Kategoria BISAC: Philosophy >> Criticism

In this book, Alison Ross engages in a detailed study of Walter Benjamin's concept of the image, exploring the significant shifts in Benjamin's approach to the topic over the course of his career. Using Kant's treatment of the topic of sensuous form in his aesthetics as a comparative reference, Ross argues that Benjamin's thinking on the image undergoes a major shift between his 1924 essay on 'Goethe's Elective Affinities, ' and his work on The Arcades Project from 1927 up until his death in 1940. The two periods of Benjamin's writing share a conception of the image as...

Originally published in 1959, The Faith of a Heretic is the most personal statement of the beliefs of Nietzsche biographer and translator Walter Kaufmann. A first-rate philosopher in his own right, Kaufmann here provides the fullest account of his views on religion. Although he considered himself a heretic, he was not immune to the wellsprings and impulses from which religion originates, declaring it among the most vital and radical expressions of the human mind. Beginning with an autobiographical prologue that traces his evolution from religious believer to "heretic," the book...

In 1931 Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote his famous Remarks on Frazer's -Golden Bough, - published posthumously in 1967. At that time, anthropology and philosophy were in close contact--continental thinkers drew heavily on anthropology's theoretical terms, like mana, taboo, and potlatch, in order to help them explore the limits of human belief and imagination. Now the book receives its first translation by an anthropologist, in the hope that it can kick-start a new era of interdisciplinary fertilization.

Ryan White reads the writings of key American philosophers, including Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and Charles Sanders Peirce, against modern theoretical works by Niklas Luhmann, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, Sharon Cameron, Cary...

The French studies scholar Patrick Coleman made the important observation that over the course of the eighteenth century, the social meanings of anger became increasingly democratized. The work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is an outstanding example of this change. In Man or Citizen, Karen Pagani expands, in original and fascinating ways, the study of anger in Rousseau's autobiographical, literary, and philosophical works. Pagani is especially interested in how and to what degree anger--and various reconciliatory responses to anger, such as forgiveness--functions as a defining aspect...