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Does history have a pattern or follow any general principle? Can we arrive at objective truth in a historically changing world? How do historical processes shape what counts as knowledge? Such questions have been discussed by philosophers of history. This course will introduce students to the central issues of the philosophy of history and the major thinkers who have understood history from a philosophical point of view, e.g., Kant, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Gadamer, Foucault, the Frankfurt School, Derrida, and Gumbrecht.
This book concerns phenomena such as the detachment of science from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment. The authors argue that the National Socialist terror was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization. They see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life.
This book is a selection of works from one of the most original cultural critics of the twentieth century. This volume includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and on Brecht’s epic theater. The chief purpose of this collection is to convey the importance of Benjamin as a literary critic. The translation of the text from the original German literature follows the two-volume German edition of Benjamin’s writings which was edited and introduced by Theodor W. Adorno in 1955.
This book introduces Derrida’s philosophy of deconstructionism. Part One argues that humans tend to see the world in binaries: love and hate, dark and light, etc. The methodology of deconstruction dismantles these binaries and reveals their dependence on one another and the fragility of their construction, and Derrida applies his methodology to the binary oppositions of speech and writing. Part Two focuses on the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to lay out this controversial and counterintuitive claim that writing in some sense precedes speech and gives us the general form of language. Derrida asserts that writing and speech have the same origination, and that supplementation is natural.
This book, a landmark work on the philosophy of humanistic studies, establishes the field of philosophical hermeneutics. Exploring the nature of knowledge, the book rejects traditional quasi-scientific approaches to establishing cultural meaning that were prevalent after the war. In arguing that truth and method acted in opposition to each other, it examines the ways in which historical and cultural circumstance fundamentally influenced human understanding. This is an approach that would become hugely influential in the humanities and social sciences and remains so to this day in the work of Jurgen Habermas and many others.
The Communist Menafesto, also referred to as the Manifesto of the Communist Party, was first published on February 21, 1848 in German as Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei. Commissioned by the Communist League and co-authoered by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, it laid out the League’s purposes and program on the instruction of its Second Congress (London, November 29-December 8, 1847). The Manifesto suggested a course of action for a proletarian revolution to overthrow the bourgeois social order and to eventually bring about a classless and stateless society and the abolition of private property.
These lectures constitute Jürgen Habermas’ response to the challenge posed by the radical critique of reason in contemporary French poststructuralism. Habermas examines the odyssey of the philosophical discourse of modernity from Hegel through the present and tests his own ideas about the appropriate form of a postmodern discourse through dialogs with a broad range of past and present critics and theorists. The lectures on Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Cornelius Castoriadis are of particular note since they are the first fruits of the recent cross-fertilization between French and German thought.
Being and Time, first published in 1927, has long been recognized as a landmark work of the twentieth century for its original analyses of the character of philosophic inquiry and the relation of the possibility of such inquiry to the human situation. Being and Time raises questions about the end of philosophy and the possibilities for thinking liberated from the presumptions of metaphysics. This edition of Stambaugh translation includes the marginal notes made by Heidegger in his own copy of Being and Time, and takes account of the many changes that he made in the final German edition of 1976.
This book is renowned for Jaspers' theory of an 'Axial Age', running from the 8th to the 3rd century BCE. Jaspers argues that this period witnessed a remarkable flowering of new ways of thinking that appeared in Persia, India, China and the Greco-Roman world. Jaspers identifies key thinkers from this age, including Confucius, Buddha, Zarathustra, Homer and Plato. For Jaspers, crucially, it is here that we see the flowering of diverse philosophical beliefs such as scepticism, materialism, sophism, nihilism, and debates about good and evil, which taken together demonstrate human beings' shared ability to engage with universal, humanistic questions as opposed to those mired in nationality or authoritarianism.
The original edition was first published in 1970, and has long been established as the principal English-language edition of this important body of writing. In this expanded edition, two important texts illustrating Kants's view of history are included for the first time: his reviews of Herder's Ideas on the Philosophy of The History of Mankind and Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History; as well as the essay What is Orientation in Thinking. This edition also contains such useful student aids as notes on the texts, a comprehensive bibliography, and a new postscript, looking at some of the principal issues in Kantian scholarship that have arisen since first publication.
This book documents and analyses major developments in German philosophy and theology in the German Enlightenment. It presents the most comprehensive collection to date in English of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's philosophical and theological writings, several of which are here translated for the first time. Lessing is the most representative figure of the German Enlightenment. His defence of Spinoza, who had traditionally been condemned as an atheist, provoked a major controversy in philosophy, and his publication of H. S. Reimarus' radical assault on Christianity led to fundamental changes in Protestant theology.
The four short works in Untimely Meditations were published by Nietzsche between 1873 and 1876, which are key documents for understanding the development of Nietzsche's thought and clearly anticipate many of the themes of his later writings. They deal with such broad topics as the relationship between popular and genuine culture, strategies for cultural reform, the task of philosophy, the nature of education, and the relationship between art, science and life. They also include Nietzsche's earliest statement of his own understanding of human selfhood as a process of endlessly 'becoming who one is'.
This book collects twelve essays by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and makes significant strides in explicating Spivak's complicated theories of reading. The first five essays represent key moments in Spivak’s deconstructive critique, especially the ways it has both challenged and transformed the development of feminism, Marxist analysis, and cultural theory. The next four sharpen, extend, and broaden that project by examining the politics of translation and multiculturalism in a variety of textual, historical, and political arenas. The last three are some supplementary materials. Many pieces in the Reader have not been published in Spivak’s earlier books, and it also includes a new interview on the question of the subaltern.
This book explores the narrative form embodied in the experience, action, and life of the individual, and projects this analysis onto the social plane. Carr argues that narrative is a temporal structure inherent in our way of living and acting, challenging the preoccupation with forms of discourse and with the paradigm of the text that has characterized much recent philosophy. Unlike physical or objective time, the temporality of human experience and action is configured and reflexively structured, as if by a storyteller unfolding a tale- stories are a form of being, not merely of discourse.
The Idea of History is the best-known work of the great Oxford philosopher, historian, and archaeologist R. G. Collingwood. Published posthumously in 1946, having been mainly reconstructed from his manuscripts, it examines how the idea of history has evolved from the time of Herodotus to the twentieth century, and offers Collingwood's own view of what history is. It proposes history as a discipline in which one relives the past in one’s own mind. Only by immersing oneself in the mental actions behind events, by rethinking the past within the context of one’s own experience, can the historian discover the significant patterns and dynamics of cultures and civilizations.
In this book, Karl Löwith, a German philosopher of history and culture, beginning with the more accessible philosophies of history in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries and working back to the Bible, analyzes the writings of outstanding historians both in antiquity and in Christian times, arguing that the modern mind, is neither Christian nor pagan—and its interpretations of history are Christian in derivation and anti-Christian in result, in contrary to the traditional view from the Christian or classical standpoint—from a deep faith in the Kingdom of God or a belief in recurrent and eternal life-cycles.
