Kategoria BISAC: Philosophy >> Movements - Rationalism

As Plato's tripartite division of the soul, Descartes's criterion of clear and distinct ideas, and Kant's notion of the categorical imperative attest, philosophy has traditionally been wedded to rationalism and its "intellectualist" view of persons. In this book Christopher Williams seeks to wean his fellow philosophers away from an overly rationalistic self-understanding by using resources that are available within the philosophical tradition itself, including some that anticipate strands of Nietzsche's thought.

The book begins by developing Hume's critique of rationalism, with...

Aristotle maintains that biological organisms are compounds of matter and form and that compounds that have the same form are individuated by their matter. According to Aristotle, an object that undergoes change is an object that undergoes a change in form, i.e. form is imposed upon something material in nature. Aristotle therefore identifies organisms according to their matter and essential forms, forms that are arguably essential to an object's existence.
Jeremy Kirby addresses a difficulty in Aristotle's metaphysics, namely the possibility that two organisms of the same species...

In Heidegger, Metaphysics and the Univocity of Being, Philip Tonner presents an interpretation of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger in terms of the doctrine of the 'univocity of being'. According to the doctrine of univocity there is a fundamental concept of being that is truly predicable of everything that exists. This book explores Heidegger's engagement with the work of John Duns Scotus, who raised philosophical univocity to its historical apotheosis. Early in his career, Heidegger wrote a book-length study of what he took to be a philosophical text of Duns Scotus'. Yet, the word...

The development of increasingly precise measurements is an essential part of what Samuel L. Macey identifies as the West's wide-ranging effort to rationalize human activity--to simplify and standardize the way we work and communicate with one another. In "The Dynamics of Progress," Macey examines the history of such rationalizations as they have manifested themselves. He identifies a symbiotic relationship among these different types of rationalization, demonstrating that without the rationalizing of time, weights and measures, numbers, and language, the scientific, technological, and...

Art, Myth and Society in Hegel's Aesthetics returns to the student transcripts of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics, which have yet to be translated into English and in some cases remain unpublished. David James develops the idea that these transcripts show that Hegel was primarily interested in understanding art as an historical phenomenon and, more specifically, in terms of its role in the ethical life of various peoples. This involves relating Hegel's aesthetics to his philosophies of right and history, rather than to his logic or metaphysics. The book thus offers a thorough re-evaluation...

The Tang dynasty is often called China's "golden age," a period of commercial, religious, and cultural connections from Korea and Japan to the Persian Gulf, and a time of unsurpassed literary creativity. Mark Lewis captures a dynamic era in which the empire reached its greatest geographical extent under Chinese rule, painting and ceramic arts flourished, women played a major role both as rulers and in the economy, and China produced its finest lyric poets in Wang Wei, Li Bo, and Du Fu.

The Chinese engaged in extensive trade on sea and land. Merchants from Inner Asia settled in the...

Derrida wrote a vast number of texts for particular events across the world, as well as a series of works that portray him as a voyager. As an Algerian emigre, a postcolonial outsider, and an idiomatic writer who felt tied to a language that was not his own, and as a figure obsessed by the singularity of the literary or philosophical event, Derrida emerges as one whose thought always arrives on occasion. But how are we to understand the event in Derrida? Is there a risk that such stories of Derrida's work tend to misunderstand the essential unpredictability at work in the conditions of his...

Alienation After Derrida rearticulates the Hegelian-Marxist theory of alienation in the light of Derrida's deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence. Simon Skempton aims to demonstrate in what way Derridian deconstruction can itself be said to be a critique of alienation. In so doing, he argues that the acceptance of Derrida's deconstructive concepts does not necessarily entail the acceptance of his interpretations of Hegel and Marx. In this way the book proposes radical reinterpretations, not only of Hegel and Marx, but of Derridian deconstruction itself.

The critique of...

In Reality and Its Appearance, Nicholas Rescher aims to address the conceptual and analytical question: how does the concept of reality function and how should we think with regard to the issue of reality's relations to appearances? Rescher argues that the distinction between reality and its appearance is not a substantive distinction between two types of being, but rather relates to different ways of understanding one selfsame mode of being.
The book proposes that while realism is a sensible and tenable position, nevertheless there is something to be said for idealism as well. In the...

Nietzsche famously regarded Thus Spoke Zarathustra as his greatest work. However, despite Nietzsche's pervasive influence upon the philosopher and non-philosopher alike, and his own intense regard for Zarathustra, there has been relatively little serious study of Nietzsche's magnum opus.This book seeks to address this gap in the available literature by taking Thus Spoke Zarathustra seriously, not only with respect to its impact on the interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy, but also in light of the broader questions of the relationships between poetry,...

What is the self? Is it the impregnable cogito of Descartes or the shattered self of Nietzsche? Or has it become serendipitously constituted from pieces of fairy tales and novels, childhood comics and soap operas - a multitude of forces culled from fashion, modern myth, culture and recreation? Or must we still convince ourselves, like Rousseau, that the self can never be tainted; that it is, above all else, irrefrangible?

Paul Ricoeur proposed that the self is formed within the narratives we tell of ourselves, that it is itself a form of narrative. But is this enough? Could a self...