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  3. Modern European Philosophy

This series publishes a range of high-quality books on philosophers, topics, and schools of thought prominent in the Kantian and post-Kantian European tradition. The series is non-sectarian in approach and methodology, and includes both introductory and more specialised treatments of these thinkers and topics. Authors are encouraged to interpret the boundaries of the modern European tradition in a broad way and to engage with it in primarily philosophical rather than historical terms.

  • Advisory Boards: Sebastian Gardner, University College London, Beatrice Han-Pile, University of Essex, Hans Sluga, University of California, Berkeley

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65 results in Modern European Philosophy

Page 1 of 4

Schopenhauer's Politics
  • Jakob Norberg
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2024
    Print publication:
    31 December 2024
  • Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) lived through an era of great political turmoil, but previous assessments of his political thought have portrayed him as a pessimistic observer with no constructive solutions to offer. By assembling and contextualizing Schopenhauer's dispersed comments on political matters, this book reveals that he developed a distinct conception of politics. In opposition to rising ideological movements such as nationalism or socialism, Schopenhauer denied that politics can ever bring about universal emancipation or fraternal unity. Instead, he viewed politics as a tool for mitigating rather than resolving the conflicts of a fundamentally imperfect world. Jakob Norberg's fascinating book reconstructs Schopenhauer's political ideas and shows how they relate to the dominant debates and trends during the period in which he lived. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Heidegger's Social Ontology
  • The Phenomenology of Self, World, and Others
  • Nicolai K. Knudsen
  • Published online:
    18 February 2023
    Print publication:
    24 November 2022
  • Many critics and commentators hold that Heidegger had next to nothing to say about human sociality. In this book, Nicolai Knudsen rectifies this popular misconception. Drawing on his influential philosophy of mind, his philosophy of action and his conception of being-with, Knudsen argues that the central idea of Heidegger's social ontology is that we can only understand others, do things with others, and form lasting groups with others if we pre-reflectively correlate their behaviour with our own projects and the world that lies between us. Knudsen then uses this framework to formulate Heideggerian contributions to current debates on social cognition, collective intentionality, and social normativity. He also reinterprets Heidegger's famous concept of authenticity in the light of his social ontological commitments, and shows how Heidegger's affiliation with National Socialism betrays his own best insights into the fundamental structure of social life.

Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception
  • On the Body Informed
  • Timothy D. Mooney
  • Published online:
    03 November 2022
    Print publication:
    17 November 2022
  • This is an advanced introduction to and original interpretation of Merleau-Ponty's greatest work, Phenomenology of Perception. Timothy Mooney provides a clear and compelling exposition of the theory of our projective being in the world, and demonstrates as never before the centrality of the body schema in the theory. Thanks to the schema's motor intentionality our bodies inhabit and appropriate space: our postures and perceptual fields are organised schematically when we move to realise our projects. Thus our lived bodies are ineliminably expressive in being both animated and outcome oriented through-and-through. Mooney also analyses the place of the work in the modern philosophical world, showing what Merleau-Ponty takes up from the Kantian and Phenomenological traditions and what he contributes to each. Casting a fresh light on his magnum opus, this book is essential reading for all those interested in the philosophy and phenomenology of the body.

Nietzsche on Conflict, Struggle and War
  • James S. Pearson
  • Published online:
    16 June 2022
    Print publication:
    30 June 2022
  • Nietzsche controversially valorizes struggle and war as necessary ingredients of human flourishing. In this book, James S. Pearson reconstructs Nietzsche's rationale for placing such high value on relations of conflict. In doing so, Pearson reveals how Nietzsche's celebration of social discord is interwoven with his understanding of nature as universal struggle. This study thus draws together Nietzsche's writings on politics, culture, metaphysics, biology and human psychology. It also overcomes an entrenched dispute in the critical literature. Until now, commentators have tended to interpret Nietzsche either as an advocate of radical aristocratic violence or, by contrast, a defender of moderate democratic contest. This book navigates a path between these two opposed readings and shows how Nietzsche is able to endorse both violent strife and restrained competition without contradicting himself.

