"In his Phenomenology of Cognition, Cassirer provides a comprehensive and systematic account of the dynamic process involved in the whole of human culture as it progresses from the world of myth and its feeling of social belonging to the highest abstractions of mathematics, logic and theoretical physics. Cassirer engages with the most sophisticated and cutting-edge work in fields ranging from ethnology to classics, egyptology and assyriology to ethology, brain science and psychology to logic, mathematics and theoretical physics. His command of philosophy, literature, and the arts is superb. Echoing his work on Kant, Cassirer begins The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms with the problem posed by the meaning of being for philosophy since Plato. But Cassirer also shows that this problem gains new significance with Kant and with the development of modern culture. Cassirer weaves his conception of the development of knowledge into a broadly Kantian and German idealist dynamic-historical conception of significance and of experience that refuses to accept a fundamental opposition between literary, philosophical and scientific culture. In consequence of his great vision grounded in careful reflection and argument, Cassirer's systematic conception of the Copernican cosmopolitan-cosmological revolution is still philosophically and scientifically unmatched in contemporary philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic and of the Pacific." Pierre Keller, Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Riverside, USA. This new translation makes Cassirer's seminal work available to a new generation of scholars. Each volume includes a translator's introduction by Steve G. Lofts, a foreword by Peter E. Gordon, a glossary of key terms, and an index.

Empathy has for a long time, at least since the eighteenth century, been seen as centrally important in relation to our capacity to gain a grasp of the content of other people's minds, and predict and explain what they will think, feel, and do; and in relation to our capacity to respond to others ethically. In addition, empathy is seen as having a central role in aesthetics, in the understanding of our engagement with works of art and with fictional characters. A fuller understanding of empathy is now offered by the interaction of research in science and the humanities. Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives draws together nineteen original chapters by leading researchers across several disciplines, together with an extensive Introduction by the editors. The individual chapters reveal how important it is, in a wide range of fields of enquiry, to bring to bear an understanding of the role of empathy in its various guises. This volume offers the ideal starting-point for the exploration of this intriguing aspect of human life.

In Chapter 1, I explain why temporal syntheses, although distinguished from associative syntheses, count among the most fundamental phenomena of the passive sphere. I draw on Husserl s account of absolute consciousness, which sublates pairs of opposites such as form/content and constituting/constituted, to show that activity and passivity mutually determine one another.

In Chapter 2, I further expand on pre-egoic components of sense-giving acts encompassed by original passivity. I explain the function of primordial association (Urassoziation) in passive genesis with special reference to the problem of syntheses of similarity and contrast. Then, I turn to the difficult issue of the relation between affection and prominence (Abgehobenheit) in the perceptual field.

In Chapter 3, I explore the sphere of secondary passivity a generic name for the modifications undergone by constituted meanings once the process of constitution is accomplished. I give particular consideration to the passive components involved in the phenomena of memory fulfillment and forgetfulness.

Chapter 4 continues the previous chapter by expanding the discussion of secondary passivity from the subjective to the intersubjective level of sedimentation. I focus on Husserl s account of habitus and language as passive factors responsible for cultural crises. I use the example of translation to show, against Husserl, that passivity, understood as alienation, can also provide the palliative for cultural crises.

In Chapter 5, I question the relation between the three meanings of passivity: receptivity, inactuality and alienation. I present the distinction between the lived body and the physical body as a form of self-alienation. Then I discuss the intersubjective significance of the concept of pairing association. Finally, I turn to the problem of Fremderfahrung in the broad sense, that is, the problem of the interaction between home worlds and alien worlds. I defend the harshly criticized idea of analogical transfer by reversing it and by showing that homecultures, one s own body and also one s self manifest themselves in similar modes of accessible inaccessibility.

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This book analyzes the relation between the flow time and poetic speech in drama and rhetoric. It begins with the classical understanding of time as flux, and its problems and paradoxes entailing from Aristotle, Augustine, Kant and Husserl. The reader will see how these problems unfold and find resolutions through dramatic speech and rhetoric which has an essential relation to the flow of time. It covers elements in poetic speech such as affect, rhythm, metaphor, and syntax. It uses examples from classical rhetorical theories by Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, dramatic speeches from Shakespeare, as well as other modern dramatic texts by Chekhov, Beckett, Jelinek and Sarah Kane. This book appeals to students and academic researchers working in the philosophical fields of aesthetics and phenomenology as well those working in theater and the performing arts.

