Spanning forty years, this collection of essays represents the work of a renowned teacher and scholar of the ancient Greek world. Martin Ostwald's contribution is both philological and historical: the thread that runs through all of the essays is his precise explanation, for a modern audience, of some crucial terms by which the ancient Greeks saw and lived their lives—and influenced ours. Chosen and sequenced by Ostwald, the essays demonstrate his methodology and elucidate essential aspects of ancient Greek society. The first section plumbs the social and political terms in which the Greeks understood their lives. It examines their notion of the relation of the citizen to his community; how they conceived different kinds of political structure; what role ideology played in public life; and how differently their most powerful thinkers viewed issues of war and peace. The second section is devoted to the problem, first articulated by the Greeks, of the extent to which human life is dominated by nature (physis) and human convention (nomos), a question that remains a central concern in modern societies, even if in different guises. The third section focuses on democracy in Athens. It confronts questions of the nature of democratic rule, of financing public enterprises, of the accountability of public officials, of the conflict raised by imperial control and democratic rule, of the coexistence of "conservative" and "liberal" trends in a democratic regime, and of the relation between rhetoric and power in a democracy. The final section is a sketch of the principles on which the two greatest Greek historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, constructed their outlooks on human affairs. Ultimately, the collection intends to make selected key concepts in ancient Greek social and political culture accessible to a lay audience. It also shows how the differences—rather than the similarities—between the ancient Greeks and us can contribute to a deeper understanding of our own time.

This fresh collection of essays questions how the historical process affects our conception of science, including our understanding of its validity as well as our general conception of knowledge. The essays in this book consider the philosophical labours spanning the work of Descartes, Kant and Hegel, still the philosophical basis of our modern understanding of science, as well as recent selected philosophers and historians of science such as Kuhn and Feyerbend. Themes raised include the philosophical basis for the validity of science, the possibility of ever knowing the independent world as it truly is, and the intelligibility of construing scientific knowledge as a historical. Taken separately and together, these essays provide a sustained analysis of scientific claims to objective standing, the historicity of thought and inquiry. They point toward unfinished philosophical business and the need for a new beginning.

"Scrolls, Volume 3: Essays On Jewish History and Literature, and Kindred Subjects" presents a collection of insightful essays by Gotthard Deutsch, a renowned scholar of Jewish history. This volume delves into various aspects of Jewish history, literature, and related topics, offering readers a comprehensive understanding of the Jewish experience through the ages. Deutsch's essays explore diverse themes within Jewish studies, providing valuable perspectives on historical events, literary works, and cultural developments. This volume is a significant contribution to the field and an invaluable resource for scholars, students, and anyone interested in Jewish history and literature. Originally published in 1920, these essays continue to resonate with their scholarly rigor and insightful analysis, making "Scrolls, Volume 3" a timeless addition to any collection of Jewish studies. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

"These two long essays make up a short book, one full of depth and knowledge, in which Eva Brann gets at the roots of our thinking--without tearing things apart. Then: In the first, Brann parses out the schema and meaning of Herodotus's The History (The Persian Wars). She writes that Herodotus worked by indirection. Giving a full account of the Persians and the peoples who constituted their empire--and whose empire encircled the Greeks (thus the 'Greek center')--Herodotus delineates the essential difference between the Barbarians and the Greeks. This difference Brann calls Athens' 'elusive essence,' its freedom contrasting with the slavery upon which the Persian empire depended. Now: In the second essay, the author delves into what it means for a person to unite a disposition toward conservatism with a capacity to reiterate and rehearse events, scenes, and dramas in 'the conservatory of the imagination.' To uncover the meanings and consequences of this union--this imaginative conservatism--and the type of soul to which it applies, Brann offers twelve perspectives, starting with 'Temperamental Disposition,' and ending with 'Eccentric Centrality,' (without ever explicitly focusing on politics). Join her and you'll find both delight and education. Eva Brann is a member of the senior faculty at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where she has taught for fifty-seven years. She is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. Her other books include Un-Willing, The Logos of Heraclitus, Feeling Our Feelings, Homage to Americans, Open Secrets/Inward Prospects, The Music of the Republic, and Homeric Moments (all published by Paul Dry Books)"--

When Michael Dukakis accused George H. W. Bush of being the "Joe Isuzu of American Politics" during the 1988 presidential campaign, he asserted in a particularly American tenor the near-ancient idea that lying and politics (and perhaps advertising, too) are inseparable, or at least intertwined. Our response to this phenomenon, writes the renowned intellectual historian Martin Jay, tends to vacillate often impotently between moral outrage and amoral realism. In The Virtues of Mendacity, Jay resolves to avoid this conventional framing of the debate over lying and politics by examining what has been said in support of, and opposition to, political lying from Plato and St. Augustine to Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. Jay proceeds to show that each philosopher s argument corresponds to a particular conception of the political realm, which decisively shapes his or her attitude toward political mendacity. He then applies this insight to a variety of contexts and questions about lying and politics. Surprisingly, he concludes by asking if lying in politics is really all that bad. The political hypocrisy that Americans in particular periodically decry may be, in Jay s view, the best alternative to the violence justified by those who claim to know the truth. -- Amazon.com.

