Francois Laruelle has been developing his project of non-philosophy since the 1970s. Throughout this time he has aimed at nothing less than the discovery and development of a new form of thinking that draws its material from philosophy and related disciplines, but uses them in inventive new ways that are seen as heretical by standard philosophical approaches. The contributions to this volume highlight Laruelle's own distinctive approach to the history of thought and bring together researchers in the Anglophone and Francophone world who have taken up the project of non-philosophy in their own way, developing new heresies, sometimes even in relation to non-philosophy itself. The contributions here show the scope of non-philosophy with essays on gender, science, religion, politics, animals, and the history of philosophy. They are all brought together, not in a city of intellectuals bound together by law, but within a city of heretics bound together only by their status as stranger. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

If we read Ludwig Wittgenstein s works and take his scientific formation in mathematical logic into account, it comes as a surprise that he ever developed a particular interest in anthropological questions. The following questions immediately arise: What role does anthropology play in Wittgenstein s work? How do problems concerning mankind as a whole relate to his philosophy? How does his approach relate to philosophical anthropology? How does he view classical issues about Man s affairs and actions? The aim of this book is to investigate the anthropological questions that Wittgenstein raised in his works. The answers to the questions raised in this introduction may be found on the intersection between forms of life and radical translation from another culture into ours. The book presents an extensive analysis of anthropological issues with emphasis on language and social elements."

"Power," the third and final volume of The New Press's Essential Works of Foucault series, draws together Foucault's contributions to what he saw as the still-underdeveloped practice of political analysis. It covers the domains Foucault helped to make part of the core agenda of Western political culture--medicine, psychiatry, the penal system, sexuality--illuminating and expanding on the themes of "The Birth of the Clinic," "Discipline and Punish," and the first volume of "The History of Sexuality."

"Power" includes previously unpublished lectures, later writings highlighting Foucault's revolutionary analysis of the politics of personal conduct and freedom, interviews, and letters that illuminate Foucault's own political activism.

This book proposes a new way of reading modern Western philosophers in the Indian context. It questions the colonial methodology, or the practice of importing theories of Western philosophy, and shows how its unmediated applications are often incongruent, irrelevant, and unproductive in local frameworks. The author shows an alternative route to approaching philosophers from the West - Rousseau, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Bergson - by bending and reassembling aspects of their ideas and theories to relate with the diversity and complexity of Indian society. He also offers insights on the politics of non-being and negation from a neglected modern Indian philosopher, Vaddera Chandidas, as a step forward from the Western philosophers presented here. An intervention in philosophical research methodology, this volume will interest scholars and researchers of philosophy, Western philosophy, Indian philosophy, comparative studies, postcolonial studies, literature, cultural studies, and political philosophy.

Few twenty-first century academics take seriously mysticism's claim that we have direct knowledge of a higher or more "inner" reality or God. But Philosophical Mysticism argues that such leading philosophers of earlier epochs as Plato, G. W. F. Hegel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Alfred North Whitehead were, in fact, all philosophical mystics. This book discusses major versions of philosophical mysticism beginning with Plato. It shows how the framework of mysticism's higher or more inner reality allows nature, freedom, science, ethics, the arts, and a rational religion-in-the-making to work together rather than conflicting with one another. This is how philosophical mysticism understands the relationships of fact to value, rationality to ethics, and the rest. And this is why Plato's notion of ascent or turning inward to a higher or more inner reality has strongly attracted such major figures in philosophy, religion, and literature as Aristotle, Plotinus, St Augustine, Dante Alighieri, Immanuel Kant, Hegel, William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein. Wallace's Philosophical Mysticism brings this central strand of western philosophy and culture into focus in a way unique in recent scholarship.