This book rethinks the concept of community taking Jean-Luc Nancy's influential essay "La communaute desoeuvree" as its starting point, tracing subsequent scholarship on community and adding new insights on avant-garde aesthetics and politics. Extensively exploring the communitarian dimension of avant-garde aesthetics and politics (focusing on artistic groups, intellectual circles and theoretical collectives), the author aims to bring literature and art into a philosophical examination of the paradoxical and complex idea of community.

This book develops and demonstrates an interdisciplinary method that reads literary works as a way of thinking about the city. Literary works do not only provide reflections of the city – depictions of the city as an aesthetically compelling setting – but the literary reflection of the city also offers a critical reflection on the city. How can spatial difference be conceived in cities that are changing beyond the form of the classical modern metropolis of the early 20th century? How can one think of the relation between individual urban subjects and their urban environment, when neither spaces nor discourses of the city provide them with an answer to the question where they might "belong"? How does the human body interact with its urban surroundings, and how should technological mediations be thought of? This book approaches these questions through analysing literary texts, focusing on concepts like heterotopia, non-place and the posthuman. This book will be of interest to interdisciplinary scholars and students of the city, particularly in the fields of Urban Studies, Literary Studies, Geography, and Architecture.

This new collection of essays re-examines the relationship between the aesthetic and the human in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century manifestations of art for art's sake. It treats aestheticism as a subject of perennial interest in the field. Employing a unique methodology in approaching the study of aestheticism from a transnational, comparative standpoint - the volume as a whole presents readers with a variety of perspectives on the topic, in a coherent way.This book: includes contributions from a number of up-and-coming young scholars who are getting a good name (eg, Yvonne Ivory); addresses the question: 'does art for art's sake seek to de-humanize or re-humanize art, the artist or the artistic receptor?' and engages with art, literature, philosophy and literary and aesthetic theory.Art for art's sake addresses the relationship between art and life. Although it has long been argued that aestheticism aims to de-humanize art, this volume seeks to consider the counterclaim that such de-humanization can also lead to re-humanization and to a deepened relationship between the aesthetic sphere and the world at large.

The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch and the painter Harry Weinberger engaged in over twenty years of close friendship and intellectual discourse, centred on sustained discussion of the practice, teaching and morality of art. This book presents a reappraisal of Murdoch's novels - chiefly, three mature novels, The Sea, The Sea (1978), Nuns and Soldiers (1980) and The Good Apprentice (1985), and two enigmatic late novels, The Green Knight (1993) and Jackson's Dilemma (1995) - which are perceived through the prism of her discourse with Weinberger. It draws on a run of almost 400 letters from Murdoch to Weinberger, and on Murdoch's philosophical writings, Weinberger's private writings, the remarks of both artists in interviews, and other material relating to their views on art and art history, much of which is unpublished and has received no previous critical attention. Scrutiny of their shared values, methods and the imagistic dialogue that takes place in their art provides original perspectives on Murdoch's creativity, and new ways of understanding her experimentation with the visual arts. This book offers a new line of enquiry into Murdoch's novels, and into the relationship between literature and the visual arts.

This work presents a rethinking of critical philosophy through the recovery of a larger sense of aesthetics in Kant. It provides a unitary reading of the "Critique of Judgement". This is situated in relation to Kant's attempt to think ends in general. The question of how to think ends is argued to guide Kant both in his treatment of aesthetics and teleology and to provide the rationale for critique itself.

Dance and the Corporeal Uncanny takes the philosophy of the body into the field of dance, through the lens of subjectivity and via its critique. It draws on dance and performance as its dedicated field of practice to articulate a philosophy of agency and movement. It is organized around two conceptual paradigms - one phenomenological (via Merleau-Ponty), the other an interpretation of Nietzschean philosophy, mediated through the work of Deleuze. The book draws on dance studies, cultural critique, ethnography and postcolonial theory, seeking an interdisciplinary audience in philosophy, dance and cultural studies.

