This is an important introduction to and critical interpretation of the work of the major French thinker, Michel Foucault. Through comprehensive and detailed analyses of such important texts as The History of Madness in the Age of Reason, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge, the author provides a lucid exposition of Foucault's "archaeological" approach to the history of thought, a method for uncovering the "unconscious" structures that set boundaries on the thinking of a given epoch. The book casts Foucault in a new light, relating his work to Gaston...

Robert Pippin disputes many traditional characterizations of the distinctiveness of modern philosophy. In their place he defends claims about agency, freedom, ethical life and modernity itself, all of which are central to the German idealist philosophical tradition, and in particular, to the writings of Hegel. Having considered the Hegelian version of these issues the author explores other accounts as found in Habermas, Strauss, Blumenberg, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.

Although Adam Smith is often thought of today as an economist, he was in fact (as his great contemporaries Hume, Burke, Kant, and Hegel recognized) an original and insightful thinker whose work covers an immense territory including moral philosophy, political economy, rhetorical theory, aesthetics, and jurisprudence. Charles Griswold has written the first comprehensive philosophical study of Smith's moral and political thought. Griswold sets Smith's work in the context of the continuing debate about the nature and survival of the Enlightenment, and relates it to current discussions in moral...

This is the first major study of Marx and the Young Hegelians in twenty years. The book offers a new interpretation of Marx's early development, the political dimension of Young Hegelianism, and that movement's relationship to political and intellectual currents in early nineteenth-century Germany. The book draws together an account of major figures such as Feuerbach and Marx, with discussions of lesser-known but significant figures, as well as such movements as French Saint-Simonianism and "Positive Philosophy." Wide-ranging in scope and synthetic in approach this is an important book for...

Michael Quante focuses on what Hegel has to say about such central concepts as action, person and will, and then brings these views to bear on contemporary debates in analytic philosophy. This book enables professional analytic philosophers and their students to understand the significance of Hegel's philosophy to contemporary theory of action. As such, it will contribute to the ever-increasing erosion of the barrier between the continental and analytic approaches to philosophy.

It has been argued that Kant's all-consuming efforts to place autonomy at the center of philosophy has had, in the long-run, the unintended effect of leading to the widespread discrediting of philosophy and of undermining the notion of autonomy itself. The result of this "Copernican revolution" has seemed to many commentators the de-centering, if not the self-destruction, of the autonomous self. Ameriks challenges the presumptions that dominate popular approaches to the concept of freedom, and to the interpretation of the relation among the Enlightenment, Kant and post-Kantian thought.

In this book Gary Gutting offers a powerful account of the nature of human reason in modern times. The fundamental question addressed by the book is what authority human reason can still claim once it is acknowledged that our fundamental metaphysical and religious pictures of the world no longer command allegiance. Gutting analyzes the work of three dominant philosophical voices in our time: Richard Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor. His own position is defined as "pragmatic liberalism." The book will appeal to readers in such fields as philosophy, literature, and political...

This book constitutes one of the most important contributions to recent Kant scholarship. In it, one of the preeminent interpreters of Kant, Henry Allison, offers a comprehensive, systematic, and philosophically astute account of all aspects of Kant's views on aesthetics. An authoritative guide to the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (the first and most important part of the Critique of Judgment), no one with a serious interest in Kant's aesthetics can afford to ignore this groundbreaking study.

Allen Speight argues that behind Hegel's extraordinary appeal to literature in the Phenomenology of Spirit lies a philosophical project concerned with understanding human agency in the modern world. It shows that Hegel looked to three literary genres--tragedy, comedy, and the romantic novel--as offering privileged access to three moments of human agency: retrospectivity, theatricality, and forgiveness. Taking full account of the authors that Hegel himself refers to (Sophocles, Diderot, Schlegel, Jacobi), Allen Speight has written a book with a broad appeal to both philosophers and literary...

These challenging essays defend Romanticism against its critics. They argue that Romantic thought, interpreted as the pursuit of freedom in concrete contexts, remains a central and exemplary form of both artistic work and philosophical understanding. Richard Eldridge traces the central features of Romantic thinking and shows that Romanticism is neither emptily literary and escapist nor dogmatically optimistic and sentimental. The first serious philosophical defense of the ethical ideals of Romanticism, this volume will appeal particularly to all professionals and students in philosophy,...