The new collection features 14 essays relevant to the Literary Decadence movement, including pieces on: Joris-Karl Huysmans, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Aloysius Bertrand, Theophile Gautier, Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola, Edmond de Goncourt, and Anatole France. Complete with bibliography and index.

Outlines the political pressures that have shaped the writing and interpretation of modern world history in post-1949 China, and assesses the impact of these pressures and political themes through three case studies: the 17th-century English revolution, the Paris Commune, and the treatment of the Th

Philosophy has sometimes been described as the discipline in which you can never be wrong, as the reserve of absentminded professors, aloof academics and purveyors of obscure ideas or interesting opinions. Quite the contrary. Philosophy answers the hard questions: Does everything happen by chance? Is there anything more than matter in the universe? Are humans in the same class as animals? Is there a God? Can we know the correct answer to these questions? The answers to these questions matter. We are all philosophers even though we are not aware of the fact. We each have a set of ultimate priorities and principles, answers to these questions, a big picture that determines our everyday thoughts, decisions, and actions. In this book Brian Cronin uses the ideas of Bernard Lonergan's Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, to argue methodically towards a correct, critical, comprehensive worldview, an answer to those big questions which is the precise task of first philosophy. This book is an accessible and readable presentation of Lonergan's metaphysics, a somewhat neglected topic. Science and philosophy are complementary. Scientists answer the concrete, detailed questions about everything around us: the parts. Philosophy integrates all these into a correct worldview of the whole: of everything.

This book is the first full-length study of the ongoing debate over the status of our "disenchanted" world--a world stripped of mysterious and supernatural forces by the demythologizing power of reason and modern science. It draws together for the first time the writings of various theorists on this theme, such as Georg Lukacs, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas, providing a coherent overview of an evolving dialogue, as well as Germain's own evaluation of the disenchantment problematic.

In any field—whether scientific, business, or social—ethics plays a critical role in determining what is acceptable in a particular community and what is considered taboo. The source of these preconditions is often a complex interweaving of tradition and rational thought. Socio-Cybernetic Study of God and the World-System investigates morality in a socio-scientific worldview, examining the epistemology of existence in conjunction with Islamic monotheistic law to generate a world-system that governs action and reaction in the context of a variety of cognitive and social environments. Readers with backgrounds in finance and economics can utilize this book to construct a more thorough theoretical understanding of their societal and professional associations.

Conceiving of Christianity as a "worldview" has been one of the most significant events in the church in the last 150 years. In this new book David Naugle provides the best discussion yet of the history and contemporary use of worldview as a totalizing approach to faith and life. This informative volume first locates the origin of worldview in the writings of Immanuel Kant and surveys the rapid proliferation of its use throughout the English-speaking world. Naugle then provides the first study ever undertaken of the insights of major Western philosophers on the subject of worldview and offers an original examination of the role this concept has played in the natural and social sciences. Finally, Naugle gives the concept biblical and theological grounding, exploring the unique ways that worldview has been used in the Evangelical, Orthodox, and Catholic traditions. This clear presentation of the concept of worldview will be valuable to a wide range of readers.

An illuminating exploration of fin de siècle decadence “by a well-known authority in the areas of European literature, culture, and psychoanalysis” (Pre-Raphaelite Studies). The influential writer and scholar Charles Bernheimer described decadence as a “stimulant that bends thought out of shape, deforming traditional conceptual molds.” In this posthumously published work, Bernheimer succeeds in making a critical concept out of this perennially fashionable, rarely understood term. This remarkable collection of essays shows the contradictions of the phenomenon, which is both a condition and a state of mind. In seeking to show why people have failed to give a satisfactory account of the term decadence, Bernheimer argues that we often mistakenly take decadence to represent something concrete, that we see as some sort of agent. His salutary response is to return to those authors and artists whose work constitutes the topos of decadence, rereading key late nineteenth-century authors such as Nietzsche, Zola, Hardy, Wilde, Moreau, and Freud to rediscover the very dynamics of the decadent. Through careful analysis of the literature, art, and music of the fin de siècle—including a riveting discussion of the many faces of Salome—Bernheimer leaves us with a fascinating and multidimensional look at decadence. Honorable Mention for the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association

The Dialogue in Hell between Montesquieu and Machiavelli is the source of the world's most infamous literary forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. John Waggoner's superb translation of and commentary on Joly's Dialogue—the first faithful translation in English—seeks not only to update the sordid legacy of the Protocols but to redeem Joly's original work for serious study in its own right, rather than through the lens of antisemitism. Waggoner's work vindicates a man who was neither an antisemite nor a supporter of the kind of tyrannical politics the Protocols subsequently served and presents Maurice Joly, once much maligned and too long ignored, as one of the nineteenth century's foremost political thinkers.

An environmental history of ideas embedded in a compact account of Western civilization's ecological impact upon the planet, particularly in Europe and its colonies.