Bücher der Reihe Modern European Philosophy

This book proposes a radical new reading of the development of twentieth-century French philosophy. Henry Somers-Hall argues that the central unifying aspect of works by philosophers including Sartre, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Derrida is their attempt to provide an account of cognition that does not reduce thinking to judgement. Somers-Hall shows that each of these philosophers is in dialogue with the others in a shared project (however differently executed) to overcome their inheritances from the Kantian and post-Kantian traditions. His analysis points up the continuing relevance of German idealism, and Kant in particular, to modern French philosophy, with novel readings of many aspects of the philosophies under consideration that show their deep debts to Kantian thought. The result is an important account of the emergence, and essential coherence, of the modern French philosophical tradition.

This is the first book in English to elucidate the central issues in the work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), a figure crucial to the movement of philosophy from Kant to German idealism. The book explains Fichte's notion of subjectivity and how his particular view developed out of Kant's accounts of theoretical and practical reason. Fichte argued that the subject has a self-positing structure which distinguishes it from a thing or an object. Thus, the subject must be understood as an activity rather than a thing and is self-constituting in a way that an object is not. In the final chapter, Professor Neuhouser considers how this doctrine of the self-positing subject enables us to understand the possibility of the self's autonomy, or self-determination.

This is a new interpretative guide to Hegel's influential Phenomenology of Spirit, a work that combines a world history of culture and society with a systematic epistemology and a philosophy of nature and culture. A subtle and elegantly argued assessment, the book appears here in English for the first time.

Providing a fundamentally new account of the arguments and concepts that define Heidegger's early philosophy, this book locates Heidegger's work in relation to contemporary analytic philosophy, the history of philosophy, and to Plato, Kant and Husserl. It will be of great interest to those studying Heidegger and the history of twentieth-century philosophy.

This book shows that Adorno holds a substantive ethics, albeit one that is minimalist and based on a pluralist conception of the bad, and is an important intervention into current moral philosophy debates. It will be useful to those studying Adorno and twentieth-century philosophy, Aristotelianism, and the nature of normativity.

Through careful readings of the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason, Grenberg shows how Kant defends the moral import of the common person's first-personal encounter with moral demands. For all those involved in Kant studies and the history of philosophy.

This book traces the development of theories of moral obligation of three key philosophers, showing how each tries to deal with the tension between obligation and autonomy. Of interest to those concerned with the history of modern ethics and the interaction of historical debate to constructivism and moral realism.

Edmund Husserl discusses the question of whether the world is of our making or whether some form of realism is true. In this book Robert Tragesser sets out to determine the conditions under which a realist ontology of mathematics and logic might be justified, taking Husserl as his starting point.

This 2005 book is a critical examination of Michel Foucault's relation to ancient Greek thought. It offers a complex reading of the texts which Foucault discusses, covering topics such as Aristotle's ethics and theory of sex, Hippocratic dietetics, the earliest treatises on economics, and Plato's theory of love.

This book shows that the repeated announcements of the death of Hegel's philosophical system have been premature. Hegel's Philosophy of Freedom, Reality, and God brings to light accomplishments for which Hegel is seldom given credit, responding in a systematic manner to many of the criticisms leveled at his system.

This book is a critical analysis of how key philosophers in the European tradition have responded to the emergence of a modern conception of temporality. Espen Hammer presents a rich exploration of an enduring philosophical theme: the role of temporality in shaping and reshaping modern human affairs.

This book offers an interpretation of Fichte's most famous writings centred on two main themes: property and virtue. It relates Fichte's social and political philosophy to the ideas of such thinkers as Locke and Kant, as well as to the radical phrase of the French Revolution.

By providing the first study of the structure of the reaction to Kant's critical philosophy in the writings of Reinhold, Fichte and Hegel, Ameriks challenges the presumptions that dominate popular approaches to the concept of freedom, and to the interpretation of the relation between the Enlightenment, Kant and post-Kantian thought.

