18th- and 19th-century philosophy

If the greatness of a philosophical work can be measured by the volume and vehemence of the public response, there is little question that Rousseau's Social Contract stands out as a masterpiece. Within a week of its publication in 1762 it was banished from France. Soon thereafter, Rousseau fled to Geneva, where he saw the book burned in public. At the same time, many of his contemporaries, such as Kant, considered Rousseau to be “the Newton of the moral world,” as he was the first philosopher to draw attention to the basic dignity of human nature. The Social Contract has never ceased to be read in the 250 years since it was written. Rousseau's “Social Contract”: An Introduction offers a thorough and systematic tour of this notoriously paradoxical and challenging text. David Lay Williams offers readers a chapter-by-chapter reading of the Social Contract, squarely confronting these interpretive obstacles, leaving no stones unturned. The conclusion connects Rousseau's text both to his important influences and those who took inspiration and sometimes exception to his arguments. The book also features a special extended appendix dedicated to outlining his famous conception of the general will, which has been the object of controversy since the Social Contract's publication.

The eighteenth-century German physicist, philosopher, and aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99) is well known for his objection to the substantial view of the self, but his thoughts on idealism and the relationship of his views to the positions of his philosophical predecessors are less familiar. I argue that Lichtenberg’s empiricism leads him to maintain a form of idealism according to which objects for us are only representations, and I show how this position relates to his linguistic idealism and his coherentist theory of truth. Seen in this light, Lichtenberg makes an important, if unacknowledged, contribution to the history of German philosophy distinct from later German idealism.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Fundamental Political Writings includes the Social Contract, Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, and “Preface to Narcissus.” Each text has been newly translated, and includes a full complement of explanatory notes. The editors’ introduction offers students diverse points of entry into some of the distinctive possibilities and challenges of each of these fundamental texts, as well as an introduction to Rousseau’s life and historical situation, from his early years in Geneva to his final years in relative solitude. Each text is accompanied by images from the original editions. The volume also includes annotated appendices that help students to explore the origins and influences of Rousseau’s work, including excerpts from Hobbes, Pascal, Descartes, Mandeville, Diderot, Voltaire, Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant, Joseph de Maistre, Kant, Hegel, and Engels.

In § 42 of the third Critique, ‘On the intellectual interest in the beautiful,’ Kant claims that it is ‘always the mark of a good soul’ (5:298) to take an ‘immediate interest’ in natural beauty because it indicates a moral interest in harmony between nature and moral freedom. In the same pages, however, he denies the possibility of a similarly morally significant interest in artistic beauty. This paper argues that according to his own theory of fine art Kant ought not to deny this value to artistic beauty. In the pages that immediately follow his discussion of immediate interest Kant defines artistic beauty as the joint product of a ‘natural gift’ of genius and a freely exercised discipline of skill and taste. This commits him to the claim that artistic beauty embodies and expresses a harmony between nature and freedom in the productive act of a human being, and thus to the claim that one can take an immediate and morally significant interest in artistic beauty, just as much as in natural beauty.

978-0-7618-3410-6 • Hardback
March 2006 • $62.99 • (£39.95)

978-0-7618-3411-3 • Paperback
April 2006 • $36.99 • (£22.95)

Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1860 book, The Conduct of Life is among the gems of his mature works. First published in the year of Abraham Lincoln's election as President, this work poses the questions of human freedom and fate.

This new edition emphasizes Emerson's philosophy and thoughts on such issues as freedom and fate; creativity and established culture; faith, experience, and evidence; the individual, God, and the world; unity and dualism; moral law, grace, and compensation; and wealth and success. Emerson's text has been fully annotated to explain difficult words and to clarify his references. The Introduction, Notes, Bibliography, Index, and Chronology of Emerson's life help the reader understand his distinctive outlook, his contributions to philosophy, and his place in American culture and society.

In this paper we present and discuss the main Romanian attempts in philosophical psychology in the first decades of the 19th century, with a special focus on the mind–body problem. Whereas the issue of the relationship between the mind or soul and the body, comprising the existence or inexistence of the soul, its materiality or immateriality, its mortality or immortality etc. is discussed in sufficient detail by the authors of this epoch, the narrow mind–body problem, concerning the difficulty for a material thing and an immaterial thing to causally interact, is curiously underestimated and unsatisfactorily treated. We explain this by the interplay of a sensualist philosophical outlook and a pre-modern, basically religion-informed, world-view. The resulting thought, we argue, misses the modern concept of Spirit, hence of mind as spiritual. Therefore, the narrow mind–body problem does not arise for it.

