This book focuses on Hegel's philosophy of spirit, his major concept and the core of his mature system. It does not so much define Geist as it does illustrate its many forms and manifestations.

(2000). ‘Nothing is, but what is not’: Utopias as practical political philosophy. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 3, The Philosophy of Utopia, pp. 9-24.

From Thursday to Saturday, October 4 to 6, 1984, at Russell Sage College in Albany, New York, upwards of 75 members of the Society and friends of Hegel attended the meeting which was devoted to Hegel’s philosophy of spirit, or to the substance and topics presented in their mature form in Part III of the Encyclopedia.

The Dispossessed has been described by political thinker Andre Gorz as 'The most striking description I know of the seductions—and snares—of self-managed communist or, in other words, anarchist society.' To date, however, the radical social, cultural, and political ramifications of Le Guin's multiple award-winning novel remain woefully under explored. Editors Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman right this state of affairs in the first ever collection of original essays devoted to Le Guin's novel. Among the topics covered in this (...) wide-ranging, international and interdisciplinary collection are the anarchist, ecological, post-consumerist, temporal, revolutionary, and open-ended utopian politics of The Dispossessed. The book concludes with an essay by Le Guin written specially for this volume, in which she reassesses the novel in light of the development of her own thinking over the past 30 years. (shrink)

Thomas McCarthy, the general editor of the series of “Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought,” and Richard Dien Winfield, the translator and introducer of this volume, deserve signal praise for making Joachim Ritter’s essays on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right available in a fine and accurate English translation. Despite the book’s narrow title, these essays address in cogent and far-reaching ways major issues in Hegel’s political philosophy and in modernity generally.

Leo Rauch has written an intelligent, humane, and readable set of studies of six major political philosophers from Machiavelli to Marx. His book is of particular interest to members of the Hegel Society for two reasons. The immediately apparent reason is the sixty-page chapter on Hegel. In this chapter, Rauch does not arrive at any striking or novel interpretation nor produce any sustained confrontation with the scholarly works on Hegel. Not does he intend to. His aim, rather, is to provide (...) an interpretive exegesis of politically important portions of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right. So he undertakes discussions of, for instance, alienation, the struggle for self-hood and identity, the problematic status of individual, labor, and the relations of individual to state and civil society to state. The presentation is lucid; the assertions and arguments are sound and comprehensible. Undergraduates at all levels will be able to make sense of Rauch’s text and hence of Hegel; and advanced students will appreciate Rauch’s breadth, learning, felicity of phrase, and balanced insight. (shrink)

Harris finds the spirit of Hegel in his systematic thinking unified by dialectical logic, his uncompromising realism, and his powerful responses to the dilemmas of modernity in his time and ours. Writing from a lifetime of knowledge and obvious erudition about the history of philosophy, recurring central questions of philosophy, and modern science over the past few centuries, Harris seeks to revive interest in Hegel's philosophical thought and to indicate its relevance to the present.

In Will and Political Legitimacy, Patrick Riley explores the related nexus of some core modern political concepts - will, legitimacy, consent, and social contract - in five major philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, devoting a chapter to each. He introduces the book with a chapter discussing how coherent the social contract tradition is, and concludes with some reflections on the five philosophers and their relation to contemporary political thought. Riley presents his reader with interpretations based on wide reading, (...) sympathetic understanding, and an elegant and discursive approach that raises multiple questions about and uncovers many dimensions of the philosophical theories and issues that he discusses. (shrink)

In Will and Political Legitimacy, Patrick Riley explores the related nexus of some core modern political concepts - will, legitimacy, consent, and social contract - in five major philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, devoting a chapter to each. He introduces the book with a chapter discussing how coherent the social contract tradition is, and concludes with some reflections on the five philosophers and their relation to contemporary political thought. Riley presents his reader with interpretations based on wide reading, (...) sympathetic understanding, and an elegant and discursive approach that raises multiple questions about and uncovers many dimensions of the philosophical theories and issues that he discusses. (shrink)

This is a study of how self-transformation may occur through the practice of reframing one's personal experience in terms of a canonical language: that is, a system of symbols that purports to explain something about human beings and the universe they live in. The Christian conversion narrative is used as the primary example here, but the approach used in this book also illuminates other practices such as psychotherapy in which people deal with emotional conflict through language.

