Rousseau: A Guide for the Perplexed

Rousseau: A Guide for the Perplexed
Author: Matthew Simpson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 157
Release: 2010-06-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 144115082X

Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to fathom, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the most engaging yet enigmatic philosophers of the eighteenth century. He wrote with a flair and directness unique among great thinkers, yet beneath the surface of his works there is an extraordinarily complex theory of human nature and society. His diverse body of writing often leaves students struggling to find a coherent philosophical outlook. Rousseau: A Guide for the Perplexed is a clear and thorough account of Rousseau's major works and ideas, providing an ideal guide to the complicated thought of this key philosopher. The book covers the whole range of Rousseau's life and work, offering a detailed review of his landmark philosophical texts, including The Social Contract and Emile, together with examination of his influential contribution to the social sciences . The book provides a cogent and reliable survey of the famous paradoxes in his philosophy and shows how they fit together into a coherent and important theory of culture and politics. This book is the ideal companion to the study of this most influential and challenging philosopher.

Habermas: A Guide for the Perplexed

Habermas: A Guide for the Perplexed
Author: Lasse Thomassen
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2010-04-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0826487661

A clear, accessible and authoritative account of Jurgen Habermas's wide-ranging and ambitious philosophical project. >

Hegel: A Guide for the Perplexed

Hegel: A Guide for the Perplexed
Author: David James
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2007-05-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0826485375

An invaluable student's guide to one of the most influential, widely-studied - and notoriously difficult to understand - of major Western philosophers

A History of Modern Political Thought

A History of Modern Political Thought
Author: Gary Browning
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2016-10-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 019150484X

How are we to understand past political thinkers? Is it a matter simply of reading their texts again and again? Do we have to relate past texts of political thought to the contexts in which ideas were composed and in which the aims of past thinkers were formulated? Or should past political theories be deconstructed so as to uncover not what their authors maintain, but what the texts reveal? In this book, theories of interpreting past political thinkers are examined and the interpretive methods of a range of theories are reviewed, including those of Hegel, Marx, Oakeshott, Collingwood, the Cambridge School, Foucault, Derrida and Gadamer. The application of these theories of interpretation to notable modern political theorists, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Bentham, Mill, Nietzsche and Beauvoir is then used as a way of understanding modern political thought and of assessing interpretive theories of past political thought. The result is a book which sees the history of modern political thought as more than a procession of political theories but rather as a reflection on the meaning of past political thought and its interpretation. It provides a way of reading the history of modern political thought, in which the question of interpretation matters both for understanding how we interpret the past but also for considering what it means to undertake political thinking.

An Analysis of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract

An Analysis of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract
Author: James Hill
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351351656

Few people can claim to have had minds as fertile and creative as the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. One of the most influential political theorists of the modern age, he was also a composer and writer of opera, a novelist, and a memoirist whose Confessions ranks as one of the most striking works of autobiography ever written. Like many creative thinkers, Rousseau was someone whose restless mind could not help questioning accepted orthodoxies and looking at matters from novel and innovative angles. His 1762 treatise The Social Contract does exactly that. Examining the nature and sources of legitimate political power, it crafted a closely reasoned and passionately persuasive argument for democracy at a time when the most widely accepted form of government was absolute monarchy, legitimised by religious beliefs about the divine right of kings and queens to rule. In France, the book was banned by worried Catholic censors; in Rousseau’s native Geneva, it was both banned and burned. But history soon pushed Rousseau’s ideas into the mainstream of political theory, with the French and American revolutions paving the way for democratic government to gain ground across the Western world. Though it was precisely what got Rousseau’s book banned at the time, the novel idea that all legitimate government rests on the will of the people is now recognised as the core principle of democratic freedom and represents, for many people, the highest of ideals.

Rousseau's Social Contract

Rousseau's Social Contract
Author: David Lay Williams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2014-01-13
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1107511607

If the greatness of a philosophical work can be measured by the volume and vehemence of the public response, there is little question that Rousseau's Social Contract stands out as a masterpiece. Within a week of its publication in 1762 it was banished from France. Soon thereafter, Rousseau fled to Geneva, where he saw the book burned in public. At the same time, many of his contemporaries, such as Kant, considered Rousseau to be 'the Newton of the moral world', as he was the first philosopher to draw attention to the basic dignity of human nature. The Social Contract has never ceased to be read and debated in the 250 years since its publication. Rousseau's Social Contract: An Introduction offers a thorough and systematic tour of this notoriously paradoxical and challenging text. David Lay Williams offers readers a chapter-by-chapter reading of the Social Contract, squarely confronting these interpretive obstacles. The book also features a special extended appendix dedicated to outlining Rousseau's famous conception of the general will, which has been the object of controversy since the Social Contract's publication in 1762.

Starting with Rousseau

Starting with Rousseau
Author: James Delaney
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2009-08-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1847062784

A new introduction to Rousseau, guiding the student through the key concepts of his work by examining the overall development of his ideas.

Socrates: A Guide for the Perplexed

Socrates: A Guide for the Perplexed
Author: Sara Ahbel-Rappe
Publisher: Continuum
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2009-08-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN:

An introduction to Socrates, ideal for undergraduate students taking courses in Ancient and Greek Philosophy.

Arendt: A Guide for the Perplexed

Arendt: A Guide for the Perplexed
Author: Karin A. Fry
Publisher: Continuum
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2009-06-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN:

The author examines the most important theories of Hannah Arendt's work, as well as the main controversies surrounding it.

Philosophic Classics: From Plato to Derrida

Philosophic Classics: From Plato to Derrida
Author: Forrest Baird
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 1590
Release: 2023-09-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1351764519

Philosophic Classics: From Plato to Derrida includes essential writings of the most important philosophers from almost two millennia of Western philosophy. In updating this Seventh Edition, editor Forrest E. Baird has continued to follow the same criteria established by the late-Walter Kaufmann when the Philosophic Classics series was first established: (1) to use complete works or, where more appropriate, complete sections of works (2) in clear translations (3) of texts central to each thinker’s philosophy or widely accepted as part of the "canon." To make the works more accessible to students, most footnotes treating textual matters (variant readings, etc.) have been omitted and important words from antiquity have been transliterated and put in angle brackets. In addition, each thinker is introduced by a brief essay composed of three sections: (1) biographical (a glimpse of the life), (2) philosophical (a résumé of the philosopher’s thought), and (3) bibliographical (suggestions for further reading). A timeline places important philosophers alongside other important thinkers, world leaders, and major global events. Photos and paintings with explanatory captions illuminate the ideas, debates, and places discussed in the text. New to the Seventh Edition: New translations: Plato, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo; Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics; Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus and Principal Doctrines; Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy; Anselm, Proslogion; Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man; René Descartes, Correspondence with Princess Elizabeth; Gottfried Leibniz, Monadology; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract; Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics and Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals Additional material: Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus (in part); Francis Bacon, Aphorisms (selections from Novum Organum); Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach; A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (in part) Updated, annotated bibliographies with each bibliography now broken into two sections, one for beginning and another for advanced students.