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An updated edition of Otfried Höffe's revolutionary study of Kant's philosophy. Published in English for the first time, Kant's Critique of Practical Reason is an abridged and updated edition of Otfried Höffe's groundbreaking work which was originally published in German. In the book, the author systematically introduces one of the most important areas of Kant's philosophy and relates its basic ideas to the debates of today. The first part introduces the four driving forces that motivated Kant's practical philosophy: enlightenment, critique, morality, and cosmopolitanism. The second part demonstrates the extent to which Kant revolutionized moral philosophy, and in the third part, the author explains the provocations that lie at the heart of Kant's practical philosophy. The remaining parts deal with political philosophy, the philosophy of history, and Kant's thinking about religion and education.

Isaiah Berlin, a prominent public intellectual of the second half of the twentieth century, is examined in historical context for the first time as a thinker deeply influenced by, and deeply reactive against, the British Idealists.

The topic chosen by Nietzsche for his Pforta dissertation was Theognis, his life in Megara, his lyrical production, and his views on the gods, morality and politics. Nietzsche saw Theognis as the intellectual champion of the defeated Megarian aristocracy, who sought to preserve the Dorian spirit and its noble virtues. The interests that guided Nietzsche transcended scientific philology and embraced a concern for the social and political context he adumbrated in the Theognidea. The editors of this volume refer to this novel standpoint as constituting a rudimentary political philology, showing that Theognis' aristocratism determined and guided Nietzsche's critique of the moral point of view and his conception of an aristocratic state.

States are powerful actors in world politics, and we wish to hold them accountable - especially when they violate the rights of their people. By benefitting from Immanuel Kant's philosophy, this book explores the requirements to and consequences of holding states as responsible agents in a morally imperfect world.

Patrick Hayden presents an account of John Rawls's views regarding the nature of social justice among states and the international law and morality he considers necessary in order to secure universal human rights and political stability among individuals and states.

This book is the reconstruction of a critical theory of modernity. 'Modernity Reconstructed' is divided into four parts: freedom, equality, solidarity and responsibility. The first three follow the basic ideas of the constitutional revolutions of the 18th century.

An original, informed, and engaging reading of Kant's ideas on basic rights and human dignity, on how to eliminate war from international affairs, and on the reasons we have to believe that political progress is possible.

Richard Rorty is among the most cited, influential and notorious of recent philosophers. This book seeks to take Rorty seriously as a social and political philosopher, and to argue that his work is not as flippant, as frothy, or as easily dismissed as his opponents often tend to portray it.

In current debates, the term cosmopolitanismA" often remains quite vague and leads to sweeping generalizations. Unlike many recent publications, this book looks at the notion from a decidedly historical perspective, trying to give depth and texture to the concept.

This volume focuses on one relationship that has featured prominently in the debate about the decline of the Westaphalian model of the nation-state - citizenship. It argues for a distinctive approach to theories of citizenship.

This work presents a review of works in the area of universal human rights and their implications for international politics. The text addresses such questions as: what rights are universal?; who holds the rights under international conventions?; and what is the link between such rights and peace?

Examines the use of metaphors of monstrosity and the place of the dead in political theory, specifically in relation to conservatism, Marxism and fascism.

Kant is not the philosopher who has his head in the clouds, but the philosopher seeking to bridge the gulf between the ideal and the real in international relations.

This work attempts to guide the reader through a maze of interpretations of Machiavelli's political opinions. The author demonstrates that Machiavelli was an anti-metaphysical empiricist who sought to free political thought from all theological preconceptions.

Ideology draws on the social, political and cultural theory of Jurgen Habermas, Gilles Deleuze and Slavoj Zizek in order to explore the possibility of developing a 'critical conception of ideology'. The book is concerned with two main themes: the relationship of ideology to the 'real' and the relationship between ideology and the 'ethical'.

An exposition of Gellner's thought, both in terms of the specific areas in which he worked and the underlying consistency of his theoretical principles. It provides a context within which to evaluate Gellner's contribution to social and politcal thought.

Hegel's concept of civil society endorses a market economy and a liberal outlook. But his concept of state culminates in an authoritarian prince who is protector of the constitution. The tensions and contradictions that plague Hegel's liberal society that cannot be resolved by its own civil institutions, motivate his conservative authoritarianism.

