This clear, accessible account of Hegelian logic makes a case for its enormous seductiveness, its surprising presence in the collective consciousness, and the dangers associated therewith. Offering comprehensive coverage of Hegel's important works, Bencivenga avoids getting bogged down in short-lived scholarly debates to provide a work of permanent significance and usefulness.
This clear, accessible account of Hegelian logic makes a case for its enormous seductiveness, its surprising presence in the collective consciousness,...
Can we regard ourselves as having free will? What is the place of values in a world of facts? What grounds the authority of moral injunctions, and why should we care about them? Unless we provide satisfactory answers to these questions, ethics has no credible status and is likely to be subsumed by psychology, history, or rational decision theory. According to Ermanno Bencivenga, this outcome is both common and regrettable. Bencivenga points to Immanuel Kant for the solution. Kant's philosophy is a sustained, bold, and successful effort aiming at offering us the answers we need. Ethics...
Can we regard ourselves as having free will? What is the place of values in a world of facts? What grounds the authority of moral injunctions, and why...
In Dancing Souls Bencivenga addresses the crucial question of how the subject can be one and multiple at the same time. He finds that this phenomenon is like the disciplined movement of the dancer through space. Bencivenga explores the structure of this ontological betweenness in its various levels of complexity from the most intimately personal to the communal and the political.
In Dancing Souls Bencivenga addresses the crucial question of how the subject can be one and multiple at the same time. He finds that this phenomenon ...
Philosophy in this century has often self-consciously presented itself as aiming at the destruction or deconstruction of the philosophical tradition or even of theorizing as such. The basis for such self-description may well be a deep-seated anxiety about death; but whatever its grounds, the procession of distinguished intellectuals who seem mostly concerned with who gets to turn off the light on philosophy on his/her way out is one main reason why philosophy seems to have lost its grip on public opinion and public policy. Which is ironical, because there is often considerable constructive...
Philosophy in this century has often self-consciously presented itself as aiming at the destruction or deconstruction of the philosophical tradition o...
Translated by Bencivenga from the original Italian of his philosophical best-seller, this dialogue provides a comprehensive statement on the role of freedom in the realms of morality, psychology, metaphysics, and aesthetics. Bencivenga lets his four characters embrace a wide range of topics in their eclectic discussion, including considerations of quantum physics and deconstruction, the Gothic novel and detective stories, the structure of desire and the mathematics of infinity, penetrating comments on Freud, Raymond Chandler, and Wertverlufe, and a reasonable explanation of why Kants first...
Translated by Bencivenga from the original Italian of his philosophical best-seller, this dialogue provides a comprehensive statement on the role o...
In modern thought, possibility has been exiled to other worlds, in a move best typified by Leibniz. And the move has obvious repercussions in popular culture, where possibility is lived mostly as an exotic evasion, whose outcome--consistently with the Leibnizian model--reinforces the hold of conventional reality, elevating it all the way to a necessity. Return from Exile: A Theory of Possibility sees this outcome as a challenge. It is divided into three main parts. In the first, Ermanno Bencivenga presents the Leibnizian model in some detail, together with its heirs in the contemporary...
In modern thought, possibility has been exiled to other worlds, in a move best typified by Leibniz. And the move has obvious repercussions in popular ...
Through an interpretation of Montaigne's philosophical vision as expressed in his Essays, Ermanno Bencivenga contributes to the current debate about the "death of the subject" by developing a view of the self as a project of continuous construction rather than the source and foundation of knowledge. This latter, Cartesian conception of self-consciousness as a logical and epistemological starting point is, Bencivenga contends, delusive: the certainty it provides is more akin to faith than to a cognitive state. How then do we acquire knowledge of the self? Montaigne makes for a productive...
Through an interpretation of Montaigne's philosophical vision as expressed in his Essays, Ermanno Bencivenga contributes to the current debate abou...
