Schopenhauer dealt intensively with Spinoza throughout his whole life. This includes not only enthusiastic agreement, but also harsh rejection. Spinoza's peculiar use of words caused some misunderstandings, which are clarified here. In the course of this, it turns out that Schopenhauer's fundamental view is the same as Spinoza's, which he does not even acknowledge. According to Schopenhauer, Spinoza fails to solve the problem of all ethics, and he provides a fix by borrowing some of Spinoz...

Hope is at the core of human existence. It can either be an emotion or an attitude. In either case, it is a natural and basic affection of the mind. This analysis of hope will clarify the concept by dealing with its involvement in knowledge, ethics and metaphysics. Hope can lead to truth or error, depending on whether it is a presentation of probabilities by the intellect, or just a reflection of expectations from the will. In this book, a short survey of views on hope, from the history of...

"A passionate, humane intelligence addressing itself to the fundamental problem of how the mind operates." — NewsweekConsidered by many to be Hannah Arendt's greatest work, published as she neared the end of her life, The Life of the Mind investigates thought itself, as it exists in contemplative life. In a shift from her previous writings, most of which focus on the world outside the mind, this work was planned as three volumes that would explore ...

A rich and evocative study of one of modern history's most compelling and controversial philosophers by a literary and critical grand masterIn Martin Heidegger, George Steiner delves into the life and work of the prolific German philosopher. His deft analysis lays bare the intricacies of Heidegger's work and his influence on modern society, offering a clear and accessible analysis of the philosopher's more difficult ideas, from the human condition and lang...

If there exists on any subject a philosophy (that is, a system of rational knowledge based on concepts), then there must also be for this philosophy a system of pure rational concepts, independent of any condition of intuition, in other words, a metaphysic. It may be asked whether metaphysical elements are required also for every practical philosophy, which is the doctrine of duties, and therefore also for Ethics, in order to be able to present it as a true science (systematically), not me...

This edition replaces the earlier translation by Walter Lowrie that appeared under the title The Concept of Dread. Along with The Sickness unto Death, the work reflects from a psychological point of view Søren Kierkegaard's longstanding concern with the Socratic maxim, "Know yourself." His ontological view of the self as a synthesis of body, soul, and spirit has influenced philosophers such as Heidegger and Sartre, theologians such as Jaspers and Tillich, and psychologist...

Truth and Method is a landmark work of 20th century thought which established Hans Georg-Gadamer as one of the most important philosophical voices of the 20th Century. In this book, Gadamer established the field of 'philosophical hermeneutics': exploring the nature of knowledge, the book rejected traditional quasi-scientific approaches to establishing cultural meaning that were prevalent after the war. In arguing the 'truth' and 'method' acted in opposition to each other, Gadamer ...

During the first year of the first Waldorf school, Rudolf Steiner agreed to give a science course to the teachers, which was to be on the nature of light. At the last minute, he was asked to give an additional course on language, which he improvised. "The Genius of Language" is the result. Steiner demonstrates how history and psychology together form the different languages and how ideas, images, and vocabulary travel through time within various cultural streams. He describes how the power to...

In 1781, Immanuel Kant published his first and most famous work, the “Critique of Pure Reason”. To the German philosopher’s dismay, the work was at first poorly received and largely misunderstood by his readers. As a result, two years later Kant produced his “Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics that will be Able to Present Itself as a Science” to serve as an introduction to the “Critique”. He restated the main ideas of his philosophy in what Schopenhauer, in 1819, declared was “the fines...

Jewish German philosopher Ernst Cassirer was a leading proponent of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. The essays in this volume provide a window into Cassirer’s discovery of the symbolic nature of human existence-that our entire emotional and intellectual life is configured and formed through the originary expressive power of word and image, that it is in and through the symbolic cultural systems of language, art, myth, religion, science, and technology that human life realizes itse...

One of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger was primarily concerned with the ‘question of Being.’ However, recent scholarship has tended to marginalize the importance of the name of Being in his thought. Through a focused reading of Heidegger's texts, and especially his late and often overlooked Four Seminars (1966-1973), Richard Capobianco counters this trend by redirecting attention to the centrality of the name of Being in Heidegger's lifet...

A work that "not only treats of irony but is irony," wrote a contemporary reviewer of The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates. Presented here with Kierkegaard's notes of the celebrated Berlin lectures on "positive philosophy" by F.W.J. Schelling, the book is a seedbed of Kierkegaard's subsequent work, both stylistically and thematically. Part One concentrates on Socrates, the master ironist, as interpreted by Xenophon, Plato, and Aristophanes, with a word on Heg...