"First published by Oxford University Press, 1916."--Title page verso.

The famous story of the choice of Hercules became one frequently depicted in Western art and, as Ernst Panofsky showed, the various treatments of this theme demonstrate the significance of cultural continuity through the centuries. At the same time, the motif of Hercules and his choice presents us with a challenge to current theoretical approaches to culture. We can either take the easy path and accept the current hermeneutic orthodoxies of popular cultural studies, or we can choose a harder but, (...) ultimately, more rewarding path: the philosophy of culture articulated by Ernst Cassirer. This volume brings together a collection of papers which reflects the broad sweep, both historical and theoretical, of Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms. They range from language-theory to myth and religion; and all are set, with varying degrees of emphasis, in a comparative context. (shrink)

This article reconstructs Nietzsche's shifting views on democracy in the period 1870–86 with reference to his enduring preoccupation with tyrannical concentrations of power and the conviction that radical pluralism offers the only effective form of resistance. As long as he identifies democracy with pluralism , he sympathizes with it as a site of resistance and emancipation. From around 1880 on, however, Nietzsche increasingly links it with tyranny, in the form of popular sovereignty, and with the promotion of uniformity, to the (...) exclusion of genuine pluralism. Democracy's emancipatory claims are reinterpreted as "misarchism," or hatred of authority, and Nietzsche looks to the "exceptional beings" excluded by democracy for sources of resistance to the "autonomous herd" and "mob rule." Against elitist readings of this move, it is argued that Nietzsche opposes the domination of the herd type under democracy from a standpoint in human diversity and a generic concern with the future of humankind. Exceptional individuals are conceived in pluralistic, agonal terms, as a community of legislators engaged in a process of transvaluation that serves the interests not of one or a few but of all of us: "the self-overcoming of the human.". (shrink)

First published in 1938. The aim of this book is to expound Kant’s _Critique of Judgement _by interpreting all the details in the light of what Kant himself declares to be his fundamental problem. _A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Judgement _provides an excellent introduction to Kant’s third critique, and will be of interest to students of philosophy.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This paper examines Nietzsche's attitude to the empirical by concentrating on his concept of Empfindung (sensation, perception, feeling). In Section 1, five distinctive features of his use of 'Empfindung' are described in relation to the philosophical tradition and some of his sources in 19 th Century physiology. All five features, I argue, point to Nietzsche's philosophical concern to stake out the limits of 'Empfindung' as an aspect of human finitude. In Section 2, my attention turns from the term 'Empfindung' to (...) Nietzsche's actual argumentation. The bewildering variety of perspectives and arguments concerning 'Empfindung' in his writings are broken down into three basic types of argument or discourse with radically different, incompatible presuppositions: a critical, epistemological discourse serving anti-metaphysical ends; a quasiscientific discourse serving critical-epistemological ends; and a quasi-ontological discourse of life that looks to explain the results of Nietzsche's critical epistemology. The value of this 'contradictory' practice, I contend, is twofold: Nietzsche makes epistemology fruitful for the philosophical problem of life; at the same time he offers a performative critique of epistemology by the manner in which he exceeds it. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 25(2) 2006: 146-158. (shrink)

British accounts of medical ethics concentrate on confidentiality to the exclusion of wider questions of privacy. This paper argues for consideration of privacy within medical ethics, and illustrates through the television series `Hospital', what may go awry when this wider concept is forgotten.

There is preserved in Suidas' Lexicon a story about Polycrates of Samos and the island of Delos. It is offered by the lexicographer as an explanation of the phrase τατ σοι κα πύθια κα δλια , when used in a colloquial sense to mean ‘it's all the same to you’. Polycrates had instituted a festival on Delos and asked the Pythia whether to call it by the one name or the other. The phrase, which was supposed to have been the (...) Pythia's reply, was taken to mean that it was all the same to Polycrates whatever he called it, and the death of Polycrates, coming soon after, was interpreted as the fulfilment of the prophecy. Suidas cites Epicurus and Menander for the phrase itself, which was therefore in familiar use by the end of the fourth century B.C. As for the story about Polycrates, it is quite likely that Suidas' ultimate source was some writer of about that period, such as Demon, περ παροιμιν. It is very much in the manner of his fragments. (shrink)