Philosophy: Books

This book introduces Immanuel Kant's masterwork, the Critique of Pure Reason, from a ‘relaxed’ problem-oriented perspective which treats Kant as an especially insightful practising philosopher, from whom we still have much to learn, intelligently and creatively responding to significant questions that transcend his work's historical setting.

This book features a collection of essays that seek to provide accurate and well-developed characterizations of the epistemological and metaphysical concerns that shaped the conceptual languages and philosophical thought of sub-Saharan Africa.

This study of five American thinkers—Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau—considers their work in relation to the philosophers and other thinkers they found important: to the deism of John Toland and Matthew Tindal, the moral sense theories of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and David Hume, the political and religious philosophy of John Locke, the romanticism of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant.

This is a key text for the reconstruction of the early history of Greek philosophy, and sets the agenda for Aristotle's project of wisdom. Included is a new edition of the Greek text, and an introduction which examines its divergent traditions

This volume collects together eleven essays on Alexander Baumgarten’s Metaphysics and its relation to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The early chapters examine Baumgarten’s philosophy in its historical context, including its link with both Pietism and rationalism. The later chapters explore the many ways in which Kant criticized and built upon Baumgarten’s Metaphysics.

Brentano is one of the ‘grandfathers’ of philosophy of mind. His work influenced analytic philosophers like Russell and Chisholm as well as phenomenologists like Husserl and Sartre and continues to shape debates in the philosophy of mind.

Cursory allusions to the relation between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are common in philosophical literature, but there has been little in the way of serious and comprehensive commentary on the relationship between their ideas. This book attempts both to close this gap and to offer important independent readings of Kierkegaard's and Wittgenstein's conceptions of philosophy and religious belief.

A Solid Grasp of the Main Themes And Arguments of the seventeenth-century philosopher Rene Descartes is essential for understanding modern thought, and a necessary entrée to the work of the Empiricists and Immanuel Kant.

Stephen Gaukroger traces the development of Descartes's thought in the social, religious, and intellectual context of seventeenth‐century Europe. Gaukroger describes Descartes's upbringing and his education at the Jesuit La Flèche collège, and shows the role these played in the development of his ground‐breaking work in philosophy and science.

The Reformation and the religious wars of sixteenth-century France provided the conditions in which philosophers reflected anew on the source and limits of political authority, the categorical implications of divine commands, and the competing claims of religious faith and reason to decide a wide range of issues that ranged from astronomy to theories of human nature.

This book presents eighteen essays on the philosophers and schools of the Hellenistic and Roman periods: Epicureans, Stoics, and Sceptics. The discussion ranges over four centuries of innovative and challenging thought in ethics and politics, psychology, epistemology, and cosmology

This is a study of Hegel’s critique of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Its main purpose is to defend the thesis that Hegel offers us a compelling critique of, and alternative to, the conception of cognition Kant argues for in his ‘Critical’ period.

In focusing on American philosophy, the book makes implicit claims about thought and life related to a peculiar western polity and the US, by the nineteenth century.

This book studies Locke's views on the content and method of natural philosophy. Focusing on his Essay concerning Human Understanding, but also drawing extensively from Locke's other writings and manuscript remains.

This book traces a particular development of the metaphysics of the material world in early modern thought. The route it follows derives from a critique of Spinoza in the work of Pierre Bayle.

This book is a philosophical study of two major thinkers who span the period of late antiquity. While Plotinus stands at the beginning of its philosophical tradition, setting the themes for debate and establishing strategies of argument and interpretation, Proclus falls closer to its end, developing a grand synthesis of late ancient thought.

Among ancient Greek plays, the Oedipus plays of Sophocles have been especially interesting to philosophers. Much of the action in each play centers on the oscillation of the main character between self-deception and self-discovery. Other important themes of the plays include destiny, responsibility, aging, and death.

This book includes 19 essays on the theory of knowledge by leading philosophers in the field. Its essays cover all the key areas in the field while making original contributions.

This book is a concise and readable study of five intertwined themes at the heart of Wittgenstein's thought, written by one of his most eminent interpreters.

What if there is no strong evidence that God exists? Is belief in God when faced with a lack of evidence illegitimate and improper? Evidentialism answers yes. According to Evidentialism,

At the apex of his influence, from about 1860 up to the start of World War I, Arthur Schopenhauer was known first and foremost as a philosopher of pessimism, sparking an entire “pessimism controversy” in German philosophy in the latter part of the 19th century. Still today, his main reputation is as one of the few philosophers to have argued that it would have been better never to have been.

While few soldiers may have read the works of Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius, it is undoubtedly true that the ancient philosophy known as Stoicism guides the actions of many in the military.

How do you know the world around you isn’t just an elaborate dream or the creation of an evil neuroscientist? Questions like these lie at the core of venerable philosophical arguments for radical skepticism: the stark contention that we in fact know nothing at all about the world, that we have no more reason to believe any claim than we have to disbelieve it.

What is race? This is a question that has haunted human interaction and vexed scholars. In this book, four race theorists debate how best to answer it, applying philosophical tools and principles of social justice to cutting-edge findings from the biological and social sciences.

his volume contains nine chapters of translation focusing on the philosophy of Zhu Xi (1130–1200), one of the most influential Chinese thinkers of the later Confucian tradition. Zhu Xi’s philosophy offers the most systematic and comprehensive expression of the Confucian tradition.