Anne Margaret Baxley offers a systematic interpretation of Kant's theory of virtue, showing how the distinctive features of Kant's moral theory offer an important and overlooked alternative to the Aristotelian views which have dominated contemporary virtue ethics.

This clear and comprehensive analysis of Foucault's thought identifies the different interpretations of freedom in his philosophy and examines three major divisions of it: the archaeological, the genealogical, and the ethical. It also discusses Foucault's treatment of the body in relation to recent feminist work on this topic.

In Political Theory and Postmodernism, Stephen K. White outlines a path through the postmodern problematic by distinguishing two distinct ways of thinking about the meaning of responsibility, one prevalent in modern and the other in postmodern perspectives.

This is the first critically evaluative study of Gaston Bachelard's philosophy of science to be written in English. Bachelard's professional reputation was based on his philosophy of science, though that aspect of his thought has tended to be neglected by his English-speaking readers.

This major study of Marx and the Young Hegelians offers a new interpretation of Marx's early development, the political dimension of Young Hegelianism, and that movement's relationship to political and intellectual currents in early nineteenth-century Germany.

This original study examines the views of Kant, Fichte and Hegel on punishment, and traces in their work the gradual emergence of views in favour of deterrence and resocialisation. Merle also examines Nietzsche's view that morality rests on the rejection of retribution.

This study provides an illuminating assessment of both the merits and the limitations of Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical thought. Kristin Gjesdal uses a close analysis and critical investigation of Gadamer's Truth and Method (1960) to show that his engagement with Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher is integral to his conception of hermeneutics.

This book, which draws on detailed analysis of texts by Husserl, is an illuminating exploration of how and why Husserl considered the question of time-consciousness to be the most difficult, yet also the most central, of all the challenges facing his unique philosophical enterprise.

In this book Wayne Martin develops a historical survey of theoretical approaches to judgement, focusing on treatments of judgement in psychology, logic, phenomenology and painting.

Sharon Krishek offers an original and compelling interpretation of the Works of Love in the light of Kierkegaard's famous analysis of the paradoxicality of faith in Fear and Trembling, showing that preferential love plays a much more important and positive role in his thinking than has usually been assumed.

A comprehensive study in English of Bruno Bauer, a leading Hegelian philosopher of the 1840s. Inspired by the philosophy of Hegel, Bauer led an intellectual revolution that influenced Marx and shaped modern secular humanism.

This 2003 book offers an interpretation of Heidegger's major work, Being and Time. Unlike those who view Heidegger as an idealist, Taylor Carman argues that Heidegger is best understood as a realist. Rigorous, jargon-free and deftly argued this book will be necessary reading for all serious students of Heidegger.

Kant's Critique of Judgment has often been interpreted by scholars as comprising separate treatments of three uneasily connected topics: beauty, biology, and empirical knowledge. Rachel Zuckert's book interprets the Critique as a unified argument concerning all three domains.

Paul Redding traces the consequences of the displacement of the logic presupposed by Kant and Hegel by modern post-Fregean logic, and examines the developments within twentieth-century analytic philosophy which have made possible an analytic re-engagement with a previously dismissed philosophical tradition.

This book is an important gateway through which professional analytic philosophers and their students can come to understand the significance of Hegel's philosophy to contemporary theory of action. As such it will contribute to the ever-increasing erosion of the sterile barrier between the continental and analytic approaches to philosophy.

As well as aiming to revive interest in Meinong's thought, this book challenges many of the most widespread assumptions of philosophical logic. It will reopen questions about existence and the logical form for representing it which many have regarded as closed and stimulate them to rethink their positions.

This major study of Kant provides a detailed examination of the doctrine of transcendental illusion in his theoretical philosophy. The author argues that we cannot understand Kant unless we take seriously his claim that the mind inevitably acts in accordance with ideas and principles that are 'illusory'.