Diese Wirtschaft totet! besonders dieser Satz von Papst Franziskus hat beachtliche Aufmerksamkeit gefunden. Aber: Welche Wirtschaft totet? Und welche fordert Leben? Dieser Band stellt wirtschaftswissenschaftliche, ethische und theologische Ansatze vor, die Verengungen in gegenwartigen Theorien uberwinden: Welche Bedeutung haben offentlicher Guter? Wie lassen sich soziale und okologische Dimensionen in die Wirtschaftstheorie integrieren? Wie sollte eine Finanzwirtschaft aussehen, die der Realwirtschaft dient? Was ist die Verantwortung des Konsumenten? Diese und weitere Grundfragen, die in den wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Mainstream-Theorien zu kurz kommen, erinnern die (...) Wirtschaft daran, dem Leben dienen zu mussen. (shrink)

This book provides the Latin text and its annotated English translation of the question-commentary of John Buridan (ca. 1300-1360) on Aristotle’s “On the Soul”. Buridan was the most influential Parisian nominalist philosopher of his time. His work speaks across centuries to our modern concerns in the philosophy of mind. This volume completes the project of a volume published earlier in the same series: “Questions on the Soul by John Buridan and Others”. An appealing book for scholars of Aristotle and those (...) who are in the field of Medieval philosophy. (shrink)

A sceptical response to the idea that wisdom may be turned into a new academic subject or science, and to the idea that to do so would be in any way be wise. .

We survey the theory of Mucnik and Medvedev degrees of subsets of $^{\omega}{\omega}$with particular attention to the degrees of $\Pi_{1}^{0}$ subsets of $^{\omega}2$. Sections 1-6 present the major definitions and results in a uniform notation. Sections 7-6 present proofs, some more complete than others, of the major results of the subject together with much of the required background material.

The basis of the Periodic Table is discussed. Electronic configuration recurs in only 21 out of the 32 groups. A better basis is derived by considering the highest classical valency (v) exhibited by an element and a new measure, the highest valency in carbonyl compounds (v*). This leads to a table based on the number of outer electrons possessed by an atom (N) and the number of electrons required for it to achieve an inert (noble) gas configuration (N*). Periodicity of (...) these is nearly complete. The new basis helps to settle the question of the best form of table and related issues. (shrink)

In recent years, observational techniques at cosmological distances have been sufficiently improved that cosmology has become an empirical science, rather than a field for unchecked speculation. There remains the fact that its object, the whole universe, exists only once; hence, we are unable to separate “general” features from particular aspects of “our” universe. This might not be a serious drawback if we were justified in the belief that presently accepted laws of nature remain valid on the cosmological scale. In the (...) author's opinion, however, there are grounds for doubting that belief. The three arguments presented are (1) the possibility that apparent constants of nature may, during cosmological times, turn out to vary (Dirac conjecture); (2) the effective breakdown of the principle of relativity caused by the effects of the cosmological environment on local experiments; and (3) the fact that present theory leads to field singularities at the early stages of the expanding universe, which might be a signal that currently accepted theoretical concepts are inadequate for an understanding of highly condensed matter. (shrink)

Thirty-two years ago W. V. Quine proposed a definition of 'logical truth' that has been widely repeated and reprinted. Quine himself seems to have recognized that this definition is wrong in detail; in section 1 we eliminate this fault. What has perhaps been less widely observed is that, in abandoning the model-theoretic account of logical truth in favor of a "substitutional" account, Quine's definition swells the ranks of the logical truths and makes the classification of a sentence as a logical (...) truth dependent both on the interpretation of its extralogical words and on the extralogical vocabulary available in the language. (shrink)