During the first quarter of the twentieth century, the French philosopher Henri Bergson became an international celebrity, profoundly influencing contemporary intellectual and artistic currents. While Bergsonism was fashionable, L. Susan Stebbing, Bertrand Russell, Moritz Schlick, and Rudolf Carnap launched different critical attacks against some of Bergson’s views. This book examines this series of critical responses to Bergsonism early in the history of analytic philosophy. Analytic crit...

René Descartes’s 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy is a cornerstone of the history of western thought. One of the most important philosophical texts ever written, it is also a masterclass in the art of critical thinking – specifically when it comes to reasoning and interpretation.Descartes sought to do nothing less than create a new foundation for the pursuit of knowledge – whether philosophical, scientific, or theological. To that end, he laid out a systematic programm...

René Descartes posed questions about the nature of knowledge and the nature of being that philosophers still debate today. ¶In Meditations, Descartes expands on his most famous pronouncement, “I think, therefore I am,” which first appeared in an earlier text. He explores the idea of the mind as an entity separate from the body—the ‘dualist’ approach. He also attempts to dispel skepticism—the idea that one cannot truly know anythingand shows that, by doubting everything, we can know some th...

Widely accepted as a philosophical masterpiece, Ethics sets out to explain nothing less than the nature of God, the world, and how we should live. Rejecting some of the most deeply held presuppositions of classical and medieval thought, Spinoza makes the radical claim that God and the universe are in fact one and the same, a single substance with infinite attributes.¶Ethics is famously complex, its elaborate and self-referential matrix of definitions and propositions unfolding across five ...

Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics is a dense masterpiece of sustained argumentative reasoning. It earned its place as one of the most important and influential books in Western philosophy by virtue of its uncompromisingly direct arguments about the nature of God, the universe, free will, and human morals.Though it remains one of the densest and most challenging texts in the entire canon of Western philosophy, Ethics is also famous for Spinoza’s unique approach to ordering a...