The Politics of Skepticism in the Ancients, Montaigne, Hume, and Kant PDF Download
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Author: John Christian Laursen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004246843
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
This book brings out the profound influence of the tradition of philosophical skepticism on political thought. It shows that many of the root ideas of liberalism in early modern thought were a product of engagement with the skeptical tradition. The book begins with the first extended discussion in the literature of the political implications of ancient skepticism, asking the question, "Can Skeptics Live a Skeptical Politics?" The following sections explore the influence of skepticism on the political thought of Montaigne, Hume, and Kant. The case is made that some forms of liberalism derived from these thinkers have been historically closely bound up with skepticism.
Author: John Christian Laursen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004246843
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
This book brings out the profound influence of the tradition of philosophical skepticism on political thought. It shows that many of the root ideas of liberalism in early modern thought were a product of engagement with the skeptical tradition. The book begins with the first extended discussion in the literature of the political implications of ancient skepticism, asking the question, "Can Skeptics Live a Skeptical Politics?" The following sections explore the influence of skepticism on the political thought of Montaigne, Hume, and Kant. The case is made that some forms of liberalism derived from these thinkers have been historically closely bound up with skepticism.
Author: John Christian Laursen
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442619732
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
In this collection, thirteen distinguished contributors examine the influence of the ancient skeptical philosophy of Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus on early modern political thought. Classical skepticism argues that in the absence of certainty one must either suspend judgment and live by habit or act on the basis of probability rather than certainty. In either case, one must reject dogmatic confidence in politics and philosophy. Surveying the use of skepticism in works by Hobbes, Descartes, Hume, Smith, and Kant, among others, the essays in Skepticism and Political Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries demonstrate the pervasive impact of skepticism on the intellectual landscape of early modern Europe. This volume is not just an authoritative account of skepticism’s importance from the Enlightenment to the French Revolution, it is also the basis for understanding skepticism’s continuing political implications.
Author: Michelle Zerba
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110702465X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
An interdisciplinary study of the forms and uses of uncertainty in important works of literature and philosophy in antiquity and the Renaissance.
Author: Christopher J. Berry
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1623569451
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 102
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Book Description
In this compelling and accessible account of the life and thought of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), Professor Christopher J. Berry of the University of Glasgow argues that the belief in the uniformity of human nature was at the heart of Hume's thought. In this volume, Berry introduces classic 'Humean' themes including the evolution of social institutions as an unintended consequence of the pursuit of self-interest, the importance of custom and habit in establishing rules of just conduct, and the defence of commerce and luxury. The book reveals Hume as an original thinker, whose thought may be understood as a combination of various strands of conservatism, libertarianism and liberalism.
Author: José Raimundo Maia Neto
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004177841
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
Since the publication of the first edition of Richard Popkin s classic The History of Scepticism in 1960, skepticism has been increasingly recognized as a major force in the development of early modern philosophy. This book provides a review of current scholarship and significant updated research on some of the main thinkers and issues related to the reappraisal of ancient skepticism in the modern age. Special attention is given to the nature, importance, and relation to religion of Montaigne s and Hume s skepticisms; to the various skeptical and non-skeptical sources of Cartesian doubt; to the skeptical and anti-skeptical impact of Cartesianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and to philosophers who dealt with skeptical issues in the development of their own various intellectual interests.
Author: Georg Cavallar
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786835533
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
A similar book is Reidar Maliks, Kant’s Politics in Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014, but it does not focus on international law. Pauline Kleingeld’s Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012 touches upon international relations, but is mainly a book on Kant’s cosmopolitanism, and a comparison with other 18c thinkers.
Author: Wendell John Coats
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820463162
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 140
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Book Description
This book provides an extensive and textual analysis of Montaigne's essays - both the relevant Villey French texts as well as the Frame English translations. It identifies and illustrates a unifying, recurring theme in the ostensibly diverse and often apparently contradictory essays of the sixteenth-century writer - the attempt at psychic harmony through «temporal solipsism», or living insofar as possible in the present moment by doing things for their own sake rather than for extrinsic purposes. Placing Montaigne in historical context, Montaigne's Essais argues that he implicitly provides his own synthesis of pagan and Christian ideas, with no fewer tensions than the Aquinian synthesis. A concluding bibliographic essay addresses some issues of scholarly controversy, primarily from the perspectives of philosophy and political theory.
