Εὐθύφρων / Κρίτων / Ἀπολογία Σωκράτους

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André Glucksmann

"La philosophie n'est pas un dîner de gala. Ni un guide des bienséances. Ni une panacée antidéprime. La philosophie est un champ de bataille, un face-à-face avec nos défis intimes et ultimes : le souci de la vérité et du mensonge, l'épreuve de la mortalité, le feu de l'amour, le pari de survivre. Sur le ring, deux poids lourds de la pensée. Socrate, inventeur d'une sagesse occidentale et déracinante, avale la ciguë fatale en concoctant un suprême pied de nez aux convenances éternelles. Heidegger, et philosophe, et nazi, et paradoxalement adulé par toutes les universités du monde, meurt dans son lit. Deux manières d'exister et de méditer, deux engagements inconciliables. Le temps ne rentre pas dans ses gonds, les escargots font le dos rond, Dieu s'affiche aux abonnés absents, le diable se perd dans ses déguisements, et pourtant elle tourne, notre planète"--P. [4] of cover.

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[edited by] Tom Ricketts, Michael Potter

"Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) was unquestionably one of the most important philosophers of all time. He trained as a mathematician, and his work in philosophy started as an attempt to provide an explanation of the truths of arithmetic, but in the course of this attempt he not only founded modern logic but also had to address fundamental questions in the philosophy of language and philosophical logic. Frege is generally seen (along with Russell and Wittgenstein) as one of the fathers of the analytic method, which dominated philosophy in English-speaking countries for most of the twentieth century. His work is studied today not just for its historical importance but also because many of his ideas are still seen as relevant to current debates in the philosophies of logic, language, mathematics and the mind. The Cambridge Companion to Frege provides a route into this lively area of research"--

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Peter Poellner

This book offers a new and comprehensive interpretation and a detailed critical assessment of Nietzsche's later ideas on epistemology and metaphysics, drawing extensively not only on his published works but also his voluminous notebooks, largely unpublished in English. The author examines Nietzsche's various distinct lines of thought on the traditionally central areas of philosophy and shows in what specific sense Nietzsche, as he himself claimed, might be said to have moved beyond these questions. Throughout the book, considerable attention is paid both to the historical context of his writings and to subsequent developments in philosophy - English-language as well as Continental European. Among the themes discussed are Nietzsche's relation to scepticism and to evolutionary epistemology; his analysis of 'objective reality' and the associated 'perspectivism'; his criticism of the metaphysician's 'will to truth' and the related analysis of the intellectual paradigm he called the 'ascetic ideal'; his notion of unconscious mental states; and the concept of the will to power and its relation to metaphysics. Dr Poellner, while recognizing the originality of Nietzsche's influential new philosophical paradigm, shows that his thought has closer affinities to the philosophical tradition than is often supposed.

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Elizabeth Bredeck

Metaphors of Knowledge examines the work of philosopher and critic Fritz Mauthner, who influenced much of the discussion on language and literature in turn-of-the-century Austria and Germany. This monograph provides an in-depth analysis of Mauthner's Beitrage zu einer Kritik der Sprache, written in 1901-02, at the time of the "linguistic turn" in the history of philosophy. Bredeck analyzes Mauthner's views of language and knowledge, then considers their implications for his understanding of philosophy as language critique. Noting historical parallels between Mauthner and his contemporaries, the author also draws on recent philosophers and theorists including Richard Rorty and Jacques Derrida, who have re-examined critical commonplaces about philosophical discourse in particular and language in a very general sense. This study considers Mauthner's views on language and thought as "metaphorical," then traces the consequences of those views in his discussion of language origin, history, and the problems of distinguishing between both individual disciplines and types of disciplines. Bredeck gives an overview of Mauthner's critique, but also does more, since a reconstruction of key arguments reveals some troubling inconsistencies. To account for these discrepancies rather than simply identify them, she looks at both what Mauthner says and how he says it. Though Bredeck's emphasis on rhetorical aspects of Mauthner's writing reflects the influence of contemporary trends in interpretation, it is Mauthner's own practice that invites, and even necessitates, such an approach. To view Mauthner in light of current theoretical debates not only helps explain some obvious, fundamental discrepancies in Mauthner's arguments, it also represents an inquiry into the historical background of those present-day discussions. Thus, Mauthner serves as a lens through which we can get a new perspective on issues in contemporary theory, while contemporary theory helps shed new light on the complexities of Mauthner's own thought.