Gertrude Stein began the creative work that was to earn her the reputation as one of the most original writers of this century with the three pieces in this volume. Fernhurst, a fictional episode based on a Bryn Mawr scandal of the early 1900s, explores the labyrinth of love between man and woman and between woman and woman; Q.E.D. fictionalizes an early Stein romance (doomed finally by a rival); and the third selection is an early draft of The Making of Americans, which records Stein's struggle toward maturity as woman and artist. Essential works of a significant twentieth-century literary voice.

"An iconoclastic philosopher revives Socrates for our time, showing how we can answer-and, in the first place, ask-life's most important questions"--

Maimonides was the greatest Jewish philosopher and legal scholar of the medieval period, a towering figure who has had a profound and lasting influence on Jewish law, philosophy, and religious consciousness. This book provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to his life and work, revealing how his philosophical sensibility and outlook informed his interpretation of Jewish tradition. Moshe Halbertal vividly describes Maimonides's childhood in Muslim Spain, his family's flight to North Africa to escape persecution, and their eventual resettling in Egypt. He draws on Maimonides's letters and the testimonies of his contemporaries, both Muslims and Jews, to offer new insights into his personality and the circumstances that shaped his thinking. Halbertal then turns to Maimonides's legal and philosophical work, analyzing his three great books - Commentary on the Mishnah, the Mishneh Torah, and the Guide of the Perplexed. He discusses Maimonides's battle against all attempts to personify God, his conviction that God's presence in the world is mediated through the natural order rather than through miracles, and his locating of philosophy and science at the summit of the religious life of Torah. Halbertal examines Maimonides's philosophical positions on fundamental questions such as the nature and limits of religious language, creation and nature, prophecy, providence, the problem of evil, and the meaning of the commandments. A stunning achievement, Maimonides offers an unparalleled look at the life and thought of this important Jewish philosopher, scholar, and theologian.

For Elisabeth Roudinesco, a historian of psychoanalysis and one of France's leading intellectuals, Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, and Derrida represent a "great generation" of French philosophers who accomplished remarkable work and lived incredible lives. These troubled and innovative thinkers endured World War II and the cultural and political revolution of the 1960s, and their cultural horizon was dominated by Marxism and psychoanalysis, though they were by no means strict adherents to the doctrines of Marx and Freud. Roudinesco knew many of these intellectuals personally, and she weaves an account of their thought through lived experience and reminiscences. Canguilhem, for example, was a distinguished philosopher of science who had a great influence on Foucault's exploration of sanity and madness-themes Althusser lived in a notorious personal drama. And in dramatizing the life of Freud for the screen, Sartre fundamentally altered his own philosophical approach to psychoanalysis. Roudinesco launches a passionate defense of Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, and Derrida against the "new philosophers" of the late 1970s and 1980s, who denounced the work-and sometimes the private lives-of this great generation. Roudinesco refutes attempts to tar them, as well as the Marxist and left-wing tradition in general, with the brush of Soviet-style communism. In Freudian theory and the philosophy of radical commitment, she sees a bulwark against the kind of manipulative, pill-prescribing, and normalizing psychology that aims to turn individuals into mindless consumers. Intense, clever, and persuasive, Philosophy in Turbulent Times captivates with the dynamism of French thought in the twentieth century.

From her political awakening as a high school student in tsarist-occupied Poland until her murder in 1919 during the German revolution, Rosa Luxemburg acted and wrote as a proletarian revolutionist. Rosa Luxemburg Speaks takes us inside the political battles between revolution and class collaboration that still shape the modern workers movement.

