Philosophical Ideas

Philosophical Ideas: A Historical Study invites the reader to consider central ideas from Plato, Hegel, Vico, and Cassirer from points of view that have not been fully articulated in the most frequently encountered interpretations of their works. It is an examination of the ideas of poetics, dialectics, science, and symbol as they function in their works with focus on the problem of knowledge as present in each of them.



The history of philosophy, approached in this way, is a treasure house of ideas that constitutes the subject matter of the contemplative life.



Thora Ilin Bayer is RosaMary Foundation Professor of Liberal Arts and Professor of Philosophy at Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans. She is the author of Cassirer’s Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms: A Philosophical Commentary and co-editor of Giambattista Vico: Keys to the New Science.



Donald Phillip Verene is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Emory University and a fellow of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. His many books include Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge and Vico’s New Science: A Philosophical Commentary.