These 2 essays demonstrate that, beyond example's rich genealogy in the rhetorical tradition, it involves issues that are central to current theories of meaning and ethics in literature and philosophy.

This book examines ethical problems raised by a number of key twentieth-century theoretical and fictional texts by authors such as Levinas, Sartre, Beauvoir, Yourcenar, Duras and Genet. It argues that even texts which apparently espouse ethical positions based on respect for and responsibility towards others, frequently depict conflict as an insurmountable aspect of human relations. This is reflected at an aesthetic level, as these texts both describe the struggle for supremacy and replicate it in their relation to their readers.

This book investigates the role and significance that examples play in shaping arguments and thought, both in philosophy and in everyday life. It addresses questions about how our moral thinking is informed by our conceptual practices, especially in ways related to the relationship between ethics and literature, post-Wittgensteinian ethics, or meta-philosophical concerns about the style of philosophical writing. Written in an accessible and non-technical style, the book uses examples from real-life events or pieces of well-known fictional stories to introduce its discussions. In doing so, it demonstrates the complex way examples, rather than exemplifying philosophical points, inform and condition how we approach the points for which we want to argue. The author shows how examples guide or block our understanding in certain directions, how they do this by stressing morally relevant aspects or dimensions of the terms, and how the sense of moral seriousness allows us to learn from examples. The final chapter explores whether these kinds of engagement with examples can be understood as "thinking primarily through examples." Examples and Their Role in Our Thinking will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working in ethics and moral philosophy, philosophy of language, and philosophy of literature.

Kant and Milton brings to bear new evidence and long-neglected materials to show the importance of Kant’s encounter with Milton’s poetry to the formation of Kant’s moral and aesthetic thought. Sanford Budick reveals the relation between a poetic vision and a philosophy that theorized what that poetry was doing. As Plato and Aristotle contemplate Homer, so Kant contemplates Milton. In all these cases philosophy and poetry allow us to better understand each other. Milton gave voice to the transformation of human understanding effected by the Protestant Revolt, making poetry of the idea that human reason is created self-sufficient. Kant turned that religiously inflected poetry into the richest modern philosophy. Milton’s bold self-reliance is Kant’s as well.Using lectures of Kant that have been published only in the past decade, Budick develops an account of Kant based on his lifelong absorption in the poetry of Milton, especially Paradise Lost. By bringing to bear the immense power of his reflections on aesthetic and moral form, Kant produced one of the most penetrating interpretations of Milton’s achievement that has ever been offered and, at the same time, reached new peaks in the development of aesthetics and moral reason.

"After Poststructuralism is an accessible account of the past and present fortunes of theory, suitable for anyone researching, teaching or studying in the field. However, it offers much more than this, by tracing the real contribution of poststructuralist thought to core philosophical and critical issues. Most importantly, Colin Davis's study offers a way forward for the humanities - a way forward in which theory will play a crucial part."--BOOK JACKET.

Enth. u.a. "The polyphony of Heinrich Glarean's 'Dodecachordon'" (S. 115-176).