An extensive scholarly literature, written in the past century, holds that in ancient Greek and Roman thought history is understood as circular and repetitive - a consequence of their anti-temporal metaphysics - in contrast with Judaeo-Christian thought, which sees history as linear and unique - a consequence of their messianic and hence radically temporal theology. Gerald Press presents a more general view - that the Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian cultures were fundamentally alien and opposed cultural forces and that, therefore, Christianity's victory over paganism included the...

Plotinus, the father of Neoplatonism, lived in Rome during the third century AD. For many scholars -- not only classicists and philosophers but medievalists, renaissance specialists, Islamists, theologians, and students of religion -- he remains a figure of commanding importance. Yet his work is seen as forbidding and inaccessible. The increase in Plotinian scholarship since the 1970s has included works that, although deeply rooted in scholarship, aim at a wider audience. Form and Transformation, while in that tradition, is the first book in English to provide an accessible introduction to...

Kierkegaard as Humanist is an extensive analysis of Kierkegaard's concepts of self, freedom, possibility, and necessity. Topics examined include the essential and continuing duality of the self, the process by which the self becomes self-consciousness, freedom as the dialectical tension between necessity and possibility and between temporality and eternity, the indeterminate/determinate leap as freedom's form, and love as freedom's content. Come finds in Kierkegaard's writings an anthropological ontology that is derived by a phenomenological method and distinct from those Kierkegaardian...

Jurgen Habermas' pioneering work has provoked intense discussion about the rise of a modern public sphere and civil society. Redekop revises and expands the Habermasian thesis by demonstrating that, rather than being particularly "bourgeois," the eighteenth-century German public was a problematic, amorphous entity that was not based on a single social grouping - a beckoning figure that led Lessing, Abbt, and Herder on unique but comparable quests to give it shape and form. His perspective provides an important new understanding of the work of authors who have often been placed in overly...

These appropriations fall into two main groups: those pertaining to the name Bohme or a life assigned to it, and those involving concepts or images from the mystic's oeuvre. The first group constituted an attempt to co-opt the aura of sanctity attached to portrayals of the poet-prophet in order to invest Romantic Poesie with the sacral standing of religion. The second group, exemplified by Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schelling, involved the borrowing and radical redefinition of a few concepts and images from Bohme's work in the hope of bridging the gap between the abstract first...

A portrayal of the importance of Herder's ideas on nationality, culture, and history.

The conventional image of French polemicist and diplomat Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) is that of a theocrat and a protofascist. Cara Camcastle challenges this by considering his unpublished memoirs, memoranda, diplomatic correspondence, and letters. In an analysis of his ideas on political economy, international relations, and domestic politics, Camcastle reveals Maistre to have opposed absolutism and points to the views of an economic liberal and moderate conservative closer to Montesquieu, Smith, and Burke.

As anti-globalization protests show, the public is searching for ways to explain and rethink material inequity between developed democracies and those across the development divide. Jeff Noonan provides a strategy for analyzing these issues. In Democratic Society and Human Needs Noonan examines the moral grounds for liberalism and democracy, arguing that contemporary democracy was created through needs-based struggles against classical liberal rights, which are essentially exclusionary. For him, a democratic society is one in which human beings collectively control necessary life-resources,...

The Career of Toleration considers the Locke-Proast controversy from the standpoint of political theory, examining Locke's and Proast's texts and tracing their relationship to later discussions of toleration. Vernon reconstructs the grounds of the dispute, drawing attention to the long-term importance of the arguments and evaluating their relative strength. He then examines issues of toleration in later contexts, specifically James Fitzjames Stephen's critique of John Stuart Mill, the perfectionist alternative to contractualist liberalism, and the view that the traditional attachment to...

J.A.W. Gunn studies the French effort during 1814 to 1848 to adopt the set of common understandings that lent a comparative stability to British government.