《Visions of Politics (Volume 1)》简介：

The first of three volumes of essays by Quentin Skinner, one of the world's leading intellectual historians. This collection includes some of his most important philosophical and methodological statements written over the past four decades, each carefully revised for publication in this form. In a series of seminal essays Professor Skinner sets forth the intellectual principles that inform his work. Writing as a practising historian, he considers the theoretical difficulties inherent in the pursuit of knowledge and interpretation, and elucidates the methodology which finds its expression in his two successive volumes. All of Professor Skinner's work is characterised by philosophical power, limpid clarity, and elegance of exposition; these essays, many of which are now recognised classics, provide a fascinating and convenient digest of the development of his thought. Professor Skinner has been awarded the Balzan Prize Life Time Achievement Award for Political Thought, History and Theory. Full details of this award can be found at http://www.balzan.it/News_eng.aspx?ID=2474

《Visions of Politics (Volume 1)》摘录：

One final consideration worth highlighting relates to the activity of thinking itself. We need to reckon with the fact that thinking is an effortful activity, not simply a manipulation of a kaleidoscope of mental images. The attempt to think out problem, as a matter of common introspection and observation, does not seem to take the form of, or be reducible to, a patterned or even a uniformly purposive activity. Rather we engage in an often intolerable wrestle with words and meanings, we spill over the limits of our intelligence and become confused, and we often find that our attempts to synthesise our views reveal conceptual disorders at least as much as coherent doctrines. But it is precisely this consideration which is ignored whenever an interpreter insists on collecting the regrettably...

《Visions of Politics (Volume 1)》目录：

General preface
Full contents: volumes 1–3
Acknowledgements
Conventions
Volume 1: Regarding Method:
1. Introduction: seeing things their way
2. The practice of history and the cult of the fact
3. Interpretation, rationality and truth
4. Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas
5. Motives, intentions and interpretation
6. Interpretation and the understanding of speech acts
7. 'Social meaning' and the explanation of social action
8. Moral principles and social change
9. The idea of a cultural lexicon
10. Retrospect: studying rhetoric and conceptual change
Bibliography
Index.
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