Summary
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
By calling everything into doubt, Descartes laid the foundations of modern philosophy. He deduced that human beings consist of minds and bodies; that these are totally distinct "substances"; that God exists and that He ensures we can trust the evidence of our senses. Ushering in the "scientific revolution" of Galileo and Newton, Descartes' ideas swept aside ancient and medieval traditions of philosophical methods and investigation.

Summary
Excellent Anthology, December 29, 1999
Reviewer:jjparsons@ra.rockwell (Minneapolis)
Although SK is not an easy read due perhaps to his prolixity and sometimes tortuous reasoning, this anthology provides the reader with an excellent overview and foretaste of his more demanding, full-length works. Perhaps the single-best introduction to SK in print.

Summary
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
David Hume's comprehensive attempt to base philosophy on a new, observationally grounded study of human nature is one of the most important texts in Western philosophy. The Treatise first explains how we form such concepts as cause and effect, external existence, and personal identity, and how we create compelling but unverifiable beliefs in the entities represented by these concepts. It then offers a novel account of the passions, explains freedom and necessity as they apply to human choices and actions, and concludes with a detailed explanation of how we distinguish between virtue and vice. The volume features Hume's own abstract of the Treatise, a substantial introduction, extensive annotations, a glossary of terms, a comprehensive index, and suggestions for further reading.--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Summary
From the Publisher
The publication of Martin Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time, in 1927 signaled an intellectual event of the first order and had an impact in fields far beyond that of philosophy proper. Among the most complex and original analyses of the character of philosophic inquiry and the relation of the possibility of such inquiry to the human situation, Being and Time has long been recognized as a landmark work of the twentieth century. Still provocative and much disputed, Heidegger's text has been taken as the inspiration for a variety of innovative movements in fields ranging from psychoanalysis, literary theory, existentialism, ethics, hermeneutics, and theology. A work that disturbs the traditions of philosophizing that it inherits, Being and Time raises questions about the end of philosophy and the possibilities for thinking liberated from the presumptions of metaphysics. This new translation by Joan Stambaugh, one of Heidegger's students and leading interpreters, takes account of English-language Heidegger research since the first translation of Being and Time in 1962.

Summary
Book Description
The fullest expression of the distinguished French philosopher’s ideas about the meaning of life appear in this extended essay, his most famous and influential work. In propounding his distinctive theory of evolution, Bergson considers nature and intelligence, examines mechanisms of thought and illusion, and presents a criticism of philosophical systems from those of the ancients to those of his 19th-century contemporaries.

Summary
ANNOTATION
This book reveals how Henri Bergson became a philosopher, why he is a philosopher and what philosophy must be.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
This edition of Henri Bergson's masterful autobiography is the last of his works to be published. In it, he sets forth his philosophical method: how he became a philosopher, why he made philosophy his life's work, and what philosophy must be -- a search for truth that emphasizes the spiritual dimension of human life and the importance of intuition over intellect. The Creative Mind takes readers into the mind of one of philosophy's most original and eclectic thinkers, whose passionate exploration into the meaning of knowledge and creativity remains revolutionary in its approach. One of the first in his field to emphasize the need to take philosophy out of the realm of wordy dialectic, he carefully outlines how its study should be undertaken. This fascinating introduction to metaphysics is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the discipline of philosophy, how we think, and the importance of contemplation and discovery to us all.

Summary
Book Description
This entirely new translation of Critique of Pure Reason is the most accurate and informative English translation ever produced of this epochal philosophical text. Though its simple, direct style will make it suitable for all new readers of Kant, the translation displays a philosophical and textual sophistication that will enlighten Kant scholars as well. This translation recreates as far as possible a text with the same interpretative nuances and richness as the original.

Summary
By 1781 the sceptical criticism of David Hume had deprived thinkers of all surety except the little they could find in logic and mathematics, and the search for certainry seemed to have reached a dead end. But that year Immmanuel Kant published his brilliantlty original attempt to rescue philosophy, the CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. In his eyes the problem was of demonstrating the possibility of what he called "synthetic a priori" propositions, that is, statements that are not simply tautological and yet do not depend on inductive or experimential proof. The answer, he said, lay in the fact that the apparatus of the mind itself necessarily contributes various ordering elements to our sensations, such as space, time and causality. Without such elements, our experience would be chaotic and unintelligible; and, Kant argued, since our sensations always undergo these orderings we can know a priori all that they imply. It was this ingenious suggestion, and Kant's distinction between the "world-in-itself" and the world as we know it (plus the implication of this distinction for metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and human freedom) that combine to make his CRITIQUE one of th monumental masterworks of all philosophy. (From backcover of the book).

Summary
Book Description
Eighteenth century philosophy was in a crisis, the schism between rationalism and empiricism complicating the dispute over the status of religion and the threat of science. Committed equally to reason and experience, science and morality, Kant's aim was to place these concerns on a secure basis while limiting their claim to unqualified truth: the result is the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), a decisively influential and radically original work.

Summary
FROM THE PUBLISHER
In this volume Spenser presents his formula of evolution, demonstrating that the whole of the cosmos, from the nebulae to moral sentiments, obeyed the same general laws. The theory offers a resolution of the most pressing debates in Victorian intellectual life: the contest between theism and atheism and proposed a solution to the dispute between Mill and Hamilton over the nature of the ultimate reality.