This major study examines the most fundamental categories in terms of which we conceive of ourselves, critically surveying the concepts of substance, causation, agency, teleology, rationality, mind, body and person, and elaborating the conceptual fields in which they are embedded. The culmination of 40 years of thought on the philosophy of mind and the nature of the mankind Written by one of the world’s leading philosophers, the co-author of the monumental 4 volume _Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations_ Uses broad (...) categories, such as substance, causation, agency and power to examine how we think about ourselves and our nature Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of human nature are sketched and contrasted Individual chapters clarify and provide an historical overview of a specific concept, then link the concept to ideas contained in other chapters. (shrink)

This work, the text of Martin Heidegger's lecture course of 1929/30, is crucial for an understanding of Heidegger's transition from the major work of his early years, Being and Time, to his later preoccupations with language, truth, and ...

Tyler Burge presents an original study of the most primitive ways in which individuals represent the physical world. By reflecting on the science of perception and related psychological and biological sciences, he gives an account of constitutive conditions for perceiving the physical world, and thus aims to locate origins of representational mind.

I am trying...to go back through all those places where I was exiled-enclosed so he could constitute his there. To read his text to try to take back from it what he took from me irrecoverably...I am trying to re-discover the possibility of a relation to air. Don’t I need one, well before starting to speak?

Part I: The representation of life -- Can life be given a real definition? -- The representation of the living individual -- The representation of the life-form itself -- Part II: Naive action theory -- Types of practical explanation -- Naive explanation of action -- Action and time -- Part III: Practical generality -- Two tendencies in practical philosophy -- Practices and dispositions as sources of the goodness of individual actions -- Practice and disposition as sources of individual action.

The question "Why?" that is deployed in these exchanges evidently bears the "special sense" Elizabeth Anscombe has linked to the concepts of intention and of a reason for action; it is the sort of question "Why?" that asks for what Donald Davidson later called a "rationalization".2 The special character of what is given, in each response, as formulating a reason ── a description, namely, of the agent as actually doing something, and, moreover, as..

The margins of philosophy are populated by non-human, non-animal living beings, including plants. While contemporary philosophers tend to refrain from raising ontological and ethical concerns with vegetal life, Michael Marder puts this life at the forefront of the current deconstruction of metaphysics. He identifies the existential features of plant behavior and the vegetal heritage of human thought so as to affirm the potential of vegetation to resist the logic of totalization and to exceed the narrow confines of instrumentality. Reconstructing the (...) life of plants "after metaphysics," Marder focuses on their unique temporality, freedom, and material knowledge or wisdom. In his formulation, "plant-thinking" is the non-cognitive, non-ideational, and non-imagistic mode of thinking proper to plants, as much as the process of bringing human thought itself back to its roots and rendering it plantlike. (shrink)

Note on the texts -- Note on the translation -- October 1867 - April 1868 : on Schopenhauer -- Notebook 1, autumn 1869 -- Notebook 2, winter 1869/1870 - spring 1870 -- Notebook 3, winter 1869/1870 - spring 1870 -- Notebook 5, September 1870 - January 1871 -- Notebook 6, end of 1870 -- Notebook 7, end of 1870 - April 1871 -- Notebook 9, 1871 -- Notebook 10, beginning of 1871 -- Notebook 11, February 1871 -- Notebook 12, spring (...) 1871 -- Notebook 16, summer 1871 - spring 1872 -- Notebook 19, summer 1872 - beginning of 1873 -- Notebook 23, winter 1872/1873 -- Notebook 28, spring-autumn 1873 -- Notebook 29, summer-autumn 1873 -- Notebook 30, autumn 1873 - winter 1873/1874 -- Notebook 31, autumn 1873 - winter 1873/1874 -- Notebook 32, beginning of 1874 - spring 1874 -- Notebook 34, spring-summer 1874 -- Notebook 37, end of 1874 -- Notebook 3, March 1875 -- Notebook 5, spring-summer 1875 -- Notebook 6, summer? 1875 -- Notebook 17, summer 1876 -- Notebook 19, October-December 1876 -- Notebook 21, end of 1876 - summer 1877 -- Notebook 23, end of 1876 - summer 1877 -- Notebook 27, spring-summer 1878 -- Notebook 28, spring-summer 1878 -- Notebook 29, summer 1878 -- Notebook 30, summer 1878 -- Notebook 33, autumn 1878 -- Notebook 40, June-July 1879 -- Notebook 41, July 1879 -- Notebook 42, July-August 1879 -- Notebook 47, September-November 1879 -- On the pathos of truth -- On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense. (shrink)

. This is thinking that is alive, always green.Ó ÑReview of Metaphysics ÒThis translation . . . enlarges our historical view of the probing advances in Heidegger's thought.Ó ÑInternational Studies in Philosophy This clear translation ...

For much of his adult life, Nietzsche wrote notes on philosophical subjects in small notebooks that he carried around with him. After his breakdown and subsequent death, his sister supervised the publication of some of these notes under the title The Will to Power, and that collection, which is textually inaccurate and substantively misleading, has dominated the English-speaking discussion of Nietzsche's later thought. The present volume offers, for the first time, accurate translations of a selection of writings from Nietzsche's late (...) notebooks, dating from his last productive years between 1885 and 1889. Many of them have never before been published in English. They are translated by Kate Sturge from reliable texts in the Colli-Montinari edition, and they are edited by Rüdiger Bittner, whose introduction places them in the context of Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole. (shrink)

Heidegger's later thought is a thinking of things, so argues Andrew J. Mitchell in The Fourfold. Heidegger understands these things in terms of what he names "the fourfold"--a convergence of relationships bringing together the earth, the sky, divinities, and mortals--and Mitchell's book is the first detailed exegesis of this neglected aspect of Heidegger's later thought. As such it provides entré to the full landscape of Heidegger's postwar thinking, offering striking new interpretations of the atomic bomb, technology, plants, animals, weather, time, (...) language, the holy, mortality, dwelling, and more. What results is a conception of things as ecstatic, relational, singular, and, most provocatively, as intrinsically tied to their own technological commodification. A major new work that resonates beyond the confines of Heidegger scholarship, The Fourfold proposes nothing less than a new phenomenological thinking of relationality and mediation for understanding the things around us. (shrink)

Theodore Kisiel's outstanding translation premits English-speaking readers to appreciate the central importance of this text in the development of Heidegger's thought.

Despite their conceptual allergy to vegetal life, philosophers have used germination, growth, blossoming, fruition, reproduction, and decay as illustrations of abstract concepts; mentioned plants in passing as the natural backdrops for dialogues, letters, and other compositions; spun elaborate allegories out of flowers, trees, and even grass; and recommended appropriate medicinal, dietary, and aesthetic approaches to select species of plants. In this book, Michael Marder illuminates the vegetal centerpieces and hidden kernels that have powered theoretical discourse for centuries. Choosing twelve botanical (...) specimens that correspond to twelve significant philosophers, he recasts the development of philosophy through the evolution of human and plant relations. A philosophical history for the postmetaphysical age, The Philosopher's Plant reclaims the organic heritage of human thought. With the help of vegetal images, examples, and metaphors, the book clears a path through philosophy's tangled roots and dense undergrowth, opening up the discipline to all readers. (shrink)