Knowing full well

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Gilles Deleuze

Giles Deleuze (1925-1995) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. He is a key figure in poststructuralism and one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. In "Foucault", Deleuze presents one of the most incisive and productive analyses of the work of Michel Foucault. This is a crucial examination of the philosophical foundations and principal themes of Foucault's work, providing a rigorous engagement with Foucault's views on knowledge, punishment, power, and the nature of subjectivity.

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T.K. Seung

For more than two centuries, Kant scholars have operated on the unquestioned premise that Kant's three Critiques offered a systematic exposition of his philosophy. But this unitary view, argues T. K. Seung, is gravely mistaken. In Kant's Platonic Revolution in Moral and Political Philosophy, Seung shows how each of the three works represents a major reformulation of the initial commitment to Platonism which Kant had made in his Inaugural Dissertation of 1770. For Kant, Platonic Forms are the basic ideas for constructing moral, aesthetic, and political norms and standards. This is the essence of Kant's Platonic constructivism, which Seung explicates with comparisons to other programs of construction, such as Hobbesian conventionalism and Hegelian historicism. Finally, he clarifies the link between constructivism and deconstruction.

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André J. Bélanger

"Using France as the most representative case of a Catholic context, Andre J. Belanger argues that as French society became more secularized intellectuals replaced the clergy as arbitrators of justice and enlightenment. Catholic morality was consolidated by the scholastic tradition and confirmed by the Counter-Reformation, providing the foundation that allowed the establishment of a lay elite. Belanger describes the progressive takeover of positions of influence by the new elite in Catholic society and examines arguments used by thinkers from the seventeenth to the twentieth century to legitimize their positions. In contrast, the Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition, due to its emphasis on the priesthood of all believers, led to recognition of the individual's conscience as the sole judge of her or his deeds and failed to provide intellectuals with the basis for any claim to serve as moral leaders in political affairs."--BOOK JACKET. "Encompassing a variety of disciplines, this study will be of interest to students of political science, sociology, philosophy, and history."--BOOK JACKET.

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Genevieve Lloyd

In this lucid and elegantly written book, Genevieve Lloyd reads Spinoza's philosophy as a profound articulation of ideas of individuality, selfhood, and freedom. Focusing on Spinoza's Ethics, Lloyd illuminates as well his transformation of Descartes's concepts of substance, mind, and body, and the relations between Spinoza's metaphysics and his ethical views. Spinoza's doctrine of the uniqueness of substance has been interpreted as absorbing individual self-consciousness into an all-embracing whole. Here, Lloyd addresses the dilemmas posed by the Cartesian legacy of what it means to be a self: the sense of isolation of a contained intellectual substance trying to establish contact with an "external" world, the limitations of an idea of knowledge that sharply distinguishes between reason and the passions, problems in thinking about time and mortality in ways that allow no middle ground between an afterlife and annihilation, and tensions in ideals of personhood that claim to transcend sexual difference. Throughout, Lloyd emphasizes the ethical importance of Spinoza's metaphysics. Out of his treatment of substance and its modes emerge new ways of thinking about self-consciousness, freedom, gender difference, the passions, and time. As the influence of Descartes wanes, Lloyd suggests that Spinoza's philosophy may help us rethink some of the most troubling issues surrounding our understanding of the self.