In mid-eighteenth-century Europe, a taste for sentiment accompanied the 'rise of the novel', and the success of Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) played a vital role in this. James Fowler's new study is the first to compare the response of the most famous philosophes to the Richardson phenomenon. Voltaire, who claims to despise the novel, writes four 'Richardsonian' fictions; Diderot's fascination with the English author is expressed in La Religieuse, Rousseau's in Julie - the century's bestseller. Yet the philosophes' response remains ambivalent. On the one hand they admire Richardson's ability to make the reader weep. On the other, they champion a range of Enlightenment beliefs which he, an enthusiast of Milton, vehemently opposed. In death as in life, the English author exacerbates the philosophes' rivalry. The eulogy which Diderot writes in 1761 implicitly asks: who can write a new Clarissa? But also: whose social, philosophical or political ideas will triumph as a result?

In this book John Richardson argues for centering the concept of values in the study of Nietzsche's philosophical thinking. He identifies twelve of Nietzsche's key concepts, and organizes them into three sections: the first two outline how values influence human behavior and self-conception, while the third presents new values Nietzsche himself defines in response to his previous critiques. The study builds on recent scholarship in philosophy and provides one of the most up-to-date comprehensive assessments of Nietzsche.

In 1980, at the end of the most intensely political period of his work and life, Louis Althusser penned Philosophy for Non-philosophers. Available here for the first time in English, Philosophy for Non-philosophers constitutes a rigorous and engaged attempt to address a wide reading public unfamiliar with Althusser's project. As such, the work is a concentration of the most fundamental theses of Althusser's own ideas, and presents a synthesis of his sprawling and disparate philosophical and political writings. Nowhere else does Althusser push the distinction between philosophy and other disciplines as far, or develop in such detail the concept of 'practice'. Rather than a work of 'popular philosophy', Philosophy for Non-philosophers is a continuation and conglomeration of Althusser's thought; a thought whose radicality is still perceptible in those that have followed since. Philosophy for Non-philosophers thus provides a vivid encapsulation of Althusser's seminal influence on the leading thinkers of today, including Ranciere, Badiou, Balibar, and Žižek.

How do minds cause events in the world? How does wanting to write a letter cause a person's hands to move across the page, or believing something to be true cause a person to make a promise? In Actions and Objects, Jonathan Kramnick examines the literature and philosophy of action during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when philosophers and novelists, poets and scientists were all concerned with the place of the mind in the world. These writers asked whether belief, desire, and emotion were part of nature—and thus subject to laws of cause and effect—or in a special place outside the natural order. Kramnick puts particular emphasis on those who tried to make actions compatible with external determination and to blur the boundary between mind and matter. He follows a long tradition of examining the close relation between literary and philosophical writing during the period, but fundamentally revises the terrain. Rather than emphasizing psychological depth and interiority or asking how literary works were understood as true or fictional, he situates literature alongside philosophy as jointly interested in discovering how minds work.

The definitive biography of the fascinating William James, whose life and writing put an indelible stamp on psychology, philosophy, teaching, and religion—on modernism itself. Often cited as the “father of American psychology,” William James was an intellectual luminary who made significant contributions to at least five fields: psychology, philosophy, religious studies, teaching, and literature. A member of one of the most unusual and notable of American families, James struggled to achieve greatness amid the brilliance of his theologian father; his brother, the novelist Henry James; and his sister, Alice James. After studying medicine, he ultimately realized that his true interests lay in philosophy and psychology, a choice that guided his storied career at Harvard, where he taught some of America’s greatest minds. But it is James’s contributions to intellectual study that reveal the true complexity of man. In this biography that seeks to understand James’s life through his work—including Principles of Psychology, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and Pragmatism—Robert D. Richardson has crafted an exceptionally insightful work that explores the mind of a genius, resulting in “a gripping and often inspiring story of intellectual and spiritual adventure” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). “A magnificent biography.” —The Washington Post

Martin Heidegger is one of the twentieth century’s most influential, but also most cryptic and controversial philosophers. His early fusion of phenomenology with existentialism inspired Sartre and many others, and his later critique of modern rationality inspired Derrida and still others. This introduction covers the whole of Heidegger’s thought and is ideal for anyone coming to his work for the first time. John Richardson centres his account on Heidegger’s persistent effort to change the very kind of understanding or truth we seek. Beginning with an overview of Heidegger’s life and work, he sketches the development of Heidegger’s thought up to the publication of Being and Time. He shows how that book takes up Husserl’s method of phenomenology and adapts it. He then introduces and assesses the key arguments of Being and Time under three headings—pragmatism, existentialism, and temporality—its three levels of analysis of human experience. Subsequent chapters introduce Heidegger’s later philosophy, including his turn towards a historical account of being, and new ideas about how we need to ‘think’ to get the truth about it; his influential writings on language, art, and poetry, and their role in the Western history of being; and his claim that this history has culminated in a technological relation to things that is deeply problematic, above all in the way it excludes the divine. The final chapter looks at Heidegger’s profound influence on several intellectual movements ranging from phenomenology to existentialism to postmodernism. A much-needed and refreshing introduction to this major figure, Heidegger is ideal reading for anyone coming to his work for the first time and will interest and stimulate students and scholars alike.

This book argues against philosophical opponents, that we can determine our ends or goals rationally.