Originally a Master's thesis, this book is available at Eurobuch.com http://bit.ly/2zoFO4v and Amazon: http://amzn.to/2fUmhvy. This book discusses the exact nature of Will to Power in the overcoming of tragedy through the soulful forces (/Macht/) of the psyche. From The Birth of Tragedy, to Genealogy of Morals and at last Will to Power, Nietzsche's works address the willful strength of psyche (Spirit) being fundamental to, and more central to Life than the sheer reactive forces of nihilism and strength of body alone (/Kraft/). Along with cosmological and metaphysical, historiological, aetiological, and sociopolitical questions and implications of the Eternal Return, the book discusses various ways that Nietzschean Will to Power (Wille zur Macht) has been misunderstood and appropriated by fascism. Passive and active nihilism are tied to various defense/coping mechanism, including Sublimation as a valid mechanism or a way to overcome the hardships of tragic events.Copy available at aaaaarg.fail/thing/58607c7b9ff37c253cb6742c.It is selling worldwide, in more than ten countries.

Nihilism poses grave problems for those who seek directives to lead their lives. In this article, the three most important ways to deal with nihilism are inquired, with an emphasis on their credibility. Both nihilism from a metaphysical perspective and the emphasis on pleasure from nihilistic considerations are given attention. The acceptance of nihilism can have far-reaching consequences, which are evaluated at various points. Nietzsche’s approach must also be considered. He accepts what he calls a sort of nihilism, but as a means to ‘new’ values. This alternative to nihilism is examined no less critically than the other two stances.

Although its origins stem from theological debates, the general will would ultimately become one of the most celebrated and denigrated concepts emerging from early modern political thought.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau would make it the central element of his political theory, and it would take on a life of its own during the French Revolution before being subjected to generations of embrace or opprobrium.  James Farr and David Lay Williams have collected for the first time a set of essays that track the evolving history of the general will from its origins to recent times.  These essays include attention to the general will’s theological, political, formal, and substantive dimensions with a careful eye to the concept’s virtues and limitations as understood by its expositors and critics, among them Pascal, Malebranche, Locke, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Constant, Tocqueville, Adam Smith, and John Rawls.

A contextual study of the development of Alfred Marshall’s thinking during the early years of his apprenticeship in the Cambridge moral sciences. Marshall’s thought is situated in a crisis of academic liberal thinking that occurred in the late 1860s. His crisis of faith is shown to have formed part of his wider philosophical development, in which he supplemented Anglican thought and mechanistic psychology with Hegel’s Philosophy of History. This philosophical background informed Marshall’s early reformulation of value theory and his subsequent wide-ranging reinterpretation of political economy as a whole. The book concludes with the suggestion that Marshall conceived of his mature economic science as but one part of a wider, neo-Hegelian social philosophy.

I'm interested in two Kierkegaardian views about suffering, both of which appear controversial. The first is that suffering is essential to human existence. The second is that suffering is essential to human flourishing. My goal is to defend an interpretation of the first view by arguing that what is essential to human existence isn't this or that form of suffering, but rather an originary imperfection of human creatures due to their ontological separation from and dependence on God. I situate this interpretation as a response to a particular form of the problem of evil raised by Leibniz in his Theodicy, what Michael Murray calls the "holiness problem of evil."

Stella Ghervas, "La Sainte-Alliance: un pacte pacifique européen comme antydote à l'Empire", in Europe de papier. Projets européens au XIXe siècle, ed. Sylvie Aprile et al. (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2015), pp. 47-64.

Abstract:
"One of the key treaties of the “Congress System”, born out of the Congress of Vienna, was the Holy Alliance, signed in Paris on 26 September 1815, and ratified by most European states. This short document, with its mystical accents, deserves more careful attention than it has been given in the past. One of its major innovations was that it promoted the ideal of a “family” that included all states of the continent, including Russia. This article analyses the intellectual sources perceptible in that covenant – among them, a tradition of perpetual peace going back to authors of the eighteenth century, such as Abbé de Saint-Pierre. It also examines the reasons for the Holy Alliance’s lack of success, as well as two of its main side effects: the eviction of the Pope from his position as the tutelary figure of European politics, and the ideological ambiguity that would later contribute to the emergence of the Eastern Question."

