Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling is widely regarded as one of the most difficult and influential of German philosophers. In this book, S. J. McGrath not only makes Schelling's ideas accessible to a general audience, he uncovers the romantic philosopher's seminal role as the creator of a concept which shaped and defined late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century the concept of the unconscious. McGrath shows how the unconscious originally functioned in Schelling's philosophy as a bridge between nature and spirit. Before Freud revised the concept to fit his psychopathology, the unconscious was understood largely along Schellingian lines as primarily a source of creative power. Schelling's life-long effort to understand intuitive and non-reflective forms of intelligence in nature, humankind and the divine has been revitalised by Jungians, as well as by archetypal and trans-personal psychologists. With the new interest in the unconscious today, Schelling's ideas have never been more relevant. The Dark Ground of Spirit will therefore be essential reading for those involved in psychoanalysis, analytical psychology and philosophy, as well as anyone with an interest in the history of ideas.

From later antiquity down to the close of the eighteenth century, most philosophers and men of science and, indeed, most educated men, accepted without question a traditional view of the plan and structure of the world.In this volume, which embodies the William James lectures for 1933, Arthur O. Lovejoy points out the three principles—plenitude, continuity, and graduation—which were combined in this conception; analyzes their origins in the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists; traces the most important of their diverse samifications in subsequent religious thought, in metaphysics, in ethics and aesthetics, and in astronomical and biological theories; and copiously illustrates the influence of the conception as a whole, and of the ideas out of which it was compounded, upon the imagination and feelings as expressed in literature.

In Contradiction advocates and defends the view that there are true contradictions (dialetheism), a view that flies in the face of orthodoxy in Western philosophy since Aristotle. The book has been at the centre of the controversies surrounding dialetheism ever since its first publication in 1987. This second edition of the book substantially expands upon the original in various ways, and also contains the author's reflections on developments overthe last two decades. Further aspects of dialetheism are discussed in the companion volume, Doubt Truth to be a Liar, also published by Oxford University Press in 2006.

Is it possible for reality as a whole to be part of itself? Can the world appear within itself without thereby undermining the consistency of our thought and knowledge-claims concerning more local matters of fact? This is a question on which Markus Gabriel and Graham Priest disagree. Gabriel argues that the world cannot exist precisely because it is understood to be an absolutely totality. Priest responds by developing a special form of mereology according to which reality is a single all-encompassing whole, everything, which counts itself among its denizens. Their disagreement results in a debate about everything and nothing: Gabriel argues that we experience nothingness once we overcome our urge to contain reality in an all-encompassing thought, whereas Priest develops an account of nothing according to which it is the ground of absolutely everything. A debate about everything and nothing, but also a reflection on the very possibility of metaphysics.

This collection of essays by James Bradley showcases his unique a speculative cosmology of the Trinity, drawing on the vast history of Western philosophy. This journey led him into an intensive study of a number of different thinkers, ancient and modern, including Plato, John Scotus Eriugena, Duns Scotus, Hegel, Schelling, Peirce, Whitehead and Collingwood.

One of the major philosophical texts of the 20th century, Process and Reality is based on Alfred North Whitehead’s influential lectures that he delivered at the University of Edinburgh in the 1920s on process philosophy.

Whitehead’s master work in philsophy, Process and Reality propounds a system of speculative philosophy, known as process philosophy, in which the various elements of reality into a consistent relation to each other. It is also an exploration of some of the preeminent thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Descartes, Newton, Locke, and Kant.

The ultimate edition of Whitehead’s magnum opus, Process and Reality is a standard reference for scholars of all backgrounds.

In this short, lucid, rich book, Sir Michael Dummett, perhaps the most eminent living British philosopher, sets out his views about some of the deepest questions in philosophy. The fundamental question of metaphysics what does reality consist of? Dummett puts forward his controversial view of reality as there may be no fact of the matter about whether an object does or does not have a given property.

Actuality and potentiality, substantial form and prime matter, efficient causality and teleology are among the fundamental concepts of Aristotelian philosophy of nature. Aristotle's Revenge argues that these concepts are not only compatible with modern science, but are implicitly presupposed by modern science.

Among the many topics covered are:

- The metaphysical presuppositions of scientific method
- The status of scientific realism
- The metaphysics of space and time
- The metaphysics of quantum mechanics
- Reductionism in chemistry and biology
- The metaphysics of evolution
- Neuroscientific reductionism

The book interacts heavily with the literature on these issues in contemporary analytic metaphysics and philosophy of science, so as to bring contemporary philosophy and science into dialogue with the Aristotelian tradition.

