From the mysterious powers and forces peculiar to both individual and community that can turn our lives into either good or bad lives, I wish to point to two such powers being at the same time different in their own nature and yet closely related to each other: The powers that emerge from exemplary persons and leaders. Understood as basic to both sociology and the philosophy of history, it comes to us as no surprise that the problem of exemplary persons and leaders - along with the questio...

The Nature of Sympathy explores, at different levels, the social emotions of fellow-feeling, the sense of identity, love and hatred, and traces their relationship to one another and to the values with which they are associated. Scheler criticizes other writers, from Adam Smith to Freud, who have argued that the sympathetic emotions derive from self-interested feelings or instincts. He reviews the evaluations of love and sympathy current in different historical periods and in different soci...

Max Scheler (1874-1928) decisively influenced German philosophy in the period after the First World War, a time of upheaval and new beginnings. Without him, the problems of German philosophy today, and its attempts to solve them would be quite inconceivable. What was new in his philosophy was that he used phenomenology to investigate spiritual realities.The subject of On the Eternal in Man is the divine and its reality, the originality and non-derivation of religious exper...

First Published in 1980, Manfred S. Frings’ translation of Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge makes available Max Scheler’s important work in sociological theory to the English-speaking world. The book presents the thinker’s views on man’s condition in the twentieth-century and places it in a broader context of human history.This book highlights Scheler as a visionary thinker of great intellectual strength who defied the pessimism that many of his peers could not avoid. ...

Catherine Malabou, Antonio Negri, John D. Caputo, Bruno Bosteels, Mark C. Taylor, and Slavoj Zizek join seven others—including William Desmond, Katrin Pahl, Adrian Johnston, Edith Wyschogrod, and Thomas A. Lewis—to apply Hegel's thought to twenty-first-century philosophy, politics, and religion. Doing away with claims that the evolution of thought and history is at an end, these thinkers safeguard Hegel's innovations against irrelevance and, importantly, reset the distinction of secular an...

The atmosphere of silence all around provided a faithful setting for Heidegger’s philosophy. I could not help comparing it with the atmosphere I had encountered in the house of Professor Berdyaev near Paris and that of Professor Jaspers in Heidelberg. In every case, the external world faithfully reflected the world of the mind. In Berdyaev’s case it was the spirit of communion; in Jaspers’s that of spiritual engagement. But in Heidegger’s case it was the spirit of overwhelming solitude. Wi...

Of all of his works, Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path is the one that Steiner himself believed would have the longest life and the greatest spiritual and cultural consequences. It was written as a phenomenological account of the results of observing the human soul according to the methods of natural science. This seminal work asserts that free spiritual activity - understood as the human ability to think and act independently of physical nature - is the suitable path for human beings to...

No philosopher has held a higher opinion of art than Hegel, yet nor was any so profoundly pessimistic about its prospects - despite living in the German golden age of Goethe, Mozart and Schiller. For if the artists of classical Greece could find the perfect fusion of content and form, modernity faced complicating - and ultimately disabling - questions. Christianity, with its code of unworldliness, had compromised the immediacy of man's relationship with reality, and ironic detachment had a...

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 rich study explores the elements of Hegel's social and political thought that are most relevant to our society today. Combating the prevailing post-World War II stereotype of Hegel as a proto-fascist, Charles Taylor argues that Hegel aimed not to deny the rights of individuality but to synthesise them with the intrinsic good of community membership. Hegel's goal of a society of free individuals whose social activity is expressive of who they are seems an even more distant goal now, an...

One of the most important of Jung's longer works, and probably the most famous of his books, Psychological Types appeared in German in 1921 after a "fallow period" of eight years during which Jung had published little. He called it "the fruit of nearly twenty years' work in the domain of practical psychology," and in his autobiography he wrote: "This work sprang originally from my need to define the ways in which my outlook differed from Freud's and Adler's. In attempting to answe...

A shocking and extreme interpretation of culture, history, and the father of psychoanalysis.In Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, social philosopher Norman O. Brown radically analyzes and critiques the work of Sigmund Freud. Brown attempts to define a non-repressive civilization, draws parallels between psychoanalysis and the theology of Martin Luther, and also examines the revolutionary themes present in western religious thought,...