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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present
Hegel's Philosophy of Right has long been recognized as the only
systematic alternative to the dominant social contract tradition in
modern political philosophy. Dean Moyar here takes on the difficult
task of reading and representing Hegel's view of justice with the
same kind of intuitive appeal that has made social contract theory,
with its voluntary consent and assignment of rights and privileges,
such an attractive model. Moyar argues that Hegelian justice
depends on a proper understanding of Hegel's theory of value and on
the model of life through which the overall conception of value,
the Good, is operationalized. Closely examining key episodes in
Phenomenology of Spirit and the entire Philosophy of Right, Moyar
shows how Hegel develops his account of justice through an
inferentialist method whereby the content of right unfolds into
increasingly thick normative structures. He asserts that the theory
of value that Hegel develops in tandem with the account of right
relies on a productive unity of self-consciousness and life, of
pure thinking and the natural drives. Moyar argues that Hegel's
expressive account of the free will enables him to theorize rights
not simply as abstract claims, but rather as realizations of value
in social contexts of mutual recognition. Moyar shows that Hegel's
account of justice is a living system of institutions centered on a
close relation of the economic and political spheres and on an
understanding of the law as developing through practices of public
reason. Moyar defends Hegel's metaphysics of the State as an
account of the sovereignty of the Good, and he shows why Hegel
thought that philosophy needs to offer an account of world history
and reformed religion to buttress the modern social order.
In a "return" to Edmund Husserl and Sigmund Freud, Intimacy and the
Anxieties of Cinematic Flesh explores how we can engage these
foundational thinkers of phenomenology and psychoanalysis in an
original approach to film. The idea of the intimate spectator
caught up in anxiety is developed to investigate a range of topics
central to these critical approaches and cinema, including: flesh
as a disruptive state formed in the relationships of intimacy and
anxiety; time and the formation of cinema's enduring objects; space
and things; the sensual, the "real" and the unconscious; wildness,
disruption, and resistance; and the nightmare, reading "phantasy"
across the critical fields. Along with Husserl and Freud, other key
thinkers discussed include Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, Mikel Dufrenne in phenomenology; Melanie Klein,
Ernest Jones, Julia Kristeva, and Rosine Lefort in psychoanalysis.
Framing these issues and critical approaches is the question: how
might Husserlian phenomenology and Freudian/Lacanian
psychoanalysis, so often seen as contradistinctive, be explored
through their potential commonalities rather than differences? In
addressing such a question, this book postulates a new approach to
film through this phenomenological/psychoanalytic
reconceptualization. A wide range of films are examined not simply
as exemplars, but to test the idea that cinema itself can be a
version of critical thinking.
Before he had even conceived of the Decline and fall of the Roman
Empire there was another Edward Gibbon, a young expatriate living
in Switzerland and writing in French. In the Essai, a work of
remarkable erudition and energy completed by the age of twenty-one,
Gibbon reflects on the present state of knowledge in
post-Renaissance Europe - what he calls litterature. The first
publication of the Essai since 1761, this critical edition sets
Gibbon's work in its intellectual context. A detailed introduction
examines the biographical, cultural and historical background to
this text: the young writer's perception of European intellectual
life as he observed it from Lausanne, his relation to the
Encyclopedie and the French academies, the fate of erudition, and
the modern organization of learning in books. An extensive
commentary completes this edition, providing invaluable annotation
of each chapter, including the important but little-known sections
on religion that were replaced by Gibbon in the final text. As
current debates revisit the meaning of Enlightenment, readers will
find in this edition of Gibbon's Essai a new approach to the
intellectual networks and tensions that lie at its heart.
Julia Kristeva has revolutionized the study of modernism by
developing a theoretical approach that is uniquely attuned to the
dynamic interplay between, on the one hand, linguistic and formal
experimentation, and, on the other hand, subjective crisis and
socio-political upheaval. Inspired by the contestatory spirit of
the late 1960s in which she emerged as a theorist, Kristeva has
defended the project of the European avant-gardes and has
systematically attempted to reclaim their legacy in the new
societal structures produced by a global, spectacle-dominated
capitalism. Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism brings
together essays that take up the threads in Kristeva's analyses of
the avant-garde, offering an appreciation of her overall
contribution, the intellectual and political horizon within which
she has produced her seminal works as well as of the blind spots
that need to be acknowledged in any contemporary examination of her
insights. As with other volumes in this series, this volume is
structured in three parts. The first part provides new readings of
key texts or central aspects in Kristeva's oeuvre. The second part
takes up the task of showing the impact of Kristeva's thought on
the appreciation of modernist concerns and strategies in a variety
of fields: literature, philosophy, the visual arts, and dance. The
third part is a glossary of some of Kristeva's key terms, with each
entry written by an expert contributor.
This reader makes the key essays of 19th century French philosopher
Felix Ravaisson available in English for the first time. In recent
years, Ravaisson has emerged as an extremely important and
influential figure in the history of modern European philosophy.
The volume contains the classic 1838 dissertation Of Habit, studies
of Pascal, Stoicism and the wider history of philosophy together
with the Philosophical Testament that he left unfinished when he
died in 1900. The volume also features Ravaisson's work in
archaeology, the history of religions and art-theory, and his essay
on the Venus de Milo, which occupied him over a period of twenty
years after he noticed, when hiding the statue behind a false wall
in a dingy Parisian basement during the Franco-Prussian war, that
it had previously been presented in a way that deformed its
original bearing and meaning. Felix Ravaisson: Selected Essays
contains an introductory intellectual biography of Ravaisson, which
contextualises each of the essays in the volume. It also features
an annotated bibliography of suggested further reading. This book
will grant scholars and students alike wider access to his
distinctive contribution to the history of philosophy.
