Topics in Historical Philosophy

Series Editor: John McCumber

The history of philosophy is one of the treasure houses of Western culture; it amounts to a multi-generational dialogue about the nature and function of basic concepts such as freedom, justice, divinity, and causality. Traditionally, work in the field has focused on the views of individual thinkers on various topics; the result has been an impressive number of monographs with such titles as “Plato’s Theory of Forms,” “Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion,” and so on. This series is designed to break through this “great man” theory of the history of philosophy and to focus, not on the views of a single thinker, but on themes and processes in which one thinker learns from and develops the views of his or her predecessors. The aim is to take the history of philosophy to the next level, thereby changing the way the history of philosophy is done in the United States.