In this clear and comprehensive account of Merleau-Ponty's thought Eric Matthews shows how Merleau-Ponty has contributed to current debates in philosophy, such as the nature of consciousness, the relation between biology and personality, the historical understanding of human thought and society, and many others. Surveying the whole range of Merleau-Ponty's thinking, Matthews examines his views about the nature of phenomenology and the primacy of perception; his account of human embodiment, being-in-the-world, and the understanding of human behaviour; his conception of the self and its...

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) crafted one of the most unified philosophical systems by synthesizing Plato, Kant, and Asian religious traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism into an encyclopedic worldview that combines the empirical science of his day with Eastern mysticism in a radically idealist metaphysics and epistemology. In "The Philosophy of Schopenhauer," Dale Jacquette assesses Schopenhauer's philosophical enterprise and the astonishing implications it has for metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, logic, science, and religion. Jacquette analyses the...

Although the ideas of Soren Kierkegaard played a pivotal role in shaping mainstream German philosophy and French existentialism, the question of how philosophers should read Kierkegaard is difficult. His intransigent religiosity has led some philosophers to view him essentially as a religious thinker with an anti-philosophical attitude. In a major new survey of Kierkegaard's thought, George Pattison addresses this question and shows that although it would be difficult to claim a "philosophy of Kierkegaard" as one can a philosophy of Kierkegaard" examines existence, anxiety, the good, and the...

What remains constant is that Foucault never stops asking the question of who we are and how we came to be that way. Following Foucault's itinerary from his early history of madness to his recently published Collhge de France lectures, Todd May shows that the question of who we are, while changing, remains always at or just below the surface of Foucault's writings. In so doing he offers students an immediately engaging and perceptive way to understand Foucault. The Philosophy of Foucault is an accessible and stimulating introduction that will be welcomed by students studying Foucault as part...

For more than forty years Jacques Derrida unsettled and challenged the presumptions underlying our most fundamental philosophical, political, and ethical conventions. In The Philosophy of Derrida, Mark Dooley and Liam Kavanagh provide a succinct overview of his core philosophical ideas and a balanced appraisal of their lasting impact. The authors' analysis of Derrida's writings, especially the objectives of deconstruction, make his work clearly accessible. Dooley and Kavanagh also situate Derrida within historicist, hermeneutic, and linguistic thought. From his early work on Husserl, Hegel,...

Hopkins begins his study with Plato's written and unwritten theories of eide and Aristotle's criticism of both. He then traces Husserl's early investigations into the formation of mathematical and logical concepts, charting the critical necessity that leads from descriptive psychology to transcendentally pure phenomenology. An investigation of the movement of Husserl's phenomenology of transcendental consciousness to that of monadological intersubjectivity follows. Hopkins then presents the final stage of the development of Husserl's thought, which situates monadological intersubjectivity...