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Hello and Welcome to the Gordon Library Philosophy Guide!

What's In This Guide

This guide is designed to find resources for for research related to Philosophy. Use the tabs above of the links below to navigate through this guide. This guide contains information on:

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Statue of Plato at The Academy of Athens

Statue of Plato at The Academy of Athens 

Edgar Serrano (CC BY-NC-SA)

Resources Available at the Gordon Library

The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy

The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy is a definitive introduction to the field, consisting of 15 newly-contributed essays that apply philosophical methods and approaches to feminist concerns. Offers a key view of the project of centering women's experience. Includes topics such as feminism and pragmatism, lesbian philosophy, feminist epistemology, and women in the history of philosophy.

Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Religion

The twentieth century saw religion challenged by the rise of science and secularism, a confrontation which resulted in an astonishingly diverse range of philosophical views about religion and religious belief. Many of the major philosophers of the twentieth century - James, Bergson, Russell, Wittgenstein, Ayer, Heidegger, and Derrida - significantly engaged with religious thought. Idiosyncratic thinkers, such as Whitehead, Levinas and Weil, further contributed to the extraordinary diversity of philosophical investigation of religion across the century. In their turn, leading theologians and religious philosophers - notably Buber, Tillich and Barth - directly engaged with the philosophy of religion. Later, philosophy of religion became a distinct field of study, led by the work of Hick, Alston, Plantinga, and Swinburne. "Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Religion" provides an accessible overview of the major strands in the rich tapestry of twentieth-century thought about religion and will be an indispensible resource for any interested in contemporary philosophy of religion.

On Revolution

Hannah Arendt’s penetrating observations on the modern world, based on a profound knowledge of the past, have been fundamental to our understanding of our political landscape. On Revolution is her classic exploration of a phenomenon that has reshaped the globe. From the eighteenth-century rebellions in America and France to the explosive changes of the twentieth century, Arendt traces the changing face of revolution and its relationship to war while underscoring the crucial role such events will play in the future. Illuminating and prescient, this timeless work will fascinate anyone who seeks to decipher the forces that shape our tumultuous age.

Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus: The Paradigmatic Individuals

Karl Jaspers provides much insight into these four paradigmatic figures who taught us how to live as well as how to think. The reader will see them as both individual personalities and seminal philosophers of vital importance to this day.

The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon

The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon is a reference tool that provides clear and incisive definitions and descriptions of all of Foucault's major terms and influences, including history, knowledge, language, philosophy and power. It also includes entries on philosophers about whom Foucault wrote and who influenced Foucault's thinking, such as Deleuze, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Canguilhem. The entries are written by scholars of Foucault from a variety of disciplines such as philosophy, gender studies, political science and history. Together, they shed light on concepts key to Foucault and to ongoing discussions of his work today.

Rethinking Political Judgement: Arendt and Existentialism

How can we reinvigorate the human capacity for political judgement as a practical activity capable of addressing the uncertainties of our postfoundational world? The book takes up this challenge by drawing on the historically attuned perspective of 20th-century philosophies of existence - in particular the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt. Displacing the lingering rationalist temptations, Masa Mrovlje engages these thinkers' aesthetic sensibility to delve into the experiential reality of political judgement and revivify it as a worldly, ambiguous practice. The purpose is to illustrate the prescient political significance of existentialists' narrative imagination on two contemporary perplexities of political judgement: the problem of dirty hands and the challenge of transitional justice. This engagement reveals the distinctly resistant potential of worldly judgement in its ability to stimulate our capacities of coming to terms with and creatively confronting the tragedies of political action, rather than simply yielding to them as a necessary course of political life.

The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Volume 1

These two 1985 volumes provide a translation of the philosophical works of Descartes, based on the best available Latin and French texts. They are intended to replace the only reasonably comprehensive selection of his works in English, by Haldane and Ross, first published in 1911. All the works included in that edition are translated here, together with a number of additional texts crucial for an understanding of Cartesian philosophy, including important material from Descartes' scientific writings. The result should meet the widespread demand for an accurate and authoritative edition of Descartes' philosophical writings in clear and readable modern English.

The Second Sex

The essential masterwork that has provoked and inspired generations of men and women. "From Eve's apple to Virginia Woolf's room of her own, Beauvoir's treatise remains an essential rallying point, urging self-sufficiency and offering the fruit of knowledge." --Vogue This unabridged edition reinstates significant portions of the original French text that were cut in the first English translation. Vital and groundbreaking, Beauvoir's pioneering and impressive text remains as pertinent today as when it was first published, and will continue to provoke and inspire generations of men and women to come.