Surveys category: 1940 books

Most philosophical writing is impersonal and argumentative, but many important philosophers have nevertheless written accounts of their own lives. Filling a gap in the market for a text focusing on autobiography as philosophy, this collection discusses several such autobiographies in the light...

BERDYAEV AS A PHILOSOPHER How shall a non-Russian, above all a North American, assimilate the extraordinary assemblage of ideas which is Berdyaev's philosophy? Dr. Richardson does not exaggerate the difficulties. And he introduces us with great care (and what a formidable task it must have been) precisely...

Due to his theory of 'immaterialism' and Schopenhauer's regard of him as the 'father of idealism', George Berkeley (1685-1753) is one of the most important thinkers of the Early Modern period. The Bloomsbury Companion to Berkeley is a comprehensive one volume reference guide to his life, thought and...

This book is divided into nine chapters trying to draw attention to the various aspects of the understanding of God, to the question of the individual, the ideal state arrangement, and the question of freedom (free will) as well as of history. Special attention is paid to the issue of cognition, the...

Epic in scope, "Between the Shadow and the Flame" is the allegorical retelling of the history of philosophy, seen through the journey of its three main characters.When a pandemic and ensuing nuclear war all but destroy civilization, and conspiracy theorists whisper of a plot to wipe out humanity,...

The laughter of delight has gone unheard in the Western tradition. This work brings new light to the notion, and has a consistent leitmotif: the delighted laughter of the matriarch Sarah in the book of Genesis, when she gives birth to her son Isaac. This laughter is "heard" through biblical commentaries and twentieth-century theorists of laughter.

Naturalization of the Soul charts the development of the concepts of soul and self in Western thought, from Plato to the present. It fills an important gap in intellectual history by being the first book to emphasize the enormous intellectual transformation in the eighteenth century, when the religious...

This book provides an analytical interpretation of Leibniz's 'Essais de Théodicée' with wide-ranging references to all his works. It shows and upholds many thesis: Leibniz's rational conception of faith, his rational notion of mystery, the reformation of classical ontology, and the importance of...

This book seeks to set humanism on a new footing. No longer Enlightenment intuitions of an autonomous, disconnected, and rational self but a philosophy oriented towards the relationship between self and other. With this, it seeks to provide an escape from present egotism and narcissism in society. It discusses altruism as well as its limitations.

George Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge is a crucial text in the history of empiricism and in the history of philosophy more generally. Its central and seemingly astonishing claim is that the physical world cannot exist independently of the perceiving mind. The meaning of this claim, the powerful...

During the last 25 years, a large number of publications on the history of analytic philosophy have appeared, significantly more than in the preceding period. As most of these works are by analytically trained authors, it is tempting to speak of a 'historical turn' in analytic philosophy. The present...

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel evoked passionate discipleship, as well as equally passionate opposition. He was praised by the likes of Karl Marx and John Dewey but scorned by Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell. He has been charged with being a proponent of an authoritarian state by some, and he has...

The long tradition of Kierkegaard studies has made it impossible for individual scholars to have a complete overview of the vast field of Kierkegaard research. The large and ever increasing number of publications on Kierkegaard in the languages of the world can be simply bewildering even for experienced...