Essences have been assigned important but controversial explanatory roles in philosophical, scientific, and social theorizing. Is it possible for the same organism to be first a caterpillar and then a butterfly? Is it impossible for a human being to transform into an insect like Gregor Samsa does in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis? Is it impossible for Lot’s wife to survive being tur...(展开全部)

Chaos surrounds us. Seemingly random events -- the flapping of a flag, a storm-driven wave striking the shore, a pinball's path -- often appear to have no order, no rational pattern. Explicating the theory of chaos and the consequences of its principal findings -- that actual, precise rules may govern such apparently random behavior -- has been a major part of the work of Edwar...(展开全部)

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72), the German philosopher and a founding member of the Young Hegelians, a group of radical thinkers influenced by G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), was an outspoken critic of religion, and the 1841 publication of this work established his reputation. In the first part of the book he examines what he calls the 'anthropological essence' of religion, and in the ...(展开全部)

This book was born of a refusal, the refusal of the very philosophy from which it has sprung. After the war, when it had become apparent that the classical tradition, and particularly neo-Kantianism, was breathing its last, French thought looked to Germany for its inspiration and renewal. Jean Hyppolite and Kojeve reintroduced Hegel and the "existentialists" and phenomenologist...(展开全部)

"Marxism and Anthropology" is one of the most detailed philosophically-oriented attempts at explaining Marx's own position on philosophical anthropology, encompassing the organic conditions of human sociality, the humanization of nature and the naturalization of man. In the second decade of the 21st Century, rethinking Marx's intensely historicized conception of human nature ha...(展开全部)

This book grew out of a sense that contemporary philosophy lacks a self-image that does it justice. Of the self-images that philosophy inherited from the twentieth century, the most prominent – natural-ism, the linguistic turn, postmodern irony, and so on – seemed obviously inadequate to most of the most interesting work in contemporary philosophy: as descriptions, false when b...(展开全部)