The Metaphysics of Morals is Kant's major work in applied moral philosophy in which he deals with the basic principles of rights and of virtues. It comprises two parts: the 'Doctrine of Right', which deals with the rights which people have or can acquire, and the 'Doctrine of Virtue', which deals with the virtues they ought to acquire. Mary Gregor's translation, revised for publication in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series, is the only complete translation of the (...) whole text, and includes extensive annotation on Kant's difficult and sometimes unfamiliar vocabulary. A new introduction by Roger Sullivan sets the work in its historical and philosophical context. This volume will be of wide interest to students of ethics and of legal and political philosophy. (shrink)

For most readers of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel’s example of “Ethical Action” is taken from Sophocles’ Antigone. In fact, however, Hegel provides us with a trilogy of tragic examples. The first is Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos; the second, Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes; Antigone is but the third. Further, just as a dramatic trilogy was followed by a satyr play among the ancients, ethical action’s final moment is taken from Aristophanes’ Ekklesiazousai. These four examples do not form a simple series where (...) each equally expresses the truth of ethical action. Rather, they are increasingly adequate to that truth. (shrink)

This is an invited introductory discussion of tragedy in Hegel.

In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault describes the task of the philosophical archaeologist: to study the incommensurable breaks and disruptions in a given history of systems of thought. Akin to the distinctive layers of soil one finds digging into the earth, Foucault analyzes what he calls an episteme: a distinctive cultural and intellectual order that shapes the character and limits of knowledge production and the parameters of experience as such.1 Where archaeology sees radical breaks between epistemes, Foucault's later genealogical (...) method goes to work upon these breaks, engaging them in their contingencies, decentering and denaturalizing those things—madness, criminality, sexuality—that we take to be... (shrink)

A lively dialogue between a foreign philosopher and a powerful statesman, Plato's Laws reflects the essence of the philosopher's reasoning on political theory and practice. It also embodies his mature and more practical ideas about a utopian republic. Plato's discourse ranges from everyday issues of criminal and matrimonial law to wider considerations involving the existence of the gods, the nature of the soul, and the problem of evil. Translated by the distinguished scholar Benjamin Jowett, this edition is an authoritative choice (...) for students of philosophy, political science, and literature. (shrink)

Six essays which analyze the non-national thought processes that influence culture.

This is an invited introductory discussion of tragedy in Hegel.

What is a rule, if it appears to become confused with life? And what is a human life, if, in every one of its gestures, of its words, and of its silences, it cannot be distinguished from the rule? It is to these questions that Agamben's new book turns by means of an impassioned reading of the fascinating and massive phenomenon of Western monasticism from Pachomius to St. Francis. The book reconstructs in detail the life of the monks with their (...) obsessive attention to temporal articulation and to the Rule, to ascetic techniques and to liturgy. But Agamben's thesis is that the true novelty of monasticism lies not in the confusion between life and norm, but in the discovery of a new dimension, in which "life" as such, perhaps for the first time, is affirmed in its autonomy, and in which the claim of the "highest poverty" and "use" challenges the law in ways that we must still grapple with today. How can we think a form-of-life, that is, a human life released from the grip of law, and a use of bodies and of the world that never becomes an appropriation? How can we think life as something not subject to ownership but only for common use? (shrink)

Homo sacer : sovereign power and bare life -- State of exception -- Stasis : civil war as a political paradigm -- The sacrament of language : an archaeology of the oath -- The kingdom and the glory : for a theological genealogy of economy and government -- Opus Dei : an archaeology of duty -- Remnants of Auschwitz : the witness and the archive -- The highest poverty : monastic rules and form-of-life -- The use of bodies.

Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series is one of the seminal Works of political philosophy in recent decades. A twenty-year undertaking, this project is a series of interconnected investigations of staggering ambition and scope, investigating the deepest foundations of every major Western institution and discourse.

Much recent scholarship on Heraclitus has emphasized that the philosopher exploits recurring words in his terse sayings. The dok- words were among his favorites, for example, as was psychê, soul, in some innovative usages. The great Ephesian philosopher also enjoyed drawing sharp, verbal images borrowed from contemporary life, some of them memorable even to the modern reader. Words and images can, in turn, “resonate” between contexts when they appear in several fragments. One example, a recurring word and image concerns marturia, (...) witnessing as a formal legal action. The chosen terminology of Heraclitus and the scene it evokes are borrowed from the local courts. In this feature the witness sayings bear comparison to earlier well-known examples from Milesian Anaximander and Athenian Solon, who imagines himself summoning Mother Earth as his eyewitness at a future trial where he will defend his accomplishments. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 48, Issue 2, pp 244 - 264 Cassirer is important in 20th Century philosophy for the attention he gives to the fundamental relationship between myth and language. For Cassirer, myth is a non-subjective form of discourse wherein the origin of language coincides with both the human-divine encounter and the event of being itself. In this article, I trace the disagreement between Cassirer and Heidegger on the nature of the magical sign, which is at the heart of mythical (...) discourse. While Heidegger initially argues that this form of sign is structurally impossible on the basis of his accounts of signs and language in _Being and Time_, he later comes to recognize that he had not properly accounted for its possibility within his phenomenological deduction. I conclude by describing how Heidegger’s notion of poetry eventually comes into alignment with the way Cassirer describes the function of myth and the magical sign. (shrink)

In the 23rd book of the Iliad, Menelaus loses second place in the chariot race because of a manoeuvre by Antilochus. So, after Antilochus claims the second prize as his and dares others to fight him for it with their fists, Menelaus rises before the assembled heroes, sceptre in hand, to initiate a formal proceeding against him . First he makes the charge: Antilochus has insulted his aretē and endangered his horses. He then calls upon the leaders of the Argives (...) to judge fairly between them. But at this point he states that he will judge the case himself – in both instances the verb for ‘to judge’ is δικάζειν. He then calls on Antilochus to follow an involved procedure and finally to swear an oath that in running the race he did not purposefully use a trick. But despite the fact that Menelaus said during the race that Antilochus would not take the prize without swearing an oath , we do not know later what the result might be if Antilochus were to accept Menelaus' challenge and to swear the oath. Homer has him sidestep the challenge and concede the prize. (shrink)