An essay on the history and reality of apparitions. : Being an account of what they are, and what they are not; whence they come, and whence they come not. As also how we may distinguish between the apparitions of good and evil spirits and how we ought to behave to them. With a great variety of surprizing and diverting examples, never publish'd before.
History begins inseparably with the birth of the polis and of philosophy. Both represent a unity in strife. History is life that no longer takes itself for granted. To speak, then, of the meaning of history is not to tell a story with a projected happy or unhappy ending, as Western civilization has hoped, at least since the French Revolution. History's meaning is the meaning of the struggle in which being both reveals and conceals itself. Technological society represents both the triumph of historicity and its implosion, since here humans turn from reaching for the sacrum imperium - life lived in the perspective of truth and justice - to the mundane satisfaction of mundane needs, to life lived for the sake of catering to life.
Kantian autonomy is often thought to be independent of time and place, but J.B. Schneewind in his landmark study, The Invention of Autonomy, has shown that there is much to be learned by setting Kant's moral philosophy in the context of the history of modern moral philosophy.The distinguished authors in the collection continue Schneewind's project by relating Kant's work to the historical context of his predecessors and to the empirical context of human agency.This will be a valuable resource for professionals and advanced students.
George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times
