History of Philosophy

Gandhi was a philosopher and understanding his philosophy helps with re-assessing the consistency of his positions and life. He was less influenced by the Stoics than by Socrates, Christ, Christian writers and Indian thought. But whereas he re-interpreted those, he discovered the congeniality of the Stoics too late to re-process them. They could supply even more of the consistency he sought. He could show them the effect of putting their unrealised ideals into actual practice. They from the Cynics, he from the Bhagavadgita, learnt the indifference of most objectives. But both had to square that with their love for all humans and their political engagement. Indifference was to both a source of freedom. Gandhi was converted to non-violence by Tolstoy's picture of Christ. But he addressed the sacrifice it called for, and called even protective killing violent. He was nonetheless not a pacifist, because he recognized the double-bind of rival duties, and the different duties of different individuals, which was a Stoic theme. For both, it accompanied doubts about universal rules. Contrary to one picture, the Stoics did not give up politics, but in Rome, like Gandhi, were leaders of political resistance. Both preferred human duties to human rights. But Gandhi's idea of individual conscience, was influenced by Socrates, his belief in subsistence-living by Christ, not the Stoics. Gandhi's lapses were inevitable from ideals adopted as a counsel of perfection. In his search for criticism, he transcended other philosophers by refining his values through public experiment.

The German Historicist Tradition is a study of the rise of the German historicism from Chladenius to Weber. The work is an historical survey and philosophical examination of the main thinkers in this tradition. It covers thirteen thinkers: Chladenius, Möser, Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Savigny, Ranke, Droysen, Windelband, Rickert, Lask, Dilthey, Simmel and Weber. Most of these thinkers have been little studied in the Anglophone world, and in some cases this book provides the first general account in English of their historical thought. The book intends to provide an introduction for first‐time readers but also a scholarly interpretation for a more professional audience. I explain the historical context and significance of each thinker, analyze his main arguments, and indicate the chief problems in the interpretation of his thought. My method is both historical and systematic: historical, insofar as I place each thinker in context and trace the evolution of his thought; and systematic, insofar as I examine the validity of his arguments and the logical structure of his philosophy. This book is conceived as a continuation and completion of the grand project begun by Friedrich Meinecke in his Entstehung des Historismus (1936). It was Meinecke's ambition to trace the genesis of German historicism from its beginnings in the late seventeenth century until its culmination in Ranke. Such was Meinecke's thoroughness, however, that after 500 pages he never got beyond Goethe. Although Meinecke's work has great merits his analyses of texts are unfailingly perceptive, and his historical perspective is deep and broad it still has serious flaws that make it an inadequate introduction today. Meinecke ignores crucial figures, his interpretations are often anachronistic, and his conceptual scheme is misleading and simplistic. The present work attempts to retell Meinecke's story in the light of later research.

After a Darwinian-type account of what beliefs are and how they arose in animals acting to cope with their environments–“low beliefs,” virtually all of which are true–Professor Matson shows how the invention of language led to imagination and thence to beliefs formed in other ways (“high beliefs”), not true though thought to be, which could be consolidated into mythologies, the first Grand Unified Theories of Everything. Science began when Thales of Miletus produced a Grand Theory based on low (“everyday”) beliefs. Matson traces the course of science and philosophy through seven centuries to their sudden and violent displacement by Christianity with its Grand Theory of the old type. Against the widespread opinion that modern philosophy has slowly but completely emancipated itself from bondage to theology, he shows how remnants from the medieval ‘interlude’ still lurk unnoticed in the purportedly neutral notions of logical possibility, possible worlds, and laws as commands, to the detriment of the natural harmony between science and philosophy, including ethics. Accessibly written, this is a book for all who are interested in the foundations of 21st century thought and who wonder where the cracks might be.

This book presents a study of Hegel's hugely influential but notoriously difficult Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel describes the method of this work as a ‘way of despair’, meaning that the reader who undertakes its inquiry must be open to the experience of self-loss through it. Whereas the existential dimension of Hegel's work has often been either ignored or regarded as romantic ornamentation, this book argues that it belongs centrally to Hegel's attempt to fulfil a demanding epistemological ambition. With his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant expressed a new epistemological demand with respect to rational knowledge and presented a new method for meeting this demand. This book reconstructs Hegel's objection to Kant's Critical Philosophy, according to which Kant's way of meeting the epistemological demand of philosophical critique presupposes subjectivism, that is, presupposes the restriction of our knowledge to things as they are merely for us. Whereas Hegel in his early Jena writings rejects Kant's critical project altogether on this basis, he comes to see that the epistemological demand expressed in Kant's project must be met. This book argues that Hegel's method in the Phenomenology of Spirit takes shape as his attempt to meet the epistemological demand of Kantian critique without presupposing subjectivism. The key to Hegel's transformation of Kant's critical procedure, by virtue of which subjectivism is to be avoided, is precisely the existential or self-transformational dimension of Hegel's criticism, the openness of the criticizing subject to being transformed through the epistemological procedure.

This is a study of Hegel’s critique of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Its main purpose is to defend the thesis that Hegel offers us a compelling critique of, and alternative to, the conception of cognition Kant argues for in his ‘Critical’ period. It examines key features of what Kant identifies as the ‘discursive’ character of our mode of cognition, and considers Hegel’s reasons for arguing that these features condemn Kant’s theoretical philosophy to skepticism as well as dualism. This study presents in a sympathetic light Hegel’s claim to derive from certain Kantian doctrines clues to a superior form of idealism, a form of idealism that better captures the nature of our cognitive powers and their relation to objects.

The book offers the first full‐length treatment in English of Hegel's idea of freedom. It explores his theory of what it is for an individual to be free and his account of the social and political contexts in which freedom is developed, realized, and sustained. The book investigates a number of central questions concerning Hegel's ethics and political theory. Is Hegel's outlook unacceptably conservative? Can freedom be equated with rational self‐determination? Is there any special connection between freedom and citizenship? By offering interpretations of Hegel's views on these and other questions, the book develops a novel ‘civic humanist’ reading of Hegel's social philosophy, one that restores to its proper, central place Hegel's idea of freedom. The book is written in a clear and jargon‐free style and will be of interest to anyone concerned with Hegel's ethical, social, and political thought and the sources of contemporary ideas about freedom, community, and the state.

Heidegger's early ‘fundamental ontology’ offers a vision of our subjectivity and of the world we inhabit that can appear to be simply truer to life. It allows us to understand the creature that thinks as also one which acts, moves, even touches the world around it — a creature at home in the same ordinary world in which we too live our lives when outside of the philosophical closet. It also promises to free us from seemingly intractable philosophical problems, such as scepticism about the external world. But many of the concepts central to that vision are elusive; and some of the most widely accepted interpretations of Heidegger's vision harbour within themselves deep and important unclarities, while others foist upon us hopeless species of idealism. This book offers a new way of understanding that vision. Drawing on an examination of Heidegger's work throughout the 1920s, it takes as central to that vision the proposals that propositional thought presupposes a mastery of what might be called a ‘measure’, and that mastery of such a ‘measure’ requires a recognizably ‘worldly’ subject. These insights provide the basis for a novel reading of key elements of Heidegger's ‘fundamental ontology’, including his concept of ‘Being-in-the-world’, his critique of scepticism, his claim to disavow both realism and idealism, and his difficult reflections on the nature of truth, science, authenticity, and philosophy itself. According to this interpretation, Heidegger's central ideas identify genuine demands that we must meet if we are to achieve the feat of thinking determinate thoughts about the world around us.