In a new introduction, Steiner addresses language and philosophy and the rise of Nazism."It would be hard to imagine a better introduction to the work of philosopher Martin Heidegger."—George Kateb, The New Republic

    Tore Boeckmann and Leonard Peikoff for the first time now bring readers the edited transcript of these exciting personal statements. The Art of Fiction offers invaluable lessons, in which Rand analyzes the four essential elements of fiction: theme, plot, characterization, and style. She demonstrates her ideas by dissecting her best-known works, as well as those of other famous authors, such as Thomas Wolfe, Sinclair Lewis, and Victor Hugo. An historic accomplishment, this compendium will be a unique and fascinating resource for both writers and readers of fiction.

    Hubert Dreyfus's commentary opens the way for a new appreciation of this difficult philosopher, revealing a rigorous and illuminating vocabulary that is indispensable for talking about the phenomenon of world.The publication of Being and Time in 1927 turned the academic world on its head. Since then it has become a touchstone for philosophers as diverse as Marcuse, Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida who seek an alternative to the rationalist Cartesian tradition of western philosophy. But Heidegger's text is notoriously dense, and his language seems to consist of unnecessarily barbaric neologisms; to the neophyte and even to those schooled in Heidegger thought, the result is often incomprehensible.Dreyfus's approach to this daunting book is straightforward and pragmatic. He explains the text by frequent examples drawn from everyday life, and he skillfully relates Heidegger's ideas to the questions about being and mind that have preoccupied a generation of cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind.

    Violence is ubiquitous and incessant but protean, varying its outward form according to the social constellation at hand. In Topology of Violence, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han considers the shift in violence from the visible to the invisible, from the frontal to the viral to the self-inflicted, from brute force to mediated force, from the real to the virtual. Violence, Han tells us, has gone from the negative—explosive, massive, and martial—to the positive, wielded without enmity or domination. This, he says, creates the false impression that violence has disappeared. Anonymized, desubjectified, systemic, violence conceals itself because it has become one with society. Han first investigates the macro-physical manifestations of violence, which take the form of negativity—developing from the tension between self and other, interior and exterior, friend and enemy. These manifestations include the archaic violence of sacrifice and blood, the mythical violence of jealous and vengeful gods, the deadly violence of the sovereign, the merciless violence of torture, the bloodless violence of the gas chamber, the viral violence of terrorism, and the verbal violence of hurtful language. He then examines the violence of positivity—the expression of an excess of positivity—which manifests itself as over-achievement, over-production, over-communication, hyper-attention, and hyperactivity. The violence of positivity, Han warns, could be even more disastrous than that of negativity. Infection, invasion, and infiltration have given way to infarction.

    It was the government, led by the Social Democratic Party, which took power, albeit with some trepidation, after Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated the German throne. Socialists saw this as the opportunity they had been waiting for, the day when workers would be the ones in power. For the conservatives who could not accept the German defeat in World War I, however, the Weimar Republic was a feeble entity which had capitulated to Germany’s enemies.The German Revolution of 1918-1919 told the story of a bruised nation attempting to overcome its military defeat at the hands of enemies who wanted to punish Germany for starting the war. Because Germany was caught in the vise of such irreconcilable political philosophies between the left and the right, the Weimar Republic, although it was the ruling power following the German Revolution, was destined to have a doomed, short life in Germany’s tragic twentieth-century history.

    It is also one of the best introductions to Deleuze's thought, establishing many of his central philosophical positions.In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze identifies and explores three crucial concepts in Nietzschean thought-multiplicity, becoming, and affirmation-and clarifies Nietzsche's views regarding the will to power, eternal return, nihilism, and difference. For Deleuze, Nietzsche challenged conventional philosophical ideas and provided a means of escape from Hegel's dialectical thinking, which had come to dominate French philosophy. He also offered a path toward a politics of difference. In this new edition, Michael Hardt's foreword examines the profound influence of Deleuze's provocative interpretations on the study of Nietzsche, which opened a whole new avenue in postwar thought.

    He has gone down in history as one of the greatest philosophers of all time. Cicero, the Roman statesman and philosopher, once called his writing style "a river of gold;" and his scope of thought and subsequent influence on the study of science, logic, philosophical discourse, and theology has led many to dub him "The Philosopher."Contents:Part 1: Logic (Organon)Categories, translated by E. M. EdghillOn Interpretation, translated by E. M. EdghillPrior Analytics (2 Books), translated by A. J. JenkinsonPosterior Analytics (2 Books), translated by G. R. G. MureTopics (8 Books), translated by W. A. Pickard-CambridgeSophistical Refutations, translated by W. A. Pickard-CambridgePart 2: Universal PhysicsPhysics (8 Books), translated by R. P. Hardie and R. K. GayeOn the Heavens (4 Books), translated by J. L. StocksOn Gerneration and Corruption (2 Books), translated by H. H. JoachimMeteorology (4 Books), translated by E. W. WebsterPart 3: Human PhysicsOn the Soul (3 Books), translated by J. A. SmithOn Sense and the Sensible, translated by J. I. BeareOn Memory and Reminiscence, translated by J. I. BeareOn Sleep and Sleeplessness, translated by J. I. BeareOn Dreams, translated by J. I. BeareOn Prophesying by Dreams, translated by J. I. BeareOn Longevity and Shortness of Life, translated by G. R. T. RossOn Youth, Old Age, Life and Death, and Respiration, translated by G. R. T. RossPart 4: Animal PhysicsThe History of Animals (9 Books), translated by D'Arcy Wentworth ThompsonOn the Parts of Animals (4 Books), translated by William OgleOn the Motion of Animals, translated by A. S. L. FarquharsonOn the Gait of Animals, translated by A. S. L. FarquharsonOn the Generation of Animals (5 Books), translated by Arthur PlattPart 5: Metaphysics(15 Books), translated by W. D. RossPart 6: Ethics and PoliticsNicomachean Ethics (10 Books), translated by W. D. RossPolitics (8 Books), translated by Benjamin JowettThe Athenian Constitution, translated by Sir Frederic G. KenyonPart 7: Aesthetic WritingsRhetoric (3 Books), translated by W. Rhys RobertsPoetics, translated by S. H. Butcher

