This book is both a careful study of Immanuel Kant’s work and the context of that work in the movement known as early modern philosophy. The chief interest of the author concerns the philosophy of perception that is manifest in Kant’s doctrines of the transcendental aesthetic and the concept of phenomena. Philosophy bears a crucial relationship to the public in terms of the evidence that it identifies as original and binding. In the early modern period, philosophy repudiated its dependence on ordinary perception, and on language as ordinarily used, in the setting forth of its own authority. This historiographical fact is presently of immense interest, as public discourse finds itself rudderless and without agreed upon common facts for deliberation to settle on. It was not the view of the ancient Greeks that philosophy could so emancipate itself from the perception of common facts as the original evidence for higher investigations. The Early Modern era, beginning with Bacon but now more furiously in the work of Kant, has anchored a general indictment of ordinary perception in a remnant of natural philosophy. Human beings, in Kant’s philosophy, are not capable of knowing what objects, external objects, are in themselves. We may only know what are called "appearances," and Kant refers to these appearances as phenomena. Yet this claim is complicated by the a priori knowledge which Kant claims to possess as regards these phenomena: that they must all be eternal substances. The book freely moves back and forth between Greek antiquity and the Early Modern period to illustrate the full nature of the rupture on this ground of the metaphysics of fact determination. For Aristotle, the founder of the theory of substance, substances are just the perishable bodies commonly perceived. Kant’s phenomena, which claims to embody what appears to the generality of the human race, cannot be that, for the human race does not perceive eternal objects.

This book is a careful study of both Immanuel Kant's work and the context of that work in Early Modern Philosophy. Roecklein's chief concern is the philosophy of perception, which is manifest in Kant's doctrines of the transcendental aesthetic and the concept of phenomena.

Tackling important philosophical questions on modernity – what it is, where it begins and when it ends – Przemyslaw Tacik challenges the idea that modernity marks a particular epoch, and historicises its conception to offer a radical critique of it. His deconstruction-informed critique collects and assesses reflections on modernity from major philosophers including Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan, Arendt, Agamben, and Žižek. This analysis progresses a new understanding of modernity intrinsically connected to the growth of sovereignty as an organising principle of contemporary life. He argues that it is the idea of 'modernity', as a taken-for-granted era, which is positioned as the essential condition for making linear history possible, when it should instead be history, in and of itself, which dictates the existence of a particular period. Using Hegel's notion of 'spirit' to trace the importance of sovereignty to the conception of the modern epoch within German idealism, Tacik traces Hegel's influence on Heidegger through reference to the 'star' in his late philosophy which represents the hope of overcoming the metaphysical poverty of modernity. This line of thought reveals the necessity of a paradigm shift in our understanding of modernity that speaks to contemporary continental philosophy, theories of modernity, political theory, and critical re-assessments of Marxism.

Jeff Morgan argues that both Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard think of conscience as an individual's moral self-awareness before God, specifically before the claim God makes on each person. This innovative reading corrects prevailing views that both figures, especially Kant, lay the groundwork for the autonomous individual of modern life – that is, the atomistic individual who is accountable chiefly to themselves as their own lawmaker. This book first challenges the dismissal of conscience in 20th-century Christian ethics, often in favour of an emphasis on corporate life and corporate self-understanding. Morgan shows that this dismissal is based on a misinterpretation of Immanuel Kant's practical philosophy and moral theology, and of Søren Kierkegaard's second authorship. He does this with refreshing discussions of Stanley Hauerwas, Oliver O'Donovan, and other major figures. Morgan instead situates Kant and Kierkegaard within a broad trajectory in Christian thought in which an individual's moral self-awareness before God, as distinct from moral self-awareness before a community, is an essential feature of the Christian moral life.

Chosen as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2003 by Choice Magazine Originally published in 2002. Does violence inevitably shadow our ethico-political engagements and decisions, including our understandings of identity, whether collective or individual? Questions that touch upon ethics and politics can greatly benefit from being rephrased in terms borrowed from the arsenal of religious and theological figures, because the association of such figures with a certain violence keeps moralism, whether in the form of fideism or humanism, at bay. Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida's careful posing of such questions and rearticulations pioneers new modalities for systematic engagement with religion and philosophy alike.

