Empfehlungen basierend auf "De Anima (On the Soul) (Penguin Classics)"

'The most esteemed philosopher to have produced a general introduction to his discipline since Bertrand Russell' Independent In these essays, one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century writes about communism and socialism, the problem of evil, Erasmus and the reform of the Church, reason and truth, and whether God is happy. Accessible and absorbing, the essays in Is God Happy? deal with some of the eternal problems of philosophy and the most vital questions of our age. Leszek Kolakowski has also written on religion, Spinoza, Bergson, Pascal and seventeenth-century thought. He left communist Poland after his expulsion from Warsaw University for anti-communist activities. From 1970 he was a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. 'His distinctive mix of irony and moral seriousness, religious sensibility and epistemological scepticism, social engagement and political doubt was truly rare ... a true Central European intellectual-perhaps the last' Tony Judt, The New York Times Review of Books

The most intriguing…and thought-provoking book that Hannah Arendt wrote (The New York Times Book Review), The Life of the Mind is the final work by the political theorist, philosopher, and feminist thinker.This fascinating book investigates thought itself as it exists in contemplative life. In a shift from Arendt's previous writings, most of which focus on the world outside the mind, this is an exploration of the mind's activities she considered to be the most fundamental. The result is a rich, challenging analysis of human mental activity in terms of thinking, willing, and judging.

The Roman statesman and philosopher Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE) recorded his moral philosophy and reflections on life as a highly original kind of correspondence. Letters on Ethics includes vivid descriptions of town and country life in Nero’s Italy, discussions of poetry and oratory, and philosophical training for Seneca’s friend Lucilius. This volume, the first complete English translation in nearly a century, makes the Letters more accessible than ever before.Written as much for a general audience as for Lucilius, these engaging letters offer advice on how to deal with everything from nosy neighbors to sickness, pain, and death. Seneca uses the informal format of the letter to present the central ideas of Stoicism, for centuries the most influential philosophical system in the Mediterranean world. His lively and at times humorous expositions have made the Letters his most popular work and an enduring classic. Including an introduction and explanatory notes by Margaret Graver and A. A. Long, this authoritative edition will captivate a new generation of readers.

This brilliant exposition of the critique of identity is a classic in contemporary philosophy and one of Deleuze's most important works. Of fundamental importance to literary critics and philosophers,Difference and Repetition develops two central concepts―pure difference and complex repetition―and shows how the two concepts are related. While difference implies divergence and decentering, repetition is associated with displacement and disguising. Central in initiating the shift in French thought away from Hegel and Marx toward Nietzsche and Freud, Difference and Repetition moves deftly to establish a fundamental critique of Western metaphysics.

One of the most remarkable philosophical works of the nineteenth century, The Sickness Unto Death is also famed for the depth and acuity of its modern psychological insights. Writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard explores the concept of 'despair', alerting readers to the diversity of ways in which they may be described as living in this state of bleak abandonment - including some that may seem just the opposite - and offering a much-discussed formula for the eradication of despair. With its penetrating account of the self, this late work by Kierkegaard was hugely influential upon twentieth-century philosophers including Karl Jaspers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The Sickness unto Death can be regarded as one of the key works of theistic existentialist thought - a brilliant and revelatory answer to one man's struggle to fill the spiritual void.

A landmark discussion between two great thinkers, vital to an understanding of twentieth-century philosophy and intellectual history.

In Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism, Gary Steiner illuminates postmodernism's inability to produce viable ethical and political principles. Ethics requires notions of self, agency, and value that are not available to postmodernists. Thus, much of what is published under the rubric of postmodernist theory lacks a proper basis for a systematic engagement with ethics. Steiner demonstrates this through a provocative critique of postmodernist approaches to the moral status of animals, set against the background of a broader indictment of postmodernism's failure to establish clear principles for action. He revisits the ideas of Derrida, Foucault, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, together with recent work by their American interpreters, and shows that the basic terms of postmodern thought are incompatible with definitive claims about the moral status of animals—as well as humans. Steiner also identifies the failures of liberal humanist thought in regards to this same moral dilemma, and he encourages a rethinking of humanist ideas in a way that avoids the anthropocentric limitations of traditional humanist thought. Drawing on the achievements of the Stoics and Kant, he builds on his earlier ideas of cosmic holism and non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism to arrive at a more concrete foundation for animal rights.

For the first time in Penguin Classics: Nietzsche’s accessible exploration of key ideas in his landmark Beyond Good and Evil—in a lucid new translationFriedrich Nietzsche claimed that the purpose of On the Genealogy of Morals was to call attention to his previous writings. But in fact the book does much more than that, elucidating and expanding on the cryptic aphorisms of Beyond Good and Evil, and presenting a coherent discussion of morality in a work that is more accessible than much of his previous writings.For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

"To read Heidegger is to set out on an adventure. The essays in this volume--intriguing, challenging, and often baffling to the reader--call him always to abandon all superficial scanning and to enter wholeheartedly into the serious pursuit of thinking...."Heidegger is not a 'primitive' or a 'romanitic.' He is not one who seeks escape from the burdens and responsibilities of contemporary life into serenity, either through the re-creating of some idyllic past or through the exalting of some simple experience. Finally, Heidegger is not a foe of technology and science. He neither disdains nor rejects them as though they were only destructive of human life."The roots of Heidegger's hinking lie deep in the Western philosophical tradition. Yet that thinking is unique in many of its aspects, in its language, and in its leterary expression. In the development of this thought Heidegger has been taught chiefly by the Greeks, by German idealism, by phenomenology, and by the scholastic theological tradition. In him these and other elements have been fused by his genius of sensitivity and intellect into a very individual philosophical expression." --William Lovitt, from the Introduction

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, and his ill health and eventual insanity. In Part 2 the papers treat Nietzsche in historical context: his relations back to other philosophers—the Greeks, Kant, and Schopenhauer—and to the cultural movement of Romanticism, as well as his own later influence in an unlikely place, on analytic philosophy. The papers in Part 3 treat a variety of Nietzsche's works, from early to late and in styles ranging from the 'aphoristic' The Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil through the poetic-mythic Thus Spoke Zarathustra to the florid autobiography Ecce Homo. This focus on individual works, their internal unity, and the way issues are handled within them, is an important complement to the final three groups of papers, which divide up Nietzsche's philosophical thought topically. The papers in Part 4 treat issues in Nietzsche's value theory, ranging from his metaethical views as to what values are, to his own values of freedom and the overman, to his insistence on 'order of rank', and his social-political views. The fifth group of papers treat Nietzsche's epistemology and metaphysics, including such well-known ideas as his perspectivism, his promotion of becoming over being, and his thought of eternal recurrence. Finally, Part 6 treats another famous idea—the will to power—as well as two linked ideas that he uses will to power to explain, the drives, and life. This Handbook will be a key resource for all scholars and advanced students who work on Nietzsche.