The concept of innateness is central to Descartes' epistemology; the Meditations display a new, non-Aristotelian method of acquiring knowledge by attending properly to our innate ideas. Yet understanding Descartes's conception of innate ideas is not an easy task and some commentators have concluded that Descartes held several distinct and unrelated conceptions of innateness.

In Descartes on Innate Ideas, however, Deborah Boyle argues that Descartes's remarks on innate ideas in fact form a unified account. Addressing the further question of how Descartes thinks innate...

Offering one of the first initiatives of reconciliation between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions, this important collection of original essays offers a new perspective on Hegel's philosophy within the context of some of the themes central to current discussion. Placing Hegel at the intersection between continental and analytic philosophy, the book presents an indispensible guide to the most current contemporary debates and to an emerging topic within Hegel studies. Analytic philosophy has long been held to consider Hegel its bete noir. Yet in fact Hegel and analytic...

Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) was one of the most notorious and pious of Rene Descartes' philosophical followers. A member of The Oratory, a Roman Catholic order founded in 1611 to increase devotion to the Church and St. Augustine, Malebranche brought together his Cartesianism and his Augustinianism in a rigorous theological-philosophical system.Malebranche's occasionalist metaphysics asserts that God alone possesses true causal power. He asserts that human understanding is totally passive and relies on God for both sensory and intellectual perceptions. Critics have wondered what exactly...

Taste is ordinarily thought of in terms of two very different idioms - a normative idiom of taste as a standard of appraisal and a non-normative idiom of taste as a purely personal matter. Kant attempts to capture this twofold conception of taste within the terms of his mature critical philosophy by distinguishing between the beautiful and the agreeable. Scholars have largely taken Kant's distinction for granted, but David Berger argues that it is both far richer and far more problematic than it may appear. Berger examines in detail Kant's various attempts to distinguish beauty from...

John Duns Scotus (d.1308), known as the 'subtle doctor' among medieval schoolmen, produced a formidable philosophical theology using and adapting an Aristotelian metaphysical framework. Critical of Thomas Aquinas' grand Summas, Scotus died before producing a final synthesis of his own. Indeed, his work, left in disarray for centuries, has only recently become available in an edited format. Contemporary metaphysics, taking up the problem of universals, treads on ground already well-worked by Scotus. Duns Scotus and the Problem of Universals shows how Scotus' treatment of the problem of...

While many studies have chronicled the Romantic legacy of artistic genius, this book uncovers the roots of the concept of genius in Kant's third Critique, alongside the development of his understanding of nature. Paul Bruno addresses a genuine gap in the existing scholarship by exploring the origins of Kant's thought on aesthetic judgment and particularly the artist.

The development of the word 'genius' and its intimate association with the artist played itself out in a rich cultural context, a context that is inescapably significant in Western thought. Bruno shows how in...

Conflict, Power and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza explores Spinoza's political philosophy by confronting it with that of Niccolo Machiavelli.
Filippo Del Lucchese conducts a study of the relationship between Machiavelli and Spinoza from a perspective at once philosophical, historical and political.
The book begins by showing how closely tied the two thinkers are in relation to realism. Del Lucchese then goes on to examine the theme of conflict as a crucial element of an understanding of Machiavelli and Spinoza's conceptions of modernity.

The book concludes with an...

Since the 1960s 'New Left' emancipatory movements have claimed that women, ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, and other groups are oppressed. Some liberal theorists have treated their demands for equality as matters of toleration, of securing by law the equal treatment of cultures and conceptions of the good. However, much more is involved. Also at stake are conceptions of identity differences that inform social practices and perpetuate inequalities that are beyond the reach of legislation.

This book outlines an alternative approach to a liberal politics of difference. Sybol...