Department of Languages

Schmidt, Johannes

Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (annotated translation): F. W. J. Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006)

Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt offer a fresh translation of Schelling’s enigmatic and influential masterpiece, widely recognized as an indispensable work of German Idealism. The text is an embarrassment of riches—both wildly adventurous and somberly prescient. Martin Heidegger claimed that it was “one of the deepest works of German and thus also of Western philosophy” and that it utterly undermined Hegel’s monumental Science of Logic before the latter had even appeared in print. Schelling carefully investigates the problem of evil by building on Kant’s notion of radical evil, while also developing an astonishingly original conception of freedom and personality that exerted an enormous (if subterranean) influence on the later course of European philosophy from Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard through Heidegger to important contemporary theorists like Slavoj Zizek.

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An, Yanming

The Idea of Cheng (Sincerity/Reality) in the History of Chinese Philosophy. Global Scholarly Publications, New York 2006.

Yanming An combines a mastery of detail with a complex and humane philosophical vision. He articulates the role of cheng as a central concept of Chinese thought, discusses the extension of cheng from moral psychology to philosophy of nature, metaphysics and philosophy of language and examines its contrasting roles in explaining change and transformation. In doing so, he places and justifies the varying Western translations of cheng in terms of sincerity, integrity, reality and truth. He also assesses the importance of cheng in Chinese intellectual history and in current debates about using the resources.

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