This book presents an expanded edition of the author's exploration of the nature and limits of thought. Embracing contradiction and challenging traditional logic, the book engages with issues across philosophical borders, from the historical to the modern, from Eastern to Western, and from the continental to the analytic. This edition of the text includes new chapters on European and Indian philosophy, and reflections on responses to the previous edition of the book.

Praise for previous "a splendid tour de force , one which should be read by every philosopher..."-- Philosophical Quarterly
"[H]ighly entertaining and provocative...an engaging and instructive tour through some of the most perplexing features of our own conceptual finitude..."-- TLS

The Indian philosopher Acharya Nagarjuna (c. 150-250 CE) was the founder of the Madhyamaka (Middle Path) school of Mahayana Buddhism and arguably the most influential Buddhist thinker after Buddha himself. Indeed, in the Tibetan and East Asian traditions, Nagarjuna is often referred to as the 'second Buddha.' His primary contribution to Buddhist thought lies is in the further development of the concept of sunyata or 'emptiness.' For Nagarjuna, all phenomena are without any svabhaba, literally 'own-nature' or 'self-nature', and thus without any underlying essence. In this book, Jan Westerhoff offers a systematic account of Nagarjuna's philosophical position. He reads Nagarjuna in his own philosophical context, but he does not hesitate to show that the issues of Indian and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy have at least family resemblances to issues in European philosophy.

A long-awaited translation on the philosophical relation between technology, the individual, and milieu of the living

From Democritus’s atomism to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, from Aristotle’s reflections on the individual to Husserl’s call for a focused return to things, from the philosophical advent of the Cartesian ego and the Leibnizian monad to Heidegger’s notion of Dasein, the question concerning the constitution of the individual has continued to loom large over the preoccupations of philosophers and scholars of scientific disciplines for thousands of years. 

Through conceptions in modern scientific areas of research such as thermodynamics, the fabrication of technical objects, gestalt theory, cybernetics, and the dynamic formation at work in the creation of crystals, Gilbert Simondon’s unique multifaceted philosophical and scholarly research will eventually lead to an astounding reevaluation and questioning of the historical methods for posing the very question and notion of the individual. More than fifty years after its original publication in French, this groundbreaking work of philosophical theory is now available in its first complete English language translation.

Does the real world, defined as a world of objects that exist independent of human interests, concerns, and cognitive activities, really exist? Jan Westerhoff argues that we have good reason to believe it does not. His discussion considers four main facets of the idea of the real world, ranging from the existence of a separate external and internal world (comprising various mental states congregated around a self), to the existence of an ontological foundation that grounds the existence of all the entities in the world, and the existence of an ultimately true theory that provides a final account of all there is. As Westerhoff discusses the reasons for rejecting the postulation of an external world behind our representations, he asserts that the internal world is not as epistemically transparent as is usually assumed, and that there are good reasons for adopting an anti-foundational account of ontological dependence. Drawing on conclusions from the ancient Indian philosophical
system of Madhyamaka Buddhism, Westerhoff defends his stance in a purely Western philosophical framework, and affirms that ontology, and philosophy more generally, need not be conceived as providing an ultimately true theory of the world.

A comprehensive and accessible philosophy of all and everything, presenting the source and synthesis of metaphysics, science, art, language, sex, gender, character, culture, society, history, self-knowledge, love and death. Neither optimistic nor pessimistic, neither objective nor subjective, neither theist nor atheist, Self and Unself expresses the unfathomable paradox at the root of all branches of human experience, providing the reader with a new, radical ground of understanding, solving, en route, all the actually important questions of philosophy; who I am, who you are, why we are here and what on earth is going on.

George Berkeley (1685–1753) was a university teacher, a missionary, and later a Church of Ireland bishop. The over-riding objective of his long philosophical career was to counteract objections to religious belief that resulted from new philosophies associated with the Scientific Revolution. Accordingly, he argued against scepticism and atheism in the Principles and the Three Dialogues; he rejected theories of force in the Essay on Motion; he offered a new theory of meaning for religious language in Alciphron; and he modified his earlier immaterialism in Siris by speculating about the body's influence on the soul. His radical empiricism and scientific instrumentalism, which rejected the claims of the sciences to provide a realistic interpretation of phenomena, are still influential today. This edition provides texts from the full range of Berkeley's contributions to philosophy, together with an introduction by Desmond M. Clarke that sets them in their historical and philosophical contexts.