A key to modern studies of 18th century Western philosophy, the Treatise considers numerous classic philosophical issues, including causation, existence, freedom and necessity and morality. This abridged edition has an introduction which explain's Hume's thought and places it in the context of its times.

One of Hume's most well-known works and a masterpiece of philosophy, A Treatise of Human Nature is indubitably worth taking the time to read.

French theorist Luce Irigaray has become one of the twentieth century's most influential feminist thinkers. Among her many writings are three books (with a projected fourth) in which she challenges the Western tradition's construals of human beings' relations to the four elements--earth, air, fire, and water--and to nature. In answer to Heidegger's undoing of Western metaphysics as a "forgetting of Being," Irigaray seeks in this work to begin to think out the Being of sexedness and the sexedness of Being. This (...) volume is the first English translation of L'oubli de l'air chez Martin Heidegger (1983). In this complex, lyrical, meditative engagement with the later work of the eminent German philosopher, Irigaray critiques Heidegger's emphasis on the element of earth as the ground of life and speech and his "oblivion" or forgetting of air. With the other volumes (Elemental Passions and Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche) in Irigaray's "elemental" series, The Forgetting of Air offers a fundamental rereading of basic tenets in Western metaphysics. And with its emphasis on dwelling and human habitation, it will be important reading not only in the humanities but also in architecture and the environmental sciences. (shrink)

Julia Kristeva. alteration has been identified, one is able to detect a similar ferment in the essential writings of other historical periods. A few definitions or clarifications are in order. That there has been a conceptual "revolution" is, 1 believe, ...

Examines the relationship between time and sexual difference in the work of French feminists Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. This book is the first to examine the relationship between time and sexual difference in the work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Because of their association with reproduction, embodiment, and the survival of the species, women have been confined to the cyclical time of nature—a temporal model that is said to merely repeat itself. Men, on the other hand, have been (...) seen as bearers of linear time and as capable of change and progress. Fanny Söderbäck argues that both these temporal models make change impossible because they either repeat or repress the past. The model of time developed here—revolutionary time—aims at returning to and revitalizing the past so as to make possible a dynamic-embodied present and a future pregnant with change. Söderbäck stages an unprecedented conversation between Kristeva and Irigaray on issues of both time and difference, and engages thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, Hannah Arendt, and Plato along the way. “Revolutionary Time makes a distinctive contribution to contemporary feminist and continental philosophical thought. By engaging Kristeva and Irigaray in depth alongside one another, and making time the guiding thread for reading their work, the author generates insights that are not to be found elsewhere in the existing literature. Through its development of the concept of revolutionary time, the book offers rich resources for thinking about temporalization in its existential, ontological, and political dimensions, in ways that are particularly valuable for feminist projects of change and political transformation.” — Rachel Jones, author of Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy. (shrink)

This is a book that no one with a serious interest in the spiritual life can afford to be without.

_Gravity and Grace_ shows Weil's religious thoughts and ideas, drawn from many sources - Christian, Jewish, Indian, Greek and Hindu - and focusing on suffering and redemption. It brings the reader face to face with the profoundest levels of existence as Weil explores the relationship of the human condition to the realm of the transcendent.

This book, whose original French edition achieved worldwide attention when its author died trying to save two children caught in a riptide, challenges the psychic work the modern world devotes to avoiding risk. Weaving psychoanalytic case studies together with philosophical reflections, Dufourmantelle shows how risk is an essential property of life, one that requires our embrace.

This book analyzes the exile ontology of Spanish philosopher María Zambrano. Karolina Enquist Källgren connects Zambrano’s lived exile and political engagement with the Spanish Civil War to her poetic reason, and argues that Zambrano developed a theory of expressive subjectivity that combined embodiment with the expressive creativity of the human mind. The analysis of recurring literary figures and concepts—such as new materialism, the confession, image, the ruin, the heart, and awakening— show how a comprehensive argument runs as a thread through (...) her works. Further, this book situates Zambrano’s thought in a larger European philosophical context by showing how Zambrano’s poetic reason was directly related to her unconventional exile readings of Martin Heidegger, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and Xavier Zubiri, among others. (shrink)

First published in English in 1953, this important book from eminent philosopher Karl Jaspers deals with the philsophy of the history of mankind. More specifically, its avowed aim is to assist in heightening our awareness of the present by placing it within the framework of the long obscurity of prehistory and the boundless realm of possibilities which lie within the undecided future.This analysis is split into 3 parts: World history The present and the future The meaning of history.

‘You can’t stop progress’, we are endlessly told. But what is meant by “progress”? What is “progress” toward? We are rarely told. Human flourishing? And a culture? That would be a good start – but rarely seems a criterion for ‘progress’. Rather, ‘progress’ is simply a process, that we are not allowed, apparently, to stop. Or rather: it would be futile to seek to stop it. So that we are seemingly-deliberately demoralised into giving up even trying.Questioning the myth of ‘progress’, (...) and seeking to substitute for it the idea of real progress – progress which is actually assessed according to some independent not-purely-procedural criteria – is a vital thing to do, at this point in history. Literally: life, or at least civilisation, and thus culture, may depend on it.Once we overcome the myth of ‘progress’, we can clear the ground for a real politics that would jettison the absurd hubris of liberalism and of most ‘Leftism’. And would jettison the extreme Prometheanism and lack of precaution endemic to our current pseudo-democratic technocracy. The challenge is to do so in a way that does not fall into complete pessimism or into an endorsement of the untenable and unsavoury features of conservatism. The challenge, in other words, is to generate an ideology or philosophy for our time, that might yet save us, and ensure that we are worth saving.This paper is then a kind of reading of Wittgenstein’s crucial aphorism on this topic: ‘Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features.’. (shrink)

First published in English in 1953, this important book from eminent philosopher Karl Jaspers deals with the philsophy of the history of mankind. More specifically, its avowed aim is to assist in heightening our awareness of the _present_ by placing it within the framework of the long obscurity of prehistory and the boundless realm of possibilities which lie within the undecided future.This analysis is split into 3 parts: World history The present and the future The meaning of history.

First published in English in 1953, this important book from eminent philosopher Karl Jaspers deals with the philsophy of the history of mankind. More specifically, its avowed aim is to assist in heightening our awareness of the _present_ by placing it within the framework of the long obscurity of prehistory and the boundless realm of possibilities which lie within the undecided future.This analysis is split into 3 parts: World history The present and the future The meaning of history.

Like the latter, it unites into one and the same function the possibility of giving things a sign, of representing one thing by another, and the possibility of causing a sign to shift in relation to what it designates. The four functions that define the ...

Hegel's Encyclopaedia Logic constitutes the foundation of the system of philosophy presented in his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Together with his Science of Logic, it contains the most explicit formulation of his enduringly influential dialectical method and of the categorical system underlying his thought. It offers a more compact presentation of his dialectical method than is found elsewhere, and also incorporates changes that he would have made to the second edition of the Science of Logic if he had lived (...) to do so. This volume presents it in a new translation with a helpful introduction and notes. It will be a valuable reference work for scholars and students of Hegel and German idealism, as well as for those who are interested in the post-Hegelian character of contemporary philosophy. (shrink)