Ursula Renz - Böcker

The acquisition of self-knowledge is often described as one of the main goals of philosophical inquiry. At the same time, some sort of self-knowledge is often regarded as a necessary condition of our being a human agent or human subject. Thus self-knowledge is taken to constitute both the beginning and the end of humans' search for wisdom, and as such it is intricately bound up with the very idea of philosophy. Not surprisingly therefore, the Delphic injunction 'Know thyself' has fascinated philosophers of different times, backgrounds, and tempers.But how can we make sense of this imperative? What is self-knowledge and how is it achieved? What are the structural features that distinguish self-knowledge from other types of knowledge? What role do external, second- and third-personal, sources of knowledge play in the acquisition of self-knowledge? How can we account for the moral impact ascribed to self-knowledge? Is it just a form of anthropological knowledge that allows agents to act in accordance with their aims? Or, does self-knowledge ultimately ennoble the self of the subjects having it? Finally, is self-knowledge, or its completion, a goal that may be reached at all?The book addresses these questions in fifteen chapters covering approaches of many philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Edmund Husserl or Elisabeth Anscombe. The short reflections inserted between the chapters show that the search for self-knowledge is an important theme in literature, poetry, painting and self-portraiture from Homer.

The acquisition of self-knowledge is often described as one of the main goals of philosophical inquiry. At the same time, some sort of self-knowledge is often regarded as a necessary condition of our being a human agent or human subject. Thus self-knowledge is taken to constitute both the beginning and the end of humans' search for wisdom, and as such it is intricately bound up with the very idea of philosophy. Not surprisingly therefore, the Delphic injunction 'Know thyself' has fascinated philosophers of different times, backgrounds, and tempers.But how can we make sense of this imperative? What is self-knowledge and how is it achieved? What are the structural features that distinguish self-knowledge from other types of knowledge? What role do external, second- and third-personal, sources of knowledge play in the acquisition of self-knowledge? How can we account for the moral impact ascribed to self-knowledge? Is it just a form of anthropological knowledge that allows agents to act in accordance with their aims? Or, does self-knowledge ultimately ennoble the self of the subjects having it? Finally, is self-knowledge, or its completion, a goal that may be reached at all?The book addresses these questions in fifteen chapters covering approaches of many philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Edmund Husserl or Elisabeth Anscombe. The short reflections inserted between the chapters show that the search for self-knowledge is an important theme in literature, poetry, painting and self-portraiture from Homer.

Spinoza on the Human Perspective gathers a variety of contributions concerned with the role of the human perspective and the human lifeform in Spinoza's philosophy, as well as the resources that Spinoza provides for such a philosophy. While significant parts of the current scholarship tend towards ascribing an acosmist view, more recent interpretations have begun to consider human life and specifically human attitudes as being of fundamental concern to Spinoza. It is the aim of this book to draw attention to those parts of Spinoza's philosophy where he is explicitly engaged in a reflection on human life, or some peculiarity of it.The chapters collected here argue in various ways that notions such as 'human being' and 'human life' play a significant role in his thought, and that they do so in non-trivial ways. These hitherto neglected perspectives on Spinoza's philosophy result in accounts of a Spinozistic universe that is no longer completely devoid of particulars and of all those features of reality that are usually taken to be fundamental to the human condition and experience, such as subjectivity or perspectivity, temporality, and emotional salience. In doing so, this book provides new avenues for the study of Spinoza's philosophy. It highlights the role of the human perspective for his metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and social and political philosophy. Accordingly, the volume contains highly original contributions from leading scholars that will have a notable impact on the full breath of Spinoza studies.This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

This book reconstructs Spinoza's theory of the human mind against the backdrop of the twofold notion that subjective experience is explainable and that its successful explanation is of ethical relevance, because it makes us wiser, freer, and happier. Doing so, the book defends a realist rationalist interpretation of Spinoza's approach which does not entail commitment to an ontological reduction of subjective experience to mere intelligibility. In contrast to a long-standing tradition of Hegelian reading of Spinoza's Ethics, it thus defends the notion that the experience of finite subjects is fully real.

Emotionen sind in den letzten Jahren als zentraler Gegenstand der Ethik, der philosophischen Anthropologie und der Philosophie des Geistes wieder entdeckt worden. Die Thematisierung von Gefühlen hat in der Philosophie durchaus Tradition. Seit Platon und Aristoteles gehören Reflexion auf und theoretische Erklärung von Gefühlen zur Philosophie. Viele dieser klassischen Emotionstheorien haben indirekt auf die heutige Diskussion Einfluss, andere eröffnen gerade in ihrer heute ungewöhnlichen Sicht neue Perspektiven. Der vorliegende Band, in dem die wichtigsten Emotionstheorien von Platon bis Wittgenstein vorgestellt werden, soll für die aktuelle Philosophie der Gefühle neue Anschlussmöglichkeiten aufzeigen.