Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Ludwig Wittgenstein are two of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, yet their work is generally regarded as standing in contrast to one another. However, as this outstanding collection demonstrates they both reject a Cartesian picture of the mind and sought to offer an alternative that does justice to the role played by bodily action, language, and our membership within a community that shares a way of life. This is the first collection to compare and contrast the work of these two major philosophers. Fundamental topics and problems discussed include the role of community in their philosophies; Merleau-Ponty on description and depiction and Wittgenstein on saying and doing; the role of language; their treatment of expression; their relation to the philosophy of the Vienna Circle; solipsism; and rule-following. It is essential reading for anyone studying the work of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, as well as those interested in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language.

This is the first book to offer a thorough examination of the relationship that Stanley Cavell's celebrated philosophical work has to the ways in which the United States has been imagined and articulated in its literature. Establishing the contours of Cavell's most significant readings of American philosophical and cultural activity, the volume explores how his philosophy and the kind of reading it demands have an important relation to broader considerations of the American national imaginary. Focused, coherent, and original essays from a wide range of philosophers and critics consider how his investigations of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, represent a sustained engagement with the ways in which philosophy might provide us with new ways of thinking and of living. This is the first detailed and comprehensive treatment of "America" as a category of enquiry in Cavell's writing, engaging with the terms of Cavell's various configurations of the nation and offering readings of American texts that illustrate the possibilities that Cavell's work has, in turn, for literary and film criticism. This study of the role played by philosophy in the articulation of the American self-imaginary highlights the ways in which the reading of literature, and the practice of philosophy, are conjoined in the ethical and political project of national self-definition.

The question of what it means to be human has never before been more difficult and more contested. The human, with a complicated social history that his rarely been examined, remains entrenched in traditional Enlightenment thinking. "Human, All Too Human" considers how we might radicalize our notion of the human. Can the human be thought outside humanism?
Any rethinking of the human places us immediately inside an ever-widening field of contrasting labels: animate and inanimate, natural and artificial, living and dead, organic and mechanistic. These and other boundary confusions at the frontier of the human are the subject of this volume, as each essay takes up one of three disputed border identities: animals, things or children. "Human, All Too Human" examines how we explain our interest in anthropomorphism and our fascination with species categorizations. Essays explore what we mean by "things" and how the integrity of the human may already be compromised by them.
The nine essays in this volume all attempt to rethink the category of the human, challenging some of our most cherished cultural classifications. By inviting us to place the traditions subject of knowledge in the unsettling position of object, these writers interrogate the boundary distinctions that, until now, have exempted the human from the vigilant analysis it so urgently requires.
Contributors: Nancy Armstrong, Rey Chow, Drucilla Cornell, Diana Fuss, Marjorie Garber, Barbara Johnson, Cora Kaplan, James Kincaid, Harriet Ritvo, David Willis

This text investigates the ways in which differently sexed bodies can occupy the same social or political space. Representations of sexual difference have unacknowledged philosophical roots which cannot be dismissed as a superficial bias on the part of the philosopher, be he Aristotle or Lacan, nor removed without destroying the coherence of the philosophical system concerned. The deep structural bias against women extends beyond metaphysics and its effects are felt in epistemology, moral, social and political theory. The idea of sexual difference is contextualized in the study and traced through the history of philosophy. Through her work on Spinoza, Gatens develops alternative conceptions of power, new ways of conceiving women's embodiment, and their legal, political and ethical status.

'I want to begin by declaring that I regard scientific knowledge as the most important kind of knowledge we have,' writes Sir Karl Popper in the opening essay of this book, which collects his meditations on the real improvements science has wrought in society, in politics and in the arts in the course of the twentieth century.
His subjects range from the beginnings of scientific speculation in classical Greece to the destructive effects of twentieth century totalitarianism, from major figures of the Enlightenment such as Kant and Voltaire to the role of science and self-criticism in the arts. The essays offer striking new insights into the mind of one of the greatest twentieth century philosophers.

In Imaginary Bodies Moira Gatens investigates in which ways differently sexed bodies can occupy the same social or political space. Representations of sexual difference have unacknowledged philosophical roots which cannot be dismissed as a superficial bias on the part of the philosopher, be he Aristotle or Lacan, nor removed without destroying the coherence of the philosophical system concerned. The deep structural bias against women extends beyond metaphysics and its effects are felt in epistemology, moral, social and political theory.
The idea of sexual difference is contextualised in Imaginary Bodies and traced through the history of philosophy. Through her work on Spinoza, Gatens develops alternative conceptions of power, new ways of conceiving women's embodiment, and their legal, political and ethical status.