This book, The Kyoto Post-COVID Manifesto for Global Economics (KM-PC), is a sequel to our 2018 book, The Kyoto Manifesto for Global Economics (KM-I, 2018). It further exposes the failures of a global economic regime that, based on self-interest, has led to the enormously unequal and fragmented society of today and our decreased ability to respond and recover from the critical worldwide consequences of such a regime over time - notably, climate change. At stake is our very survival beyond the twenty-first century. The fundamental tenet of this book is that our power to heal our currently fractured society lies in the depth of our humanity - in our shared human spirit and spirituality. What is sacred or of imperishable supreme value is what we can be as a human race: empowered, fulfilled individuals, living in harmony, deeply sharing and caring for one another and the environment that sustains us across our distinct cultures and worlds in which we live. Thus, the norms in our economic relations do not have to be those of self-interest that separates us, the ever-watchful distrust represented by "the deal" and immediate economic advantage for me. Instead, we can build an economic frame for our society based on mindfulness, care, mutual human benefit, and trust - on our shared humanity. Our argument was complete and we were ready to publish. But then, suddenly, from the dawning of 2020, everything changed. COVID-19 invaded and the world as we knew it simply stopped. No one saw it coming. As authors, we waited to watch and seek to understand. The result is that the book captures the COVID trauma and, against the fractures based on self-interest already visible in today's society, assesses the impact of COVID-19 now and for the future. Focusing on a humanity-based economics is even more important now, and this book shows why. Chapter 15 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This text probes the psychic and social roots of artistic scenarios of loss. Demonstrating that artistic activity is inextricably bonded to imaginary scripts of bereavement and these in turn to patterns of social dominance, the author argues in favor of an "aesthetics of lessness" that is, postmodern resistance to imaginary inscriptions of grief and their misogynist sequels. The book draws on psychoaesthetics, discourse theory and feminist social critiques to analyse literary visual figurations of loss. Included in its analysis of the romantic and post-romantic imaginary are readings of Merimee, Nerval, Hoffmann, H.D., Anne Hebert, Proust and Beckett, and essays, among others, on Kollwitz, Glacometti, Bellmer, Klee, Gidal and Oulton.

Thinking About Stories is a fun and thought-provoking introduction to philosophical questions about narrative fiction in its many forms, from highbrow literature to pulp fiction to the latest shows on Netflix. Written by philosophers Samuel Lebens and Tatjana von Solodkoff, it engages with fundamental questions about fiction, like: What is it? What does it give us? Does a story need a narrator? And why do sad stories make us cry if we know they aren’t real? The format of the book emulates a lively, verbal exchange: each chapter has only one author while the other appears spontaneously in dialogues in the text along the way, raising questions and voicing criticisms, and inviting responses from their co-author. This unique format allows readers to feel like they are a part of the conversation about the philosophical foundations of some of the fictions in their own lives. Key Features Draws on a wide range of types of narrative fiction, from Harry Potter to Breakfast of Champions to Parks and Recreation. Explores how fiction, despite its detachment from truth, is often best able to teach us important things about the world in which we live. Concludes by asking in the final chapter whether we all might be fictions. Includes bibliographies and suggested reading lists in each chapter

When we think of Iris Murdoch's relationship with art forms, the visual arts come most readily to mind. However, music and other sounds are equally important. Soundscapes - music and other types of sound - contribute to the richly textured atmosphere and moral tenor of Murdoch's novels. This book will help readers to appreciate anew the sensuous nature of Iris Murdoch's prose, and to listen for all kinds of music, sounds and silences in her novels, opening up a new sub-field in Murdoch studies in line with the emerging field of Word and Music Studies. This study is supported by close readings of selected novels exemplifying the subtle variety of ways she deploys music, sounds and silence in her fiction. It also covers Murdoch's knowledge of music and her allusions to music throughout her work, and includes a survey of musical settings of her words by various composers.

Is populism the unsurpassable horizon of our own time or is it a temptation that should at all costs be resisted? Who, and to what end, does the jargon of populism serve? To answer these questions, Alexander Stagnell, Gustav Strandberg, David Payne, and their contributors trace the socio-historical significance of the concept of 'The People' in western philosophy and its relationship to the trend of populist politics today. Bringing together scholars from the fields of aesthetics, critical, cultural and political theory, philosophy, and rhetoric, this volume critically explores the issues facing contemporary society today. With an international team of authors, each chapter speaks to a range of contexts recently affected by populism today, including Sweden, Brazil, Germany, Austria, France, and the UK. As political and economic establishments face a crisis of legitimacy, Populism and The People in Contemporary Critical Thought reveals the shaky foundations on which the concept of 'The People' rests. Engaging with critical theory, feminist theory, Marxism, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, this collection highlights how 'The People' comes to stand in for both belonging and exclusion, enabling us to see the uses and abuses of such terminology as pressing theoretical and political concerns.

