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.

The volume advances research in the philosophy of technology by introducing contributors who have an acute sense of how to get beyond or reframe the epistemic, ontological and normative limitations that currently limit the fields of philosophy of technology and science and technology studies.

This book is a treasure house of Italian philosophy. Narrating and explaining the history of Italian philosophers from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, the author identifies the specificity, peculiarity, originality, and novelty of Italian philosophical thought in the men and women of the Renaissance. The vast intellectual output of the Renaissance can be traced back to a single philosophical stream beginning in Florence and fed by numerous converging human factors. This work offers historians and philosophers a vast survey and penetrating analysis of an intellectual tradition which has heretofore remained virtually unknown to the Anglophonic world of scholarship.

Addresses not only the basic theme of phenomenology, but its aesthetic, social, psychological, scientific, and technological aspects as well.

Descartes among the Scholastics takes the position that philosophical systems cannot be studied adequately apart from their intellectual context: philosophers accept, modify, or reject doctrines whose meaning and significance are given in a particular culture. Thus, the volume treats Cartesian philosophy as a reaction against, as well as an indebtedness to, scholastic philosophy and touches on many topics shared by Cartesian and late scholastic philosophy: matter and form, causation, infinity, place, time, void, and motion; the substance of the heavens; principles of metaphysics (such as unity, principle of individuation, truth and falsity). One moves from within Cartesian philosophy and its intellectual context in the seventeenth century, to living philosophical debate between Descartes and his contemporaries, to its first reception. Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions, 1

Originally published: Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, c1992.