Publisher's Synopsis
Volume 1; Peter Kaufmann was a Christian mystic and early utoplan socialist who resourcefully adapted the ideas of Hegel and other German philosophers to his reform agenda. In his Temple of Truth he sought to reveal unassailable truth that would ground the human quest for knowledge, conceived broadly as knowledge of our environment and self-understanding. Volume 2; Moncure D. Conway, a southern gentlemen, transcendentalist and Unitarian minister, emerged as a leading publicist for the abolitionist movement before the Civil War, and a champion of pacifism and free thought thereafter.;Less philosophically ambitious than Kaufmann, the crux of Conway's oeuvre is his ongoing effort to reveal the ways in which we allow our thinking to be distorted by authoritative social and political institutions, such as slavery and organized religion, as well as personal biases. Conway's project reached its apex in The Earthward Pilgrimage, in which he parodied John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, admonishing his fellow man to confront the facts of this world rather than escape to a supernatural one that exists only in the imagination. Volume 3; J.B. Stallo's The Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics was hailed in 1961 by Nobel laureate Percy Williams Bridgman as a 'landmark of intellectual history.' The book argues that the mechanistic atomism of Newton and Descartes carried metaphysical commitments that science cannot sustain. Highly influential, it was translated into French and into German at the insistence of Ernest Mach.
