Blame is an unpopular and neglected notion: it goes against the grain of a therapeutically-oriented culture and has been far less discussed by philosophers than such related notions as responsibility and punishment. This book seeks to show that neither the opposition nor the neglect is justified. The book's most important conclusion is that blame is inseperable from morality itself - that any considerations that justify us in accepting a set of moral principles must also call for the condemnation of those (...) who violate the principles. Properly understood, blame and morality must stand or fall together. (shrink)

Radical empiricism is the view that a person's experiences (sensory and introspective), or a person's observations, constitute the person's evidence. This view leads to epistemic self-defeat. There are three arguments, concerning respectively: (1) epistemic starting points; (2) epistemic norms; (3) terms of epistemic appraisal. The source of self-defeat is traced to the fact that empiricism does not count a priori intuition as evidence (where a priori intuition is not a form of belief but rather a form of seeming, specifically intellectual (...) as opposed to sensory). Moderate rationalism, by contrast, avoids self-defeat. (shrink)

George Kateb's writings have been innovatory in exploring the fundamental quandary of how modern democracy--sovereignty vested in the many--might nevertheless protect, respect, promote, even celebrate the singular, albeit ordinary individual. His essays, often leading to unexpected results, have focused on many inter-related topics: rights, representation, constitutionalism, war, evil, extinction, punishment, privacy, patriotism, and more. This book focuses in particular on his thought in three key areas: Dignity These essays exhibit the breadth and complexity of Kateb's notion of dignity and outline (...) some implications for political theory. Rather than a solely moral approach to the theory of human rights, he elaborates a human-dignity rationale for the very worth of the human species Morality Here Kateb challenges the position that moral considerations are often too demanding to have a place in the rough-and-tumble of modern politics and political analysis. Rejecting common justifications for the propriety of punishment, he insists that state-based punishment is a perplexing moral problem that cannot be allayed by repairing to theories of state legitimacy. Individuality These essays gather some of Kateb's rejoinders and correctives to common conceptions and customary critiques of the theory of democratic individuality. He explains that Locke's hesitations and religious backtracking are instructive, perhaps as precursors for the ways in which vestigial beliefs can still cloud moral reasoning. (shrink)

As the work of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, François Jacob, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu demonstrates, Georges Canguilhem has exerted tremendous influence on the philosophy of science and French philosophy more generally. In Knowledge of Life, a book that spans twenty years of his essays and lectures, Canguilhem offers a series of epistemological histories that seek to establish and clarify the stakes, ambiguities, and emergence of philosophical and biological concepts that defined the rise of modern biology. How do (...) transformations in biology and modern medicine shape conceptions of life? How do philosophical concepts feed into biological ideas and experimental practices, and how are they themselves transformed? How does knowledge "undo the experience of life so as to help man remake what life has made without him, in him or outside of him?" Knowledge of Life is Canguilhem's effort to explain how the movements of knowledge and life come to rest upon each other. Published at the dawn of the genetic revolution and still pertinent today, the book tackles the history of cell theory, the conceptual moves toward and away from mechanical understandings of the organism, the persistence of vitalism, and the nature of normality in science and its objects. (shrink)

Georg Aerni is a photographic artist with a particular interest in architecture. Educated as an architect himself, he has been working with the camera on this subject with great precision and consistence for the past fifteen years. Paris, Barcelona, Hon.

Presented here in a lucid, simple style is an extended defense of a behavioral and direct-realist theory of sense perception. Originally published in 1971. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich (...) scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

"Historian Ramsay Cook called George Grant one of Canadas two most important political thinkers in the twentieth century.

Georges Rey presents a much-needed philosophical defense of Noam Chomsky's famous view of human language, as an internal, innate computational system. But he also offers a critical examination of problematic developments of this view, to do with innateness, ontology, intentionality, and other issues of interdisciplinary interest.

Though Nicholson (b.1760) devoted his life to a number of radical causes -- among them popular education, women's rights, democratic government, and animal welfare -- he was not part of the London circle of radical political reforms that their enemies called English Jacobins, but a printer far from the city. He did however contribute to the movement that brought a number of reforms during the 19th century, including legislation to protect animal interests. He argues not only that eating meat is (...) cruel to animals, but that it is unnatural for humans and therefore unhealthy. (shrink)

Dreyfus examines the central ideas of Dharmakīrti, one of the most important Indian Buddhist philosophers, and their reception among Tibetan thinkers. During the golden age of ancient Indian civilization, Dharmakīrti articulated and defended Buddhist philosophical principles. He did so more systematically than anyone before his time (the seventh century CE) and was followed by a rich tradition of profound thinkers in India and Tibet. This work presents a detailed picture of this Buddhist tradition and its relevance to the history of (...) human ideas. Its perspective is mostly philosophical, but it also uses historical considerations as they relate to the evolution of ideas. (shrink)

bk. 1. 1868-1909 -- bk. 2. 1910-1920 -- bk. 3. 1921-1927 -- bk. 4. 1928-1932 -- bk. 5. 1933-1936 -- bk. 6. 1937-1940 -- bk. 7. 1941-1947 -- v. 8. 1948-1952.