Judgement and Sense in Modern French Philosophy
  • A New Reading of Six Thinkers
  • Henry Somers-Hall
  • Published online:
    09 June 2022
    Print publication:
    23 June 2022
  • This book proposes a radical new reading of the development of twentieth-century French philosophy. Henry Somers-Hall argues that the central unifying aspect of works by philosophers including Sartre, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Derrida is their attempt to provide an account of cognition that does not reduce thinking to judgement. Somers-Hall shows that each of these philosophers is in dialogue with the others in a shared project (however differently executed) to overcome their inheritances from the Kantian and post-Kantian traditions. His analysis points up the continuing relevance of German idealism, and Kant in particular, to modern French philosophy, with novel readings of many aspects of the philosophies under consideration that show their deep debts to Kantian thought. The result is an important account of the emergence, and essential coherence, of the modern French philosophical tradition.

Heidegger on Concepts, Freedom and Normativity
  • Sacha Golob
  • Published online:
    05 January 2014
    Print publication:
    16 January 2014
  • This book offers a fundamentally new account of the arguments and concepts which define Heidegger's early philosophy, and locates them in relation to both contemporary analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy. Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of mind and on Heidegger's lectures on Plato and Kant, Sacha Golob argues against existing treatments of Heidegger on intentionality and suggests that Heidegger endorses a unique position with respect to conceptual and representational content; he also examines the implications of this for Heidegger's views on truth, realism and 'being'. He goes on to explore Heidegger's work on the underlying issue of normativity, and focuses on his theory of freedom, arguing that it is freedom that links the existential concerns of Being and Time to concepts such as reason, perfection and obligation. His book offers a distinctive new perspective for students of Heidegger and the history of twentieth-century philosophy.

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
  • Ludwig Siep
  • Published online:
    05 January 2014
    Print publication:
    16 January 2014
  • Hegel only published five books in his lifetime, and among them the Phenomenology of Spirit emerges as the most important but also perhaps the most difficult and complex. In this book Ludwig Siep follows the path from Hegel's early writings on religion, love and spirit to the milestones of his 'Jena period'. He shows how the themes of the Phenomenology first appeared in an earlier work, The Difference between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems of Philosophy, and closely examines the direction which Hegel's thought took as he attempted to think through the possibility of a complete system of philosophy. The themes encompassed by the Phenomenology - anti-dualistic epistemology, autonomy, historicality, the sociality of reason - are thoroughly discussed in Siep's subtle and elegantly argued assessment, which appears here in English for the first time. It will be of great interest to all readers studying Hegel's thought.

Adorno's Practical Philosophy
  • Living Less Wrongly
  • Fabian Freyenhagen
  • Published online:
    05 August 2013
    Print publication:
    25 July 2013
  • Adorno notoriously asserted that there is no 'right' life in our current social world. This assertion has contributed to the widespread perception that his philosophy has no practical import or coherent ethics, and he is often accused of being too negative. Fabian Freyenhagen reconstructs and defends Adorno's practical philosophy in response to these charges. He argues that Adorno's deep pessimism about the contemporary social world is coupled with a strong optimism about human potential, and that this optimism explains his negative views about the social world, and his demand that we resist and change it. He shows that Adorno holds a substantive ethics, albeit one that is minimalist and based on a pluralist conception of the bad - a guide for living less wrongly. His incisive study does much to advance our understanding of Adorno, and is also an important intervention into current debates in moral philosophy.

Kant's Defense of Common Moral Experience
  • A Phenomenological Account
  • Jeanine Grenberg
  • Published online:
    05 July 2013
    Print publication:
    18 July 2013
  • In this book, Jeanine Grenberg argues that everything important about Kant's moral philosophy emerges from careful reflection upon the common human moral experience of the conflict between happiness and morality. Through careful readings of both the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason, Grenberg shows that Kant, typically thought to be an overly technical moral philosopher, in fact is a vigorous defender of the common person's first-personal encounter with moral demands. Grenberg uncovers a notion of phenomenological experience in Kant's account of the Fact of Reason, develops a new a reading of the Fact, and grants a moral epistemic role for feeling in grounding Kant's a priori morality. The book thus challenges readings which attribute only a motivational role to feeling; and Fichtean readings which violate Kant's commitments to the limits of reason. This study will be valuable to students and scholars engaged in Kant studies.