What does the politics of the self mean for a politics of liberation? Morwenna Griffiths argues that mainstream philosophy, particularly the anglo-analytic tradition, needs to tackle the issues of the self, identity, autonomy and self creation. Although identity has been a central concern of feminist thought it has in the main been excluded from philosophical analysis.
Feminisms and the Self is both a critique and a construction of feminist philosophy. After the powerful challenges that postmodernism and poststructuralism posed to liberation movements like feminism, Griffiths book is an original and timely contribution to current debate surrounding the notion of identity and subjectivity.

This text brings together a selection of the work on Martin Heidegger from a number of key commentators working in Europe. These essays, translated from German and French, are a guide to the current European reception of Heidegger and makes available essays that have had considerable impact on English-language Heidegger studies. Essays in this collection include: Marlene Zarader,"The mirror with the triple reflection"; Franco Volpi, "Dasein and Praxis: Aristotle"; Jean-Luc Marion, "Heidegger on Descartes"; Christopher Macann, "Heidegger's Kant Interpretation"; Michel Haar, "Critical remarks on the Heideggerian Reading of Nietzsche"; Maria Villela-Petit, "Heidegger's Conception of Space"; Francoise Dastur, "The ekstatico-horizontal constitution of temporality"; F-W von Herrmann, "Way and Method in Philosophy"; Samuel IJsseling, "The End of Philosophy as the Commencment of Thinking"; Otto Poggler, "Does the saving power also grow? Heidegger's last paths"; Ernst Tugendhat, "Heidegger's Idea of Truth"; and Karl-Otto Apel, "Wittgenstein and Heidegger".

This text brings together a selection of the work on Martin Heidegger from a number of key commentators working in Europe. These essays, translated from German and French, are a guide to the current European reception of Heidegger and makes available essays that have had considerable impact on English-language Heidegger studies. Essays in this collection include: Marlene Zarader,"The mirror with the triple reflection"; Franco Volpi, "Dasein and Praxis: Aristotle"; Jean-Luc Marion, "Heidegger on Descartes"; Christopher Macann, "Heidegger's Kant Interpretation"; Michel Haar, "Critical remarks on the Heideggerian Reading of Nietzsche"; Maria Villela-Petit, "Heidegger's Conception of Space"; Francoise Dastur, "The ekstatico-horizontal constitution of temporality"; F-W von Herrmann, "Way and Method in Philosophy"; Samuel IJsseling, "The End of Philosophy as the Commencment of Thinking"; Otto Poggler, "Does the saving power also grow? Heidegger's last paths"; Ernst Tugendhat, "Heidegger's Idea of Truth"; and Karl-Otto Apel, "Wittgenstein and Heidegger".

Michael Luntley provides a lively introduction to the debate over postmodernism.Sympathisers of the postmodernist critique of absolute knowledge have jetisoned concepts of reason,truth and self;this abandonment has fuelled their opponents' case against postmodernism.This has led them to ignore the very real problems raised by the postmodernists.Luntley offers a clear and careful exposition of how rational debate survives despite the Enlightenment's failings.
Reason,Truth and Self covers many of the key questions of our age:
* How rational is science?
* Can we really know the truth about ourselves and the world?
* What is the nature of the mind?
* Can we know the difference between right and wrong?
Reason,Truth and Self is ideal for introductory courses in philosophy and the social sciences.

What does the politics of the self mean for a politics of liberation? Morwenna Griffiths argues that mainstream philosophy, particularly the anglo-analytic tradition, needs to tackle the issues of the self, identity, autonomy and self creation. Although identity has been a central concern of feminist thought it has in the main been excluded from philosophical analysis.
Feminisms and the Self is both a critique and a construction of feminist philosophy. After the powerful challenges that postmodernism and poststructuralism posed to liberation movements like feminism, Griffiths book is an original and timely contribution to current debate surrounding the notion of identity and subjectivity.

Who are we today? That deceptively simple question continued to be asked by the French historian and philosopher, Michel Foucault, who for the last three decades has had a profound influence on English-speaking scholars in the humanities and social sciences.; This text is designed for undergraduates and others who feel in need of some assistance when coming to grips with Foucault's voluminous and complex writings. Instead of dealing with them chronologically, however, this book concentrates on some of their central concepts, primarily Foucault's rethinking of the categories of "discourse," "power," and " the subject."; Foucault's writings contribute collectively to what he himself calls "an ontology of the present." His historical research was always geared towards showing how things could have been and still could be otherwise. This is especially the case with respect to the production of human subjects.

