A first in English, this book engages with the ways in which Hegel and Sartre answer the difficult questions: What is it to be human? What place do we have in the world? How should we live? What can we be?

The new edition of this celebrated anthology surveys the Western philosophical tradition from its origins in ancient Greece to the work of today’s leading philosophers Western Philosophy: An Anthology provides an authoritative guided tour through the great tradition of Western philosophical thought. The seminal writings of the great philosophers along with more recent readings of contemporary interest are explored in 144 substantial and carefully chosen extracts, each preceded by a lucid introduction, guiding readers through the history of a diverse range of key arguments, and explaining how important theories fit into the unfolding story of Western philosophical inquiry. Broad in scope, the anthology covers all the main branches of philosophy: theory of knowledge and metaphysics, logic and language, philosophy of mind, the self and freedom, religion and science, moral philosophy, political theory, aesthetics, and the meaning of life, all in self-contained parts which can be worked on by students and instructors independently. The third edition of the Anthology contains newly incorporated classic texts from thinkers such as Aquinas, Machiavelli, Descartes, William James, and Wittgenstein. Each of the 144 individual extracts is now followed by sample questions focusing on the key philosophical problems raised by the excerpt, and accompanied by detailed further reading suggestions that include up-to-date links to online resources. Also new to this edition is an introductory essay written by John Cottingham, which offers advice to students on how to read and write about a philosophical text. Part of the Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies series, Western Philosophy: An Anthology, Third Edition remains an indispensable collection of classic source materials and expert insights for both beginning and advanced university students in a wide range of philosophy courses.

Philosopher Terry Pinkard revisits Sartre’s later work, illuminating a pivotal stance in Sartre’s understanding of freedom and communal action. Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, released to great fanfare in 1960, has since then receded in philosophical visibility. As Sartre’s reputation is now making a comeback, it is time for a reappraisal of his later work. In Practice, Power, and Forms of Life, philosopher Terry Pinkard interprets Sartre’s late work as a fundamental reworking of his earlier ideas, especially in terms of his understanding of the possibility of communal action as genuinely free, which the French philosopher had previously argued was impossible. Pinkard reveals how Sartre was drawn back to Hegel, a move that was itself incited by Sartre’s newfound interest in Marxism. Pinkard argues that Sartre constructed a novel position on freedom that has yet to be adequately taken up and analyzed within philosophy and political theory. Through Sartre, Pinkard advances an argument that contributes to the history of philosophy as well as key debates on action and freedom.

In capitalism human beings act as if they are mere animals. So we hear repeatedly in the history of modern philosophy. Indifference and Repetition examines how modern philosophy, largely coextensive with a particular boost in capitalism’s development, registers the reductive and regressive tendencies produced by capitalism’s effect on individuals and society. Ruda examines a problem that has invisibly been shaping the history of modern, especially rationalist philosophical thought, a problem of misunderstanding freedom. Thinkers like Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Marx claim that there are conceptions and interpretations of freedom that lead the subjects of these interpretations to no longer act and think freely. They are often unwillingly led into unfreedom. It is thus possible that even “freedom” enslaves. Modern philosophical rationalism, whose conceptual genealogy the books traces and unfolds, assigns a name to this peculiar form of domination by means of freedom: indifference. Indifference is a name for the assumption that freedom is something that human beings have: a given, a natural possession. When we think freedom is natural or a possession we lose freedom. Modern philosophy, Ruda shows, takes its shape through repeated attacks on freedom as indifference; it is the owl that begins its flight, so that the days of unfreedom will turn to dusk.

Alienation has objective, social-structural determinants, yet is experienced subjectively as a psychological state involving both emotion and cognition. Part I considers conceptualizations of alienation and affect in historical context, emphasizing Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Simmel, and Weber. Part II develops a theory of the affective bases of Seeman’s original five varieties of alienation – normlessness, meaninglessness, self-estrangement, cultural estrangement, and powerlessness. The book argues that both normlessness and cultural estrangement manifest in two distinct forms and involve distinct emotions. Thus it develops the affective bases of seven distinct varieties of alienation. This work synthesizes classical and contemporary alienation theory and the sociology of emotions. It contributes to political sociology, and finds application in social psychiatry and related health and social-service fields that treat traumatized and highly alienated individuals.

In an original approach to Foucault's philosophy, Christopher Falzon argues for a reading of Foucault as a philosopher of finite transcendence, and explores its implications for ethics. In order to distinguish Foucault's position, Falzon charts the historical trajectory of transcendence as a philosophical concept, starting with the radical notion of transcendence that was introduced by Plato, and which reappears in various forms in subsequent thinkers from the Stoics to Descartes, and from Kant to Sartre. He argues that Foucault's critique of the transcendent subject of humanism is a rejection not of transcendence per se but of radical transcendence in its distinctively modern form. As such, he shows how Foucault's conceptualisation of transcendence as finite enables a picture of the human being as neither fully determined nor a creature of infinite possibilities, but as both subject and object, affected by but also able to affect the world. With the notion of finite transcendence Falzon captures the essence of Foucault's unique philosophy and provides a new insight into his contribution to ethics. Demonstrating its contemporary relevance, Foucault and the History of Philosophical Transcendence further explores the potential application of Foucault's approach to the current ecological crisis.

The remarkable lectures that Hegel gave in Berlin in the 1820s generated an exciting intellectual atmosphere which lasted for decades. From the 1830s, many students flocked to Berlin to study with people who had studied with Hegel, and both his original students, such as Feuerbach and Bauer, and later arrivals including Kierkegaard, Engels, Bakunin, and Marx, evolved into leading nineteenth-century thinkers. Jon Stewart's panoramic study of Hegel's deep influence upon the nineteenth century in turn reveals what that century contributed to the wider history of philosophy. It shows how Hegel's notions of 'alienation' and 'recognition' became the central motifs for the era's thinking; how these concepts spilled over into other fields – like religion, politics, literature, and drama; and how they created a cultural phenomenon so rich and pervasive that it can truly be called 'Hegel's century.' This book is required reading for historians of ideas as well as of philosophy.