Historical Teleologies in the Modern World tracks the fragmentation and proliferation of teleological understandings of history – the notion that history had to be explained as a goal-directed process – in Europe and beyond throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. Historical teleologies have profoundly informed a variety of other disciplines, including modern philosophy, natural history, literature, humanitarian and religious philanthropism, the political thought and practice of revolution, emancipation, imperialism, colonialism and anti-colonialism, the conceptualization of universal humankind, and the understanding of modernity in general. By exploring the extension and plurality of historical teleology, the essays in this volume revise the history of historicity in the modern period. Historical Teleologies in the Modern World casts doubt on the idea that a single, if powerful, conception of time could function as the unifying principle of all modern historicity, instead pursuing an investigation of the plurality of modern historicities and its underlying structures. By bringing together Western and non-Western histories, this book provides the first extended treatment of the idea of historical teleology. It will be of great value to students and scholars of modern global and intellectual history.

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1829) both introduced and epitomized the great philosophical controversies of his age. His influential text Von den göttlichen Dingen und Ihrer Offenbarung aroused the final debate about the intrinsic nihilism of modern philosophy, which, he postulated, ran the risk of becoming a serious threat to human life and intellect. In the first English translation of this text,* On the Divine Things and Their Revelation*, Paolo Livieri provides readers with a historical investigation of the debates that preceded and followed Jacobi’s book, as well as a philosophical review of its main topics and arguments. Jacobi’s concluding analysis against systematic philosophy, given at the closing of the era of German idealism, offers an overview of the possibility of connecting the human and the divine according to the metaphysical approach that he develops into theism. This philosophical testament revives the divisive ideas of his first publications and provides new insights into his critique of Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy, yielding a final evaluation of Immanuel Kant’s transcendental method. Bringing together Jacobi’s most famous themes – from faith to revelation and nihilism to immediate knowledge – On the Divine Things and Their Revelation expresses his tireless commitment to situating the human being at the centre of reality.

In Overcoming Modernity, which contains the last writings from Yuasa, the prominent Japanese scholar reconsiders the modern Western paradigm of thinking and in its place proposes a more holistic worldview. A wide range of topics are examined, including the relationships between language, being, psychology, and logic; Jung's concept of synchronicity; the Yijing (Book of Changes); paranormal phenomena; physics and metaphysics; mind and body; and teleology. Through these explorations, engaging a wide range of Western and East Asian thought, Yuasa offers an alternative to the scientific worldview inherited from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This new paradigm involves the integration of space-and-time and mind-and-body, thematics brought together through what Yuasa calls "image-thinking," a mode of thinking that incorporates image-experience.

This collection of essays suggests new ways of looking at the intertwining of political and religious agonies in the period 1914-1991. The long 'European civil war' revealed that Europe, far from being formed by a one-track progression, has followed several tracks or fault lines, leading to a number of contrasts in European self-perception.

This volume studies the ways in which modernity has been conceived, practiced, and performed in Indian literatures from the 18th to 20th century. It brings together essays on writings in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Odia, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and languages from Northeast India, which form a dialogical relationship with each other in this volume. The concurrence and contradictions emerging through these studies problematize the idea of modernity afresh. The book challenges the dominance of colonial modernity through socio-historical and cultural analysis of how modernity surfaces as a multifaceted phenomenon when contextualized in the multilingual ethos of India. It further tracks the complex ways in which modernism in India is tied to the harvests of modernity. It argues for the need to shift focus on the specific conditions that gave shape to multiple modernities within literatures produced from India. A versatile collection, the book incorporates engagements with not just long prose fiction but also lesser-known essays, research works, and short stories published in popular magazines. This unique work will be of interest to students and teachers of Indian writing in English, Indian literatures, and comparative literatures. It will be indispensable to scholars of South Asian studies, literary historians, linguists, and scholars of cultural studies across the globe.