Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Philosophers

An essential text for understanding Socrates, Xenophon's Memorabilia is the compelling tribute of an affectionate student to his teacher, providing a rare firsthand account of Socrates' life and philosophy. The Memorabilia is invaluable both as a work of philosophy in its own right and as a complement to the study of Plato's dialogues. The longest of Xenophon's four Socratic works, it is particularly revealing about the differences between Socrates and his philosophical predecessors.

Far more obviously than Plato in the dialogues, Xenophon calls attention in the...

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis is uniquely qualified to celebrate Rene Descartes. This major intellectual biography illuminates the personal and historical events of Descartes's life, from his birth and early years in France to his death in Sweden, his burial, and the fate of his remains. Concerned not only with historical events but also with the development of Descartes's personality, Rodis-Lewis speculates on the effect childhood impressions may have had on his philosophy and scientific theories. She considers in detail his friendships, particularly with Isaac Beeckman and Marin Mersenne....

Hannah Arendt still makes people angry. Her writings on the modern German-Jewish experience are deliberately challenging--and sometimes shocking--to an audience used to thinking of the Jewish people as the victims of history. Visible Spaces is the most ambitious attempt to date to explore the origins and implications of Arendt's political thought. Dagmar Barnouw, an admiring yet critical reader, draws extensively on unpublished archival materials relating to the Jewish experience in modern Germany and its influence on Arendt's political philosophy. Arendt's work is discussed...

The first two volumes of the Correspondance g?n?rale d'Helv?tius inspired international acclaim. Now the third volume offers us further insight into a variety of aspects of life in eighteenth-century France.

Claude-Adrian Helv?tius (1715-71) was a wealthy and high-ranking member of French society. He was acquainted with the leading political and social figures of his time and, through family, with the court and government which he occasionally served in a diplomatic capacity. Philosopher, encyclopedist, and author of the explosive De l'Esprit, he and his wife, Anne...

Benedetto Croce was the foremost Italian philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century and his influence extended to every aspect of intellectual life in Italy. He played a significant, sometimes crucial, role in Italian politics, and his writing commanded attention throughout Europe, America, and beyond. In the last few years his contribution to various disciplines has been undergoing a re-evaluation in Italy. This collection continues that reassessment with an English-speaking audience in mind.

The book is a collection of essays by scholars from various disciplines -...

The second volume of letters between William and Henry James covers 1885-1896.

The third and final volume of the correspondence between William and Henry James begins in 1897 and concludes with William's death in 1910.

This volume begins a new series: William James's correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues, starting when William James was fourteen and on his second trip abroad and concluding when he was thirty-five, negotiating with the president of Johns Hopkins University about a course he had been invited to teach on the relation between mind and body. These letters deal with everything from his protracted search for a vocation, his recurrent physical and emotional problems, his irregular education, his odd -- one might say Jamesian -- courtship of Alice Howe Gibbens, and his developing...

This volume charts James's emergence into professional and personal maturity while chronicling the decisive steps he took toward resolving his notoriously protracted and difficult search for a profession. He published his first substantial signed articles and also undertook some shrewd academic maneuvering that would secure him a chair in philosophy despite his lack of formal training.

After years of procrastination and false starts, James finally completed most of the work during this peroid on a book destined to become a classic in its field: The Principles of Psychology. He continues his dialogue with established correspondents onf the psychological and philosophical issues of the day and displays a blossoming interest psychical research, much of it centered on Leonora Piper, the American trance medium. James's interest in his graduate students reveals itself in his correspondence with (among others) George Santayana and Charles Augustus Strong, both of whom sought...

This eighth volume of a projected twelve continues the series of William James's correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues, which was begun in volume 4 of the Correspondence. The eight volume contains some 530 letters, with an additional 620 letters calendared, thus giving a complete accounting of James's known correspondence from 1895 to June 1899 inclusive.

During this period, James struggles against various temptations, never completely successfully, to devote all of his attention to philosophy, the first and great love of his life. To this end, he published The Will to...

What happens, asks Patrick Riley, when a life transformed becomes an autobiography? What is the relationship between the subjective upheaval of conversion and the representation of character? Who, then, is this -self- writing the narrative of a life? Thinking of conversion as a radical turning point or fulcrum on which incompatible configurations of character are precariously balanced, Riley examines both historically and tropologically the paradoxes of identity and life writing that conversion raises. While conversion can motivate the writing of an autobiography that ties together threads...

This twelfth and final volume of The Correspondence of William James concludes the series of William James's correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues that began with volume 4. The first three volumes were devoted to the letters exchanged between the brothers William and Henry James. Consisting of some 600 letters, with an additional 650 letters calendared, this final volume gives a complete accounting of James's known correspondence from April of 1908 to 21 August 1910, inclusive, the last letter having been written five days before James's death on 26 August 1910. The volume...

Sir William Jones was a brilliant and engaged man of letters and law closely involved with the significant figures of Great Britain, America and India during the American Revolution and the early days of the Raj. He essentially introduced the Western world to Oriental peoples and cultures. To linguists, he is known as the founder of Indo-European linguistics. In the field of South Asian Studies, he is known as one of the early pioneers of Indology, and the founder of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal. His translations of Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit poetry and drama are credited with...