Publications

 

	Scotland has played an immense role in European high culture through the centuries, and among its cultural links none have been greater than those with France. This book shows that the links with France stretch back deep into the Middle Ages, and continue without a break into the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. In one way or another all of the major figures of the Scottish Enlightenment were in close relation to France, and though this book attends to the broad picture of the cultural links binding the two countries, the focus is on certain individuals, especially David Hume, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, and certain of their French counterparts such as Montesquieu, Madame de Condorcet, Victor Cousin and Theodore Jouffroy. Prominent among the areas under discussion are scepticism and common sense, morality and the role of sympathy, and civil society and the question of what constitutes good citizenship. The book should appeal to all with an interest in the broad sweep of Scottish cultural history and more particularly in the country’s Age of Enlightenment and its links with France.
	Written for general reader, considers the achievement of this particular period of Scottish history. This book attends not only to the ideas that made the Scottish Enlightenment such a noted moment, but also to the people themselves who generated these ideas – men such as David Hume and Adam Smith.
	This book examines a number of landmark shifts in our account of the relationship between human and divine existence, as reflected through the perception of time and corporeal experience. Drawing together some of the best scholars in the field, this book provides a representative cross-section of influential trends in the philosophy of religion (e.g. phenomenology, existential thought, Biblical hermeneutics, deconstruction) that have shaped our understanding of the body in its profane and sacred dimensions as site of conflicting discourses on presence and absence, subjectivity and the death of the subject, mortality, resurrection and eternal life
	In Heidegger, Metaphysics and the Univocity of Being, Philip Tonner presents an interpretation of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger in terms of the doctrine of the ‘univocity of being’. According to the doctrine of univocity there is a fundamental concept of being that is truly predicable of everything that exists. This book explores Heidegger’s engagement with the work of John Duns Scotus, who raised philosophical univocity to its historical apotheosis. Early in his career, Heidegger wrote a book-length study of what he took to be a philosophical text of Duns Scotus’. Yet, the word ‘univocity’ rarely features in translations of Heidegger’s works. Tonner shows, by way of a comprehensive discussion of Heidegger’s philosophy, that a univocal notion of being in fact plays a distinctive and crucial role in his thought. This book thus presents a novel interpretation of Heidegger’s work as a whole that builds on a suggested interpretation by Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition and casts a new light on Heidegger’s philosophy, clearly illuminating his debt to Duns Scotus.
	In the period leading up to the Scottish Reformation, there was intense debate in Scotland over matters of faith. This probing study delves into the Pre-Reformation Scottish philosophers’ understanding of the concepts of faith, and the relationship between will and intellect — questions which more than any other characterized philosophy and theology in the Middle Ages.From John Duns Scotus (1266-1308), the greatest Scottish philosopher of his age, to his 15th and 16th century successors, John Ireland, John Mair of Haddington and George Lokert of Ayr, this book is the only comprehensive study of Scottish philosophy from the 12th to the 16th centuries, and proves that the Scottish Philosophical School began well before the Enlightenment.
	This book is unique in that it provides the first-ever substantial account of the seven-centuries-old Scottish philosophical tradition. The book focuses on a number of philosophers in the period from the later-thirteenth century until the mid- twentieth and attends especially to some brilliantly original texts. The book also indicates ways in which philosophy has been intimately related to other aspects of Scotland’s culture. Among the greatest philosophers that Scotland has produced are John Duns Scotus, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid. But there were many other fine, even brilliant philosophers who are less highly regarded, if they are noticed at all, such as John Mair, George Lokert, Frederick Ferrier, Andrew Seth, Norman Kemp Smith and John Macmurray. All these thinkers and many others are discussed in these pages. This clearly written and approachable book gives us a strong sense of the Scottish philosophical tradition.
	Dwelling: Heidegger, Archaeology, Mortality negotiates the discourses of phenomenology, archaeology and palaeoanthropology in order to extend the ‘dwelling perspective’, an approach in the social sciences particularly associated with Tim Ingold and a number of other thinkers, including Chris Tilley, Julian Thomas, Chris Gosden and Clive Gamble, that developed out of an engagement with the thought of Martin Heidegger. This unique book deals with Heidegger’s philosophy as it has been explored in archaeology and anthropology, seeking to expand its cross-disciplinary engagement into accounts of early humans and death awareness. Tonner reads Heidegger’s thought of dwelling in connection to recent developments in the archaeology of mortuary practice amongst our ancestors. Agreeing with Heidegger that an awareness of death marks out a distinctive way of ‘being-in-the-world’, Tonner rejects any relict anthropocentrism in Heidegger’s thought and seeks to break down simple divisions between humans and pre-humans. This book is ideal for readers wishing to cross disciplinary boundaries and to challenge anthropocentric thinking in accounts of human evolution. It would be ideal for professional researchers in the fields covered by the book as well as for graduate students and advanced undergraduates.
	Phenomenology between aesthetics and idealism: an essay in the history of ideas is a short, informal, historical introduction to key themes and thinkers in the phenomenological tradition of European philosophy. Concentrating on the ‘transcendental’ and the ‘aesthetic’ the author highlights the phenomenological tradition’s connections to Kant’s thought and to the tradition of philosophical idealism more generally in the figure of Hegel. By outlining some key issues raised by phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophers in relation to earlier idealists, in connection to aesthetics and the philosophy of art, the author is able to highlight some of the key theoretical parameters of modern European philosophy. Phenomenology between aesthetics and idealism discusses figures, such as Mikel Dufrenne, who are not normally covered in short introductions to phenomenology and aesthetics, but who are nonetheless important to the historical development of this rich philosophical tradition. Also discussed are thinkers like Benjamin, Deleuze and Derrida, who critically reacted to, extended or abandoned key aspects of the phenomenological philosophies associated with Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.