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List of contents
CONTENTS
Preface and acknowledgements
List of contributors
- Philosophical greatness: Introducing the very idea
Stephen Hetherington
- Plato, Platonism, and the history of philosophy
Lloyd P. Gerson
- Zhuangzi’s suggestiveness: Sceptical questions
Karyn Lai
- Aristotle as systematic philosopher: Essence, necessity, and explanation in theory and practice
David Bronstein
- Attention to greatness: Buddhaghosa
Jonardon Ganeri
- Aquinas’s complex web
Jeffrey Hause
- Descartes as a great philosopher: Comprehensive physics, mechanistic embodiment, and methodological systematicity
Gary Hatfield
- Émilie du Châtelet on women’s minds and education
Karen Detlefsen
- What’s so great about Hume?
Don Garrett
- Is Kant a great moral philosopher?
Allen Wood
- ‘How is metaphysics possible?’ Kant’s great question and his great answer
Nicholas F. Stang
- Nietzsche: This time it’s personal
Ken Gemes
- What makes Peirce a great philosopher?
Cheryl Misak
- Wittgenstein’s un-ruley solution to the problem of philosophy
David Macarthur
About the author
Stephen Hetherington is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales. His publications include Epistemology’s Paradox (1992), Good Knowledge, Bad Knowledge (2001), How to Know (2011), and Knowledge and the Gettier Problem (2016).
Summary
This is a scholarly yet accessible volume, blending metaphilosophy with the long history of philosophy and traversing centuries and continents.
Additional text
"What is the difference between a merely good philosopher and a great one? Lists of the great (and usually dead) philosophers presuppose an answer to this question but it's far from obvious what the answer is. The distinguished contributors to this terrific volume advance our understanding of what great philosophy is and explain the greatness of some of the greatest philosophers."
--Quassim Cassam, University of Warwick
