Joseph Conrad's novels are recognized as great works of fiction, but they should also be counted as great works of criticism. A voracious reader throughout his life, Conrad wrote novels that question and transform the ideas he encountered in non-fiction, novels, and scientific and philosophic works. Under Conrad's Eyes looks at Conrad's revaluations of some of his important nineteenth-century predecessors - Carlyle, Darwin, Dickens, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche. Detailed readings of works from Heart of Darkness to Victory explore Conrad's language and style, focusing on questions...

Of interest to historians, classicists, media and digital theorists, literary scholars, museologists, and archivists, Media, Memory, and the First World War is a comparative study that shows how the dominant mode of communication in a popular culture - from oral traditions to digital media - shapes the structure of memory within that culture.

Schiller, Hegel and Marx looked back to ancient Greek culture, viewing it as the historical embodiment of certain ideals central to aesthetic theory. This volume investigates their viewpoints and how they use Greek culture as an ideal model for remaking the modern world, for overcoming alienation and estrangement.

Part One examines the late medieval northern Italian city-state republics and the humanist depiction of their form of polity. Part Two reviews the legal (principally canonical) and political thought behind the development of a theory of popular consent and limited authority employed to resolve the Great Schism in the Western church. Part Three describes sixteenth-century Spanish neoscholastic political writings and their application to Reformation Europe and Spanish colonial expansion in the New World. Part Four examines the political thought of some of those who responded to new problems in...

Claude Buffier (1661-1737) was a French Jesuit whose philosophy earned Voltaire's praise. Thomas Reid (1710-96) was the one Scottish philosopher whose response to David Hume is still taken seriously. In this comparative study Professor Marcil-Lacoste not only refutes common assumptions, but also shows that, despite their similar concerns and the unfounded charge that Reid plagiarized from Buffier, a comparison of Reid and Buffier illuminates a range of significant epistemological issues. Further, she demonstrates that common-sense philosophies can be varied, subtle, and original. This book...

This perceptive study of John Case, teacher of philosophy at Oxford from the mid-1560s until his death in 1600 and author of expositions of Aristotle which became standard textbooks of the time, focuses on his intellectual and cultural milieu and reveals how Case represents the intellectual awakening of Renaissance England.

The themes explored include political liberty, "legal tyranny," defences of influence in government, recognition of the Opposition, and the development of organic categories of political analysis - the latter in a chapter that explodes the association often presumed between organicism and conservative modes of thought. A chapter on the "Fourth Estate" examines the gradual process of legitimation of "interests," culminating in the influence of the press. Central to the account of new political forces and their recognition is the idea of public opinion, which evolved during this period from the...

The concepts of popular consent and limit, as applied to the exercise of political authority, are fundamental features of parliamentary democracy. Both these concepts played a role in medieval political theorizing, although the meaning and significance of political consent in this thought has not been well understood. In a careful, scholarly survey of the major political texts from Augustine to Ockham, Arthur Monahan analyses the contribution of medieval thought to the development of these two concepts and to the correlative concept of coercion.

Peter Schouls examines the role played by the concepts of freedom, mastery, and progress in Descartes' writings, arguing that these ideas express a vital and fundamental feature of Descartes' thought. These theories also occupy a central position in the thought of the Enlightenment. Since the more contentious claim is that they function centrally in Descartes' works, Schouls presents a careful and detailed examination of the conjunction and use of these ideas in Descartes' writings. This examination warrants the conclusion that they play the same role in Descartes' works as they do in...

Dialectic of Love analyses the arguments of Schiller's major writings on aesthetics and argues that his philosophical thought, theories, and concepts are characteristic of the Platonic tradition. Schiller's conception of beauty is seen as synthesis, the sublime as separation. Pugh connects these concepts to Aristotle's critique of Plato's theory of ideas, in which Aristotle points out an aporia of chorismos (separation) and methexis (participation). In Schiller's thought, Pugh argues, beauty and the sublime operate primarily as metaphysical relations of methexis and chorismos and only...