The flowering of creative and speculative philosophy that emerged in modern Europe--particularly in Germany--is a thrilling adventure story as well as an essential chapter in the history of philosophy. In this integrative narrative, Solomon provides an accessible introduction to the major authors and movements of modern European philosophy, including the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Rousseau, German Idealism, Kant, Fichte, Schelling and the Romantics, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Max Brentano, Meinong, Frege, Dilthey, Bergson, Nietzsche, Husserl, Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, hermeneutics, Sartre, Postmodernism, Structuralism, (...) Foucault, and Derrida. (shrink)

How should we understand the emotional rationality? This first part will explore two models of cognition and analogy strategies, test their intuition about the emotional desire. I distinguish between subjective and objective desire, then presents with a feeling from the "paradigm of drama" export semantics, here our emotional repertoire is acquired all the learned, and our emotions in the form of an object is fixed. It is pretty well in line with the general principles of rationality, especially the lowest reasonable (...) principles. Turned to the second part of this side of reasonable. I will inquire how emotional beliefs, desires, and behaviors contribute to the rationality. I will present a very general biological hypothesis: emotions by controlling highlights the characteristics of perception and reasoning, so that we remove the difficulties due in particular to lead to paralysis; they are being simulated by a simplified perception of information, thus limiting our practice and cognitive choice. How are we to understand emotional or axiological rationality? I pursue analogies with both the cognitive and the strategic models, testing them against intuitions about emotional desires. We distinguish two different classes of desires, the subjective and the objective, and propose that emotions have a semantics that derives from "paradigmatic scenarios", in terms of which our emotional repertoire is learned and the formal objects of our emotions fixed. This fits in well with emerging facts about how our emotional capacities develop, and it can also be squared with the general principles of rationality, particularly minimal rationality. In the second part, I return to the perspective of rationality. I ask how emotions contribute to the rationality of beliefs, desires, and behavior. I proffer a very general biological hypothesis: Emotions spare us the paralysis potentially induced by a particular predicament by controlling the salience of features of perception and reasoning; they temporarily mimic the informational encapsulation of perception and so circumscribe our practical and cognitive options. (shrink)

Imagine a universe without human beings. Now imagine a universe devoid of any creatures like human beings, beings who could think about the universe and in so doing consider it as divided up into different kinds of things that could be objects of understanding. Now imagine – this is harder – your not being there, or anyone else, to imagine such a universe. Next think about setting about describing in physical laws such a universe in line with a completist physicalist (...) program: that all the facts about the world are physical facts. But where would one begin? Why would one begin? Remember there is no-one around to take more interest in any part of the universe than any other. This contrasts with what we do now. What we do now is take chunks of the universe – stars, planets, water, trees, air, particles – and demarcate the physical laws in such a way as to explain how these objects behave against a background of other objects and ultimately the universe as a whole. But what if we were not around? Why would we there be any reason to demarcate groups of physical laws in this or any other way? My suggestion is that there would be none. The grouping of the physical laws to form complex classes and layers of explanations is parasitic upon creatures having particular interests giving them a perspective upon the universe or world, which in turn derives from the kind of limited creatures they happen to be. But the perspective itself is not a physical fact about the universe. Rather it is a way of coming to form a system of facts about the universe. Further, not only might the perspective have been otherwise, there might be none at all. In which case the demarcation of physical laws, given meaning by their application to entities picked out as having a certain significance to us, would not get off the ground. At best there might be a random bunching of laws covering regions of the universe. But such random bunchings would have no meaning; they would be unintelligible; they wouldn't really be about anything. For laws to be about things you have to have limited creatures who differentiate between parts of the universe, and for whom different parts have a variable significance and value. Things stand out for them; they literally exist . Without such creatures, things we take for granted would, in the literal sense, not exist. It is the very limitedness of our perspective and capabilities, such that things are problems for us, and wherefore we literally or metaphorically bump into things, that brings objects into existence for us. Otherwise the universe would be utterly ‘flat’ and undifferentiated. A limitation of perspective is required for there to be objects of thought, and thus for thought itself. Thus, the intelligibility of the laws of physics is logically parasitic upon our having varying interests in different segments of the universe. (shrink)

Descartes has often been called the 'father of modern philosophy'. His attempts to find foundations for knowledge, and to reconcile the existence of the soul with the emerging science of his time, are among the most influential and widely studied in the history of philosophy. This is a classic and challenging introduction to Descartes by one of the most distinguished modern philosophers. Bernard Williams not only analyzes Descartes' project of founding knowledge on certainty, but uncovers the philosophical motives for his (...) search. With acute insight, he demonstrates how Descartes' _Meditations _are not merely a description but the very enactment of philosophical thought and discovery. Williams covers all of the key areas of Descartes' thought, including God, the will, the possibility of knowledge, and the mind and its place in nature. He also makes profound contributions to the theory of knowledge, metaphysics and philosophy generally. With a new foreword by John Cottingham. (shrink)