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560 results in History of philosophy

Page 1 of 28

Why Read Wollstonecraft Today?
  • Sandrine Bergès
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2026
    Print publication:
    31 January 2026
  • What relevance does Mary Wollstonecraft's thought have today? In this insightful book, Sandrine Bergès engages Wollstonecraft with contemporary social and political issues, demonstrating how this pioneering eighteenth-century feminist philosopher addressed concerns that resonate strongly with those faced by twenty-first-century feminists. Wollstonecraft's views on oppression, domination, gender, slavery, social equality, political economics, health, and education underscore her commitment to defending the rights of all who are oppressed. Her ideas shed light on challenges we face in social and political philosophy, including intersectionality, health inequalities, universal basic income, and masculinity. Clear and accessible, this book is an invaluable resource for students and anyone interested in discovering who Mary Wollstonecraft was and how her ideas can help us navigate the struggles of today's feminist movement.

Suárez's Metaphysical Disputations
  • A Critical Guide
  • Edited by Shane Duarte, Sydney Penner
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2025
    Print publication:
    31 December 2025
  • Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), one of the most important early modern scholastic philosophers, had considerable influence not only on canonical early modern philosophers such as Descartes and Leibniz, but even more so on subsequent scholastic philosophers and theologians. His Metaphysical Disputations of 1597 was intended to provide the reader with a complete grounding in metaphysics and is one of the most detailed, comprehensive elaborations of an Aristotelian metaphysics ever published. This Critical Guide offers fourteen new essays on a wide range of topics in the Metaphysical Disputations, including Suárez's metaphysics of modality, his nominalism, and his accounts of the categories, prime matter, falsity, time, and causation. The volume will be valuable for scholars and students of early modern scholasticism, and also for those researching later thinkers whose work was influenced by Suárez.

Aristotle's Parts of Animals
  • A Critical Guide
  • Edited by Sophia Connell
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2025
    Print publication:
    31 December 2025
  • Aristotle's Parts of Animals is a foundational text in both the history of philosophy and the history and philosophy of biology. Critically important for understanding his mature philosophical programme, the Parts of Animals has two chief aims. PA Book I is an introduction to the study of animals and plants and provides preliminary considerations for how to investigate all aspects of their nature. PA Books II-IV is the most comprehensive example of the application of Aristotle's philosophical methodology to real world examples of substances, that is, to animals. In this book, a team of international experts cover topics such as Aristotle's exhortation to study biology, his methodology in the study of natural entities and kinds, the study of mind as part of nature, his analysis and use of concepts such as essence, substance, definition, matter, form, species, analogy and teleology, and the influence and legacy of the text.

The Cambridge History of Rights
  • Volume 5, The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
  • Edited by Samuel Moyn, Meredith Terretta
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2025
    Print publication:
    30 November 2025
  • The concept of a right, and the idea of human rights, were familiar abstractions on the brink of the twentieth century. But the history of political mobilization since shows that human rights had a transformative capacity in that century that no prior age had demonstrated. Through the twentieth century, human rights became institutionalized internationally in laws, movements, and organizations that transcended state-based citizenship and governance – which irrevocably changed the politics around them. Rights continued to evolve as the imperial world order transitioned to a postcolonial world of sovereign states as a primary form of political organization. Through twenty-six essays from experts around the world demonstrating how this period is historically distinctive, volume five of The Cambridge History of Rights is a comprehensive and authoritative reference for the history of rights in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Cambridge History of Rights
  • Volume 3, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
  • Edited by Andrew Fitzmaurice, Rachel Hammersley
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2025
    Print publication:
    30 November 2025
  • In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, contemporary authors explored the myriad ways in which the concept of rights could be understood, but almost always arrived at the same conclusion: it was vital that rights should never be conflated with power. Through twenty-six expertly written essays, volume three of The Cambridge History of Rights focuses on the language of rights, exploring its use in contexts as diverse as the English family, trading relations and Asian powers. This was a period in which rights came to the forefront of political discourse, making it crucial to the longer history of rights reflected in this series. By foregrounding the idea of rights in action, the volume considers the relationship between the ways in which rights were articulated – by individuals, institutions and states – and how they were enacted in practice. In doing so, it uncovers the complexities inherent in the development of the language of rights during this formative period.

Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
  • A Critical Guide
  • Edited by Paul Russell
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2025
    Print publication:
    31 October 2025
  • David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion were published posthumously in 1779 and are considered one of the most important contributions to the philosophy of religion. Throughout Hume's philosophical career his views on religion were highly controversial and many of his own contemporaries regarded his philosophy as a defence of atheism and irreligion. The Dialogues is Hume's final and his most definitive statement of his views on this subject. In this Critical Guide, leading scholars engage with topics including the argument from intelligent design, the cosmological argument, the problem of evil, religion and morality, miracles, suicide and immortality, and the natural origins and roots of religious belief. The volume updates and expands our critical understanding of this major philosophical work, and will be of interest to a range of readers in philosophy, religion, and the history of ideas.

The Cambridge History of Rights
  • Volume 1, The Ancient World
  • Edited by Clifford Ando, Mirko Canevaro, Benjamin Straumann
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2025
    Print publication:
    31 October 2025
  • The ancient world existed before the modern conceptual and linguistic apparatus of rights, and any attempts to understand its place in history must be undertaken with care. This volume covers not only Greco-Roman antiquity, but ranges from the ancient Near East to early Confucian China; Deuteronomic Judaism to Ptolemaic Egypt; and rabbinic Judaism to Sasanian law. It describes ancient normative conceptions of personhood and practices of law in a way that respects their historical and linguistic particularity, appreciating the distinctiveness of the cultures under study whilst clarifying their salience for comparative study. Through thirteen expertly researched essays, volume one of The Cambridge History of Rights is a comprehensive and authoritative reference for the history of rights in the global ancient world and highlights societies that the field has long neglected.

Kierkegaard's ‘Works of Love'
  • A Critical Guide
  • Edited by Jeffrey Hanson, Wojciech Kaftanski
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2025
    Print publication:
    31 October 2025
  • Kierkegaard's Works of Love, published in 1847, is considered a monumental text on love from one of the nineteenth century's greatest thinkers. It considers different types of love including Christian love and love of God, as well as love of a parent, a spouse, and a friend. It was initially considered austere and unrewarding as a philosophical and religious text, but is now being appraised more appreciatively from a diverse range of perspectives. The essays in this Critical Guide engage with Kierkegaard's unique view of love and expand upon topics including duty, virtue, selfhood, friendship, authenticity, God, hermeneutics, environmentalism, politics, justice, self-righteousness, despair, equality, commitment, sociality, and meaning in life. Drawing on both analytic and continental European traditions, they revisit the vexed and contested questions of this book and demonstrate its continuing relevance and importance to present-day debates.

Ockham's ‘Summa Logicae'
  • A Critical Guide
  • Edited by Claude Panaccio, Jenny Pelletier
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2025
    Print publication:
    30 September 2025
  • William of Ockham's Summa Logicae (The Sum of Logic), composed in the mid-1320s, is a major work in the history of Western philosophy. It was highly influential for several centuries following its appearance. Ostensibly a textbook on logic, the work is an essential resource for understanding Ockham's philosophical project at large and contains numerous innovative ideas about thought, language, and ontology that are now attracting much interest in contemporary philosophy. Despite an abundant growth in Ockham scholarship in recent decades, this Critical Guide is the first collection of essays to be devoted to the Summa Logicae. The volume covers a wide range of topics, including nominalism, metalanguage, modes of signifying, Ockham's theory of the categorical syllogism, and modal logic. It provides both fresh perspectives on existing debates and new contributions on topics that have not yet entered mainstream scholarship on Ockham.

Augustine's ‘Confessions'
  • A Critical Guide
  • Edited by Thomas Williams
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Augustine's Confessions, written between AD 394 and 400, is an autobiographical work which outlines his youth and his conversion to Christianity. It is one of the great texts of Late Antiquity, the first Western Christian autobiography ever written, and it retains its fascination for philosophers, theologians, historians, and scholars of religious studies today. This Critical Guide engages with Augustine's creative appropriation of the work of his predecessors in theology generally, in metaphysics, and in philosophy as therapy for the soul, and reframes a much discussed - but still poorly understood - passage from the Confessions with respect to recent philosophy. The volume represents the best of contemporary scholarship on Augustine's Confessions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and builds on existing scholarship to develop new insights, explore underappreciated themes, and situate Augustine in the thought of his own day as well as ours.

