The Void

Abstract: Part 1 Prologue: literature and philosophy - a conversation with Bryan Magee. Part 2 Nostalgia for the particular, 1951-57: thinking and language nostalgia for the particular metaphysics and ethics vision and choice in morality. Part 3 Encountering existentialism, 1950-59: the novelist as metaphysician the existentialist hero Sartre's "The Emotions - Outline of a Theory" De Beauvoir's "The Ethics of Ambiguity" the image of mind the existentialist political myth Hegel in modern dress existentialist bite. Part 4 The need for theory. 1956-66: knowing the void T.S. Eliot as a moralist a house of theory mass, might and myth the darkness of practical reason. Part 5 Towards a practical mysticism, 1959-78: the sublime and the good existentialists and mystics salvation by words art is the limitation of nature. Part 6 Can literature help cure the ills of philosophy? 1959-61: the sublime and the beautiful revisited against dryness. Part 7 Re-reading Plato, 1964-86: the idea of perfection on "God" and "good" the sovereignty of good over other concepts the fire and the sun - why Plato banished the artists art and Eros - a dialogue about art above the gods - a dialogue about religion.

Abstract: This book fills the void between what is and isn't known about Hans Kelsen's political philosophy, and the ways that philosophy has and will continue to shape political debates inherent to democracy in the future. For the first time in English, this classic book - with an introduction by political theorist Nadia Urbinati - provides an overview of Kelsen's career and his contributions to 20th century political thought.

Abstract: With "The Lucretian Renaissance", Gerard Passannante offers a radical rethinking of a familiar narrative: the rise of materialism in early modern Europe. Passannante begins by taking up the ancient philosophical notion that the world is composed of two fundamental opposites: atoms, as the philosopher Epicurus theorized, intrinsically unchangeable and moving about the void; and, the void itself, or nothingness. Passannante considers the fact that this strain of ancient Greek philosophy survived and was transmitted to the Renaissance primarily by means of a poem that had seemingly been lost - a poem insisting that the letters of the alphabet are like the atoms that make up the universe. By tracing this elemental analogy through the fortunes of Lucretius' "On the Nature of Things", Passannante argues that the philosophy of atoms and the void reemerged in the Renaissance as a story about reading and letters - a story that materialized in texts, in their physical recomposition, and in their scattering. From the works of Virgil and Macrobius to those of Petrarch, Montaigne, Bacon, Spenser, and Newton, "The Lucretian Renaissance" recovers a forgotten history of materialism in humanist thought and scholarly practice and asks us to reconsider one of the most enduring questions of the period: what does it mean for a text, a poem, and philosophy to be "reborn"?

Abstract: French philosophy changed dramatically in the second quarter of the twentieth century. In the wake of World War I and, later, the Nazi and Soviet disasters, major philosophers such as Kojeve, Levinas, Heidegger, Koyre, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Hyppolite argued that man could no longer fill the void left by the "death of God" without also calling up the worst in human history and denigrating the dignity of the human subject. In response, they contributed to a new belief that man should no longer be viewed as the basis for existence, thought, and ethics; rather, human nature became dependent on other concepts and structures, including Being, language, thought, and culture. This argument, which was to be paramount for existentialism and structuralism, came to dominate postwar thought. This intellectual history of these developments argues that at their heart lay a new atheism that rejected humanism as insufficient and ultimately violent.