In recent years, it has become widely accepted that linguistic questions were much more central to the philosophical tradition of German idealism than had been previously thought. However, most of the key texts for this discussion remain largely unknown. The present work makes available, for the first time in English, what is the seminal work for this issue: Johann Gottlieb Fichte's monograph of 1795 entitled On the Linguistic Capacity and the Origin of Language, together with other closely related essays. The (...) translations are accompanied by a detailed interpretive essay that seeks to place these materials in their historical context, relate them to the systematic concerns of German idealism, and evaluate them in relation to later approaches to language, especially those of semiotics and poststructuralism. It also explores the role played by the linguistic thought of the German idealists in the emergance of modern "scientific linguistics" with wilhelm von Humboldt, as well as its connections with the origins of German romanticism. While the book draws upon state-of-the-art scholarship in these areas, it is written in such a way as to be accessible to any serious student of philosophy, intellectual and literary history, and linguistics. (shrink)

Written by philosopher Jere Surber, Culture and Critique familiarizes students with both the broad and specialized meanings of cultural studies, providing detailed explanations of theoretical terms, critical strategies, and discursive traditions upon which it is based. In its broad and more theoretical sense, cultural studies indicates a range of modern discourses which, beyond disciplines and their particular theories, employ the notion of culture in a distinctive way and specify certain critical practices as appropriate for analyzing given cultural activities, products, and (...) institutions. In its narrower sense, cultural studies is a recently developed type of discourse, first appearing in several British universities in the 1950s, which, while eclectically drawing on certain theoretical aspects of earlier forms of critical cultural discourse, orients itself toward the analysis and practical critique of concrete contemporary cultural distinctions based on economic and political inequities.A useful reference for reading works in cultural studies, Culture and Critique puts unfamiliar terms and ideas into historical perspective and explains how the founding texts of the discipline first appeared. (shrink)

This collection, essentially a Festschrift presented to Paul Weiss on his eighty-fifth birthday, consists of fourteen contributions, primarily by his former students and colleagues past and present, together with an introduction by the editor that provides a helpful historical survey of Weiss's philosophical development. About half of the material seems to have been written specifically for this volume, the rest having either appeared elsewhere or having been presented at a symposium on the philosophy of Paul Weiss held in 1981. The (...) contributions are organized into five sections: Weissian method, the relation between Weiss's work and the sciences, issues concerning the relation between metaphysics and ethics, four essays exploring Weiss's contributions to such areas as sports and architecture, and three final pieces intended perhaps to convey something of a sense of "Weiss in process." The editor also provides a chronological bibliography of Weiss's publications. (shrink)

The Editor begins his Introduction to this volume by suggesting that any scholarly study of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature that hopes to be taken seriously must confront some formidable obstacles. Expanding his discussion just a bit, I would say that there are at least three. First, thanks to a long tradition of vocal, though often uninformed, anti-Hegelian diatribe, especially in the English-speaking world, on the part of thinkers as diverse as Russell, Popper, and Whitehead, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature has been (...) summarily dismissed on the simple grounds that he was not only ignorant of even the most basic findings and procedures of the empirical sciences of his day, but claimed to have logically “deduced” certain empirical facts and laws that were demonstrably false. Second, with the notable exception of Whitehead, most twentieth century thinkers, even if not explicitly anti-Hegelian, have tended to regard the traditional philosophical “discipline” of a Philosophy of Nature as a quaint relic of a metaphysically befuddled and happily bygone era, displaced without remainder by the logical and methodological investigations that make up the modern Philosophy of Science. Third, the dominant tradition of sympathetic scholarship on Hegel has played into the hands of the opposing party by all too often offering them a version of Hegel and his immediate predecessors as metaphysical Idealists who must, on principle, rule out of court anything which the empirical sciences might have to contribute to their philosophical projects. All the essays in this collection attempt to challenge one or more of these prejudices, thus collectively making the counter-case that Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature still has much to teach us if read in a sufficiently informed yet open-minded manner. The case is a persuasive one as it stands, although I will later suggest some additional considerations that are largely lacking in this volume. (shrink)

Given the current interest in Hegel in the English-speaking world and the prevailing philosophical concern with language which forms a large part of its intellectual background, a work dealing with the topic of language in Hegel’s thought seems especially useful and appropriate. Just as the recent turn to Hegel on the part of some philosophers might be partially explained by an impatience with the self-imposed limits of “ordinary language philosophy” on the one hand, and an awareness of the problems which (...) have led to the disintegration of the “phenomenological movement” on the other, one might expect that Hegel’s reflections upon language would provide many with a fruitful basis for a renewed approach to those problems with which both of these traditions have been preoccupied. Professor Cook’s book is a solid step in this direction. (shrink)