This collection features original essays that examine Walter Benjamin¿s and Theodor Adorno¿s essays and correspondence on literature. Taken together, the essays present the view that these two monumental figures of 20th-century philosophy were not simply philosophers who wrote about literature, but that they developed their philosophies in and through their encounters with literature. Benjamin, Adorno, and the Experience of Literature is divided into three thematic sections. The first section contains essays that directly demonstrate the ways in which literature (...) enriched the thinking of Benjamin and Adorno. It explores themes that are recognized to be central to their thinking¿mimesis, the critique of historical progress, and the loss and recovery of experience¿through their readings of literary authors such as Baudelaire, Beckett, and Proust. The second section continues the trajectory of the first by bringing together four essays on Benjamin¿s and Adorno¿s reading of Kafka, whose work helped them develop a distinctive critique of and response to capitalism. The third and final section focuses more intently on the question of what it means to gain authentically critical insight into a literary work. The essays examine Benjamin¿s response to specific figures, including Georg B¿chner, Robert Walser, and Julien Green, whose work he sees as neglected, undigested, or misunderstood. This book offers a unique examination of two pivotal 20th-century philosophers through the lens of their shared experiences with literature. It will appeal to a wide range of scholars across philosophy, literature, and German studies. (shrink)

This book illustrates the extent to which Kant's work has permeated wide areas of learning, across many disciplines, despite a general ignorance, especially in...

George MacDonald Ross; Philosophy in Schools, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 22, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 207–219, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467.

George MacDonald Ross; Philosophy in Schools, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 22, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 207–219, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467.

My general theme is the extent to which philosophers and others must be taken literally when they have written about angels, or anything else which is no longer generally believed in. However, since the title may perhaps have aroused expectations of angels dancing on points of needles, I shall take as my point of departure the question of whether or not the scholastics ever discussed how many angels could dance on the point of a needle. The answer would in fact (...) seem to be in the negative, the closest parallel being found in the anonymous fourteenth-century mystical treatise Swester Katrei , which refers to a thousand souls in heaven sitting on the point of a needle. (shrink)

George MacDonald Ross; Philosophy in Schools: a reply to Jonathan & Blake, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 22, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 229–23.

This book illustrates the extent to which Kant's work has permeated wide areas of learing, across many disciplines, despite a general ignorance, especially in England, of the details of his highly technical philosophy. Consisting of nine major contributions to the Leeds Kant Conference in April 1990, Kant and his Influence shows how Kant's thought has had a marked effect on philosophers, both Continental and Analytic, social and art historians, theologians and Church leaders.

This chapter contains sections titled: Descartes Malebranche.

This chapter contains sections titled: Spinoza Leibniz.