.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.
Robert Paul Wolff
In Defense of Anarchism
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In Defense of Anarchism is a 1970 book by the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff, in which the author defends individualist anarchism. He argues that individual autonomy and state authority are mutually exclusive and that, as individual autonomy is inalienable, the moral legitimacy of the state collapses.
In Defense of Anarchism is a 1970 book by the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff, in which the author defends individualist anarchism. He argues that individual autonomy and state authority are mutually exclusive and that, as individual autonomy is inalienable