Projections of Memory is an exploration of a body of innovative cinematic works that utilize their extraordinary scope to construct monuments to the imagination that promise profound transformations of vision, selfhood, and experience. This form of cinema acts as a nexus through which currents from the other arts can interpenetrate. By examining the strategies of these projects in relation to one another and to the larger historical forces that shape them-tracing the shifts and permutations of their forms and aspirations-Projections of Memory remaps film history around some of its most ambitious achievements and helps to clarify the stakes of cinema as a twentieth-century art form.

This book offers a bold and dynamic examination of Lars von Trier's cinema by interweaving philosophy and theology with close attention to aesthetics through style and narrative. It explores the prophetic voice of von Trier's films, juxtaposing them with Ezekiel's prophecy and Ricoeur's symbols of evil, myth, and hermeneutics of revelation. The films of Lars von Trier are categorized as extreme cinema, inducing trauma and emotional rupture rarely paralleled, while challenging audiences to respond in new ways. This volume argues that the spiritual, biblical content of the films holds a key to understanding von Trier's oeuvre of excess. Spiritual conflict is the mechanism that unpacks the films' notorious excess with explosive, centrifugal force. By confronting the spectator with spiritual conflict through evil, von Trier's films truthfully and prophetically expose the spectator's complicity in personal and structural evil, forcing self-examination through theological themes, analogous to the prophetic voice of the transgressive Hebrew prophet Ezekiel, his prophecy, and its form of delivery. Placed in context with the prophetic voices of Dante, Milton, Dostoyevsky, O'Connor, and Tarkovsky, this volume offers a theoretical framework beyond von Trier. It will be of great interest to scholars in film studies, film and philosophy, film and theology.

This book won the 2014 AESA (American Educational Studies Association) Critics Choice Award. The purpose of this book is restore the centrality of pedagogy in governing the ways literary texts are received, experienced, and interpreted by students in the classroom. Utilizing a method of pedagogical criticism, it provides an account of core approaches to teaching literature that have emerged across history and the conceptual values informing these approaches. More importantly, Reading the World discusses how these values have been shaped by broader global forces and key movements in the discipline of English Literature. To varying degrees, these approaches are aimed at cultivating a hospitable imagination so that students may more fully engage with multiple others in the world. Given the reality of an increasingly interconnected twenty-first century, literature pedagogy plays a vital role in schools by demonstrating how world, global, and cosmopolitan approaches to teaching literature can facilitate the prioritization of the other, challenge us to think about how we can be accountable to multiple others in the world, and push us to continually problematize the boundaries of our openness towards the other.

Immersion is the new orthodoxy. Within the production, curation and critique of sound art, as well as within the broader fields of sound studies and auditory culture, the immersive is routinely celebrated as an experiential quality of sound, the value of which is inherent yet strengthened through dubious metaphysical oppositions to the visual. Yet even within the visual arts an acoustic condition grounded in Marshall McLuhan's metaphorical notion of acoustic space underwrites predispositions towards immersion. This broad conception of an acoustic condition in contemporary art identifies the envelopment of audiences and spectators who no longer perceive from a distance but immanently experience immersive artworks and environments. Immanence and Immersion takes a critical approach to the figures of immersion and interiority describing an acoustic condition in contemporary art. It is argued that a price paid for this predisposition towards immersion is often the conceptual potency and efficacy of the work undertaken, resulting in arguments that compound the marginalisation and disempowerment of practices and discourses concerned with the sonic. The variously phenomenological, correlational and mystical positions that support the predominance of the immersive are subject to critique before suggesting that a stronger distinction between the often confused concepts of immersion and the immanence might serve as a means of breaking with the figure of immersion and the circle of interiority towards attaining greater conceptual potency and epistemological efficacy within the sonic arts.

A teacher to Jacques Lacan, Andre Breton, and Albert Camus, Kojeve defined art as the act of extracting the beautiful from objective reality. His poetic text, "The Concrete Paintings of Kandinsky," endorses nonrepresentational art as uniquely manifesting beauty. Taking the paintings of his renowned uncle, Wassily Kandinsky, as his inspiration, Kojeve suggests that in creating (rather than replicating) beauty, the paintings are themselves complete universes as concrete as the natural world. Kojeve's text considers the utility and necessity of beauty in life, and ultimately poses the involuted question: What is beauty? Including personal letters between Kandinsky and his nephew, this book further elaborates the unique relationship between artist and philosopher. An introduction by Boris Groys contextualizes Kojeve's life and writings.

