While some lament the slide of Western culture into relativism and nihilism and others celebrate the trend as a liberating sort of progress, Charles Taylor calls on us to face the moral and political crises of our time, and to make the most ...

In the seventeenth century, a vision arose which was to captivate the Western imagination for the next three hundred years: the vision of Cosmopolis, a society as rationally ordered as the Newtonian view of nature. While fueling extraordinary advances in all fields of human endeavor, this vision perpetuated a hidden yet persistent agenda: the delusion that human nature and society could be fitted into precise and manageable rational categories. Stephen Toulmin confronts that agenda—its illusions and its consequences for our present (...) and future world. "By showing how different the last three centuries would have been if Montaigne, rather than Descartes, had been taken as a starting point, Toulmin helps destroy the illusion that the Cartesian quest for certainty is intrinsic to the nature of science or philosophy."—Richard M. Rorty, University of Virginia "[Toulmin] has now tackled perhaps his most ambitious theme of all.... His aim is nothing less than to lay before us an account of both the origins and the prospects of our distinctively modern world. By charting the evolution of modernity, he hopes to show us what intellectual posture we ought to adopt as we confront the coming millennium."—Quentin Skinner, New York Review of Books. (shrink)

This book presents a history of spiritual exercises from Socrates to early Christianity, an account of their decline in modern philosophy, and a discussion of ...

Surveys Western literature and thought to reveal the evolution of the ideals of sincerity and authenticity.

CHAPTER I LOGICISM AND PHILOSOPHY In the preface to his Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel rightly remarks that knowing a philosophical system is something more ...

David E. Cooper elucidates Nietzsche's educational views in detail, in a form that will be of value to educationalists as well as philosophers. In this title, first published in 1983, he shows how these views relate to the rest of Nietzsche's work, and to modern European and Anglo-Saxon philosophical concerns. For Nietzsche, the purpose of true education was to produce creative individuals who take responsibility for their lives, beliefs and values. His ideal was human authenticity. David E. Cooper sets Nietzsche's (...) critique against the background of nineteenth-century German culture, yet is concerned at the same time to emphasize its bearing upon recent educational thought and policy. (shrink)

Michael Bonnett; Authenticity and Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 12, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 51–61, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-97.

In this book, one of the most distinguished scholars of German culture collects his essays on a figure who has long been one of his chief preoccupations.