Understanding Moral Obligation
  • Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard
  • Robert Stern
  • Published online:
    05 January 2012
    Print publication:
    15 December 2011
  • In many histories of modern ethics, Kant is supposed to have ushered in an anti-realist or constructivist turn by holding that unless we ourselves 'author' or lay down moral norms and values for ourselves, our autonomy as agents will be threatened. In this book, Robert Stern challenges the cogency of this 'argument from autonomy', and claims that Kant never subscribed to it. Rather, it is not value realism but the apparent obligatoriness of morality that really poses a challenge to our autonomy: how can this be accounted for without taking away our freedom? The debate the book focuses on therefore concerns whether this obligatoriness should be located in ourselves (Kant), in others (Hegel) or in God (Kierkegaard). Stern traces the historical dialectic that drove the development of these respective theories, and clearly and sympathetically considers their merits and disadvantages; he concludes by arguing that the choice between them remains open.

Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical Theory
  • Espen Hammer
  • Published online:
    21 April 2011
    Print publication:
    31 March 2011
  • This book is a critical analysis of how key philosophers in the European tradition have responded to the emergence of a modern conception of temporality. Espen Hammer suggests that it is a feature of Western modernity that time has been forcibly separated from the natural cycles and processes with which it used to be associated. In a discussion that ranges over Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Adorno, he examines the forms of dissatisfaction which result from this, together with narrative modes of configuring time, the relationship between agency and temporality, and possible challenges to the modern world's linear and homogenous experience of time. His study is a rich exploration of an enduring philosophical theme: the role of temporality in shaping and reshaping modern human affairs.

Fichte's Social and Political Philosophy
  • Property and Virtue
  • David James
  • Published online:
    03 May 2011
    Print publication:
    20 January 2011
  • In this study of Fichte's social and political philosophy, David James offers an interpretation of Fichte's most famous writings in this area, including his Foundations of Natural Right and Addresses to the German Nation, centred on two main themes: property and virtue. These themes provide the basis for a discussion of such issues as what it means to guarantee the freedom of all the citizens of a state, the problem of unequal relations of economic dependence between states, and the differences and connections between the legal and political sphere of right and morality. James also relates Fichte's central social and political ideas to those of other important figures in the history of philosophy, including Locke, Kant and Hegel, as well as to the radical phase of the French Revolution. His account will be of importance to all who are interested in Fichte's philosophy and its intellectual and political context.

Kant's Theory of Virtue
  • The Value of Autocracy
  • Anne Margaret Baxley
  • Published online:
    06 December 2010
    Print publication:
    11 November 2010
  • Anne Margaret Baxley offers a systematic interpretation of Kant's theory of virtue, whose most distinctive features have not been properly understood. She explores the rich moral psychology in Kant's later and less widely read works on ethics, and argues that the key to understanding his account of virtue is the concept of autocracy, a form of moral self-government in which reason rules over sensibility. Although certain aspects of Kant's theory bear comparison to more familiar Aristotelian claims about virtue, Baxley contends that its most important aspects combine to produce something different - a distinctively modern, egalitarian conception of virtue which is an important and overlooked alternative to the more traditional Greek views which have dominated contemporary virtue ethics.

Hegel on the Modern Arts
  • Benjamin Rutter
  • Published online:
    06 December 2010
    Print publication:
    29 July 2010
  • Debates over the 'end of art' have tended to obscure Hegel's work on the arts themselves. Benjamin Rutter opens this study with a defence of art's indispensability to Hegel's conception of modernity; he then seeks to reorient discussion toward the distinctive values of painting, poetry, and the novel. Working carefully through Hegel's four lecture series on aesthetics, he identifies the expressive possibilities particular to each medium. Thus, Dutch genre scenes animate the everyday with an appearance of vitality; metaphor frees language from prose; and Goethe's lyrics revive the banal routines of love with imagination and wit. Rutter's important study reconstructs Hegel's view not only of modern art but of modern life and will appeal to philosophers, literary theorists, and art historians alike.

Husserl and the Promise of Time
  • Subjectivity in Transcendental Phenomenology
  • Nicolas de Warren
  • Published online:
    20 January 2010
    Print publication:
    05 November 2009
  • This book provides an extensive treatment of Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness. Nicolas de Warren uses detailed analysis of texts by Husserl, some only recently published in German, to examine Husserl's treatment of time-consciousness and its significance for his conception of subjectivity. He traces the development of Husserl's thinking on the problem of time from Franz Brentano's descriptive psychology, and situates it in the framework of his transcendental project as a whole. Particular discussions include the significance of time-consciousness for other phenomenological themes: perceptual experience, the imagination, remembrance, self-consciousness, embodiment, and the consciousness of others. The result is an illuminating exploration of how and why Husserl considered the question of time-consciousness to be the most difficult, yet also the most central, of all the challenges facing his unique philosophical enterprise.