This Elibron Classics title is a reprint of the original edition published by the Clarendon Press in Oxford, 1901.

Volume II of two readers containing essential important works on constitutional liberty and the foundations of modern western political theory. This second volume contains works from King George II through Hitler and Stalin.

v. 1. Tucker's life and writings -- v. 2. Essays on various subjects of taste, morals, and national policy -- v. 3. A voyage to the moon -- v. 4. Essays, moral and metaphysical.

This volume is a direct result of a conference held at Princeton University to honor George A. Miller, an extraordinary psychologist. A distinguished panel of speakers from various disciplines -- psychology, philosophy, neuroscience and artificial intelligence -- were challenged to respond to Dr. Miller's query: "What has happened to cognition? In other words, what has the past 30 years contributed to our understanding of the mind? Do we really know anything that wasn't already clear to William James?" Each participant tried (...) to stand back a little from his or her most recent work, but to address the general question from his or her particular standpoint. The chapters in the present volume derive from that occasion. (shrink)

His is a journey marked by the questioning of experience itself, until what is reached is sovereign laughter, non-knowledge, and a Presence in no way distinct from Absence, where "The mind moves in a strange world where anguish and ecstasy ...

George Berkeley (1685-1753) is the superstar of Irish Philosophy. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1700 and became a fellow in 1707. In 1724 he resigned his Fellowship to become Dean of Derry, and in 1734 he was made Bishop of Cloyne. He settled in Oxford in 1752 and died the following year. The work of George Berkeley is marked by its diversity and range. His writings take in such topics as mathematics, psychology, politics, health, economics, deism and education, as (...) well as that with which he is most associated - philosophy. Whatever topic he dealt with, his grasp of the subject matter was always impressive and his criticisms of his contemporaries often acute. Among the most noteable of the British Empiricists, he took his starting point from Locke's new 'way of ideas', but he rejected abstract ideas and the possibility of real existence outside perception. It is for this doctrine that he is most known - that there is no such thing as matter, and that things are collections of ideas which can exist only in our minds and only for so long as they are perceived. This philosophy, summed up in his phrase 'to be is to be perceived', he termed 'immaterialism'. A.C. Fraser's collection includes a series of what were previously unpublished notes by Berkeley on all the main topics of his philosophy. This, the 1901 edition, was the first complete edition of his works. (shrink)

Georges Sorel's Study on Vico is a revelatory document of the depths and stakes of French social thought at the end of the 19th century. What brought Sorel to the 18th century Neapolitan theorist of history? Acute awareness of the limitations of Marxist thought in his day, a profound concern with the material underpinnings of language, law, and culture, and the imperative to understand the possibilities of revolutionary change. We find here a different Sorel, one who speaks in surprising (...) ways to the 21st century. The translation is accompanied by an introduction and by a set of notes which situate the text both in Sorel's overall intellectual trajectory and in the fin de siècle debates from which it emerged. (shrink)

The letter from Georges Florovsky to Davis McCaughey is a reflection after reading the Report The Era of Atomic Power: Report of a Commission (1946). Florovsky gives his own arguments against the development of research concerning nuclear weapons and their use. These include: treating an attempt at a technical transformation of the world as a human claim to put oneself in God’s place, i.e., to be a God-man. Another group of indictments against the use of the atomic bomb concerned (...) ethical issues and human responsibility for the war. Florovsky’s letter is his contribution to the discussion on the threat posed by the atomic bomb. (shrink)

Georges Rey; XV*—Semantic Externalism and Conceptual Competence, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 92, Issue 1, 1 June 1992, Pages 315–334, https.

"While the great Hungarian critic and philosopher George Lukacs wrote voluminously over a 60-year period, his work is insufficiently known in the English-speaking world. In this remarkable study, George Lichtheim interprets Lukacs' political career and his equally controversial literary critiques, relating them to the traditional issues of Central European philosophy that inform all of Lukacs' work..." - Book jacket.

"George Grant in Process contains 14 essays by noted scholars on Grant's political thought, his religious thinking and philosophical method, the intellectual background of his ideas, and his “red-toryism.”".

