History, 17th & 18th Century Books - Page 6

Hegel: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Peter Singer

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Excellent 5 out of 5 stars.
14 of 14 people found this review helpful.

Probably not very many people will plunge into Hegel on their own, and most of those will quickly plunge back out. As Bryan Magee said, "His writing is almost uniquely obscure -- it positively repels the reader...One can read page after page of Hegel, racking one's brains and thinking: 'What the HELL does he mean?'" Hegel may just be one of those writers best approached through the secondary literature -- at least you will come away with something.

Even if you intend to take the plunge, a preparatory introduction seems like a smart idea. I can't imagine a better warm-up than this little book by Peter Singer. It is a model of clear writing, and I have no doubt that Singer is superb in the classroom. He has taken a good deal of trouble to organize the book so that the reader is carefully shepherded along, step by step, through the ideas and arguments. It gives you the feeling of being in a seminar with a master teacher who really, really wants you to understand the material. This is a true introduction, not a once-over synopsis, a careful job in every sense of the term. Highest recommendation.

Editorial Review:

Hegel is regarded as one of the most influential figures on modern political and intellectual development. After painting Hegel's life and times in broad strokes, Peter Singer goes on to tackle some of the more challenging aspects of Hegel's philosophy. Offering a broad discussion of Hegel's ideas and an account of his major works, Singer explains what have often been considered abstruse and obscure ideas in a clear and inviting manner.

Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)

Immanuel Kant

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Best collection I've seen in English 5 out of 5 stars.
19 of 23 people found this review helpful.

This is the best affordable paperback collection of Kant's essays on politics and the philosophy of history. You get Perpetual Peace, Idea for a Universal History, Contest of the Faculties, The End of all Things, Theory and Practice, What is Enlightenment and several other essays. Hans Reiss' introduction is well written and illuminating as well. There is another, cheaper collection published by Hackett Publishing Co. (Perpetual Peace and Other Essays). However, it is smaller and less comprehensive than this edition.

Editorial Review:

The original edition of Kant: Political Writings was first published in 1970, and has long been established as the principal English-language edition of this important body of writing. In this new, expanded edition two important texts illustrating Kant's view of history are included for the first time, his reviews of Herder's Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind and Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History, as well as the essay What is Orientation in Thinking?. In addition to a general introduction assessing Kant's political thought in terms of his fundamental principles of politics, this edition also contains such useful student aids as notes on the texts, a comprehensive bibliogaphy and a new postscript, looking at some of the principal issues in Kantian scholarship that have arisen since the first edition.

On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Dover Books on Western Philosophy)

Friedrich Schiller

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Excellent edition of an excellent work. 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

Writing in the 1790s, Schiller united the rigorous epistemology of Kant and Fichte with Plato's dynamic account of the development of the soul to produce one of the most beautiful works of philosophy in the European tradition. The Letters on Aesthetic Education offer an interpretation of the development of the individual and the parallel development of Western civilization. These interpretations focus on the conditions that allow for mental health in a human individual and society, and especially demonstrate (as the title indicates) the crucial role of artistic experience in healthy human development. This is a great work, and a great introduction to the other German philosophers of the 19th Century (Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, et al). This edition is very good: the translation is good, and it has a facing German text. Highly recommended.

Editorial Review:

A classic of 18th-century thought, Schiller's treatise on the role of art in society ranks among German philosophy's most profound works. An important contribution to the history of ideas, it employs a political analysis of contemporary society — and of the French Revolution, in particular — to define the relationship between beauty and art.

Pensees

Blaise Pascal, Roger Ariew

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Editorial Review:

Roger Ariew masterfully renders the oddities of 17th-century French vocabulary and syntax in this eloquent and philosophically astute translation—the first complete English translation based on the Sellier edition of Pascal’s manuscript, widely accepted as the version closest to what Pascal intended. Ariew provides a select bibliography of primary and secondary sources, a chronology of Pascal’s life and works, a brief history of the text, concordances between the Sellier and Lafuma editions of the original, and an index.

Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity

Stephen Edelston Toulmin

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In the seventeenth century, a vision arose which was to captivate the Western imagination for the next three hundred years: the vision of Cosmopolis, a society as rationally ordered as the Newtonian view of nature. While fueling extraordinary advances in all fields of human endeavor, this vision perpetuated a hidden yet persistent agenda: the delusion that human nature and society could be fitted into precise and manageable rational categories. Stephen Toulmin confronts that agenda—its illusions and its consequences for our present and future world.

"By showing how different the last three centuries would have been if Montaigne, rather than Descartes, had been taken as a starting point, Toulmin helps destroy the illusion that the Cartesian quest for certainty is intrinsic to the nature of science or philosophy."—Richard M. Rorty, University of Virginia

"[Toulmin] has now tackled perhaps his most ambitious theme of all. . . . His aim is nothing less than to lay before us an account of both the origins and the prospects of our distinctively modern world. By charting the evolution of modernity, he hopes to show us what intellectual posture we ought to adopt as we confront the coming millennium."—Quentin Skinner, New York Review of Books

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of the Sublime and Beauitful: And Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings (Penguin Classics)

Edmund Burke

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A Real Statesman 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This is a good book by the articulate (very quotable) and profound philosopher-legislator Edmund Burke, who served in the English Parliament around the time of the American Revolution. Burke (1729-97) also authored the famous and controversial (at least at the time) work, "Reflections on the Revolution in France" (1790).

Of course, the main work in the Penguin Classics edition featured here is "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful". It was notably influential on many of Burke's contemporaries, as well as on later literary artists such as William Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold.

However, some of the minor works appended to this edition, such as the 1777 "Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol on the Affairs of America" (which is like a long, eloquent letter home to constituents) should not be overlooked. Indeed, while perusing this latter piece (and others included here, such as "Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents"), I couldn't help thinking how beneficial it would be to have a few sensible Edmund Burke-types serving in Congress or the White House right now as America deals with its global military adventures. America's Revolutionary War might even have been avoided if stubborn, indignent, autocratic, and belligerent King George III would have listened more closely to and followed Burke's reasoned advice.

It's a bit hilarious and ironic to think that, today, Burke is typically thought of as a political "conservative". Read this stuff, and you will likely agree that, in many respects, he was much more a thoughtful, humane liberal.

Editorial Review:

Edmund Burke was one of the foremost philosophers of the eighteenth century and wrote widely on aesthetics, politics and society. In this landmark work, he propounds his theory that the sublime and the beautiful should be regarded as distinct and wholly separate states - the first, an experience inspired by fear and awe, the second an expression of pleasure and serenity. Eloquent and profound, "A Philosophical Enquiry" is an involving account of our sensory, imaginative and judgmental processes and their relation to artistic appreciation. Burke's work was hugely influential on his contemporaries and also admired by later writers such as Matthew Arnold and William Wordsworth. This volume also contains several of his early political works on subjects including natural society, government and the American colonies, which illustrate his liberal, humane views.

Spinoza: Theological-Political Treatise (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy)

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Editorial Review:

Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise (1670) is one of the most important philosophical works of the early modern period. In it Spinoza discusses at length the historical circumstances of the composition and transmission of the Bible, demonstrating the fallibility of both its authors and its interpreters. He argues that free enquiry is not only consistent with the security and prosperity of a state but actually essential to them, and that such freedom flourishes best in a democratic and republican state in which individuals are left free while religious organizations are subordinated to the secular power. His Treatise has profoundly influenced the subsequent history of political thought, Enlightenment 'clandestine' or radical philosophy, Bible hermeneutics, and textual criticism more generally. It is presented here in a new translation of great clarity and accuracy by Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel, with a substantial historical and philosophical introduction by Jonathan Israel.

Francis Bacon: The New Organon (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy)

Francis Bacon

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

New Translation, New Readers 4 out of 5 stars.
23 of 26 people found this review helpful.

