From his earliest work - on personal identity - to his last - on the value of truthfulness - Bernard Williams’ ideas and arguments have been sometimes controversial, often influential, and always worth studying. Mark Jenkins provides a comprehensive account of Williams’ many significant contributions to contemporary philosophy and his relation to the work of other philosophers, including prominent forerunners such as Hume and Nietzsche and contemporary thinkers such as, Nagel, McDowell, MacIntyre, and Taylor.
Philosophers often find that the response I am a philosopher' when given in reply to the question What do you do?' produces a puzzled silence. The puzzle is not one simply about the nature of philosophical thought, it is one about what philosophers actually do . David Hamlyn's enjoyable and illuminating account is the first to consider the history of the practice of philosophy or of philosophy considered as an institution. Being a Philosopher examines the main trends of that practice and how philosophers have been regarded at different times.
The interaction between philosophy and theater or performance has recently become an important and innovative area of inquiry. Philosophers and Thespians contributes to this emerging field by looking at four direct encounters between philosophers and thespians, beginning with Socrates, Agathon, and Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium and ending with a discussion between Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht about a short text by Franz Kafka.
To your local anchorperson, the word "tragedy" brings to mind an accidental fire at a low-income apartment block, the horrors of a natural disaster, or atrocities occurring in distant lands. To a classicist however, the word brings to mind the masterpieces of Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Racine; beautiful dramas featuring romanticized torment. What has tragedy been made to mean by dramatists, storytellers, philosophers, politicians, and journalists over the last two and a half millennia? Why do we still read, re-write, and stage these old plays?
This volume of uncollected essays by Barry Stroud explores central issues and ideas in the work of individual philosophers, ranging from Descartes, Berkeley, Locke, and Hume to Quine, Burge, McDowell, Goldman, Fogelin, and Sosa in our own day. Seven of the essays focus on David Hume, and examine the sources and implications of his "naturalism" and his "scepticism." Three others deal with the legacy of that "naturalism" in the twentieth century. In each case Stroud moves beyond providing a description of historical contexts and developments, and confronts the philosophical issues as they present themselves to the philosophers in question.
