his is the first English translation of the Prolegomena iuris naturalis by Gottfried Achenwall (1719–1772). In this book, Achenwall presents the philosophical foundation for his comprehensive theory of natural law. The book is of interest not only because it provides the basis for a careful, systematic, and well-respected eighteenth-century theory of natural law in the Leibniz-Wolffian tradition, but also because it sheds important light on the work of Immanuel Kant. Achenwall’s work infl...

Why do human beings interpret their overall experience in terms of selfhood? How was the notion and sense of self shaped at different times and in different cultures? What sort of problems or paradoxes did these constructions face? These lectures address these and related questions by sketching a roadmap of possible theoretical avenues for conceiving of the self, bringing to the foreground its soteriological implications, while also testing this theoretical outlook against insights offered by...

An open educational and open-ended resource for whomever is interested in philosophical thinking. In this scholarly handbook you find two kinds of chapters. First, there are chapters that provide a broad introduction into a specific philosophical subdiscipline, such as political philosophy, epistemology or metaphysics. As this collection covers most of the sub-disciplines currently taught at Western philosophy departments, you can legitimately claim that you have been introduced to Western â€...

Martin Versfeld (1909–1995) is one of South Africa’s greatest philosophers, appreciated by academics and activists, poets and the broader public. His masterful prose spans the tension between disquiet and joy. Detractor of the violent trends of modernity, a critic of apartheid from the first hour, he was among the first philosophers of ecology. At the same time he celebrated the generosity of the world and advocated an ethics of simplicity, drawing on mediaeval theology and Eastern wisdom...

Passion: Journal of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotion is the bi-annual journal of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotion (EPSSE). It aims to bring together thoughts and ideas about affect and emotion from all areas of philosophy, such as the metaphysics, phenomenology, sociology, ethics, politics, and (cognitive) science of emotion. Passion is not limited to representing one tradition of philosophical thought. We welcome papers from all philosoph...

The confrontation between philosophy and psychoanalysis has had its heyday. After the major debates between Paul Ricoeur, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Henry, this dialogue now seems to have broken down. It has therefore proven necessary and gainful to revisit these debates to explore their re-usability and the degree to which they can provide new insights from a contemporary point of view. It can be said that contemporary philosophy suffers from an ‘exc...

One big question. Two great answers. In Is Free Speech Under Threat? two leading thinkers tackle the issue at the very heart of the culture wars.

Suzanne Nossel (CEO of PEN America) puts the case that even though there is an important rebalancing of power taking place in society today, rightly giving minority voices the space and prominence they have long been owed, even so the uncompromising intolerance of a left-leaning minority crosses the threshold of an important principle on which free ...

The study of Islamic philosophy has entered a new and exciting phase in the last few years. Both the received canon of Islamic philosophers and the narrative of the course of Islamic philosophy are in the process of being radically questioned and revised. Most twentieth-century Western scholarship on Arabic or Islamic philosophy has focused on the period from the ninth century to the twelfth.

It is a measure of the transformation that is currently underway in thefield that, unlike other refer...

Pontius Pilate is one of the most enigmatic figures in Christian theology. The only non-Christian to be named in the Nicene Creed, he is presented as a cruel colonial overseer in secular accounts, as a conflicted judge convinced of Jesus's innocence in the Gospels, and as either a pious Christian or a virtual demon in later Christian writings. This book takes Pilate's role in the trial of Jesus as a starting point for investigating the function of legal judgment in Western society and the way...

This Element offers a brief overview of Buddhist thought and modern scholarly approaches to its diverse forms of moral reflection. It then explores two of the most prominent philosophers from the main strands of the Indian Buddhist tradition - Buddhaghosa and Santideva - in a comparative fashion.