Senator S. I. Hayakawa discusses the role of language in human life, the many functions of language, and how language—sometimes without our knowing—shapes our thinking in this engaging and highly respected book. Provocative and erudite, it examines the relationship between language and racial and religious prejudice; the nature and dangers of advertising from a linguistic point of view; and, in an additional chapter called “The Empty Eye,” the content, form, and hidden message of television, from situation comedies to news coverage to political advertising.

    In such a scenario, it makes sense to focus on the most identifiable and urgent problems, right? Actually, it doesn't. In his classic essay "The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge," Abraham Flexner, the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the man who helped bring Albert Einstein to the United States, describes a great paradox of scientific research. The search for answers to deep questions, motivated solely by curiosity and without concern for applications, often leads not only to the greatest scientific discoveries but also to the most revolutionary technological breakthroughs. In short, no quantum mechanics, no computer chips.This brief book includes Flexner's timeless 1939 essay alongside a new companion essay by Robbert Dijkgraaf, the Institute's current director, in which he shows that Flexner's defense of the value of "the unobstructed pursuit of useless knowledge" may be even more relevant today than it was in the early twentieth century. Dijkgraaf describes how basic research has led to major transformations in the past century and explains why it is an essential precondition of innovation and the first step in social and cultural change. He makes the case that society can achieve deeper understanding and practical progress today and tomorrow only by truly valuing and substantially funding the curiosity-driven "pursuit of useless knowledge" in both the sciences and the humanities.

    Through the gaze of an impartial doctor--seemingly there for the men's solace--their mental descent is charted in exquisite, often harrowing detail. And as the morning draws inexorably closer, the men cross the psychological wall between life and death, long before the first shot rings out.This brilliant snapshot of life in anguish is the perfect introduction to a collection of stories where the neurosis of the modern world is mirrored in the lives of the people that inhabit it.

    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

    First published on the eve of war in 1939, the essay has often been read as a pacifist manifesto. Rachel Bespaloff was a French contemporary of Weil’s whose work similarly explored the complex relations between literature, religion, and philosophy. She composed her own distinctive discussion of the Iliad in the midst of World War II—calling it “her method of facing the war”—and, as Christopher Benfey argues in his introduction, the essay was very probably written in response to Weil. Bespaloff’s account of the Iliad brings out Homer’s novelistic approach to character and the existential drama of his characters’ choices; it is marked, too, by a tragic awareness of how the Iliad speaks to times and places where there is no hope apart from war.This edition brings together these two influential essays for the first time, accompanied by Benfey’s scholarly introduction and an afterword by the great Austrian novelist Hermann Broch.

    In his view, the only way of escape from the many forms of slavery--spiritual, economic, political--which shackle & improverish the spirit lies in the fuller realization of personality, as he defines it. Berdyaev turned to religious views & played a large part in the renaissance of religious & philosophical thought in Russian intellectual life early in the 20th century. In 1922 he & a number of other intellectuals were expelled from the USSR. His writings most often deal with the problem of freedom & human relations to the world in light of this problem.In Place of an IntroductionPart 1PersonalityMaster, slave & free manPart 2Being & freedom. The slavery of man to beingGod & freedom. The slavery of man to GodNature & freedom. The cosmic lure & the slavery of man to natureSociety & freedom. The social lure & the slavery of man to societyCivilization & freedom. The slavery of man to civilization & the lure of cultural valuesThe slavery of man to himself & the lure of individualismPart 3The lure of slavery & sovereignty. The 3fold image of the stateThe lure of war. The slavery of man to warThe lure & slavery of nationalism. Nation & peopleThe lure & slavery of aristocracy. The 2fold image of aristocracyThe lure of the bourgeois spirit. Slavery to property & moneyThe lure & slavery of revolution. The 2fold image of revolutionThe lure & slavery of collectivism. Enticement of utopia. The 3fold image of socialismThe erotic lure & slavery. Sex, personality & freedomThe aesthetic lure & slavery. Beauty, art & naturePart 4The spiritual liberation of man. Victory over fear & deathThe lure & slavery of history. The three kinds of time. The 2fold interpretation of the end of history. Active-creative eschatology