This is a very clear and readily assimilated translation of what may be considered the manifesto of the scientific revolution. Translating a seventeenth century Englishman, writing in latin, back into english: should it be the english he would have written at that time, or is a more ahistorical rendering ppropriate? Sometimes I wondered if the translation might be a little too up-to-date in its sensibilities and I found myself returning to the latin original to be reassured that Bacon's original intent had been rendered. Although the text is admirably clear a few more footnotes would have been welcome. Those provided are either somewhat cryptic and brief notes of textual readings, or on the other hand, notes on personages that seem to pander too much to the ignorance of today's students - vero media est. Though the second part of Novum Organon seem but little removed from the alchemists den, Bacon's first part is as relevant to the scientific enterprise today as it ever was - modern physicists and geneticists should consider carefully whether, as aphorism LXIV warns, empiricism may be a greater danger than sophistic dogma ever was.

Editorial Review:

Francis Bacon's New Organon, published in 1620, was revolutionary in its attempt to give formal philosophical shape to a new and rapidly emerging experimental science. It challenged the entire edifice of the philosophy and learning of Bacon's time, and left its mark on all subsequent discussions of scientific method. This volume presents a new translation of the text into modern English by Michael Silverthorne, together with an introduction by Lisa Jardine that sets the work in the context of Bacon's scientific and philosophical activities.

Kantian Ethics

Allen W. Wood

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Editorial Review:

Allen Wood investigates Kant's conception of ethical theory, using it to develop a viable approach to the rights and moral duties of human beings. By remaining closer to Kant's own view of the aims of ethics, Wood's understanding of Kantian ethics differs from the received 'constructivist' interpretation, especially on such matters as the ground and function of ethical principles, the nature of ethical reasoning and autonomy as the ground of ethics. Wood does not hesitate to criticize and modify Kant's conclusions when they seem inconsistent with his basic principles or fail to make the best use of the resources Kantian principles make available. Of special interest are the book's treatment of such topics as freedom of the will, the state's role in securing economic justice, sexual morality, the justification of punishment, and the prohibition on lying.

Basic Writings of Kant (Modern Library Classics)

Immanuel Kant

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

An Easy to Read Selection of Kant Writings 4 out of 5 stars.
28 of 31 people found this review helpful.

My review is more by accident then intentional logging on to write a review. While surfing around, I stumbled here to check out a couple of reviews and noticed some with astonishing errors; either due to a lack of writing a detailed review or just not understanding Kant's ideas. The problem may also lie in that anthologies don't carry the full selection of a person's arguments (although with one reviewer it is just an obvious case of silly ignorant ramblings)

Wood's book is readable and it is true that Kant is never an easy read, but neither are most Prussian Philosophers of the same era.

Whatever Kant's metaphysical faults are, he is not a relativist, but tried, although many have asserted unsuccessfully, to construct an objective moral framework on reason alone (although Kant did believe in God and asserted that the Christian religion was the closet to a true objective construct; however, that is precisely the problem of anthologies, because all they do is give one a snap shot of someone's work. Further, Kant asserted God as a practical necessity if humans were going to reach the highest good (summum bonum).

Lastly, is trying to limit the role of reason to make room for faith. He limits knowledge by demonstrating that reason belongs in the empirical realm (phenomenal) and the things-in-itself are actually in the noumenal world beyond the reach of the senses. For someone as lengthy as Kant, short reviews cannot do justice. If one gets this book, then they should also get "The Cambridge Companion to Kant" also sold on Amazon and edited by Kant scholar Guyer.

Editorial Review:

With an Introduction by renowned Kant scholar Allen W. Wood, this is the only available one-volume edition of the essential works of the Enlightenment's greatest philosopher and one of the most influential thinkers of modern times. Containing carefully selected excerpts from his most frequently taught essays and book-length publications, including Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Judgment, and Eternal Peace, the Basic Writings of Kant is an indispensable collection. This revised edition was edited by Carl J. Friedrich.