What would the global history of philosophy look like if it were told not as a story of ideas but as a series of job descriptions–ones that might have been used to fill the position of philosopher at different times and places over the past 2,500 years? The Philosopher does just that, providing a new way of looking at the history of philosophy by bringing to life six kinds of figures who have occupied the role of philosopher in a wide range of societies around the world over the millennia–the Natural Philosopher, the Sage, the Gadfly, the Ascetic, the Mandarin, and the Courtier.
Quentin Skinner presents a fundamental reappraisal of the political theory of Hobbes. Using, for the first time, the full range of manuscript as well as printed sources, it documents an entirely new view of Hobbes's intellectual development, and re-examines the shift from a humanist to a scientific culture in European moral and political thought.
Freud’s Theory of Dreams: A Philosophico-Scientific Perspective evaluates Freud’s theory of dreams in light of the many philosophical and scientific criticisms that have been brought against it. Michael T. Michael addresses the validity of Freud’s method of dream interpretation, the scientific nature of the theory, and how Freud’s ideas bear up to modern research on dreams, engaging on the way with critics such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Clark Glymour, Karl Popper, Adolf Grünbaum, and J. Allan Hobson.
Drawing together literature, media, and philosophy, Ghostly Apparitions provides a new model for media archaeology. Stefan Andriopoulos examines the relationships between new media technologies and distinct cultural realms, tracing connections between Kant's philosophy and the magic lantern's phantasmagoria, the Gothic novel and print culture, and spiritualist research and the invention of television.
Admired by philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud, Benjamin, and Wittgenstein, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 1799) is known to the English-speaking world mostly as a satirist. An eminent experimental physicist and mathematician, Lichtenberg was knowledgeable about the philosophical views of his time, and interested in uncovering the philosophical commitments that underlie our common beliefs. In his notebooks (which he called his Waste Books) he often reflects on, challenges, and critiques these philosophical commitments and the dominant views of the Enlightenment, German idealism, and British empiricism.
