This is a book about the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859-1941) that shows how relevant Bergson is to much of contemporary philosophy. The book takes as its point of departure Bergson's insistence on precision in philosophy. It then discusses a variety of topics including laughter, the nature of time as experienced, how intelligence and language should be construed as a pragmatic product of evolution, and the antimonies of reason represented by magic and religion. Written in a terse and clear style, this book will prove appealing to teachers and students of philosophy, cognitive science,...

This book provides an authoritative account of Hegel's social philosophy at a level that presupposes no specialized knowledge of the subject. Hegel's social theory is designed to reconcile the individual with the modern social world. Michael Hardimon explores the concept of reconciliation in detail and discusses Hegel's views on the relationship between individuality and social membership, and on the family, civil society, and the state.

This book provides the only detailed, systematic reconsideration of the neglected nineteenth-century positivist Auguste Comte currently available. Apart from offering an accurate account of what Comte actually wrote, the book argues that Comte's positivism has never had greater contemporary relevance than now. Providing a lucid exposition of Comte and informed by considerable new scholarship on his work, this book will be valuable to philosophers, especially philosophers of science, a wide range of intellectual historians, and to historians of science and psychology.

This broad, ambitious study is about human nature--treated in a way quite different from the scientific account that influences so much of contemporary philosophy. Drawing on certain basic ideas of Heidegger, the author presents an alternative to the debate waged between dualists and materialists in the philosophy of mind that involves reconceiving the way we usually think about "mental" life. Olafson argues that familiar contrasts between the "physical" and the "psychological" break down under closer scrutiny. They need to be replaced by a conception of human being in which we are not...

The essays collected in this volume all explore the problem of the relation between moral philosophy and modernity. The book argues against recent attempts to return to the virtue-centered perspective of ancient Greek ethics. As well as exploring the differences between ancient and modern ethics, the author treats such topics as the roles of reason and history in our moral understanding, the inadequacy of philosophical naturalism, and the foundations of modern liberalism. These essays will be of interest both to professional scholars and to general readers concerned with ethics and politics.

The first systematic account of Reid's epistemology also relates Reid's philosophy to present-day epistemological discussions.

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.

This is the first book-length treatment of the unique nature and development of Nietzsche's post-Zarathustran political philosophy. This later political philosophy is set in the context of the critique of modernity that Nietzsche advances in the years 1885-1888, in such texts as Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, The Case of Wagner, and Ecce Homo. Daniel Conway has written a powerful book about Nietzsche's own appreciation of the limitations of both his writing style and of his famous prophetic "stance."

This is the first book in English on the early works of the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814). It examines the transcendental theory of self and world from the writings of Fichte's most influential period (1794-1800), and considers in detail recently discovered lectures on the Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy. Combining incomparable erudition, sensitive readings of some of the most difficult of philosophical texts, clarity in exposition and an acute awareness of historical context, this book takes its place as the ideal introduction to Fichte's thought.

The Persistence of Subjectivity examines several approaches to and critiques of the core notion in the self-understanding and legitimation of the modern, "bourgeois" form of life: the free, reflective, self-determining subject. Since it is a relatively recent historical development that human beings think of themselves as individual centers of agency, and that one's entitlement to such a self-determining life is absolutely valuable, the issue at stake also involves the question of the historical location of philosophy. What might it mean to take seriously Hegel's claim that philosophical...