Der Text Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland ist eine in essayistischem Stil geschriebene Abhandlung des deutsch-jüdischen Dichters Heinrich Heine (1797-1856). Er entstand 1833/34 zur Zeit des Pariser Exils Heines, wurde zunächst auf französisch veröffentlicht und bildet damit einen Teil seiner Bemühungen um ein besseres Verständnis beider Völker füreinander. Die deutsche Erstausgabe erfolgte in "Der Salon. Zweiter Band" (1834).

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The Moral Instruction of Children is a classic parenting handbook/parenting skills guide by Felix Adler. Moral education is everywhere acknowledged to be the most important part of all education; but there has not been the same agreement in regard to the best means of securing it in the school. This has been due in part to a want of insight into the twofold nature of this sort of education; for instruction in morals includes two things: the formation of right ideas and the formation of right habits.

"Nietzsche's pre-Dionysian Apollo and the Limits of Contemporary Thought is the first study to place Nietzsche's Dionysian philosophy in the context of Nietzsche's overall thought. It interprets Nietzsche's Dionysian philosophy as a development of Nietzsche's earliest thinking as it is laid out in his school dissertation on Theognis of Megara. As author Carlos A. Segovia contends, the key figure in this early thinking is not Dionysus but Apollo, an earthly Apollo who, despite his partial erasure after The Birth of Tragedy, haunts Nietzsche in his later writings, including his unpublished fragments and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The author also shows that retrieving Nietzsche's pre-Dionysian Apollo can help us move beyond the theoretical limits assumed by today's two major philosophical trends, speculative realism and new materialism, thus stressing Nietzsche's untimeliness from a strictly contemporary standpoint. This book will be essential reading for all interested in Nietzsche and the birth of contemporary philosophy, including graduate students and researchers"--

Talking Wolves advances an analysis of Hobbes which takes language seriously (as seriously as Hobbes took it). It presents a reading of Hobbes's view of society at large, and political society in particular, through a comprehensive discussion based on, and intimately linked to, his philosophy of language. This philosophy, in turn, is seen in a new light as being a pragmatic theory of language in use, language in action.

In this book an eminent philosopher presents a rich and provocative analysis of the Statesman, one of Plato's most challenging works. Stanley Rosen contends that the main theme of this dialogue is defining the art of politics and the degree to which political experience is subject to the rule of sound judgment (phronesis) and to technical construction (techne)."Rosen tries by explaining the dialogue's philosophical methodology to appeal to readers other than those who specialize in Plato. He succeeds by means of his lucid prose and ordered presentation of the dialogue's twists and turns. A necessary book for all levels of thoughtful readers". -- Choice"The Statesman may well be Plato's most difficult work. Rosen's interpretation is penetrating and original, with a rich and humorous description of the recalcitrant details of the dialogue". -- Davis K. O'Connor, University of Notre Dame Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

. 1974, with chipped dustjacket, clean copy, feint foxing to edges, no markings, Professional booksellers since 1981

Throughout the ages philosophers have examined their own lives in an attempt both to find some meaning and to explain the roots of their philosophical perspectives. This volume is an introduction to philosophical autobiography, a rich but hitherto ignored literary genre that questions the self, its social context, and existence in general. The author analyzes representative narratives from antiquity to postmodernity, focusing in particular on three case studies: the autobiographies of St. Augustine, Rousseau, and Sartre. Through the study of these exemplary texts, philosophical reflection on the self emerges as a valid alternative to Freudian psychoanalysis and as a way of promoting self-renewal and change.

Human finitude and its implications have long been one of the central themes of Western philosophy. The essays gathered together in this volume explore various facets of this not altogether pleasing fact with which we must realistically come to terms.