Paul Ricoeur is one of the most wide-ranging thinkers to emerge in the twentieth century. He has developed a unique 'theory of reading' or hermeneutics, which extends far beyond the reading of literary works to build into a theory for the reading of 'life'. For this reason, his work has impacted not only upon literary studies, but upon such disciplines as philosophy, psychoanalysis, history, religion, legal studies and politics.
This introductory guide:
* details Ricoeur's most significant contributions to contemporary critical thought
* provides an intellectual context to his key ideas
* explores the debate around his work on good and evil, psychoanalysis, metaphor, narrative, politics and justice
* suggests the continuing relevance of Ricoeur's thought and examines the increasing interest in his work across a range of disciplines.
Karl Simms also provides a guide to further reading, which offers advice on Ricoeur's publications and relevant secondary texts. Refreshingly clear and impressively comprehensive, Paul Ricoeur is the essential guide to an essential theorist.

This book introduces readers to the writing of the French philosopher, Jacques Ranciere, and discusses the uptake of his work in education. Written from a personal perspective, the book tells the story of the author's engagement with Ranciere's writing as an educational researcher. The first part of the book introduces Ranciere's interventions on democracy and politics, art and aesthetics, emancipation, and education. The second part of the book analyses how Ranciere's writing has been taken up in considerations of emancipatory, democratic, and political education, art(s) education, and innovative work in educational research. The final part of the book appraises the significance of Ranciere's writing for education and considers the difficult task of applying his insights to educational scholarship.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' is one of the most important books of the twentieth century. It influenced philosophers and artists alike and it continues to fascinate readers today. It offers rigorous arguments but clothes them in enigmatic pronouncements. Wittgenstein himself said that his book is 'strictly philosophical and simultaneously literary, and yet there is no blathering in it'. This introduction, first published in 2005, considers both the philosophical and the literary aspects of the 'Tractatus' and shows how they are related. It also shows how the work fits into Wittgenstein's philosophical development and the tradition of analytic philosophy, arguing strongly for the vigour and significance of that tradition.

John Sallis's thought is oriented to two overarching tasks: to bring to light the elemental in nature and to show how the imagination operates at the very center of human experience. He undertakes these tasks by analyzing a broad range of phenomena, including perception, the body, the natural world, art, space, and the cosmos. In every case, Sallis develops an original form of discourse attuned to the specific phenomenon and enacts a thorough reflection on discourse itself in its relation to voice, dialogue, poetry, and translation. Sallis's systematic investigations are complemented by his extensive interpretations of canonical figures in the history of philosophy such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Schelling, and Hegel and by his engagement with the most original thinkers in the areas of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are arguably the most important period in philosophy's history, given that they set a new and broad foundation for subsequent philosophical thought. Over the last decade, however, discontent among instructors has grown with coursebooks' unwavering focus on the era's seven most well-known philosophers-all of them white and male-and on their exclusively metaphysical and epistemological concerns. While few dispute the centrality of these figures and the questions they raised, the modern era also included essential contributions from women-like Margaret Cavendish, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Emilie Du Chatelet-as well as important non-white thinkers, such as Anton Wilhelm Amo, Julien Raimond, and Ottobah Cugoano. At the same time, there has been increasing recognition that moral and political philosophy, philosophy of the natural world, and philosophy of race-also vibrant areas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-need to be better integrated with the standard coverage of metaphysics and epistemology. A New Modern Philosophy: The Inclusive Anthology of Primary Sources addresses-in one volume-these valid criticisms. Weaving together multiple voices and all of the era's vibrant areas of debate, this volume sets a new agenda for studying modern philosophy. It includes a wide range of readings from 34 thinkers, integrating essential works from all of the canonical writers along with the previously neglected philosophers. Arranged chronologically, editors Eugene Marshall and Susanne Sreedhar provide an introduction for each author that sets the thinker in his or her time period as well as in the longer debates to which the thinker contributed. Study questions and suggestions for further reading conclude each chapter. At the end of the volume, in addition to a comprehensive subject index, the book includes 13 Syllabus Modules, which will help instructors use the book to easily set up different topically structured courses, such as "The Citizen and the State," "Mind and Matter," "Education," "Theories of Perception," or "Metaphysics of Causation." And an eresource offers a wide range of supplemental online resources, including essay assignments, exams, quizzes, student handouts, reading questions, and scholarly articles on teaching the history of philosophy.

