A Rose Armed with Thorns: Spinoza’s Philosophy Under a Novel Lens

A Rose Armed with Thorns: Spinoza’s Philosophy Under a Novel Lens
Author: Amihud Gilead
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2020-08-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030548104

This book presents a systemic analysis of Spinoza’s philosophy and challenges the traditional views. It deals with Spinoza’s concepts of substance, truth conditions, attributes, and the first, second, and supreme grades of knowledge. Based upon an analysis of the relevant details in all of Spinoza’s philosophical works, the book reveals many important points, including the following: Spinoza’s system is not, nor is meant to be, a foundational-deductive system but was meant to be a coherent system of a network model. Spinoza’s reality is not made in the image of a mathematical model. Imaginatio, the first grade of knowledge, and ratio, the second grade, are parts or properties of the supreme grade of knowledge, scientia intuitiva, which is their essence. Finite beings, especially humans, are necessary and eternal (unless they are mistakenly perceived by imaginatio) whereas time, place, and death are simply “entities of imagination.” The salvation, happiness, and blessedness that Spinoza’s Ethics offers us, are active and depend only upon us. Concluding a careful examination and interpretation, the book suggests additional novel viewpoints in interpreting Spinoza’s philosophical psychology and political philosophy.

Restless Reason and Other Variations on Kantian Themes

Restless Reason and Other Variations on Kantian Themes
Author: Amihud Gilead
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2021-11-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030841979

This book, combining integratively-revised previously-published papers with entirely new chapters, challenges and treats some major problems in Kant’s philosophy not by means of new interpretations but by suggesting some variations on Kantian themes. Such variations are, in fact, reconstructions made according to Kantian ideas and principles and yet cannot be extracted as such directly from his writings. The book also analyses Kant's philosophy from a new metaphysical angle, based on the original metaphysics of the author, called panenmentalism. It reconstructs some missing links in Kant's philosophy, such as the idea of teleological time, which is vital for Kant's moral theory. Although these variations cannot be found literally in Kant’s works, they can be legitimately explicated, developed, and implied from them. Such is the case because these variations are strictly compatible with the details of the texts and the texts as wholes, and because they are systematically integrated. Their coherence supports their validation. The target audiences are graduate and PhD students as well as specialist researchers of Kant's philosophy.

The Sense of Beauty

The Sense of Beauty
Author: George Santayana
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2002-01-01
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 9781412838900

The author of the introduction to this new edition, John McCormick, reminds us that The Sense of Beauty is the first work in aesthetics written in the United States. Santayana was versed in the history of his subject, from Plato and Aristotle to Schopenhauer and Taine in the nineteenth century. Santayana took as his task a complete rethinking of the idea that beauty is embedded in objects. Rather, beauty is an emotion, a value, and a sense of the good. In this aesthetics was unlike ethics: not a correction of evil or pursuit of the virtuous. Rather it is a pleasure that residues in the sense of self. The work is divided into chapters on the materials of beauty, form, and expression. A good many of Santayana's later works are presaged by this early effort. And this volume also anticipates the development of art as a movement as well as a value apart from other aspects of life.

The Logic of Expression

The Logic of Expression
Author: Simon Duffy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1351886428

Engaging with the challenging and controversial reading of Spinoza presented by Gilles Deleuze in Expressionism in Philosophy (1968), this book focuses on Deleuze's redeployment of Spinozist concepts within the context of his own philosophical project of constructing a philosophy of difference as an alternative to the Hegelian dialectical philosophy. Duffy demonstrates that a thorough understanding of Deleuze's Spinozism is necessary in order to fully engage with Deleuze's philosophy of difference.

Political Philosophy

Political Philosophy
Author: Steven Cahn
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 1020
Release: 2022
Genre: Political science
ISBN: 9780197609170

Political Philosophy: The Essential Texts is ideal for survey courses in political philosophy. Offering unprecedented coverage from antiquity to the present, this historically organized collection presents the most significant works from nearly 2,500 years of political philosophy. The readings are substantial or complete texts, not fragments. An especially valuable feature of this volume is that the works of each author are introduced with an engaging essay by a leading contemporary authority.

The Phantom Image

The Phantom Image
Author: Patrick R. Crowley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2019-12-10
Genre: Art
ISBN: 022664829X

Drawing from a rich corpus of art works, including sarcophagi, tomb paintings, and floor mosaics, Patrick R. Crowley investigates how something as insubstantial as a ghost could be made visible through the material grit of stone and paint. In this fresh and wide-ranging study, he uses the figure of the ghost to offer a new understanding of the status of the image in Roman art and visual culture. Tracing the shifting practices and debates in antiquity about the nature of vision and representation, Crowley shows how images of ghosts make visible structures of beholding and strategies of depiction. Yet the figure of the ghost simultaneously contributes to a broader conceptual history that accounts for how modalities of belief emerged and developed in antiquity. Neither illustrations of ancient beliefs in ghosts nor depictions of afterlife, these images show us something about the visual event of seeing itself. The Phantom Image offers essential insight into ancient art, visual culture, and the history of the image.

The Metaphysics Of The Love Of The Sexes

The Metaphysics Of The Love Of The Sexes
Author: Arthur Schopenhauer
Publisher: FV Éditions
Total Pages: 44
Release: 2013-09-28
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 236668665X

Is Love an Illusion ? What is the relationship between Love and Sexual Impulse ? Schopenhauer gives us a new way of thinking about relationships between men and women.

The Letters of George Santayana

The Letters of George Santayana
Author: George Santayana
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 668
Release: 2001
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780262194662

The second of eight books of the correspondence of George Santayana.

Hegel's Undiscovered Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis Dialectics

Hegel's Undiscovered Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis Dialectics
Author: Leonard F. Wheat
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2012-12-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1616146435

For over fifty years, Hegel interpreters have rejected the former belief that Hegel used thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectics. In this incisive analysis of Hegel's philosophy, Leonard F. Wheat shows that the modern interpretation is false. Wheat rigorously demonstrates that there are in fact thirty-eight well-concealed dialectics in Hegel's two most important works--twenty-eight in Phenomenology of Spirit and ten in The Philosophy of History. Wheat also develops other major new insights: • Hegel's chief dialectical format consists of a two-concept thesis, a two-concept antithesis, and a two-concept synthesis that borrows one concept from the thesis and one from the antithesis. • All dialectics are analogically based on the Christian separation-and-return myth: the dialectic separates from and returns to a thesis concept. • Hegel's enigmatic Spirit is a four-faceted, deliberately fictitious, nonsupernatural entity that exists only as an atheistic redefinition of "God." • Spirit's "divine life" begins not with consciousness but with unconsciousness, in the prehuman state of nature-before Spirit acquires its human mind. • Hegel's concept of freedom is not a sociopolitical concept but release from bondage to religious superstition (belief in a supernatural God). • In Hegel's widely misinterpreted master-and-slave parable, the master is God, the slave is man, and the slave's gaining his freedom is man's becoming an atheist. • The standard non-Hegelian base-superstructure interpretation of Marx's dialectics is false. Marx's basic dialectic is actually this: thesis = communal ownership poverty, antithesis = private ownership wealth, synthesis = communal ownership wealth. Wheat also shows that Marx and Tillich, who subtly used Hegelian dialectics in their own works, are the only authors who have understood Hegelian dialectics. Thoroughly researched and exhaustive in detail, this radical reinterpretation of Hegel's philosophy should greatly interest Hegel scholars and students.