This astonishingly rich volume collects the work of an international group of scholars, including some of the best known in academia. Experts in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, political theory, aesthetics, history, critical theory, and hermeneutics bring to light the best philosophical scholarship what is arguably Friedrich Nietzsche's most rewarding but most challenging text. Including essays that were commissioned specifically for the volume as well as essays revised and edite...

The diversity of Nietzsche's books, and the sheer range of his philosophical interests, have posed daunting challenges to his interpreters. This Oxford Handbook addresses this multiplicity by devoting each of its 32 essays to a focused topic, picked out by the book's systematic plan. The aim is to treat each topic at the best current level of philosophical scholarship on Nietzsche. The first group of papers treat selected biographical issues: his family relations, his relations to women, a...

The principal aim of this volume is to elucidate what freedom, sovereignty, and autonomy mean for Nietzsche and what philosophical resources he gives us to re-think these crucial concepts. A related aim is to examine how Nietzsche connects these concepts to his thoughts about life-affirmation, self-love, promise-making, agency, the 'will to nothingness', and the 'eternal recurrence', as well as to his search for a 'genealogical' understanding of morality. These twelve essays by leading Nie...

This volume brings together a number of original articles by leading Leibniz scholars to address the meaning and significance of Leibniz’s notions of compossibility and possible worlds. In order to avoid the conclusion that everything that exists is necessary, or that all possibles are actual, as Spinoza held, Leibniz argued that not all possible substances are compossible, that is, capable of coexisting. In Leibniz’s view, the compossibility relation divides all possible substances into d...

Friedrich Nietzsche was an extremely popular 19th century German philosopher. Nietzsche wrote on a variety of topics including religion, morality, science, and modern culture. Many scholars still study Nietzsche’s works and ideology today. This edition of Thus Spake Zarathustra includes a table of contents.

As there cannot be said to be a beaten path in philosophy, and as "Introductions" to the subject differ widely from one another, it is proper that I should give an indication of the scope of the present volume.It undertakes:To point out what the word "philosophy" is made to cover in our universities and colleges at the present day, and to show why it is given this meaning.To explain the nature of reflective or philosophical thinking, and to show how it differ...

No philosopher has held a higher opinion of art than Hegel, yet nor was any so profoundly pessimistic about its prospects - despite living in the German golden age of Goethe, Mozart and Schiller. For if the artists of classical Greece could find the perfect fusion of content and form, modernity faced complicating - and ultimately disabling - questions. Christianity, with its code of unworldliness, had compromised the immediacy of man's relationship with reality, and ironic detachment had a...

Schopenhauer is the most readable of German philosophers. This book gives a succinct explanation of his metaphysical system, concentrating on the original aspects of his thought, which inspired many artists and thinkers including Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud, and Wittgenstein. Schopenhauer's central notion is that of the will - a blind, irrational force that he uses to interpret both the human mind and the whole of nature. Seeing human behaviour as that of a natural organism governed by the wi...

The explosive debate that transformed our views about time and scientific truthOn April 6, 1922, in Paris, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson publicly debated the nature of time. Einstein considered Bergson's theory of time to be a soft, psychological notion, irreconcilable with the quantitative realities of physics. Bergson, who gained fame as a philosopher by arguing that time should not be understood exclusively through the lens of science, criticized Einstein's ...

Although best known for his contributions to the theory of knowledge, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion, Hume also influenced developments in the philosophy of mind, psychology, ethics, political and economic theory, political and social history, and aesthetic theory. The fifteen essays in this volume address all aspects of Hume's thought. The picture of him that emerges is that of a thinker who, though often critical to the point of scepticism, was nonetheless able to build on that ...

This book presents an extended dialogue in essay form between specialists in the work of Moses Mendelssohn, and experts in important trends in related late-seventeenth and eighteenth century thought. The first group of contributors explores themes in Mendelssohn’s metaphysics and aesthetics, presenting both their internal argumentative coherence and their historical context. The second outlines the context of Mendelssohn’s views on specific topics, and describes his contribution to the dis...

Forgotten Origin is the third in a series of books dedicated to the first Homo sapiens: the Australian Aboriginal people. Steven Strong and Evan Strong continue in their investigation into the global impact of Aboriginal people sailing from, never to, Australia no less than 50,000 years ago, paying particular attention to the shared principles found within many Gnostic scriptures and the Dreaming. As radical as this theory may appear, the rigor applied, whether through mt...