What exactly does "Europe" mean for philosophy today? Putting aside both Eurocentrism and anti-Eurocentrism, Gasche returns to the old name "Europe" to examine it as a concept or idea in the work of four philosophers from the phenomenological tradition: Husserl, Heidegger, Patocka, and Derrida. Beginning with Husserl, the idea of Europe became central to such issues as rationality, universality, openness to the other, and responsibility. "Europe, or The Infinite Task" tracks the changes these issues have undergone in phenomenology in order to investigate "Europe's" continuing potential for critical and enlightened resistance in a world that is progressively becoming dominated by the mono-perspectivism of global market economics. Rather than giving up on the idea of Europe as an anachronism, Gasche aims to show that it still has philosophical legs.

In our daily lives we make lots of evaluations of actions. We think that driving above the speed limit is dangerous, that giving up one's bus seat to the elderly is polite, that stirring eggs with a plastic spoon is neither good nor bad. We understand, too, that we may be praised or blamed for actions performed on the basis of these evaluations. The goal of this study is to illustrate the foundations that allow for these kinds of judgments.

This multidisciplinary collection of essays provides a critical and comprehensive understanding of how knowledge has been made, moved and used, by whom and for what purpose. To explain how new knowledge emerges, this volume offers a two-fold conceptual move: challenging both the premise of insurmountable differences between confined, autarkic cultures and the linear, nation-centered approach to the spread of immutable stocks of knowledge. Rather, the conceptual focus of the book is on the circulation, amalgamation and reconfiguration of locally shaped bodies of knowledge on a broader, global scale. The authors emphasize that the histories of interaction have been made less transparent through the study of cultural representations thus distorting the view of how knowledge is actually produced. Leading scholars from a range of fields, including history, philosophy, social anthropology and comparative culture research, have contributed chapters which cover the period from the early modern age to the present day and investigate settings in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Their particular focus is on areas that have largely been neglected until now. In this work, readers from many disciplines will find new approaches to writing the global history of knowledge-making, especially historians, scholars of the history and philosophy of science, and those in culture studies.

In A Realist Metaphysics of Race: A Context-Sensitive, Short-Term Retentionist, Long-Term Revisionist Approach, Jeremy Pierce defends a social kind view of racial categories. On this view, the biological features we use to classify people racially do not make races natural kinds. Rather, races exist because of contingent social practices, single out certain groups of people as races, give them social importance, and allow us to name them as races. Pierce also identifies several kinds of context-sensitivity as central to how racial categorization works and argues that we need racial categories to identify problems in how our racial constructions are formed, including the harmful effects of racial constructions. Hence, rather than seeking to eliminate such categories, Pierce argues that we should also make efforts to change the conditions that generate their problematic elements, with an eye toward retaining only the unproblematic aspects. A Realist Metaphysics of Race contains insights relevant not just to professional philosophers in metaphysics, philosophy of race, social philosophy, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science, but also to students and scholars working in sociology, biology, anthropology, ethnic studies, and political science.

"Psyche: Inventions of the Other" is the first publication in English of the twenty-eight essay collection Jacques Derrida published in two volumes in 1998 and 2003. Advancing his reflection on many issues, such as sexual difference, architecture, negative theology, politics, war, nationalism, and religion, Volume II also carries on Derrida's engagement with a number of key thinkers and writers: De Certeau, Heidegger, Kant, Lacoue-Labarthe, Mandela, Rosenszweig, and Shakespeare, among others. Included in this volume are new or revised translations of seminal essays (for example, "Geschlecht I: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference," "Geschlecht II: Heidegger's Hand," "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," and ""Interpretations at War" Kant, the Jew, the German").

This is the first book devoted entirely to exploring Zizek's peculiar kind of Paulinism. It seeks to provide a full map of the Marxist philosopher's interpretations of Paul and critically engage with it. As one of several radical leftists of European critical thought, Zizek embraces the legacy of an ancient apostle in fascinating ways. This work considers Zizek's philosophical and political readings of Paul through the lens of reception history, and argues that through this recent philosophical turn to Paul, notions of the historical and philosophical are reproduced and negotiated anew.

