Offering a new approach to the intersection of literature and philosophy, Modernist Idealism contends that certain models of idealist thought require artistic form for their full development and that modernism realizes philosophical idealism in aesthetic form. This comparative view of modernism employs tools from intellectual history, literary analysis, and philosophical critique, focusing on the Italian reception of German idealist thought from the mid-1800s to the Second World War. Modernist Idealism intervenes in ongoing debates about the nineteenth- and twentieth-century resurgence of materialism and spiritualism, as well as the relation of decadent, avant-garde, and modernist production. Michael J. Subialka aims to open new discursive space for the philosophical study of modernist literary and visual culture, considering not only philosophical and literary texts but also early cinema. The author’s main contention is that, in various media and with sometimes radically different political and cultural aims, a host of modernist artists and thinkers can be seen as sharing in a project to realize idealist philosophical worldviews in aesthetic form.

Modernist Idealism develops a framework for understanding modernist production as the artistic realization of philosophical concepts elaborated in German idealism.

In this volume Robert Pippin disputes many traditional characterisations of the distinctiveness of modern philosophy.

This book examines the social relevance of philosophy as this problem is posed in the contemporary Modernism-Postmodernism debate. Manuel P. Arriaga critically investigates the two sides of the debate in their various presuppositions and their equally diverse ramifications in fields ranging from political theory, philosophy of religion, and theory of knowledge, among others. Making use of the problematic of social justice as touchstone in threshing out the issue and aided particularly by the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, Arriaga then presents a view of the social relevance of philosophy that incorporates the good points of the opposing camps of the debate. The Modernist-Postmodernist Quarrel on Philosophy and Justice will interest anyone wishing to ask about the social relevance of what philosophers do.

A unique study of four major post-war European films by four key 'auteurs', which argues that these films exemplify film modernism at the peak of its philosophical reflection and aesthetic experimentation.

Stephen Daniel presents a study of the philosophy of George Berkeley in the intellectual context of his times, with a particular focus on how, for Berkeley, mind is related to its ideas. Daniel does not assume that thinkers like Descartes, Malebranche, or Locke define for Berkeley the context in which he develops his own thought. Instead, he indicates how Berkeley draws on a tradition that informed his early training and that challenges much of the early modern thought with which he is often associated. Specifically, this book indicates how Berkeley's distinctive treatment of mind (as the activity whereby objects are differentiated and related to one another) highlights how mind neither precedes the existence of objects nor exists independently of them. This distinctive way of understanding the relation of mind and objects allows Berkeley to appropriate ideas from his contemporaries in ways that transform the issues with which he is engaged. The resulting insights—for example, about how God creates the minds that perceive objects—are only now starting to be fully appreciated.

In this now classic textbook, Richard Kearney surveys the work of nineteen of this century’s most influential European thinkers. The second edition has a new chapter devoted to Julia Kristeva, whose work in the fields of semiotics and psychoanalytic theory has made a significant contribution to recent continental thought.