In the first edition of A Very Bad Wizard: Morality behind the Curtain - Nine conversations, philosopher Tamler Sommers talked with an interdisciplary group of the world's leading researchers -- from the fields of social psychology, moral philosophy, cognitive science, and primatology - all working on the same issue: the origins and workings of morality. Together, these nine interviews pulled back some of the curtain, not only on our moral lives but - through Sommers' probing, entertaining, and well informed questions - on the way morality traditionally has been studied. This Second Edition increases the subject matter, adding eight additional interviews and offering features that will make A Very Bad Wizard more useful in undergraduate classrooms. These features include structuring all chapters around sections and themes familiar in a course in ethics or moral psychology; providing follow-up podcasts for some of the interviews, which will delve into certain issues from the conversations in a more informal manner; including an expanded and annotated reading list with relevant primary sources at the end of each interview; presenting instructor and student resources online in a companion website. (www.routledge.com/cw/sommers) The resulting new publication promises to synthesize and make accessible the latest interdisciplinary research to offer a brand new way to teach philosophical ethics and moral psychology. -- from back cover

"Evelyn Fox Keller trained as a theoretical physicist at a time when women didn't "do physics." Unable to find a supportive advisor, she moved into the new field of molecular biology just getting off the ground. After receiving her doctorate, she returned to physics but then took another swerve, joining a small interdisciplinary effort to develop mathematical models of biological systems. This work led to her appointment to a special position as Professor of Mathematics and Humanities at Northeastern University. When second-wave feminism arrived in the 1960s, it changed the lives of everyone in its path. It certainly changed Keller's, leading her beyond the borders of science altogether. Eventually she began to think of herself as a dual citizen of the proverbial two cultures―science and humanities. The trajectory was hardly straightforward, nor was it conducive to building a conventional career, or even getting a job. Now in hindsight, after an illustrious career and having published fourteen books, Keller reflects on her life, influences, successes and struggles along her trailblazing path as a scientist and feminist." -- From publisher's website

This is the second of three volumes of posthumously collected writings of G. A. Cohen, who was one of the leading, and most progressive, figures in contemporary political philosophy. This volume brings together some of Cohen's most personal philosophical and nonphilosophical essays, many of them previously unpublished. Rich in first-person narration, insight, and humor, these pieces vividly demonstrate why Thomas Nagel described Cohen as a "wonderful raconteur.? The nonphilosophical highlight of the book is Cohen's remarkable account of his first trip to India, which includes unforgettable vignettes of encounters with strangers and reflections on poverty and begging. Other biographical pieces include his valedictory lecture at Oxford, in which he describes his philosophical development and offers his impressions of other philosophers, and "Isaiah's Marx, and Mine," a tribute to his mentor Isaiah Berlin. Other essays address such topics as the truth in "small-c conservatism," who can and can't condemn terrorists, and the essence of bullshit. A recurring theme is finding completion in relation to the world of other human beings. Engaging, perceptive, and empathetic, these writings reveal a more personal side of one of the most influential philosophers of our time.

Considered by some the most controversial American philosopher of contemporary times, SIDNEY HOOK (1902-1989) was infamous for the wild swing in his political thought over the course of his career, starting out as a young Marxist before the Great Depression and ending up a vehement anti-Communist in his later years. Much of what he taught and valued as a thinker he learned as the prize pupil of American educator and philosopher John Dewey. In John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait, first published in 1939, Hook examines Dewey's approach to philosophy in clear, nontechnical language meant to offer insight into and illustration of the sweep and vitality of Dewey's vision. A staunch pragmatist-a developer of the philosophical discipline that insists upon taking into account the real-world impact of concepts of truth and meaning-Dewey explored theories of idealism, politics, and society that continue to be vitally relevant today. Hook's exploration deepens our appreciation of Dewey's ongoing impact on American culture.

The statesman, scientist, and philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) lived a divided life, and in the centuries since his death questions about his true nature have abounded. Deservedly called the "Father of Modern Science," and still best known today for his innovative method of scientific inquiry - a single deductive system covering the entire range of empirical research into the natural world - he spent most of his career immersed not in scientific research but in the cutthroat world of high politics. Was Bacon a noble scholar who longed for solitary contemplation of higher philosophical truths, or a conniving political crook? Was he a captive of his birth and upbringing, an innocent caught in a web of political intrigue? Was he a homosexual? Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart boldly pursue the answers to these questions through a mass of previously untapped archival sources.