Fukuyama's concept of the End of History has been one of the most widely debated theories of international politics since the end of the Cold War. This book discusses Fukuyama's claim that liberal democracy alone is able to satisfy the human aspiration for freedom and dignity, and explores the way in which his thinking is part of a philosophical tradition which includes Kant, Hegel and Marx. Two new chapters in this second edition discuss the ways in which Fukuyama's thinking has developed - they include his celebrated and controversial criticism of neoconservatism and his complex intellectual relationship to Samuel Huntington, whose Clash of Civilization thesis he rejects but whose notion of political decay is central to his more recent work. The authors here argue that Fukuyama's continuing fundamental contributions to debates concerning the spread of democracy and threat of global terror mark him out as one of the most important thinkers of the twenty-first century.

The Second Edition of Hegel and Marx After the Fall of Communism surveys Hegel's close connection with world-famed economist Friedrich List, the declared enemy of Karl Marx. Illuminating the mysterious nature of Hegel's relationship with Marx and Friedrich List may help us to comprehend the extraordinary geopolitical transformations that have occurred in the last 15 years since the original publication in 1998. The Afterword to this Edition looks at Russia's revival as a world power under Vladimir Putin, and China's ambitious economic development efforts that bring to mind Sun Yat-sen's vision of The International Development of China.

This volume critically examines and elucidates the complex relationship between politics and teleology in Kant's philosophical system. Examining this relationship is of key philosophical importance since Kant develops his political philosophy in the context of a teleological conception of the purposiveness of both nature and human history. Kant's approach poses the dual task of reconciling his normative political theory with both his priori moral philosophy and his teleological philosophy of nature and human history. The fourteen essays in this volume, by leading scholars in the field, explore the relationship between teleology and politics from multiple perspectives. Together, the essays explore Kant's normative political theory and legal philosophy, his cosmopolitanism and views on international relations, his theory of history, his theory of natural teleology, and the broader relationship between morality, history, nature and politics in Kant's works. This important new volume will be of interest to a wide audience, including Kant scholars, scholars and students working on topics in moral and political philosophy, the philosophy of history, political theory and political science, legal scholars and international relations theorists, as well as those interested broadly in the history of ideas.

Poverty violates fundamental human values through its impact on individuals and human environments. Poverty also goes against the core values of democratic societies. Lotter talks about poverty in ways that depict this devastating human condition clearly. He shows why inequalities associated with poverty require our serious moral concern.

This book examines the relationship between aesthetics and politics based on the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze (1925 - 1995) and Pierre-Felix Guattari (1930 - 1992), most famous for their collabarative works Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980).Porter analyses the relationship between art and social-political life and considers in what ways the aesthetic and political connect to each other. Deleuze and Guattari believed that political theory can have aesthetic form and that vice versa, the arts can be thought to be forms of political theory. Deleuze and Guattari force us to confront the idea that 'art', the things we call language, literature, painting and architecture, always has the potential to be political because naming, or language-use, implies a shaping or ordering of the 'political' as such, rather than its re-presentation.

How should we act? How should the world be organised? This book offers answers to these questions by analysing Kant's conception of normativity. It presents different applications of Kant's theory of normativity to meta-ethical, moral, juridical and political issues of contemporary relevance.

A critical analysis of the recent `postsecular turn' of Jurgen Habermas's political philosophy.

This collection of essays assesses the value of a conception of Kantian political philosophy grounded in the Doctrine of Right, examining some of its central arguments from a twenty-first-century political perspective.

Bringing together the contributions of the most influential philosophers in the English-speaking world, this book deals with the contemporary debates about identity formation, multi-culturalism, and diversity. It explores the pacifying role of democratic law-making as a possible solution to the issues of diversity, justice and solidarity.

Bringing together the contributions of the most influential philosophers in the English-speaking world, this book deals with the contemporary debates about identity formation, multi-culturalism, and diversity. It explores the pacifying role of democratic law-making as a possible solution to the issues of diversity, justice and solidarity.

Dealing with the morality of groups, this book addresses the conflict and tensions that exist between impartiality and partiality within political philosophy, and ordinary thought and practice by relating theoretical arguments to practical issues such as immigration and emigration policy.

A critical examination of novels by Milan Kundera, Ian McEwan, Michel Houellebecq and J. M. Coetzee to explore aesthetically our understanding of different forms of identity, through the lens of classical and contemporary political, philosophical and social theory from within the Marxist aesthetic tradition.

The past three decades have witnessed the emergence of several Kantian theories. Both the critical reaction to consequentialism inspired by Rawlsian constructivism and the universalism of more recent theories informed by Habermasian discourse ethics trace their main sources of inspiration back to Kant's writings.