The expulsion from Spain did not only result in the destruction and dispersion of Spanish Jewry but led to a crisis in Jewish faith. Don Isaac Abravanel provided a systematic treatment of the main philosophical and theological beliefs of Judaism in an attempt to resolve the inner doubts of his co-religionists. In their Italian exile his son Judah too recognized that Jews were now living in a new cultural world, but he forged a different road for Jews to pursue in their entry into the culture of the Renaissance. This book presents a picture of one family facing the challenges of a new era in Jewish history.

The expulsion from Spain did not only result in the destruction and dispersion of Spanish Jewry but led to a crisis in Jewish faith. Don Isaac Abravanel provided a systematic treatment of the main philosophical and theological beliefs of Judaism in an attempt to resolve the inner doubts of his co-religionists. In their Italian exile his son Judah too recognized that Jews were now living in a new cultural world, but he forged a different road for Jews to pursue in their entry into the culture of the Renaissance. This book presents a picture of one family facing the challenges of a new era in Jewish history.

This book punctuates the moments of crisis in continental thought from the foundational crisis of reason in Husserl’s call for a rigorous science of phenomenology to the current crisis of postmodernism and its rejection of Husserl’s metanarrative of history and rationality. The mediating links between these moments is the centrality of the epochal history of Being, the power of cultural and disciplinary practices, and the dispersal of meaning in the post-Husserlian and post-subjective philosophies of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and others. Included here are the thoughts of leading scholars who critically discuss Husserl’s analysis of the crisis of Western thought and the importance of the concepts of “world” in Husserl’s early writings. The authors analyze the deprivileging of philosophy as social critique through the text of Husserl, Habermas, Foucault, and recent feminist theory. They examine the end of the epistemological and morally autonomous subject in continental thought. Together, these thoughts articulate multiple points or moments of crisis without cure or end.

Philosophy and politics make uneasy bedfellows. Nowhere has this been more true than in Nazi Germany, where the pursuit of truth and the will to power became fatally entangled. Though Martin Heidegger's Nazi past is well known and much debated, less is understood about the role of philosophy - and other philosophers - in the rise and development of National Socialism.

Philosophical wisdom and practical advice for overcoming the problems of middle age How can you reconcile yourself with the lives you will never lead, with possibilities foreclosed, and with nostalgia for lost youth? How can you accept the failings of the past, the sense of futility in the tasks that consume the present, and the prospect of death that blights the future? In this self-help book with a difference, Kieran Setiya confronts the inevitable challenges of adulthood and middle age, showing how philosophy can help you thrive. You will learn why missing out might be a good thing, how options are overrated, and when you should be glad you made a mistake. You will be introduced to philosophical consolations for mortality. And you will learn what it would mean to live in the present, how it could solve your midlife crisis, and why meditation helps. Ranging from Aristotle, Schopenhauer, and John Stuart Mill to Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as drawing on Setiya’s own experience, Midlife combines imaginative ideas, surprising insights, and practical advice. Writing with wisdom and wit, Setiya makes a wry but passionate case for philosophy as a guide to life.

Avner Baz offers a critique of leading work in mainstream analytic philosophy, and in particular challenges assumptions underlying recent debates concerning philosophical method. In the first part of The Crisis of Method, Baz identifies fundamental confusions about what the widely-employed philosophical "method of cases" is supposed to accomplish, and how. He then argues that the method, as commonly employed by both "armchair" and "experimental" philosophers, is underwritten by substantive, and poorly supported, "representationalist" assumptions about languageassumptions to which virtually all of the participants in the recent debates over philosophical method have shown themselves committed. In the second part of the book, Baz challenges those assumptions, both philosophically and empirically. Drawing on Austin, Wittgenstein, and Merleau-Ponty, as well as on empirical studies of first language acquisition, he presents and motivates a broadly pragmatist conception of language on which the method of cases as commonly practiced is fundamentally misguidedmore misguided than even its staunchest critics have hitherto recognized.