Feminist analyses identify contemporary Western ideas of the gendered and racialized self as originating in the seventeenth century. Naomi Zack examines the writings of key "bachelors of science"--Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Gassendi, and Boyle--and locates their reputations within the framework of the de facto "masculinization of science" and "scientizing of masculinity." Zack takes on issues such as pre-racial conceptions of slavery, witchcraft trials and their connection to homosociality, and the highly sexualized nature of women's identity in the seventeenth century. She suggests a link between elite bachelorhood, the profession of philosophy, and scientific pursuit as recreational activity. This book is central to understanding the precedents of modern scientific identity, race, and gender. --From publisher's description.

Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994) was the seventh and seemingly last Rebbe of the Habad-Lubavitch dynasty. Marked by conflicting tendencies, Schneerson was a radical messianic visionary who promoted a conservative political agenda, a reclusive contemplative who built a hasidic sect into an international movement, and a man dedicated to the exposition of mysteries who nevertheless harbored many secrets. Schneerson astutely masked views that might be deemed heterodox by the canons of orthodoxy while engineering a fundamentalist ideology that could subvert traditional gender hierarchy, the halakhic distinction between permissible and forbidden, and the social-anthropological division between Jew and Gentile. While most literature on the Rebbe focuses on whether or not he identified with the role of Messiah, Elliot R. Wolfson, a leading scholar of Jewish mysticism and the phenomenology of religious experience, concentrates instead on Schneerson's apocalyptic sensibility and his promotion of a mystical consciousness that undermines all discrimination. For Schneerson, the ploy of secrecy is crucial to the dissemination of the messianic secret. To be enlightened messianically is to be delivered from all conceptual limitations, even the very notion of becoming emancipated from limitation. The ultimate liberation, or true and complete redemption, fuses the believer into an infinite essence beyond all duality, even the duality of being emancipated and not emancipated--an emancipation, in other words, that emancipates one from the bind of emancipation. At its deepest level, Schneerson's eschatological orientation discerned that a spiritual master, if he be true, must dispose of the mask of mastery. Situating Habad's thought within the evolution of kabbalistic mysticism, the history of Western philosophy, and Mahayana Buddhism, Wolfson articulates Schneerson's rich theology and profound philosophy, concentrating on the nature of apophatic embodiment, semiotic materiality, hypernomian transvaluation, nondifferentiated alterity, and atemporal temporality.

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.

"This volume collects practically all significant correspondence and documents relating to Ludwig Wittgenstein's long association with Cambridge, between his arrival in 1911 and his death there in 1951. The letters he exchanged with his most illustrious Cambridge contemporaries Russell, Keynes, Moore and Ramsey (previously published as Cambridge Letters) art included with updated notes. Some 200 previously unpublished letters and documents are added, including 40 letters from Wittgenstein to his friend and Cambridge contemporary, the economist Piero Sraffa. Many letters from or to followers, pupils, friends or younger colleagues are included, showing his influence on them and the ideals they tried to put into practice in their own teaching or writing. The friends and followers of his last years - Rush Rhees, G. H. von Wright and Norman Malcolm - close the series. Minutes of meetings representing Wittgenstein's incursions into University business and The Moral Science Club are also included in their chronological place." "Anyone interested in Wittgenstein's philosophy, his life or University life in the first half of the last century will find something in this book, fully annotated and providing lists of correspondents, index and cross-references."--BOOK JACKET.

This book presents the remarkable correspondence between Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, emigre philosophers influenced by Edmund Husserl, who fled Europe on the eve of World War II and ultimately became seminal figures in the establishment of phenomenology in the United States. Their deep and lasting friendship grew out of their mutual concern with the question of the connections between science and the life-world. Interwoven with philosophical exchange is the two scholars' encounter with the unfamiliar problems of American academic life―what Gurwitsch called the "passology" of exile. Apart from its brilliant and moving portrait of two distinguished men, the correspondence holds rich significance for current issues in philosophy and the social sciences.