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Oxford Scholarly Classics brings together a number of great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in a uniform series design, they will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Spinoza's Ethics is one of the most remarkable, important, and difficult books in the history of philosophy: a treatise simultaneously on metaphysics, knowledge, philosophical psychology, moral philosophy, and political philosophy. It presents, in Spinoza's famous 'geometric method', his radical views on God, Nature, the human being, and happiness. In this wide-ranging introduction to the work, Steven Nadler explains the doctrines and arguments of the Ethics, and shows why Spinoza's endlessly fascinating ideas may have been so troubling to his contemporaries, as well as why they are still highly relevant today. He also examines the philosophical background to Spinoza's thought and the dialogues in which Spinoza was engaged - with his contemporaries (including Descartes and Hobbes), with ancient thinkers (especially the Stoics), and with his Jewish rationalist forebears. His book is written for the student reader but will also be of interest to specialists in early modern philosophy.

This collection of essays offers an overview of the range and breadth of Platonic philosophy in the early modern period, examining both the philosophers of Platonic tradition (e.g. Cusanus, Ficino, and Cudworth), and the impact of Platonism on major philosophers of the period (especially Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Shaftesbury and Berkeley). By demonstrating the vitality of the Platonic tradition in the period this collection challenges the received view that Platonism made little or no contribution in the emergence of modern philosophy.

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People punished by law are treated in ways that we consider immoral in other contexts. In "Punishment as Societal-Defense", Phillip Montague develops a new theory of punishment that, instead of justifying it on the basis of deterrence or retribution, constructs it as analogous to individual self-defense. If people are justified in defending themselves against wrongful aggression, Montague argues, the same principles of distributive justice underlie punishment as societal defense.

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This book examines the introduction of Marxist philosophy to China from the early 1920s to the mid 1940s. It does this through an examination of the philosophical activities and writings of four Chinese Marxist philosophers central to this process. These are Qu Qiubai, Ai Siqi, Li Da and Mao Zedong. The book sets the philosophical writings of these philosophers in the context of the development of Marxist philosophy internationally, and examines particularly the influence on these philosophers of Soviet Marxist philosophy. It argues that these Chinese Marxist philosophers’ interpretations of Marxist philosophy were quite orthodox when judged by the standards of contemporary Soviet Marxism.

Béatrice Longuenesse considers the three aspects of Kant's philosophy, his epistemology and metaphysics of nature, moral philosophy, and aesthetic theory, under one unifying standpoint: Kant's conception of our capacity to form judgments. She argues that the elements which make up our cognitive access to the world have an equally important role to play in our moral evaluations and our aesthetic judgments. Her book will appeal to all interested in Kant and his thought, ranging over Kant's account of our representations of space and time, his conception of the logical forms of judgments, sufficient reason, causality, community, God, freedom, morality, and beauty in nature and art.

Quine has few if any equals as an expositor of logic...The field in which he has made himself preeminent is that of the philosophy of logic, to which...Philosophy of Logic is a short but brilliant introduction.

The postmodern condition is often associated with metaphysical relativism; the suspicion that others live in different worlds and that there are many actual worlds and truths. Through a discussion of the views of other philosophers, the implications for social and literary theory are considered.

Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) lays the foundation for a general system of morals, and is a text of central importance in the history of moral and political thought. By means of the idea of sympathy and the mental construct of an impartial spectator, Smith formulated highly original theories of conscience, moral judgment and the virtues. This volume offers a new edition of the text with helpful notes for the student reader, together with a substantial introduction that sets the work in its philosophical and historical context.

Modern interest in modal logic began with this seminal work by the American C. I. Lewis. As well as developing a theory of strict implication based on criticism of Russell and Whitehead’s concept of implication, it contains valuable historical information on the history and application of algebra to developments in symbolic logic.
-first history of the development of symbolic logic
-origins of the theory of strict implication
-valuable bibliography and index

From interpreting the world to changing it, a synthesis of Chomsky's early work on philosophy, linguistics, and politics.