Author: Christopher Meckstroth
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190213922
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
Revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries, and reformers the world over appeal to democracy to justify their actions. But when political factions compete over the right to act in "the people's" name, who is to decide? Although the problem is as old as the great revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, events from the Arab Spring to secession referendums suggest that today it is hardly any closer to being solved. This book defends a new theory of democratic legitimacy and change that provides an answer. Christopher Meckstroth shows why familiar views that identify democracy with timeless principles or institutions fall into paradox when asked to make sense of democratic founding and change. Solving the problem, he argues, requires shifting focus to the historical conditions under which citizens work out what it will mean to govern themselves in a democratic way. The only way of sorting out disputes without faith in progress is to show, in Socratic fashion, that some parties' claims to speak for "the people" cannot hold up even on their own terms. Meckstroth builds his argument on provocative and closely-argued interpretations of Plato, Kant, and Hegel, suggesting that familiar views of them as foundationalist metaphysicians misunderstand their debt to a method of radical doubt pioneered by Socrates. Recovering this tradition of antifoundational argument requires rethinking the place of German idealism in the history of political thought and opens new directions for contemporary democratic theory. The historical and Socratic theory of democracy the book defends makes possible an entirely new way of approaching struggles over contested notions of progress, popular sovereignty, political judgment and democratic change.
Author: Margaret Watkins
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108752594
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 537
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Book Description
For those open to the possibility that philosophical thought can improve life, David Hume's Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary have something to say. In the first comprehensive study of the Essays, Margaret Watkins engages closely with these neglected texts and shows how they provide important insights into Hume's perspective on the breadth and depth of human life, arguing that the Essays reveal his continued commitment to philosophy as a discipline that can promote both social and individual progress. Addressing topics such as politics, war, slavery, the priesthood, the development of industry, aesthetics, emotional disorders, egoism, friendship, sexuality, gender relations, and the nature of philosophy itself, the volume examines Hume's purposes and aims against the backdrop of the eighteenth century society in which he lived. It will be of interest to scholars of modern thought in philosophy, politics, history, and economics.
Author: Anton M. Matytsin
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421420538
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377
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Book Description
Enlightenment confidence in the power of human reason was earned by grappling with the challenge of philosophical skepticism. The ancient Greek philosophy of Pyrrhonian skepticism spread across a wide spectrum of disciplines in the 1600s, casting a shadow over the European learned world. The early modern skeptics expressed doubt concerning the existence of an objective reality independent of human perception. They also questioned long-standing philosophical assumptions and, at times, undermined the foundations of political, moral, and religious authorities. How did eighteenth-century scholars overcome this skeptical crisis of confidence to usher in the so-called Age of Reason? In The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment, Anton Matytsin describes how skeptical rhetoric forced philosophers to formulate the principles and assumptions that they found to be certain or, at the very least, highly probable. In attempting to answer the deep challenge of philosophical skepticism, these thinkers explicitly articulated the rules for attaining true and certain knowledge and defined the boundaries beyond which human understanding could not venture. Matytsin explains the dialectical outcome of the philosophical disputes between the skeptics and their various opponents in France, the Dutch Republic, Switzerland, and Prussia. He shows that these exchanges transformed skepticism by mitigating its arguments while broadening the learned world’s confidence in the capacities of reason by moderating its aspirations. Ultimately, the debates about the powers and limits of human understanding led to the making of a new conception of rationality that privileged practicable reason over speculative reason. Matytsin also complicates common narratives about the Enlightenment by demonstrating that most of the thinkers who defended reason from skeptical critiques were religiously devout. By attempting either to preserve or to reconstruct the foundations of their worldviews and systems of thought, they became important agents of intellectual change and formulated new criteria of doubt and certainty. This complex and engaging book offers a powerful new explanation of how Enlightenment thinkers came to understand the purposes and the boundaries of rational inquiry.