    At the heart of his ever-relevant inquiry is the inescapable conflict in the West between marriage and passion—the first associated with social and religious responsiblity and the second with anarchic, unappeasable love as celebrated by the troubadours of medieval Provence. These early poets, according to de Rougemont, spoke the words of an Eros-centered theology, and it was through this "heresy" that a European vocabulary of mysticism flourished and that Western literature took on a new direction.Bringing together historical, religious, philosophical, and cultural dimensions, the author traces the evolution of Western romantic love from its literary beginnings as an awe-inspiring secret to its commercialization in the cinema. He seeks to restore the myth of love to its original integrity and concludes with a philosophical perspective on modern marriage.

    He argues that, even at its most abstract, logic demands an underlying theory of experience. Husserl sketches out a genealogy of logic in three parts: Part I examines prepredicative experience, Part II the structure of predicative thought as such, and Part III the origin of general conceptual thought. This volume provides an articulate restatement of many of the themes of Husserlian phenomenology.

    

    Beginning with Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), these texts are important for their meditations on the oblivion and abandonment of being, politics, and race, and for their incisive critique of power, force, and violence. Originally published in 1998 as volume 69 of Heidegger's Complete Works, this English translation opens new avenues for understanding the trajectory of Heidegger's thinking during this crucial time.

    Despite two millennia of documented commentary, scholars struggle to make sense of it. Almost every major discussion of the Parmenides in this century has begun with some remark about its extraordinary difficulty & no interpretation has yet been offered that a majority of commentators find persuasive. The main interpretative problem of is what to make of the treatment of the several hypotheses that constitutes the 2nd portion (Stephanus 137C-166C, referred to as P2). One source of perplexity is that this latter portion fails to exhibit continuity of subject matter with the 1st part (P1), making it difficult to determine what the whole is about. To make matters worse, the argumentation of the 2nd part is so extremely condensed that it sometimes appears incoherent. As a result, not only are individual arguments hard to decipher, but moreover it's unclear what Plato was trying to accomplish with these arguments in the 1st place.Two major lines of interpretation were established by the time of Proclus' Parmenides Commentary in the 5th century, both with prominent followers. As Proclus notes in his 1st book, some readers view the dialog as a logic exercise. Some read P2 as a polemical tour-de-force in which methods of argument derived from Zeno are turned against their originator to show that Zeno's own monistic views lead to absurdities of the very sort he purports to demonstrate against pluralism's champions. Others read the 2nd part at face value, as a demonstration of a logical method that will enable Socrates to avoid the pitfalls in his Form theory exposed by Parmenides in the 1st part of the dialog. In either case, readers of this persuasion view the dialog primarily as a dialectical exercise without positive metaphysical content. The 2nd major interpretative line identified by Proclus assigns P2 a metaphysical purpose. An early version of this approach, associated with Origen, identifies the topic as the Being of the historical Parmenides, with the consequence that the exclusively negative results of the 1st hypothesis come to be viewed as adding to the pluralistic list of features denied of the singular Being in Parmenides' poem. The tradition of interpretation with which Proclus himself agrees, on the other hand, is that beginning with Plotinus & moving thru Porphyry to Iamblichus & Syrianus. As Proclus puts it, commentators of this group take the subject to be "all things that get their reality from the One," which he identifies with the Republic's Good. Keying upon the conclusion at Parmenides 142A that the One can be neither expressed nor conceived, Proclus reads the 1st hypothesis' results as a demonstration of the ineffable transcendence of this Supreme Principle. --Plato's Parmenides & the Dilemma of Participation

    

    Reissued in a uniform series design, they will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.

    We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

    Gilson examines Christianity (various groups) and their relationship with philosophy, and philosophy itself.