    This 8-hour free course introduced the study of philosophy and the methods employed by The Open University in teaching philosophy.

    In this book Ollman offers a thorough analysis of Marx's use of dialectical method.   Marx made extremely creative use of dialectical method to analyze the origins, operation, and direction of capitalism. Unfortunately, his promised book on method was never written, so that readers wishing to understand and evaluate Marx's theories, or to revise or use them, have had to proceed without a clear grasp of the dialectic in which the theories are framed. The result has been more disagreement over "what Marx really meant" than over the writings of any other major thinker.   In putting Marx's philosophy of internal relations and his use of the process of abstraction--two little-studied aspects of dialectics--at the center of this account, Ollman provides a version of Marx's method that is at once systematic, scholarly, clear and eminently useful.   Ollman not only sheds important new light on what Marx really meant in his varied theoretical pronouncements, but in carefully laying out the steps in Marx's method makes it possible for a reader to put the dialectic to work in his or her own research. He also convincingly argues the case for why social scientists and humanists as well as philosophers should want to do so.

    It was his feeling that a proper analysis of the use of language would clarify concepts and lead to the solution of (what seem to be) philosophical problems.Sometimes, Wittgenstein's expository method is pre-Socratic: a flow of disconnected statements, not unlike Heraclitean fragments, that range from clear aphorisms to cryptic oracles. Elsewhere, there are brief Socratic dialogues with imaginary persons, opponents of equally severe seriousness, representatives of the other half of Wittgenstein strove for total clarity of language as a means of solving philosophical problems, but some of his most meaningful statements here are expressed suggestively, subjectively, poetically.

    Michael Chase's lucid translation—complete with a useful chronology and analytical bibliography—at last makes this book available to the English-speaking world.Hadot carefully examines Plotinus's views on the self, existence, love, virtue, gentleness, and solitude. He shows that Plotinus, like other philosophers of his day, believed that Plato and Aristotle had already articulated the essential truths; for him, the purpose of practicing philosophy was not to profess new truths but to engage in spiritual exercises so as to live philosophically. Seen in this light, Plotinus's counsel against fixation on the body and all earthly matters stemmed not from disgust or fear, but rather from his awareness of the negative effect that bodily preoccupation and material concern could have on spiritual exercises.

    Gadamer applies hermeneutical analysis to Heidegger and Husserl's phenomenology, an approach that proves critical and instructive.

    Nietzsche's basic claim is that Christianity is a poisoner of western culture and perversion of the words of and practice of Jesus. Throughout the text, Nietzsche is very critical of institutionalized religion and its priest class, from which he himself was descended. The majority of the book is a systematic attack upon the interpretations of Christ's words by St. Paul and those who followed him. Nietzsche claimed in the Foreword to have written the book for a very limited readership. In order to understand the book, he asserted that the reader "... must be honest in intellectual matters to the point of hardness to so much as endure my seriousness, my passion." The reader should be above politics and nationalism. Also, the usefulness or harmfulness of truth should not be a concern. Characteristics such as "Strength which prefers questions for which no one today is sufficiently daring; courage for the forbidden" are also needed. He disdained all other readers.

    Although he wrote monographs on Hegel, Husserl, and Kierkegaard, the closest Adorno came to an extended discussion of Kant are two lecture courses, one concentrating on the Critique of Pure Reason and the other on the Critique of Practical Reason. This new volume by Adorno comprises his lectures on the former.Adorno attempts to make Kant's thought comprehensible to students by focusing on what he regards as problematic aspects of Kant's philosophy. Adorno examines Kant's dualism and what he calls the Kantian "block": the contradictions arising from Kant's resistance to the idealism that his successors—Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—saw as the inevitable outcome of his ideas. These lectures also provide an accessible introduction to and rationale for Adorno's own philosophy as expounded in Negative Dialectics and his other major writings. Adorno's view of Kant forms an integral part of his own philosophy, since he argues that the way out of the Kantian contradictions is to show the necessity of the dialectical thinking that Kant himself spurned. This in turn enables Adorno to criticize Anglo-Saxon scientistic or positivist thought, as well as the philosophy of existentialism.This book will be of great interest to those working in philosophy and in social and political thought, and it will be essential reading for anyone interested in the foundations of Adorno's own work.

    For Albert Camus, the urge to revolt is one of the "essential dimensions" of human nature, manifested in man's timeless Promethean struggle against the conditions of his existence, as well as the popular uprisings against established orders throughout history. And yet, with an eye toward the French Revolution and its regicides and deicides, he shows how inevitably the course of revolution leads to tyranny, as old regimes throughout the world collapse, The Rebel resonates as an ardent, eloquent, and supremely rational voice of conscience for our tumultuous times.Translated from the French by Anthony Bower.