Freedom and Perfection
  • German Political Thought from Leibniz to Marx
  • Douglas Moggach
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Leibniz, this study argues, is the genuine initiator of German Idealism. His analysis of freedom as spontaneity and the relations he establishes among freedom, justice, and progress underlie Kant's ideas of rightful interaction and his critiques of Enlightened absolutism. Freedom and Perfection offers a historical examination of perfectionism, its political implications and transformations in German thought between 1650 and 1850. Douglas Moggach demonstrates how Kant's followers elaborated a new ethical-political approach, 'post-Kantian perfectionism', which, in the context of the French Revolution, promoted the conditions for free activity rather than state-directed happiness. Hegel, the Hegelian School, and Marx developed this approach further with reference to the historical process as the history of freedom. Highlighting the decisive importance of Leibniz for subsequent theorists of the state, society, and economy, Freedom and Perfection offers a new interpretation of important schools of modern thought and a vantage point for contemporary political debates.

Kant's Lectures on Political Philosophy
  • A Critical Guide
  • Edited by Frederick Rauscher
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • A decade prior to his main publications in political philosophy, Kant presented his views on the topic in his 1784 course lectures on natural right. This Critical Guide examines this only surviving student transcript of these lectures, which shows how Kant's political philosophy developed in response to the dominant natural law tradition and other theories. Fourteen new essays explore how Kant's lectures reveal his assessment of natural law, the central value of freedom, the importance of property and contract, the purposes and powers of the state, and the role of individual autonomy and the rights of human beings. The essays place his claims in relation to events and other publications of the early 1780s, and show Kant in the process of working out the theories which would later characterize his influential political philosophy.

Heidegger's Being and Time
  • A Critical Guide
  • Edited by Aaron James Wendland, Tobias Keiling
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    26 June 2025
  • Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, published in 1927, is widely regarded as his most important work and it has had a profound influence on twentieth-century philosophy. This Critical Guide draws on recently translated and published primary sources as well as the latest developments in Heidegger scholarship to provide a series of in-depth studies of this influential text. Twelve newly-written essays examine the unity of Being and Time; the nature of human communication; truth as a catalyst of cultural transformation; feminist approaches to Being and Time; the essence of authenticity; curiosity as an epistemic vice; the nature of rationality; realism and idealism; the ontological difference; the origin of time; the possibility of death; and the failure of the Being and Time project. The volume will be particularly valuable to students and scholars interested in phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, metaphysics, epistemology, feminism, and ethics.

Pessimism, Quietism and Nature as Refuge
  • David E. Cooper
  • Published by:
    Agenda Publishing
    Published online:
    05 June 2025
    Print publication:
    19 September 2024
  • How do we, as individuals, accommodate a pessimistic and misanthropic view of the world? If the human condition is impossible to ameliorate, then how should we live? How do we bring about the wellbeing and happiness we seek in the face of such overwhelming evidence that our condition is and will remain very bad indeed and owes significantly to our own entrenched failings?

    In this thoughtful and insightful book the philosopher David E. Cooper explores this fundamental dilemma. He rejects an activist commitment to radical improvement of the human condition, and instead advocates quietism as a way to live as well and as happily as we can. This quietist position, which draws on Buddhist and Daoist ideas as well as those from western philosophy, is supplemented by finding refuge from the everyday human world in a 'place' both 'other' and 'better' than that world. Such places of refuge, Cooper argues, are best found in natural environments.

    Refuge in nature, whether a garden or a wilderness, cultivates an attunement to, or a sense of, the way of things, and thereby invites assurance of being 'in the truth' and the enjoyment that such assurance fosters. The quietist who finds refuge in nature lives as well as and as happily as anyone can do who accepts the negative verdict on the human condition.

The Cambridge Companion to Augustine's Sermons
  • Edited by Andrew Hofer, OP
  • Published online:
    26 May 2025
    Print publication:
    12 June 2025
  • Augustine of Hippo is known for some of the greatest theological masterpieces in Christian history, notably, his Confessions, The Trinity, and The City of God. Over 900 of his sermons, a treasure trove of his insights into God, Scripture, and humanity, have also survived. Given the wide dissemination of many of these texts over the past 1600 years, Augustine is arguably the most influential preacher since the time of the apostles. In recent decades, scholars have paid more attention to his sermons, including those newly discovered, with the result that Augustine's preaching has become increasingly accessible to a broad audience. The Cambridge Companion to Augustine's Sermons furthers this work by offering essays from an international team of experts. It provides a reliable guide for scholars and students of early Christian biblical exegesis, liturgy, doctrine, social practices, and homiletics, as well as for those dedicated to the retrieval of early preaching for the Church today.

