The Bloomsbury Anthology of Transcendental Thought ― From Antiquity to the Anthropocene

What is real? What is the relationship between ideas and objects in the world? Is God a concept or a being? Is reality a creation of the mind or a power beyond it? How does mental experience coordinate with natural laws and material phenomena?The Bloomsbury Anthology of Transcendental Thought is the definitive anthology of responses to these and other questions on the nature and limits of human knowledge by philosophers, theologians, and writers from Plato to Zizek.

The word "transcendental" is as prevalent and also as ambiguously defined as the name "philosophy" itself. There are as many uses, invocations, and allusions to the term as there are definitions on offer. Every generation of writers, beginning in earnest in ancient Greece and continuing through to our own time, has attempted to clarify, apply, and lay claim to the meaning of transcendental thought. Arranged chronologically, this anthology reflects the diverse uses the term has been put to over the course of two and a half millennia. It lends historical perspective to the abiding importance of the transcendental for philosophical thinking and also some sense of the complexity, richness, and continued relevance of the contested term.

The Bloomsbury Anthology of Transcendental Thought, the first anthology of its kind, offers teachers and students a new viewpoint on the history and present of transcendental thought. Its selection of essential, engaging excerpts, carefully selected, edited, and introduced, brings course materials up-to-date with the state of the discipline.

David LaRocca is Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at Cornell University, Lecturer in Aesthetics and Film in the Department of Philosophy at College at Cortland, State University of New York, and Writer-in-Residence in the Frederick Lewis Allen Room at the New York Public Library, USA. He studied philosophy, film, rhetoric, and religion at SUNY-Buffalo, UC Berkeley, Vanderbilt University, and at Harvard University, where he was Sinclair Kennedy Traveling Fellow in the United Kingdom. He is the author of On Emerson (2003), Emerson's English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor(2013) and editor of Stanley Cavell's Emerson's Transcendental Etudes (2003),The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman (2011), Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell (2013), andThe Philosophy of War Films (2014).