Hermeneutics as Politics, perhaps the most important critique of post-modern thought ever written, is here reissued in a special fifteenth anniversary edition. In a new foreword, Robert B. Pippin argues that the book has rightfully achieved the status of a classic. Rosen illuminates the underpinnings of post-modernist thought, providing valuable insight as he pursues two arguments: first, that post-modernism, which regards itself as an attack upon the Enlightenment, is in fact merely a continuation of Enlightenment thought; and second, that the extraordinary contemporary emphasis upon...

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was the leading philosopher of the first generation of the Frankfurt School and is best known for his contributions to aesthetics and social theory. In this highly original contribution to the literature on Adorno, J.M. Bernstein offers the first attempt in any language to provide an account of the ethical theory latent in Adorno's writings. This book will be widely acknowledged as the standard work on Adorno's ethics and will interest professionals and students of philosophy, political theory, sociology, history of ideas, art history and music.

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...

This book is a systematic reconstruction of Heidegger's account of time and temporality in Being and Time. The author locates Heidegger in a tradition of "temporal idealism" with its sources in Plotinus, Leibniz, and Kant. For Heidegger, time can only be explained in terms of "originary temporality," a concept integral to his ontology. Professor Blattner sets out not only the foundations of Heidegger's ontology, but also his phenomenology of the experience of time. Focusing on a neglected but central aspect of Being and Time this book will be of considerable interest to all students of...

This series makes available in English important recent work by German philosophers on major figures in the German philosophical tradition. The volumes will provide critical perspectives on philosophers of great significance to the Anglo-American philosophical community--perspectives that have been largely ignored except by a handful of writers on German philosophy. This collection brings together in translation the finest post-war German language scholarship on Hegel's social and political philosophy, concentrating on the Elements of the Philosophy of Right.

This book examines the religious, social, and political thought of Simone Weil in the context of the rigorous philosophical thinking out of which it grew. It also explores illuminating parallels between these ideas and ideas that were simultaneously being developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Simone Weil developed a conception of the relation between human beings and nature which made it difficult for her to explain mutual understanding and justice. Her wrestling with this difficulty coincided with a considerable sharpening of her religious sensibility, and led to a new concept of the natural and...

The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) has exerted a profound influence not only on twentieth century linguistics but on a whole range of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. His central thesis was that the primary object in studying a language is the state of that language at a particular time--a so-called synchronic study. He went on to claim that a language state is a socially constituted system of signs that are quite arbitrary and that can only be defined in terms of their relationship within the system. This new perspective has changed the way people...

Friedrich Nietzsche haunts the modern world. His elusive writings with their characteristic combination of trenchant analysis of the modern predicament and suggestive but ambiguous proposals for dealing with it have fascinated generations of artists, scholars, critics, philosophers, and ordinary readers. Maudemarie Clark's highly original study gives a lucid and penetrating analytical account of all the central topics of Nietzsche's epistemology and metaphysics, including his views on truth and language, his perspectivism, and his doctrines of the will-to-power and the eternal recurrence. The...

This is the most important book on Hegel to have appeared in the past ten years. The author offers a completely new interpretation of Hegel's idealism that focuses on Hegel's appropriation and development of Kant's theoretical project. Hegel is presented neither as a pre-critical metaphysician nor as a social theorist, but as a critical philosopher whose disagreements with Kant, especially on the issue of intuitions, enrich the idealist arguments against empiricism, realism, and naturalism. In the face of the dismissal of absolute idealism as either unintelligible or implausible, Pippin...

This is the first critical history of the philosophical culture of the USSR, and the first substantial treatment of a modern Soviet philosopher's work by a Western author. The book identifies a significant tradition within Soviet Marxism that has produced powerful theories exploring the origins of meaning and value, the relation of thought and language, and the nature of the self. The tradition is presented through the work of Evald Ilyenkov (1924-79), the thinker who did the most to rejuvenate Soviet philosophy after its suppression under Stalin. Professor Bakhurst sets Ilyenkov's...