Philosophy

Derrida reads the relation of time to gift through a number of texts: Heidegger's Time and Being, Mauss's The Gift, as well as essays by Benveniste and Levi-Strauss that assume Mauss's legacy. It is, however, a short tale by Baudelaire, Counterfeit Money, that guides Derrida's analyses throughout. At stake in his reading of the tale, to which the second half of this book is devoted, are the conditions of gift and forgiveness as essentially bound up with the movement of dissemination, a concept that Derrida has been working out for many years.

For both readers of Baudelaire and students of literary theory, this work will prove indispensable.

In God, Time, and Knowledge, William Hasker explores the major issues concerning God's knowledge of the future in relation to time and human freedom: divine foreknowledge, middle knowledge, and divine timelessness. Although he focuses on discussions that have taken place within analytic philosophy in the last thirty years, Hasker also places the issues within the context of the history of philosophical and theological reflection on these matters.

Proceeding from a libertarian standpoint, Hasker begins by providing a series of arguments against the possibility of middle knowledge. He next considers and rejects all of the major methods by which the compatibility of foreknowledge and freedom have been defended: the contention that facts about God's past beliefs are soft (or relational) facts about the past, the claim that we have counterfactual power over the past, and the belief that we have the power to bring about or even cause past events. Hasker then carefully examines the notion of God as timelessly eternal and finds it provisionally intelligible; nevertheless, he charges that the doctrine of divine timelessness is inadequately motivated apart from the Augustinian-Neoplatonic metaphysics that was its historical source. He concludes by arguing for a view according to which the future is open and divine providence involves risk-taking.

Lucidly and engagingly written, God, Time, and Knowledge is a significant contribution to the contemporary debate over freedom and foreknowledge. It will generate discussion and controversy among philosophers of religion, metaphysicians, and theologians.

Impassioned, erudite, thoroughly researched, and beautifully reasoned, The Great Partnership argues not only that science and religion are compatible, but that they complement each other--and that the world needs both.

"Atheism deserves better than the new atheists," states Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, "whose methodology consists of criticizing religion without understanding it, quoting texts without contexts, taking exceptions as the rule, confusing folk belief with reflective theology, abusing, ridiculing, and demonizing religious faith and holding it responsible for the great crimes against humanity. Religion has done harm; I acknowledge that. But the cure for bad religion is good religion, not no religion, just as the cure for bad science is good science, not the abandonment of science." Rabbi Sacks's counterargument is that religion and science are the two essential perspectives that allow us to see the universe in its three-dimensional depth. Science teaches us where we come from. Religion explains to us why we are here. Science is the search for explanation. Religion is the search for meaning. There have been times when religion tried to dominate science. And there have been times, including our own, when it is believed that we can learn all we need to know about meaning and relationships through biochemistry, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology. In this fascinating look at the interdependence of religion and science, Rabbi Sacks explains why both views are tragically wrong.

***National Jewish Book Awards 2012, Finalist***
Dorot Foundation Award for Modern Jewish Thought and Experience

This work, one of the most important texts in the history of ethics, presents Immanuel Kant's conception of moral self-government based on pure reason. It has been a source of controversy and an object of reinterpretation for over two centuries. This new edition of Kant's work provides a fresh translation that is uniquely faithful to the German original and more fully annotated than any previous translation. The editor and translator, Allen Wood, has written a new introduction.

"Stanley Rosen’s book . . . is scholarly, sympathetic and critical, indeed the final chapter is an incisive critique of Hegel’s central epistemological position." – Times Higher Education Supplement

"Rosen critically evaluates the Hegelian system with reference to The Science of Logic and The Phenomenology of Spirit, and against the background of an analysis of all Hegel’s major works. With a scholarly precision and a clarity due to order, paraphrase, and recapitulation, the author presents a new comprehensive interpretation of Hegel’s work." – D. A. Haney, Library Journal

"Those who have admired both the scrupulous scholarship and passionate seriousness of Rosen’s earlier books will not be disappointed with the present work." – James Ogilvy, International Philosophical Quarterly

Aristotle attempted to ground ethical life in human striving for happiness, yet he didn't understand what happiness is any better than we do. Happiness became an enigmatic, always unattainable, means of seducing humankind into living an ethical life. Freud fared no better when he tried to ground human striving, aggression, and destructiveness in the death drive, like Aristotle attributing purpose where none exists. Neither overarching principle can guide or govern "the remainder of life," in which our inherently disruptive unconscious moves in breaks and swerves to affect who and how we are. Lear exposes this tendency to self-disruption for what it is: an opening, an opportunity for new possibilities. His insights have profound consequences not only for analysis but for our understanding of civilization and its discontent.

Heidegger and ethics is a contentious conjunction of terms. Martin Heidegger himself rejected the notion of ethics, while his endorsement of Nazism is widely seen as unethical. This major new study examines the complex and controversial issues involved in bringing them together.

By working backwards through his work, from his 1964 claim that philosophy has been completed to Being and Time, his first major work, Joanna Hodge questions Heidegger's denial that his enquires were concerned with ethics. She discovers a form of ethics in Heidegger's thinking which elucidates his important distinction between metaphysics and philosophy. Against many contemporary views, she proposes therefore that ethics can be retrieved and questions the relation between ethics and metaphysics that Heidegger had made so pervasive.

About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam