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This volume offers a reappraisal of a classic text of European philosophy, Leibniz's 'Theodicy'. New essays from leading scholars open a window on the historical context of the work and give close attention to its subtle and enduring philosophical arguments.
Throughout his philosophical career at Michigan, UCLA, Yale, and Oxford, Robert Merrihew Adams's wide-ranging contributions have deeply shaped the structure of debates in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, history of philosophy, and ethics. Metaphysics and the Good: Themes from the Philosophy of Robert Merrihew Adams provides, for the first time, a collection of original essays by leading philosophers dedicated to exploring many of the facets of Adams's thought, a philosophical outlook that combines Christian theism, neo-Platonism, moral realism, metaphysical idealism, and a commitment to both historical sensitivity and rigorous analytic engagement. Tied together by their aim of exploring,...
An intellectual history of the philosophers who grappled with the problem of evil, and the case for why pessimism still holds moral value for us today In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophers engaged in heated debates on the question of how God could have allowed evil and suffering in a creation that is supposedly good. Dark Matters traces how the competing philosophical traditions of optimism and pessimism arose from early modern debates about the problem of evil, and makes a compelling case for the rediscovery of pessimism as a source for compassion, consolation, and perhaps even hope. Bringing to life one of the most vibrant eras in the history of philosophy, Mara van der...
"Ever since the beginnings of philosophical thought in Greek antiquity, philosophers have made use of modalities such as necessity and possibility. In particular, the concepts of necessity and 'what must be' played an important role in Pre-Socratic thought. For example, Anaximander maintained that things perish into that from which they came to be 'in accordance with what must be' (kata to chreôn). Heraclitus held that 'everything comes about in accordance with strife and what must be (kat' erin kai chreôn)'. In his poem, Parmenides asserts that what is (to eon) is entirely still and changeless because 'powerful Necessity (Anagkê) holds it in the bonds of a limit, which encloses it all ar...
To treat some human beings as less worthy of concern and respect than others is to lose sight of their humanity. But what does this moral blindness amount to? What are we missing when we fail to appreciate the value of humanity? The essays in this volume offer a wide range of competing, yet overlapping, answers to these questions. Some essays examine influential views in the history of Western philosophy. In others, philosophers currently working in ethics develop and defend their own views. Some essays appeal to distinctively human capacities. Others argue that our obligations to one another are ultimately grounded in self-interest, or certain shared interests, or our natural sociability. The philosophers featured here disagree about whether the value of human beings depends on the value of anything else. They disagree about how reason and rationality relate to this value, and even about whether we can reason our way to discovering it. This rich selection of proposals encourages us to rethink some of our own deepest assumptions about the moral significance of being human.
The philosopher Kant is a key thinker in shaping our contemporary concept of morality, freedom, and happiness. This book argues that Kant believes in God, but that he is not a Christian, and that this opens up an important and neglected dimension of Western Philosophy.
Samuel Newlands provides a sweeping new account of Spinoza's metaphysical system and the way it shapes and is shaped by his moral project. Newlands also shows how Spinoza can be read fruitfully alongside recent developments in contemporary analytic philosophy. According to Newlands, conceptual relations form the backbone of Spinoza's explanatory project and enable him to do everything from reconciling monism and diversity to motivating altruism within egoism. Spinoza's conceptualism culminates in his call to a radical form of self-transcendence. Readers will be invited to reconceive not only Spinoza's project, but also the world and perhaps even themselves along the way.
“An essential read for any true seeker."—Eben Alexander, MD, Neurosurgeon, author of Proof of Heaven and Living in a Mindful Universe When Paul Marshall began to pay attention to his dreams, he could not have anticipated the transformative experience that would follow. A tremendous expansion of consciousness exposed the insignificance of his everyday self but also revealed unsuspected depths of mind and hinted at a deeper self that holds the universe within. In The Shape of the Soul, Marshall—now a mysticism scholar—draws on personal experiences, along with a wealth of religious, philosophical, and scientific ideas, to explore this deeper self, sometimes experienced in mystical and n...
Situates Spinoza's philosophy in its immediate historical context and argues that much of it was conceived with the purpose of rebutting a claim about the limitations of philosophy made by some of his contemporaries.