Introduction -- On the genius and discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton -- On the character and origin of the ancient mythologies -- On the question : are the planets inhabited? -- A plea for freedom -- The right use of leisure -- On education -- The claims of science -- The social aspect of intellectual culture.

Kant's masterpiece, Critique of Pure Reason, is universally recognized to be among the most difficult of all philosophical writing, and yet it is required reading in almost every course that covers modern philosophy. Most students find Critique of Pure Reason impenetrable without the help of secondary sources. While there are numerous advanced scholarly works on the topic, Dicker's is the first treatment explicitly designed for undergraduates to read alongside the primary text, rendering Kant's views accessible without oversimplifying them. His book (...) will be useful to both undergraduate and graduate students tackling this notoriously difficult yet highly influential thinker in courses in modern philosophy, epistemology, and Kant. (shrink)

In her recent (2009) book, The Origins of Concepts, Susan Carey argues that what she calls ‘Quinean Bootstrapping’ and processes of analogy in children show that the expressive power of a mind can be increased in ways that refute Jerry Fodor's (1975, 2008) ‘Mad Dog’ view that all concepts are innate. I argue that it is doubtful any evidence about the manifestation of concepts in children will bear upon the logico-semantic issues of expressive power. Analogy and bootstrapping may be ways (...) to bring about the former, but only by presupposing the very expressive powers Carey is claiming they explain. Analogies must be understood, and bootstrapping involves confirmation of hypotheses already expressible; otherwise they can't select among an infinitude of hypotheses compatible with the finite data the child has encountered, a fact rendered vivid by Goodman's ‘grue’ paradox and Chomsky's poverty of stimulus argument. The problems have special application to minds, since there is no reason to expect a child's concepts to be ‘projectible’ or to correspond to mind-independent natural kinds. I conclude with an ecumenical view that concepts are reasonably regarded as both innate and often learned, and that what is learned can in fact increase what really concerns Carey, the functioning psychological expressive power of the child, even if it leaves untouched what concerns Fodor, the semantic expressive power. Less ecumenically: maybe Fodor (2008) miscast the debate, and the real issue that bothers people concerns not nativism, but an issue on which Carey and Fodor surprisingly agree, his conceptual Atomism, or the view that all mono-morphemic concepts are primitive and unanalyzable. The issue deserves further discussion independently of Mad-doggery. (shrink)

C'est dans l'esprit des travaux d'Octave Hamelin que se situent ces Etudes de philosophie grecque: l'activite propre de l'historien de la philosophie s'y manifeste comme une reconstruction des pensees du dedans, a partir d'une minutieuse preparation historique. Ces essais donnent une idee assez precise de l'ampleur des travaux de Georges Rodier dans le domaine de la philosophie grecque: le volume s'ouvre en effet sur une etude approfondie de la figure emblematique qu'est Socrate, envisage ensuite de maniere chronologique certains aspects (...) des pensees d'Antisthene, de Platon, d'Aristote et du systeme stoicien, avant de s'achever sur une etude de la pensee de Plotin, notamment dans la perspective singuliere de son influence dans la genese du systeme leibnizien. C'est ainsi que des questions aussi determinantes que celles de la nature et de l'evolution de la dialectique platonicienne, des preuves de l'immortalite de l'ame dans le Phedon, de la composition de la Physique d'Aristote, de la notion de substance dans la Metaphysique se trouvent ici abordees et jointes a des exposes argumentes de la morale aristotelicienne ou stoicienne. (shrink)

Georges Bataille's work is an essential reference in any discussion of modernity and postmodernity. An important influence on Foucault, Derrida and post-structuralism, Bataille is a thinker of key significance. This volume makes a selection from the entire body of his academic work, showing how his thinking on sacrifice, eroticism, taboo and transgression, and the nature of identity inform his social theory. Bataille - Essential Writings contains much previously untranslated material, including the complete texts of seven essays, and long extracts (...) from many others. It is the most comprehensive selection of Bataille's work to date, edited by an acknowledged authority. Bataille - Essential Writings will be the standard introductory text to this profound and difficult thinker. (shrink)

The aim of the Georg Büchner Yearbook, which is published at irregular intervals, is to serve Büchner research as a forum for stock-taking and innovation, reflection and debate, for documenting sources and imparting information swiftly, to support critical debate and understanding, and in so doing to cover the whole range of research findings and discussions in both their substance and their methodology. This mission statement from the foreword to the 1st volume (1981) still guides the Yearbook in all its regular (...) sections (articles debates minor contributions and glosses documents and materials reviews current bibliography). (shrink)