Kategoria BISAC: Philosophy >> Movements - Rationalism

The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy examines three generations of analytic philosophers, who between them founded the modern discipline of analytic philosophy in Britain. The book explores how philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, A.J. Ayer, Gilbert Ryle and Isaiah Berlin believed in a link between German aggression in the twentieth century and the nineteenth-century philosophy of Hegel and Nietzsche. Thomas L. Akehurst thus identifies in this political critique of continental philosophy the origins of the hugely significant faultline between analytic and continental thought,...

Conflict, Power and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza explores Spinoza's political philosophy by confronting it with that of Niccolo Machiavelli.
Filippo Del Lucchese conducts a study of the relationship between Machiavelli and Spinoza from a perspective at once philosophical, historical and political.
The book begins by showing how closely tied the two thinkers are in relation to realism. Del Lucchese then goes on to examine the theme of conflict as a crucial element of an understanding of Machiavelli and Spinoza's conceptions of modernity.

The book concludes with an...

Charles S. Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, was also the architect of a remarkable theory of signs that continues to puzzle and inspire philosophers today. In this important new book, Mats Bergman articulates a bold new approach to Peirce's semeiotic through a reassessment of the role of rhetoric in his work. This systematic approach, which is offered as an alternative to formalistic accounts of Peirce's project, shows how general sign-theoretical conceptions can plausibly be interpreted as abstractions from everyday communicative experiences and practices. Building on this fallible...

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was one of the most important and influential thinkers of the 20th century. In Wittgenstein and Value, Eric B. Litwack attempts to clarify his many challenging ideas and arguments related to the notion of value and the implications of his work for debates in contemporary ethics, aesthetics and religious studies.

Litwack shows that Wittgenstein was engaged in a project of philosophical anthropology, which set him against some of the main currents of 20th century intellectual life. The book explores the key notions in...

The intensification of interest in Deleuze over the last decade has coincided with the end of the linguistic paradigm in both continental and analytic philosophy. Indeed, the division between the two traditions appears to be closing and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze seems to be crucial to this convergence, as he is both indebted to the phenomenological tradition at the same time as he operates with concepts drawn from the sciences. Claire Colebrook explores these ideas and offers a new and alternative assessment of Deleuze's contribution to philosophy. She argues that while Deleuze does...

Since the 1960s 'New Left' emancipatory movements have claimed that women, ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, and other groups are oppressed. Some liberal theorists have treated their demands for equality as matters of toleration, of securing by law the equal treatment of cultures and conceptions of the good. However, much more is involved. Also at stake are conceptions of identity differences that inform social practices and perpetuate inequalities that are beyond the reach of legislation.

This book outlines an alternative approach to a liberal politics of difference. Sybol...

In a world of changing work patterns and the global displacement of working lifestyles, the nature of human identity and work is put under great strain. Modern conceptions of work have been restricted to issues of utility and necessity, where aims and purposes of work are reducible to the satisfaction of immediate technical and economic needs. Left unaddressed is the larger narrative context in which humans naturally seek to understand a human contribution to and responsibility for themselves, others and being as a whole. What role does human work play in the development of the world...

Contemporary epistemology debates have largely been occupied with formulating a definition of knowledge that is immune to any counterexample. To date, no definition has been able to escape unscathed.

Moving away from debates about definitions, Virtue Epistemology shows what conditions are essential for knowledge and applies this account to different domains. It proposes that agents must be motivated correctly to acquire knowledge, even in the case of perception.

Stephen Napier examines closely the empirical research in cognitive science and moral psychology to build an...

Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and Globalization explores the philosophical resources provided by Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics in dealing with the challenges of a world framed by globalization. Bengt Kristensson Uggla's reflections start from an understanding of globalization as an 'age of hermeneutics', linking the seldom related problematic of globalization with hermeneutics through Ricoeur's concept of interpretation. The book proceeds to embrace lifelong learning as the emerging new life script of the globalized knowledge economy, the post-national 'memory wars' generated by the celebration of...

Felix Guattari was a French political militant, practicing psychoanalyst and international public intellectual. He is best known for his work with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze on the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia, one of the most influential works of post-structuralism. From the mid-1950s onward, Guattari exerted a profound yet often behind-the-scenes influence on institutional psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, radical politics and philosophy.
Guattari's Diagrammtic Thought examines the writings that Guattari authored on his own, both before and during his...

In the wake of much previous work on Gilles Deleuze's relations to other thinkers (including Bergson, Spinoza and Leibniz), his relation to Kant is now of great and active interest and a thriving area of research. In the context of the wider debate between 'naturalism' and 'transcendental philosophy', the implicit dispute between Deleuze's 'transcendental empiricism' and Kant's 'transcendental idealism' is of prime philosophical concern.

Bringing together the work of international experts from both Deleuze scholarship and Kant scholarship, Thinking Between Deleuze and Kant addresses...

Climate Change and Philosophy presents ten original essays by an international team of expert contributors, exploring the important contribution philosophical inquiry can make to contemporary debates to do with climate change and the global environment. Examining this hugely topical issue through the lens of environmental philosophy, political theory, philosophy of technology, philosophy of education and feminist theory, these essays interrogate some of the presumptions that inform modernity and our interaction with natural processes.
The book asks fundamental questions about human...

This book offers the first detailed examination of the influence of the English-speaking world on the development of Nietzsche's philosophy. In recent years, Nietzsche's reputation has undergone a transformation and he is today seen as one of the greatest defenders of human freedom. His is more than just a model for political liberty. It is a grand vision of what humanity could be if it really unleashed its creative power. And Nietzsche owes more than just a passing debt to the Anglo-Saxon world in the construction of this vision.
Yet much of what Nietzsche has to say about the British...

Heidegger and Happiness offers an original interpretation of Heidegger's later thought, within the context of his philosophy as a whole, to develop a new conception of human happiness.
The book redeems the essential content of the Greek notion of eudaimonia and transcends recent debates concerning the 'objectivity' or 'subjectivity' of happiness. The author shows that Heidegger's thinking of being is far from arcane and abstract, and is crucially important in understanding the deepest sources of human well-being. An etymological examination of the word 'happiness' frees the word...

The scale of some environmental problems, such as climate change and human overpopulation, exceed any one nation state and require either co-ordinated governance or a shift in the culture of modernity. Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change examines this crisis alongside Heidegger's ideas about technology and modernity. Heidegger suggests that refocusing on the primary questions that make it meaningful to be human - the question of Being - could create the means for alternative discourses that both challenge and sidestep the attempt for total surveillance and total control. He advocates...