Kant's Critique of Practical Reason
  • Background Source Materials
  • Michael Walschots
  • Published online:
    31 January 2025
    Print publication:
    28 March 2024
  • Kant did not initially intend to write the Critique of Practical Reason, let alone three Critiques. It was primarily the reactions to the Critique of Pure Reason and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals that encouraged Kant to develop his moral philosophy in the second Critique. This volume presents both new and first-time English translations of texts written by Kant's predecessors and contemporaries that he read and responded to in the Critique of Practical Reason. It also includes several subsequent reactions to the second Critique. Together, the translations in this volume present the Critique of Practical Reason in its full historical context, offering scholars and students new insight into Kant's moral philosophy. The detailed editorial material appended to each of the eleven chapters helps introduce readers to the life and works of the authors, outlines the texts translated, and points to relevant passages across Kant's works.

Liberty as Independence
  • The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal
  • Quentin Skinner
  • Published online:
    23 January 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
  • What does liberty entail? How have concepts of liberty changed over time? And what are the global consequences? This book surveys the history of rival views of liberty from antiquity to modern times. Quentin Skinner traces the understanding of liberty as independence from the classical ideal to early modern Britain, culminating in the claims of the Whig oligarchy to have transformed this idea into reality. Yet, with the Whig vision of a free state and civil society undermined by the American Revolution of 1776, Skinner explores how claims that liberty was fulfilled by an absence of physical or coercive restraint came to prominence. Liberty as Independence examines new dimensions of these rival views, considering the connections between debates on liberty and debates on slavery, and demonstrating how these ideas were harnessed in feminist discussions surrounding limitations on the liberty of women. The concept of liberty is inherently global, and Skinner argues strongly for the reinstatement of the understanding of liberty as independence.

Schopenhauer's Politics
  • Jakob Norberg
  • Published online:
    09 January 2025
    Print publication:
    23 January 2025
  • Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) lived through an era of great political turmoil, but previous assessments of his political thought have portrayed him as a pessimistic observer with no constructive solutions to offer. By assembling and contextualizing Schopenhauer's dispersed comments on political matters, this book reveals that he developed a distinct conception of politics. In opposition to rising ideological movements such as nationalism or socialism, Schopenhauer denied that politics can ever bring about universal emancipation or fraternal unity. Instead, he viewed politics as a tool for mitigating rather than resolving the conflicts of a fundamentally imperfect world. Jakob Norberg's fascinating book reconstructs Schopenhauer's political ideas and shows how they relate to the dominant debates and trends during the period in which he lived. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Lightning in the Age of Benjamin Franklin
  • Facts and Fictions in Science, Religion, and Art
  • Jan Wim Buisman
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    04 January 2025
    Print publication:
    01 May 2023
  • Thunder and lightning have been seen from time immemorial as God's instruments of punishment. Until the invention of the lightning rod by Benjamin Franklin in 1752. In Lightning in the Age of Benjamin Franklin: Facts and Fictions in Science, Religion, and Art, Jan Wim Buisman shows how the Enlightenment and Romanticism have changed our scientific, religious and artistic image of natural violence forever. In the eighteenth century, thunderstorms are experienced less and less as a threat and more and more as something extraordinary. The image of God and the image of nature changed radically. The religion of enlightened people, for example, was more determined by joy than by fear. And nature was almost experienced as a girlfriend. That had significant consequences because those who no longer had to be afraid of the thunderstorm could play with it without hesitation. That's what poets, painters and musicians did to their heart's content. Never before the beauty of the storm was depicted as much in the western culture as during the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism.

Hume's Essays
  • A Critical Guide
  • Edited by Max Skjönsberg, Felix Waldmann
  • Published online:
    02 January 2025
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025
  • David Hume's Essays, which were written and published at various junctures between 1741 and his death in 1776, offer his most accessible and often most profound statements on a range of subjects including politics, philosophy, aesthetics, and political economy. In Hume's lifetime, the readable and wide-ranging Essays acquired considerable fame throughout Europe and North America, influencing the writings of such diverse figures as James Madison and William Paley, yet they have not been given the same scholarly attention as his more famous philosophical works. This Critical Guide provides a series of in-depth studies of the Essays, as well as an account of the state of scholarship on the work. Thirteen chapters examine the Essays from historical, political and philosophical perspectives, with the aim of restoring the work to its rightful place among Hume's works and in intellectual history more broadly.

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