Nietzsche’s Immoralism begins a two-volume critical reconstruction of a socialist, democratic, and non-liberal Nietzschean politics. Nietzsche’s ideal of amor fati (love of fate) cannot be individually adopted because it is incompatible with deep freedom of agency. However, we can create its social conditions thanks to an under-appreciated aspect of his will-to-power psychology. We are driven not toward domination and conquest but toward resistance, contest, and play―a heightened feeling of power provoked by equal challenges that enables the non-instrumental affirmation of suffering. This incompatibilist, anti-teleological psychology leads to Nietzsche’s distinctive immoralism: the abandonment of cultural means of human improvement for a historical materialist politics of breeding that produces future higher types through changes to our political order’s material conditions. Politics becomes first philosophy: it is not grounded in moral values but is instead the very source of their legitimacy. Moreover, despite Nietzsche’s professed aristocratism, his immoralism offers a stronger foundation for a renewed left, attacking conservative politics at its very root: the belief in moral order, authority, and responsibility.

In this essay, I argue that Søren Kierkegaard’s oeuvre can be seen as a theater of ideas. This argument is developed in three steps. First, I will briefly introduce a theoretical framework for addressing the theatrical dimension of Kierkegaard’s works. This framework is based on a distinction between“performative writing strategies” and “categories of performativity.” As a second step, I will focus on Repetition: A Venture in Experimenting Psychology, by Constantin Constantius, one of the best examples of Kierkegaard’s innovative way of doing philosophy. This strange and elusive book introduces the difficult and counter-intuitive notion of repetition. Repetition is a category of performativity that aims to activate the subjectivity of the reader. This performative effect is achieved by confronting the reader with an “unresolved”existential problem that is not yet drawn into clarity but is staged in all its confusions and contradictions. Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Constantius relies here on a performative writing strategy that is animated by a dialectic of advance and withdrawal. In the last and third step, I will analyze Constantius’s own reflection on the performative dimension of his text. Constantius has left several clues behind, each of which suggests that he deliberately developed a performative writing strategy.

Recent years have witnessed a rehabilitation of early German Romanticism in philosophy, including a renewed interest in Romantic ethics. Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) is acknowledged as a key figure in this movement. While significant work has been done on some aspects of his thought, his views on ethics have been surprisingly overlooked. This essay aims to redress this shortcoming in the literature by examining the core themes of Schlegel’s ethics during the early phase of his career (1793–1801). I argue that Schlegel’s position stands out against both the dominant Kantianism of his era, as well as against some of fellow Romantics. I show how Schlegel anticipates contemporary philosophers such as Bernard Williams, Harry Frankfurt, John McDowell, and Stanley Cavell in both his criticisms of traditional moral theory and in his attempts to develop a positive position.

An intriguing historical feature of the Scottish Enlightenment is the blend of philosophical and drinking clubs to which leading thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith belonged. Two leading clubs of the period, the Select Society and the Poker Club, are the primary focus of this essay; the clubs provided members with dramatically different types of social experience. For the Select, it was a space for formal debate of topical issues, while the Poker offered a venue for convivial sociability. This essay examines the significant intersections of polite culture and convivial enjoyment occurring in Edinburgh club life, in order to analyze the active negotiation of boundaries between polite and popular tastes. Of particular interest is how that negotiation was played out in the “drinking and thinking” lives of some of polite culture’s most eloquent arbiters.

In Kierkegaard and the Staging of Desire: Rhetoric and Performance in a Theology of Eros Carl S. Hughes develops an original approach to Søren Kierkegaard’s religious writings. As is well known, Kierkegaard published these religious writings under his own name. Some interpreters take this to mean that he no longer relies on the poetics of indirect communication that underlies his pseudonymous works. According to them, the religious writings finally formulate Kierkegaard’s true views in a direct and unambiguous way. Others have suggested that these religious writings are just as indirect as all the others. Hughes belongs to the second camp. In his illuminating book, he convincingly shows that the indirect method of writing is not undermining the religious content of Kierkegaard’s works, as is feared by many interpreters from the first camp, but is essential for sustaining it. That is why Hughes believes that Kierkegaard’s indirect mode of writing is of vital importance for contemporary theology as a discipline.

From the public burnings of the Social Contract occurring immediately following its publication, to Isaiah Berlin's condemnation of Rousseau as "the most sinister and most formidable enemy of liberty in the whole history of modern thought," Jean-Jacques Rousseau has rarely held universal favor among his commentators. The most common charge against him was, and remains, that he provided the essential philosophic tools for the modern tyrant. While this position has numerous and illustrious advocates, I argue that it fails to take into account the whole of Rousseau's thought. Specifically, it ignores his extensive attention to the problem of political power and his attempts to control it with checks and balances. In focusing on Rousseau's specific proposals in his Government of Poland, it is evident that the purpose of his system is to prevent tyranny, rather than to promote it.