Kierkegaard on Faith and Love
  • Sharon Krishek
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    23 July 2009
  • Kierkegaard's writings are interspersed with remarkable stories of love, commonly understood as a literary device that illustrates the problematic nature of aesthetic and ethical forms of life, and the contrasting desirability of the life of faith. Sharon Krishek argues that for Kierkegaard the connection between love and faith is far from being merely illustrative. Rather, love and faith have a common structure, and are involved with one another in a way that makes it impossible to love well without faith. Remarkably, this applies to romantic love no less than to neighbourly love. Krishek's original and compelling interpretation of the Works of Love in the light of Kierkegaard's famous analysis of the paradoxicality of faith in Fear and Trembling shows that preferential love, and in particular romantic love, plays a much more important and positive role in his thinking than has usually been assumed.

German Idealism and the Concept of Punishment
  • Jean-Christophe Merle
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    28 May 2009
  • Against the background of early modernism - a period that justified punishment by general deterrence - Kant is usually thought to represent a radical turn towards retributivism. For Kant, and later for Fichte and Hegel, a just punishment respects the humanity inherent in the criminal, and serves no external ends - it is instituted only because the criminal deserves it. In this original study, Jean-Christophe Merle uses close analysis of texts to show that these philosophers did not in fact hold a retributivist position, or even a mixed position; instead he traces in their work the gradual emergence of views in favour of deterrence and resocialisation. He also examines Nietzsche's view that morality rests on the rejection of retribution. His final chapter offers a challenge to the retributivist position, and a defence of resocialisation, in the context of current legal theory and practice concerning the punishment of crimes against humanity.

Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism
  • Kristin Gjesdal
  • Published online:
    06 August 2010
    Print publication:
    28 May 2009
  • The philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer interests a wide audience that spans the traditional distinction between European (continental) and Anglo-American (analytic) philosophy. Yet one of the most important and complex aspects of his work - his engagement with German Idealism - has received comparatively little attention. In this book, Kristin Gjesdal uses a close analysis and critical investigation of Gadamer's Truth and Method (1960) to show that his engagement with Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher is integral to his conception of hermeneutics. She argues that a failure to engage with this aspect of Gadamer's philosophy leads to a misunderstanding of the most pressing problem of post-Heideggerian hermeneutics: the tension between the commitment to the self-criticism of reason, on the one hand, and the turn towards the meaning-constituting authority of tradition, on the other. Her study provides an illuminating assessment of both the merits and the limitations of Gadamer's thought.

Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought
  • Paul Redding
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    13 September 2007
  • This 2007 book examines the possibilities for the rehabilitation of Hegelian thought within analytic philosophy. From its inception, the analytic tradition has in general accepted Bertrand Russell's hostile dismissal of the idealists, based on the claim that their metaphysical views were irretrievably corrupted by the faulty logic that informed them. These assumptions are challenged by the work of such analytic philosophers as John McDowell and Robert Brandom, who, while contributing to core areas of the analytic movement, nevertheless have found in Hegel sophisticated ideas that are able to address problems which still haunt the analytic tradition after a hundred years. Paul Redding traces the consequences of the displacement of the logic presupposed by Kant and Hegel by modern post-Fregean logic, and examines the developments within twentieth-century analytic philosophy which have made possible an analytic re-engagement with a previously dismissed philosophical tradition.

Music, Philosophy, and Modernity
  • Andrew Bowie
  • Published online:
    15 October 2009
    Print publication:
    13 September 2007
  • Modern philosophers generally assume that music is a problem to which philosophy ought to offer an answer. Andrew Bowie's Music, Philosophy, and Modernity suggests, in contrast, that music might offer ways of responding to some central questions in modern philosophy. Bowie looks at key philosophical approaches to music ranging from Kant, through the German Romantics and Wagner, to Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Adorno. He uses music to re-examine many ideas about language, subjectivity, metaphysics, truth and ethics, and he suggests that music can show how the predominant images of language, communication, and meaning in contemporary philosophy may be lacking in essential ways. His book will be of interest to philosophers, musicologists, and all who are interested in the relation between music and philosophy.

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