Thought: A Philosophical History

Panayiota Vassilopoulou, Daniel Whistler, Panayiota Vassilopoulou, Daniel Whistler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780429816864
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism

Of all the topics in the history of philosophy, the history of different forms of thinking and contemplation is one of the most important, and yet is also relatively overlooked. What is it to think philosophically? How did different forms of thinking—reflection, contemplation, critique and analysis—emerge in different epochs?

This collection offers a rich and diverse philosophical exploration of the history of contemplation, from the classical period to the twenty-first century. It covers canonical figures including Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and Kant, as well as debates in less well-known areas such as classical Indian and Islamic thought and the role of speculation in twentieth-century Russian philosophy.

Comprising twenty-two chapters by an international team of contributors, the volume is divided into five parts:

• Flourishing and Thinking from Homer to Hume
• The Thinking of Thinking from Augustine to Gödel
• Images and Thinking from Plotinus to Unger
• Bodies of Thought and Habits of Thinking from Plato to Irigaray
• The Efficacy of Thinking from Sextus to Bataille

Thought: A Philosophical History is the first comprehensive investigation of the history of philosophical thought and contemplation. As such, it is a landmark publication for anyone researching and teaching the history of philosophy, and a valuable resource for those studying the subject in related fields such as literature, religion, sociology and the history of ideas.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction: Patterns of thinking
• Part I: Flourishing and thinking from Homer to Hume
• 1. Thinking like a hero
• 2. The primacy of practice and the centrality of outlook: Reflections on Chinese ethical traditions
• 3. Thinking, theorizing and theoria
• Part II: The thinking of thinking from Augustine to Gödel
• 4. The myth of the mental: An Augustinian critique of Dreyfus and McDowell
• 5. Romantic thinking
• 6. Pure and impure thinking in Hegel's Encyclopedia
• 7. Denkicht—thicket-thinking with Walter Benjamin around 1917
• 8. Formal-syntactical thinking and the structure of the world
• Part III: Images and thinking from Plotinus to Unger
• 9. Plotinus: Philosophical thinking as self-creation
• 10. Thinking's history: Descartes and the past tense of thought
• 11. Polyp-thinking in the eighteenth century
• 12. The mythic imagination as an 'experiment in philosophy': Erich Unger's contribution to the phenomenology of thinking
• Part IV: Bodies of thought and habits of thinking from Plato to Irigaray
• 13. Thinking about the unthinkable: Hypothesizing the khôra in the Timaeus
• 14. Thought in motion: Lucretius' materialist practice
• 15. Thinking philosophically in the Middle Ages: The case of the early Franciscans
• 16. The 'thought-work'; or, the exuberance of thinking in Kant and Freud
• 17. Thinking otherwise with Irigaray and Maximin
• Part V: The efficacy of thinking from Sextus to Bataille
• 18. Thinking without commitment: Two models
• 19. Thinking, acting, and acting by thinking: Marx and Althusser
• 20. 'Thoughts and purposes have come to me in the shadow I should never have learned in the sunshine': The development of philosophical thinking in the literature of Frances E. W. Harper
• 21. The void of thought and the ambivalence of history: Chaadaev, Bakunin, and Fedorov
• 22. The destruction of thought
• Index