Opening the way for a reexamination of Matthew Arnold's unique contributions to ethical criticism, James Walter Caufield emphasizes the central role of philosophical pessimism in Arnold's master tropes of "culture" and "conduct." Caufield uses Arnold's ethics as a lens through which to view key literary and cultural movements of the past 150 years, demonstrating that Arnoldian conduct is grounded in a Victorian ethic of "renouncement," a form of altruism that wholly informs both Arnold's poetry and prose and sets him apart from the many nineteenth-century public moralists. Arnold's thought is situated within a cultural and philosophical context that shows the continuing relevance of "renouncement" to much contemporary ethical reflection, from the political kenosis of Giorgio Agamben and the pensiero debole of Gianni Vattimo, to the ethical criticism of Wayne C. Booth and Martha Nussbaum. In refocusing attention on Arnold's place within the broad history of critical and social thought, Caufield returns the poet and critic to his proper place as a founding father of modern cultural criticism.

From the relative obscurity in which Levinas's work languished until very recently, Emmanuel Levinas must now be judged as one of the most influential figures in contemporary Continental philosophy. There is no better guide than John Lewelyn to lead one through the thickets of Levinas's prose. Bursting with questions, multiple references, cascading citations and multilingual puns and nuances, this book is the compelling record of intellectual obsession. Taking as its guiding thre
the theme of genealogy, the book gives a broadly chronological and impressively manageable presentation of the whole sweep of the Levinas's work. Balanced and finely grained, Llewelyn confronts questions of method, Heidegger, phenomenology, the theme of sensibility, religion, enjoyment, feminity, eros, justice and the political. The book reaches a stunning climax in a series of chapters that give a hestitant but tolerant discussion of the question of God in Levinas, the relation to Levinasian ethics to Nietzschean genealogy, and an extraordinary discussion of metaphor that leads into a wholly original analysis of Levinas's poetics and metaphorics. The book concludes with a sensitive reading of the autobiographical epigraphs to Levinas's "Otherwise than Being..." and a consideration of the Holocaust.

With this profound final work, completed in the days leading up to his death, Michel Serres presents a vivid picture of his thinking about religion-a constant preoccupation since childhood-thereby completing Le Grand Recit, the comprehensive explanation of the world and of humanity to which he devoted the last twenty years of his life. Themes from Serres's earlier writings-energy and information, the role of the media in modern society, the anthropological function of sacrifice, the role of scientific knowledge, the problem of evil-are reinterpreted here in the light of the Old Testament accounts of Isaac and Jonah and a variety of Gospel episodes, including the Three Wise Men of the Epiphany, the Transfiguration, Peter's denying Christ, the Crucifixion, Emmaus, and the Pentecost. Monotheistic religion, Serres argues, resembles mathematical abstraction in its dazzling power to bring together the real and the virtual, the natural and the transcendent; but only in its Christian embodiment is it capable of binding together human beings in such a way that partisan attachments are dissolved and a new era of history, free for once of the lethal repetition of collective violence, can be entered into.

In this unique book, Sidney Dekker tackles a largely unexplored dilemma. Our scientific age has equipped us ever better to explain why things go wrong. But this increasing sophistication actually makes it harder to explain why we suffer. Accidents and disasters have become technical problems without inherent purpose. When told of a disaster, we easily feel lost in the steely emptiness of technical languages of engineering or medicine. Or, in our drive to pinpoint the source of suffering, we succumb to the hunt for a scapegoat, possibly inflicting even greater suffering on others around us. How can we satisfactorily deal with suffering when the disaster that caused it is no more than the dispassionate sum of utterly mundane, imperfect human decisions and technical failures? Broad in its historical sweep and ambition, The End of Heaven is also Dekker's most personal book to date.

Since Descartes, the mind has been thought to be "in the head," separable from the world and even from the body it inhabits. In "The Mind and its World," Gregory McCulloch considers the latest debates in philosophy and cognitive science about whether the thinking subject actually requires an environment in order to be able to think.
McCulloch explores the mind/body duality from the Enlightenment to the 20th century. He examines such figures as Descartes, Frege, Locke, and Wittgenstein. His method is comparative, and his insights are illuminating. By pitting Descartes against such thinkers as Wittgenstein and Frege, McCulloch produces a dynamic account of the implications of the Descartian argument about consciousness and the mind. The contrast evolves into McCulloch's original theory of externalism, the notion that the mind is not in the head, and is constituted by environmental, and linguistic object relations.
"The Mind and its World" is a clear and compelling reading of the one of the dominant elements and debates within Western philosophy. Its synthesis of the arguments and controversies will make this book necessary reading for the general reader who is interested in the claims the Enlightenment and its aftermath have made about consciousness, our "minds," and even our brains._

