Aesthetic Transcendentalism is a philosophy endorsing the qualitative and creative aspects of nature. Theoretically it argues for a metaphysical dimension of nature that is aesthetically real, pluralistic, and prolific. It directs our attention to the rich complexity of immediate experience, the possibility of discovering new aesthetic features about the world, and the transformative potential of art as an organic expression. This book presents the philosophy in its relationship to its historical roots in the philosophic and artistic traditions of nineteenth-century North America. In this...

Thinking The Plural: Richard J. Bernstein and the Expansion of American Philosophy is a text devoted to highlighting, scrutinizing, and deploying Bernstein s philosophical research as it has intersected and impacted American and European philosophy. Collecting essays written explicitly for the volume from former students of Bernstein s, the book shows the breadth and scope of his work while expanding key insights into new contexts and testing his work against thinkers outside the canon of his own scholarship. In light of urgent contemporary ethical and political problems, the papers collected...

Gabriel Marcel and American Philosophy: The Religious Dimension of Experience examines the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel and its relationship to key figures in classical American Philosophy, in particular Josiah Royce, William Ernest Hocking, and Henry Bugbee. Few scholars have taken sufficient note of the fact that Gabriel Marcel's thought is vitally informed by classical American philosophy. Marcel's essays on Royce offer a window into the soul of Marcel's recent philosophical development. The idealism of early Marcel stemmed from an omnipresent sense of a "broken world"--an experience of...

This book presents a nonstandard approach to epistemology. Where standard epistemology generally focuses on the certain knowledge the Greeks called episteme, the present focus is on some less assured modes of information. Its deliberations focus on such cognitively suboptimal processes as conjecture, guesswork, and plausible supposition.

This edited volume demonstrates that a virtue-centered approach to the ethical life is a consistent feature of William James's moral reasoning from the 1880s until his death in 1910. Little else, however, seems constant within James's writings on moral philosophy and the ethical life, and this lack of constancy is what keeps James's work of interest more than a century later.