Drawing on a detailed analysis of their correspondence, this books offers a new intepretation of the relation between Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill, which focuses on their controvery over sexual equality.

Vincent Guillin uses the issue of sexual equality as a prism through which to examine important differences – epistemological, methodological and theoretical – between Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill. He succeeds in showing how their differing conceptions of science and human nature influence and affect their respective approaches to philosophy and to the analysis of female (in)equality in particular. Guillin shines a bright searchlight into long-neglected aspects of both men’s thinking – for example, Mill’s proposal to construct an ‘ethology’, or science of character-formation, and Comte’s seemingly bizarre interest in phrenology – and the ways in which these shaped their views of women’s intellectual and political capacities. Guillin’s wide-ranging study examines both men’s major and minor works, their correspondence with one another, and the reasons for the final acrimonious break between two of the nineteenth century’s most original and important thinkers.

The concepts and rhetoric of democracy are once again the main focus of this volume of Redescriptions volume. The book's contributions take up: the claim of representative democracy as an elective aristocracy, the past and present of the British parliament, the media's dealing with gender in the US presidential campaign, and the reactivated debate on obligatory voting. Two articles deal with the legal language of politics, namely with the German tradition of international law and with the unproblematic concept of human rights today, and a further article looks at the politics of languages. (Series: Redescriptions. Yearbook of Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory - Vol. 15)

Collects four of the philosopher's essays on issues central to liberal democratic regimes. --Publisher.

God’s war crimes, Aristotle’s sneaky tricks, Einstein’s pajamas, information theory’s blind spot, Stephen Wolfram’s new kind of science, and six monkeys at six typewriters getting it wrong. What do these have to do with the birth of a universe and with your need for meaning? Everything, as you’re about to see. How does the cosmos do something it has long been thought only gods could achieve? How does an inanimate universe generate stunning new forms and unbelievable new powers without a creator? How does the cosmos create? That’s the central question of this book, which finds clues in strange places. Why A does not equal A. Why one plus one does not equal two. How the Greeks used kickballs to reinvent the universe. And the reason that Polish-born Benoît Mandelbrot—the father of fractal geometry—rebelled against his uncle. You’ll take a scientific expedition into the secret heart of a cosmos you’ve never seen. Not just any cosmos. An electrifyingly inventive cosmos. An obsessive-compulsive cosmos. A driven, ambitious cosmos. A cosmos of colossal shocks. A cosmos of screaming, stunning surprise. A cosmos that breaks five of science’s most sacred laws. Yes, five. And you’ll be rewarded with author Howard Bloom’s provocative new theory of the beginning, middle, and end of the universe—the Bloom toroidal model, also known as the big bagel theory—which explains two of the biggest mysteries in physics: dark energy and why, if antimatter and matter are created in equal amounts, there is so little antimatter in this universe. Called "truly awesome" by Nobel Prize–winner Dudley Herschbach, The God Problem will pull you in with the irresistible attraction of a black hole and spit you out again enlightened with the force of a big bang. Be prepared to have your mind blown. From the Hardcover edition.

This volume presents eighty-nine letters exchanged between John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte between 1841 and 1847. They address important issues of the mid-nineteenth century in philosophy, science, economics, and politics. Cumulatively, these letters provide a humanistic view of Western Europe and its social problems. They add valuable perspective to what we know about the work of Mill and Comte, in a critical period of English and French thought. The correspondence begins with an admiring letter from Mill who considers himself a positivist at the tune and writes to Comte as to an elder colleague. A close friendship developed, in the course of which they discussed matters of common concern. Their understanding extends to personal experiences, including their respective mental crises at an early age. The opinions expressed about their contemporaries are significant and include comments on Thomas Carlyle, John and Sarah Austin, and Alexander Bain, on philosophers and major authors in France, Germany, and Italy. Mill and Comte eventually encountered issues on which they could not come to consensus, especially the equality of women. While Mill was an ardent defender of women's rights, Comte supported the traditional hierarchy that endowed men with social and political superiority. According to Jerome H. Buckley, Gurner Professor of English Literature Emeritus at Harvard University, "The correspondence of Mill and Comte, now available for the first time in English translation, is a remarkable intellectual exchange, a dialogue of real significance in the history of ideas." This volume will be of great interest to philosophers, historians, economists, women's studies scholars, and political scientists.

Investigate the challenging and nuanced philosophy of the long nineteenth century from Kant to Bergson Philosophy in the nineteenth century was characterized by new ways of thinking, a desperate searching for new truths. As science, art, and religion were transformed by social pressures and changing worldviews, old certainties fell away, leaving many with a terrifying sense of loss and a realization that our view of things needed to be profoundly rethought. The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century Philosophy covers the developments, setbacks, upsets, and evolutions in the varied philosophy of the nineteenth century, beginning with an examination of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, instrumental in the fundamental philosophical shifts that marked the beginning of this new and radical age in the history of philosophy. Guiding readers chronologically and thematically through the progression of nineteenth-century thinking, this guide emphasizes clear explanation and analysis of the core ideas of nineteenth-century philosophy in an historically transitional period. It covers the most important philosophers of the era, including Hegel, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Mill, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Bradley, and philosophers whose work manifests the transition from the nineteenth century into the modern era, such as Sidgwick, Peirce, Husserl, Frege and Bergson. The study of nineteenth-century philosophy offers us insight into the origin and creation of the modern era. In this volume, readers will have access to a thorough and clear understanding of philosophy that shaped our world.

The first hemispheric study to trace how women in the Americas obtained the right to vote, Women's Suffrage in the Americas pushes back against the misconception that women's movements originated in the United States. The volume brings Latin American voices to the forefront of English-language scholarship. Suffragists across the hemisphere worked together, formed collegial networks to support each other's work, and fostered advances toward women gaining the vote over time and space from one country to the next. The collection as a whole suggests several models by which women in the Americas gained the right to vote: through party politics; through decree, despite delays justified by women's supposed conservative politics; through conservative defense of traditional roles for women; and within the context of imperialism. However, until now historians have traditionally failed to view this common history through a hemispheric lens.

This volume explores the life and works of Auguste Comte during the last and most controversial part of his career, the period from 1842 to 1857.

The first complete account of the utilitarians' historical thought, from which emerge new interpretations of their philosophy and politics.