The Complete Works In Philosophy Politics And Morals Now First Collected And Arr With Memoirs Of His Early Life Volume 3

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"Fénelon may be the most neglected of all the major early modern philosophers. His political masterwork was the most-read book in eighteenth-century France after the Bible, yet today even specialists rarely engage his work directly. This problem is particularly acute in the Anglophone world, for while Fénelon's works have been published in several excellent modern French editions, only the smallest fraction of his vast and influential corpus has appeared in modern English translation. This volume aims to help remedy this by bringing to English-language audiences the first collection of his moral and political writings in translation. By so doing it hopes to make more widely available the riches of one of the leading voices of resistance to the absolutism of Louis XIV. Fénelon's political thought will thus be of particular interest to students and scholars of French history, as well as to those today engaged in questions of political resistance and reform. But Fénelon's reach also extends to fields well beyond politics and ethics. In the Enlightenment, Fénelon came to be celebrated not only as a humanitarian political reformer but also as a pioneering theorist of education, a prescient student of economics and international relations, and a key voice in contemporary philosophical debates-not to mention his fame as one of the seventeenth-century's most preeminent theologians and spiritualists and masters of French prose. As such, his work will be of interest to students and scholars in fields ranging from philosophy and political science to economics, education, literature, French history, and religion"--

A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

Celebrated today for his groundbreaking work in logic and the foundations of mathematics, Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848) was best known in his own time as a leader of the reform movement in his homeland (Bohemia, then part of the Austrian Empire). As professor of religious science at the Charles University in Prague from 1805 to 1819, Bolzano was a highly visible public intellectual, a courageous and determined critic of abuses in Church and State. Based in large part on a carefully argued utilitarian practical philosophy, he developed a non-violent program for the reform of the authoritarian institutions of the Empire, which he himself set in motion through his teaching and other activities. Rarely has a philosopher had such a great impact on the political culture of his homeland. This volume contains a substantial collection of Bolzano's writings on ethics and politics, translated into English for the first time. It includes a complete translation of the treatise On the Best State, his principal writings on ethics, an essay on the contemporary situation in Ireland, and a selection of his Exhortations, dealing with such topics as enlightenment, civil disobedience, the status of women, anti-Semitism and Czech-German relations in Bohemia. It will be of particular interest to students of central European philosophy and history, and more generally to philosophers and historians of ideas.

First published in German in 1887, The Genealogy of Morals was intended by Nietzsche as a clarification and supplement to his 1882 treatise Beyond Good and Evil. In his last published work, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche described the essays constituting The Genealogy of Morals as “three decisive overtures on the part of a psychologist to a revaluation of all values” and claimed that they were “as regards expression, aspiration, and the art of the unexpected, perhaps the most curious things that have ever been written.” While this self-assessment is probably an overstatement, The Genealogy of Morals is widely acknowledged to be a unique contribution to philosophy in both content and style. The style is intentionally difficult, contrived by turns to embolden, to repel, and to mislead. “In each case,” he wrote, “the beginning is calculated to mystify; it is cool, scientific, even ironical, intentionally thrust to the fore, intentionally reticent. … At the end, in each case, amid fearful thunderclaps, a new truth shines out between thick clouds.” In the first essay, Nietzsche introduces the idea of ressentiment, the source and basis (he contends) of the Christian and Jewish religions and the fundamental psychological mechanism of the associated “slave revolt” in morality, an evaluative inversion performed by the oppressed to compensate for, and to enable themselves to endure, their powerlessness and its attendant frustration. Nietzsche contrasts “noble” values, the central opposition of which is that of “good” and “bad” as applied to human beings themselves, with “slavish” values, the central opposition of which is “good” and “evil” as applied to actions. The vaunting of the latter opposition in Christianity represents, according to Nietzsche, “the great insurrection against the dominion of noble values” common to pagan Rome and ancient Greece. The second essay begins with a discussion of promising and the value of forgetfulness, then traces the origins of guilt and bad conscience to self-directed cruelty, the inward application of a naturally brutal animal instinct that has been prevented from finding outward expression. Nietzsche goes on to supply an analysis of the origin and purpose of punishment in human societies. “Cruelty,” Nietzsche asserts controversially in Ecce Homo, “is here exposed, for the first time, as one of the oldest and most indispensable elements in the foundation of culture.” “Ascetic ideals,” whose “three great pomp words are poverty, humility, and chastity,” are the subject of the third essay, the longest of the work and perhaps its rhetorical high point. Nietzsche here considers the ascetic ideal as instantiated by artists, scholars, and priests, noting differences between the three groups in the ideal’s expression and effects. He asks why ascetic ideals are so powerful, given that they are, as he believes, generally detrimental to human health and well-being, concluding that the ascetic ideal’s power arose from a historical dearth of competing ideals and that “man will wish Nothingness rather than not wish at all.” Contending with the popular perception that a scientific outlook is in principle opposed to religiosity, the latter being the natural home of ascetic ideals, Nietzsche deduces from his analysis of the “will to truth” that the relation of science to ascetic ideals themselves is not at all antagonistic. In fact, “science represents the progressive force in the inner evolution of that ideal”; even further, “valuation of ascetic ideals inevitably entails valuation of science.” Nietzsche also interestingly implicates himself and his own Genealogy in the preservation of ascetic ideals, identifying the bond between such ideals and philosophy itself as very strong. The third essay is notable for having been singled out by Nietzsche as an exercise in exposition of an aphorism. Scholars, notably Christopher Janaway, have disputed whether the aphorism on which the essay is supposedly a commentary is the epigraph from his previous work Thus Spake Zarathustra, or instead the first of the essay’s numbered paragraphs. Nietzsche’s turbulent, haphazardly erudite style has contributed to his mixed reception in philosophy and the broader culture, and to the understanding that he was just as concerned with literary virtuosity as philosophical clarity. Nevertheless, despite the literary complexity of his work, it’s still possible to ask of its content—as Bertrand Russell did in his History of Western Philosophy—“What are we to think of Nietzsche’s doctrines? How far are they true? Are they in any degree useful? Is there in them anything objective, or are they the mere power-fantasies of an invalid?” “There is no escaping Nietzsche,” wrote H. L. Mencken in 1908. “You may hold him a hissing and a mocking and lift your virtuous skirts as you pass him by, but his roar is in your ears and his blasphemies sink into your mind.” Whether its blasphemous sympathies attract or repel us, and whether its analysis ultimately unsettles or only reinforces our initial ethical presuppositions, the Genealogy of Morals remains an essential work in the history of ideas whose moral and political relevance shows little sign of diminishing. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Originally published in 1949, Croce’s essays on political, philosophic and aesthetic subjects, selected from both his earlier and later writings possess a remarkable underlying unity. The political essays which form a major part of this volume display a criticism, either direct or implied of the mass creeds and movements that subordinate the individual to history. They combine a passionate belief in liberty with critical and historical judgment.