This book provides an innovative approach to meeting the challenges faced by philosophical hermeneutics in interpreting an ever-changing and multicultural world. Rudolf A. Makkreel proposes an orientational and reflective conception of interpretation...

This is the long-awaited fifth edition of Marshall Sahlins' classic series of bon mots, ruminations, and musings on the ancients, anthropology, and much else in between. It's been twenty-five years since Sahlins first devised some after-dinner entert...

"The Patriarch and the Caliph" presents the famous "dialogue without resolution" between the third Abbasid Caliph, al-Mahdi, and the first Nestorian Patriarch, Timothy I, in Baghdad in 781 CE. The abundance of versions of this intellectually rich deb...

What is the state of philosophy today, and what might it be tomorrow? With "What Philosophy Is For", Michael Hampe answers these questions by exploring the relationships among philosophy, education, science, and narrative, developing a Socratic criti...

In "Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages", Michelle Karnes revises the history of medieval imagination with a detailed analysis of its role in the period's meditations and theories of cognition. Karnes here understands imaginatio...

Although Leo Strauss published little on Nietzsche, his lectures and correspondence demonstrate a deep critical engagement with Nietzsche's thought. One of the richest contributions is a seminar on Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", taught in 1959...

Heinrich Meier's guiding insight in "Political Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion" is that philosophy must prove its right and its necessity in the face of the claim to truth and demand obedience of its most powerful opponent, revealed...

Nostalgia today is seen as essentially benign, a wistful longing for the past. This wasn't always the case, however: from the late seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth, nostalgia denoted a form of homesickness so extreme that it coul...

When Plato set his dialogs, written texts were disseminated primarily by performance and recitation. He wrote them, however, when literacy was expanding. Jill Frank argues that there are unique insights to be gained from appreciating Plato's dialogs...

Today, we believe that the map is a copy of the Earth, without realizing that the opposite is true: in our culture the Earth has assumed the form of a map. In "Blinding Polyphemus", Franco Farinelli elucidates the philosophical correlation between cu...