Interpreting Heidegger

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Bernard Reardon

This book is a survey of French Catholic thought - theological, philosophical and political - during a period of marked spiritual and intellectual revival, delimited roughly by the Napoleonic Concordat with the Vatican in 1802 and the Separation Law of 1905. The thinkers and scholars studied include such diverse figures as Maistre, Lamennais, Lacordaire, Bautin, Gratry, Olle-Laprune, Maurice Blondel and Alfred Loisy. The authors studies these writers, and many others, in detail and analyses in characteristically lucid manner the distinctive contribution of each to French intellectual life in this 'second grand siècle'. Dr. Reardon examines too the major trends in French Catholic thought and concludes that in the nineteenth century there was a recurring tension between liberalism and tradition, between the poles of a secular and even agnostic humanism, and a rigid ultramontanism. The century saw a profound and many-sided reaction to traditional scholasticism, and Dr. Reardon explores this reaction in its various expressions, in theology and philosophy, in political and social thought. The approach is non-technical, and this book will be of considerable interest to a wide variety of readers, both general and specialist. It is the first book in English to cover the development of Catholic thought in France though the whole of the nineteenth century and it will be indispensable for all those who wish for a comprehensive and reliable background to one of the major currents of French intellectual thought in this century. -- from dust cover.

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Guglielmo Ferrero

"The third volume of a trilogy. The first two volumes--The gamble and The reconstruction of Europe--were originally published in Paris. The principles of power is appearing in New York because it could not be published in Europe on account of the greatly increased censorship."--Pref.

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Ernest Sosa

In this book, Ernest Sosa explains the nature of knowledge through an approach first originated by him, known as virtue epistemology. Here he provides the first comprehensive account of his views on epistemic-normativity as a form of performance normativity on two levels. On a first level is found the normativity of the apt performance, whose success manifests the performer's competence. On a higher level is found the normativity of the meta-apt performance, -which manifests not necessarily first-order skill or competence but rather the reflective good judgment required for proper risk assessment. Sosa develops this bi-level account in multiple ways, by applying it to issues much disputed in recent epistemology: epistemic agency, how knowledge is normatively related to action, the knowledge norm of assertion, and the Meno problem as to how knowledge exceeds merely true belief. A full chapter is devoted to how experience should be understood if it is to figure in the epistemic competence that must be manifest in the truth of any belief apt enough to constitute knowledge. Another takes up the epistemology of testimony from the performance-theoretic perspective. Two other chapters are dedicated to comparisons with ostensibly rival views, such as classical internalist foundational-ism, a knowledge-first view, and attributor contextualism. The book concludes with a defense of the epistemic circularity inherent in meta-aptness and thereby in the full aptness of knowing full well. --Book Jacket.

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Thomas Nagel

Most people think about philosophical problems without realizing it. Introducing the uninitiated to the world of philosophical inquiry, this book examines nine philosophical problems fundamental to everyday living. It contains short introduction to the methods of philosophy for those with a taste for abstract ideas and theoretical arguments.