"In this bold and wide-ranging book, intellectual historian Martin Jay traces across several centuries the conflict between two versions of nominalism-"conventional" nominalism and what he calls "magical" nominalism. According to Jay, since at least William of Ockham, the conventional form of nominalism contributed to the disenchantment of the world by rejecting the notion of general terms as anything other than names we use to group particular objects together, rejecting the idea that they have any reference to a further, "higher" reality. Magical nominalism, instead, performs a reenchanting function by investing names with an auratic power of their own. Starting with the initial revolution of nominalism against Scholastic realism, Jay proceeds to unpack various "counterrevolutions" against nominalism itself. Ranging from theology to critical theory, philosophy of history, aesthetics, and political theory, engaging with thinkers including Adorno, Barthes, Bataille, Benjamin, and Derrida; artists such as Marcel Duchamp; and a range of contemporary theorists, this book provides us with a new way to understand humanity's intellectual path to modernity and its aftermath. Focusing on fundamental debates over the relationship between language and reality, Jay shows, allows for surprising, illuminating connections across thinkers, disciplines, and vast realms of human experience"--

"Texts Without Referents" offers a detailed and systematic theory of human culture, ranging across both Anglo-American and Continental European philosophy, and their allied disciplines. In it Joseph Margolis provides an account of history and interpretation and the ontology of cultural entities (persons, artefacts, artworks, words and sentences, actions, institutions, societies). Central to the book is the question of the coherent relationship between the human and the natural sciences. The author elaborates a theory that may be said to question, and challenge, the traditional emphasis given in the Western philosophical canon to the subordination of the human sciences to the physical sciences. Margolis' strategy is to show the strong conceptual evidence offered by such diverse movements as pragmatism, naturalism, phenomenology, deconstruction, Marxism, Frankfurt Critical Theory, hermeneutics, and Wittgensteinian and Nietzschean currents, for overturning this ranking. Margolis argues that it is the physical sciences that depend on the human for their distinctive rigour, and that they need to be brought under the larger constraints of social existence if, together, they are to yield a coherent and comprehensive picture of the full powers of human inquiry. This, the third volume in Margolis' trilogy, brings the issues of the first two volumes together, reworking them within a general theory of cultural life. A number of strategic questions are examined, including the nature of texts, reference, selves, praxis, thinking, and historical time. Expansive and challenging, it represents the climax to an ambitious reassessment of the relationship, within the world of culture, between the natural and the human sciences, and a reassessment of the complexities of human existence. The books is aimed at students and specialists in philosophy, social theory and the philosophy of culture.

[I]f the diffusion of American wealth is accentuated, can it be denied that the extremes are greater here than anywhere else, -that the army of the unemployed is swelling while the billion-dollar trusts are formed, that the richest men are richer than any European, while the slums of New York show a misery that is unknown in Berlin? -from "American Democracy" As a psychologist and an innovator of experimental psychology, Hugo Münsterberg was a powerful influence on thinking in both the medical and social arenas at the turn of the 20th century, developing practical applications of psychology to industry, medicine, education, the arts, and criminal investigation. Here, though, in this 1901 work, Münsterberg turns his scientific eye on American culture at large, offering the perspective of an educated and observant immigrant on the New World experience in the Gilded Age. From the delusions of American democracy to the condition of women, Münsterberg's commentary tells us much not just about the United States in the pre-World War I period, but also about the mind of a man whose work continues to impact today's philosophy of the mind and how it shapes human behavior. Also available from Cosimo Classics: Münsterberg's Psychology and Social Sanity, The Eternal Life, The War and America, and Psychotherapy OF INTEREST TO: readers of American history, students of cultural psychology German-American psychologist and philosopher HUGO MÜNSTERBERG (1863-1916) was professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1892 until his death. He was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1898.

"Like most of his theatrical pieces, Felix Guattari's Parmenides is a brief but extremely suggestive dialogue that brings life to his concerns about psychoanalysis, semiotics, the history of philosophy, and contemporary post-theatre. Edited by Gary Genosko and Carlos A. Segovia, this volume includes the facsimile edition of the original manuscript followed by its transcription and its annotated translations into English, German, Spanish, Japanese, Polish and Russian. Accompanying commentaries, diagrams, and studies of the text give an incredibly in-depth analysis of Guattari's theatrical work and its significance to his wider body of thought. Among these, Gary Genosko highlights Guattari's engagement with dialogue and language; Carlos A. Segovia examines his elaboration on Greek mythology; and Flore Gacin-Marrou looks at Guattari's role as a playwright among his other literary work, which ranged from screenplays to novels. This volume also includes another of Guattari's short theatrical pieces, Socrates, which was the only one of his plays to reach the stage, and which expands on one of the book's central themes in his dialogue with classical philosophy." -- OCLC.

"There is no more contentious and perennial issue in modern thought than the vexed relationship between an idea's genesis and its claim to transcendent validity. It is at the heart of the discipline known as intellectual history, which deals with ideas and the intellectuals who generate, disseminate, and criticize them. These essays by an internationally recognized figure in the field address the issue in new and arresting ways"--