McCulloch provides a clear and accessible introduction to the controversial area of the philosophy of mind and language. Tracing the arguments from Descartes to the present he then offers an original defence of his own version of externalism - that the mind is constituted by the objects which are its phenomena.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203003748

From the relative obscurity in which Levinas's work languished until very recently, Emmanuel Levinas must now be judged as one of the most influential figures in contemporary Continental philosophy. There is no better guide than John Lewelyn to lead one through the thickets of Levinas's prose. Bursting with questions, multiple references, cascading citations and multilingual puns and nuances, this book is the compelling record of intellectual obsession. Taking as its guiding thre
the theme of genealogy, the book gives a broadly chronological and impressively manageable presentation of the whole sweep of the Levinas's work. Balanced and finely grained, Llewelyn confronts questions of method, Heidegger, phenomenology, the theme of sensibility, religion, enjoyment, feminity, eros, justice and the political. The book reaches a stunning climax in a series of chapters that give a hestitant but tolerant discussion of the question of God in Levinas, the relation to Levinasian ethics to Nietzschean genealogy, and an extraordinary discussion of metaphor that leads into a wholly original analysis of Levinas's poetics and metaphorics. The book concludes with a sensitive reading of the autobiographical epigraphs to Levinas's "Otherwise than Being..." and a consideration of the Holocaust.

This classic study of Santayana was the first book to appear in the Arguments of the Philosophers series. Growing interest in the work of this important American philosopher has prompted this new edition of the book complete with a new preface by the author reassessing his own ideas about Santayana and reflecting the new interest in the philosopher's work. A select bibliography of works published about Santayana since the book's first appearance is also included.

First published in 1985. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this volume, originally published in 1928, Mackenzie explores the meaning of Value and its place and relation in human thought and life. Divided into two parts, the first concerns itself with more general problems concerning Value while the latter part details the bearing Value has upon social problems. Mackenzie integrates the major branches of philosophy (Logic, Ethics, Metaphysics and Aesthetics) to analyse and evaluate the fundamental problems of citizenship making this title ideal for students of Philosophy and Politics.

Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction is for students who have already completed an introductory philosophy course and need a fresh look at the central topics in the core subject of metaphysics. It is essential reading for any student of the subject. This Fourth Edition is revised and updated and includes two new chapters on (1) Parts and Wholes, and (2) Metaphysical Indeterminacy or vagueness. This new edition also keeps the user-friendly format, the chapter overviews summarizing the main topics, concrete examples to clarify difficult concepts, annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, endnotes, and a full bibliography. Topics addressed include: the problem of universals the nature of abstract entities the problem of individuation the nature of modality identity through time the nature of time the nature of parts and wholes the problem of metaphysical indeterminacy the Realism/anti-Realism debate. Wherever possible, Michael J. Loux and Thomas M. Crisp relate contemporary views to their classical sources in the history of philosophy. As experienced teachers of philosophy and important contributors to recent debates, Loux and Crisp are uniquely qualified to write this book.

Martin Heidegger's impact on contemporary thought is massive and controversial. In France, the prestige of this German philosopher is such that contemporary French thought cannot be properly understood without reference to him.
"Heidegger and French" "Philosophy" examines the reception of Heidegger's thought in France. Tom Rockmore argues that in the period after World War II, due to the peculiar nature of the humanist French philosophical tradition, Heidegger became the master thinker of French philosophy. Rockmore engages with the controversy over Heidegger's political affiliation with Nazism and the debate on how this commitment can be reconciled with his theory. Examining the relation between Heidegger's philosophy and his politics, the book contends that the French reception of Heidegger's thought--first as philosophical anthropology and later as postmetaphysical humanism--has been systematically mistaken.

Martin Heidegger's impact on contemporary thought is important and controversial. However in France, the influence of this German philosopher is such that contemporary French thought cannot be properly understood without reference to Heidegger and his extraordinary influence.
Tom Rockmore examines the reception of Heidegger's thought in France. He argues that in the period after the Second World War, due to the peculiar nature of the humanist French Philosophical tradition, Heidegger became the master thinker of French philosophy. Perhaps most importantly, he contends that this reception - first as philosophical anthropology and later as postmetaphysical humanism - is systematically mistaken.