Bringing together Bataille with Lacan and Nietzsche, Tim Themi examines the role of aesthetics implicit in each and how this invokes an erotic process celebrating the real of what is usually excluded from articulation. Bataille came to deem eroticism as the standpoint from which to grasp humanity as a whole, based on his understanding of our transition to humanity being founded on a series of taboos placed on inner animality. An erotic outlet for the latter was historically the aesthetic dimensions of our religions, but Bataille's view of how this was gradually diminished has much in keeping with Nietzsche's critique of Christian-Platonic dualism and Lacan's of the desexualised Good of Western metaphysics. Building from these often surprising proximities, Themi closely examines Bataille's many interventions into the history of aesthetics -- from his confrontations with Breton's surrealism to his own novels and encounter with the animal cave paintings of Lascaux -- radically re-illuminating the corollary phenomena of Dionysos in Nietzsche's philosophy and the jouissance [enjoyment] of transgression in the psychoanalysis of Lacan. A new ethical criterion for aesthetic works and creations on this basis becomes possible.

In "Eighteenth Century British Aesthetics", editor Dabney Townsend has brought together the work of such well-known writers as John Dryden, Joshua Reynolds, David Hume, and Samuel Johnson with the more obscure works of aestheticians such as Uvedale Price, Daniel Webb, John Baillie, and James Harris, whose work is difficult to find, but is nonetheless important, informative, and interesting. These twenty-two selections, accompanied by Dabney Townsend's historical essay on the development of eighteenth century aesthetics, make the history of aesthetics accessible to both students and specialists alike.

This book contains essays written by eminent phenomenologists & scholars closely related to R. Bernet, a person and a philosopher (colleagues, friends and collaborators, former students). The intellectual and worldwide authority of R. Bernet's work is well represented by the list of contributors, as well as by the content of their chapters. In a sense, this volume is a good indication of the importance of Bernet's own books, articles and classes.
The editors have chosen to concentrate the contributions on what could be estimated to be one of the three major themes of his philosophical itinerary: life, seen from a phenomenological point of view, its relation to subjectivity, experiences and consciousness, and both seen as the ground for an original reflection on art (paintings).

Film, Philosophy, and Reality: Ancient Greece to Godard is an original contribution to film-philosophy that shows how thinking about movies can lead us into a richer appreciation and understanding of both reality and the nature of human experience. Focused on the question of the relationship between how things seem to us and how they really are, it is at once an introduction to philosophy through film and an introduction to film through philosophy. The book is divided into three parts. The first is an introduction to philosophy and film, designed for the reader with little background in one or the other subject. The second examines the philosophical importance of the distinction between appearance and reality, and shows that reflection upon this distinction is naturally provoked by the experience of watching movies. The final part takes a close and careful look at the style and techniques of Jean-Luc Godard's groundbreaking film Breathless in order to illustrate how such themes can be explored cinematically. The book addresses topics such as: Film: what it is and how to understand it The methods and concerns of philosophy The nature of cinematic appearances The history of metaphysics The relationship between cinema and life The philosophical relevance of film techniques. With a glossary of key thinkers, terms, and concepts, as well as sections on suggested films and further reading, this textbook will appeal to lecturers and students in undergraduate philosophy and film courses, and in courses focused on Philosophy of Film, Philosophy and Film, or Film-Philosophy.

Over the last few decades, the notion of improvisation has enriched and dynamized research on traditional philosophies of music, theatre, dance, poetry, and even visual art. This Handbook offers readers an authoritative collection of accessible articles on the philosophy of improvisation, synthesizing and explaining various subjects and issues from the growing wave of journal articles and monographs in the field. Its 48 chapters, written specifically for this volume by an international team of scholars, are accessible for students and researchers alike. The volume is organized into four main sections: I Art and Improvisation: Theoretical Perspectives II Art and Improvisation: Aesthetical, Ethical, and Political Perspectives III Improvisation in Musical Practices IV Improvisation in the Visual, Narrative, Dramatic, and Interactive Arts Key Features: Treats improvisation not only as a stylistic feature, but also as an aesthetic property of artworks and performances as well as a core element of artistic creativity. Spells out multiple aspects of the concept of improvisation, emphasizing its relevance in understanding the nature of art. Covers improvisation in a wide spectrum of artistic domains, including unexpected ones such as literature, visual arts, games, and cooking. Addresses key questions, such as: - How can improvisation be defined and what is its role in different art forms? - Can improvisation be perceived as such, and how can it be aesthetically evaluated? - What is the relationship between improvisation and notions such as action, composition, expressivity, and authenticity? - What is the ethical and political significance of improvisation?