Kant claimed that the principal topics of philosophy all converge on one question: "Was ist der Mensch?" Starting with the main claim that conceptions of the human play a significant structuring role in theory construction, the contributors in this volume investigate the roles that conceptions of the human play both in philosophy and in other human and social sciences. Renowned scholars from various disciplines - philosophy, anthropology, psychology, literary studies - discuss not only the relations between philosophicy and empirical knowledge of the human being. In a rare dialogue between Anglo-Saxon and German humananities, the contributors refer to each other and take up questions of their co-contributors. Thus, controversial, cross-disciplinary debates develop, arise providing new arguments and insights to a question which is methodologically prior to that posed by Kant: How can conceptions of the human be justified?

This book introduces methodological concepts aimed at including women in the canon of the history of philosophy. The history of women philosophers is as long and strong as the history of philosophy, and this holds true not only for the European tradition, as the research of women philosophers of the past shows. The phenomenon of ignoring and excluding women in 19th and 20th century views on the history of philosophy was a result of the patriarchal tradition that ostracized women in general. In this book, leading feminist philosophers discuss methodologies for including women thinkers in the canon and curricula of philosophy. How does the recovery of women thinkers and their philosophies change our view of the past, and how does a different view of the past affect us in the present? Studying a richer and more pluralistic history of philosophy presents us with worlds we have never entered and have never been able to approach. This book will appeal to philosophers and intellectual historians wanting to view the history of philosophy in a new light and who are in favor of an inclusive perspective on that history.

Distinguished feminist philosophers consider the future of their field and chart its political and ethical course in this forward-looking volume. Engaging with themes such as the historical trajectory of feminist phenomenology, ways of perceiving and making sense of the contemporary world, and the feminist body in health and ethics, these essays affirm the base of the discipline as well as open new theoretical spaces for work that bridges bioethics, social identity, physical ability, and the very nature and boundaries of the female body. Entanglements with thinkers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, and Arendt are evident and reveal new directions for productive philosophical work. Grounded in the richness of the feminist philosophical tradition, this work represents a significant opening to the possible futures of feminist phenomenological research.

At the time of his death in 2004, Jacques Derrida was arguably the most influential and the most controversial thinker in contemporary philosophy. Deconstruction, the movement that he founded, has received as much criticism as admiration and provoked one of the most contentious philosophical debates of the twentieth century. Derrida's contribution to European and American literary and philosophical culture was enormous and a comprehensive overview of his extraordinary life and work is long overdue. "Jacques Derrida: A Biography" offers, for the first time, a complete biographical overview of this important philosopher, drawing on Derrida's own accounts of his life, as well as the narratives of friends and colleagues. Powell explores Derrida's early life in Algeria, his higher education in Paris and his development as a thinker, before examining the extraordinary influence of his published works and the celebrity status that he achieved in both Europe and the USA. Powell goes on to explore the crisis Derrida faced toward the end of the 1970s, when structuralism was waning, and his renewed efforts to create a public forum for deconstruction, often in the face of fierce criticism from the popular press. He concludes with an account of his last years and publications, which are both reflective and more assertive in their commentary on the times in which we live, bringing to light his thoughts on fame, life, and death. "Jacques Derrida: A Biography" provides an essential and engaging account of this major philosopher's remarkable life and work.

What are the foundations of human self-understanding and the value of responsible philosophical questioning? Focusing on Heidegger's early work on facticity, historicity, and the phenomenological hermeneutics of factical-historical life, Hans-Helmuth Gander develops an idea of understanding that reflects our connection with the world and other, and thus invites deep consideration of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction. He draws usefully on Husserl's phenomenology and provides grounds for exchange with Descartes, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Foucault. On the way to developing a contemporary hermeneutical philosophy, Gander clarifies the human relation to self in and through conversation with Heidegger's early hermeneutics. Questions about reading and writing then follow as these are the very actions that structure human self-understanding and world understanding.