Feminist Theory After Deleuze addresses the encounter between one
of the 20th century's most important philosophers, Gilles Deleuze,
and one of its most significant political and intellectual
movements, feminism. Feminist theory is a broad, contradictory, and
still evolving school of thought. This book introduces the key
movements within feminist theory, engaging with both Anglo-American
and French feminism, as well as important strains of feminist
thought that have originated in Australia and other parts of
Europe. Mapping both the feminist critique of Deleuze's work and
the ways in which it has brought vitality to feminist theory, this
book brings Deleuze into dialogue with significant thinkers such as
Simone de Beauvoir, Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz
and Luce Irigaray. It takes key terms in feminist theory such as,
'difference', 'gender', 'bodies', 'desire' and 'politics' and
approaches them from a Deleuzian perspective.
Ironically, the philosophy of love has long been neglected by
philosophers, so-called "lovers of wisdom," who would seemingly
need to understand how one best becomes a lover. In Kierkegaard and
the Philosophy of Love, Michael Strawser shows that the philosophy
of love lies at the heart of Kierkegaard's writings, as he argues
that the central issue of Kierkegaard's authorship can and should
be understood more broadly as the task of becoming a lover.
Strawser starts by identifying the questions (How should I love the
other? Is self-love possible? How can I love God?) and themes
(love's immediacy, intentionality, unity, and eternity) that are
central to the philosophy of love, and he develops a rich context
that includes analyses of the conceptions of love found in Plato,
Spinoza, and Hegel, as well as prominent contemporary thinkers.
Strawser provides an original and wide-ranging analysis of
Kierkegaard's writings-from the early The Concept of Irony and
Edifying Discourses to the late The Moment, while maintaining the
prominence of Works of Love- to demonstrate how Kierkegaard's
writings on love are relevant to the emerging study of the
philosophy of love today. The most unique perspective of this work,
however, is Strawser's argument that Kierkegaard's writings on love
are most fruitfully understood within the context of a
phenomenology of love. In interpreting Kierkegaard as a
phenomenologist of love, Strawser claims that it is not Husserl and
Heidegger that we should look to for a connection in the first
instance, but rather Max Scheler, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Emmanuel
Levinas, and most importantly, Jean-Luc Marion, who for the most
part center their thinking on the phenomenological nature of love.
Based on an analysis of the works of these thinkers together with
Kierkegaard's writings, Strawser argues that Kierkegaard presents
readers with a first phenomenology of love, a point of view that
serves as a unifying perspective throughout this work while also
pointing to areas for future scholarship. Overall, this work brings
seemingly divergent perspectives into a unity brought about through
a focus on love-which is, after all, a unifying force.
Eighteenth-century Epicureanism is often viewed as radical,
anti-religious and politically dangerous. But to what extent does
this simplify the ancient philosophy and underestimate its
significance in Enlightenment writing? Through a pan-European
analysis of Enlightenment centres from Scotland to Russia via the
Netherlands, France and Germany, contributors argue that elements
of classical Epicureanism were appropriated by radical and
conservative writers alike. They move beyond literature and
political theory to examine the application of Epicurean ideas in
domains as diverse as physics, natural law, and the philosophy of
language, drawing on the work of both major figures (Diderot,
Helvetius, Smith and Hume) and of lesser-known but equally
influential thinkers (Johann Jacob Schmauss and Dmitrii Anichkov).
This unique collaboration, bringing together historians,
philosophers, political scientists and literary scholars, provides
rich and varied insights into the different strategic uses of
Epicureanism in the eighteenth century.
This volume traces the topic of affect across Lyotard's corpus and
accounts for Lyotard's crucial and original contribution to the
thinking of affect. Highlighting the importance of affect in
Lyotard's philosophy, this work offers a unique contribution to
both affect theory and the reception of Lyotard. Affect indeed
traverses Lyotard's philosophical corpus in various ways and under
various names: "figure" or "the figural" in Discourse, Figure,
"unbound intensities" in his "libidinal" writings, "the feeling of
the differend" in The Differend, "affect" and "infantia" in his
later writings. Across the span of his work, Lyotard insisted on
the intractability of affect, on what he would later call the
"differend" between affect and articulation. The singular awakening
of sensibility, affect both traverses and escapes articulation,
discourse, and representation. Lyotard devoted much of his
attention to the analysis of this traversal of affect in and
through articulation, its transpositions, translations, and
transfers. This volume explores Lyotard's account of affect as it
traverses the different fields encompassed by his writings
(philosophy, the visual arts, the performing arts, literature,
music, politics, psychoanalysis as well as technology and
post-human studies).
Toward the beginning of 2013, I received reports of passages in the
Black Notebooks that offered observations on Jewry, or as the case
may be, world Jewry. It immediately became clear to me that the
publication of the Black Notebooks would call forth a wide-spread
international debate. Already in the Spring of 2013, I had asked
Professor Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, last private assistant -
and in the words of my grandfather, the "chief co-worker of the
complete edition", - if he might review the Notebooks as a whole,
based on his profound insight into the thought of Martin Heidegger,
and in particular, review those Jewish-related passages that were
the focus of the public eye. Publications about the Black Notebooks
quickly came to propagate catchy expressions such as
"being-historical anti-Semitism" and "metaphysical anti-Semitism".
The first question that obviously arises is: Does the thought of
Martin Heidegger exhibit any kind of anti-Semitism at all? In this
book Professor von Herrmann now advances his hermeneutic
explication. With Professor Francesco Alfieri of the Pontificia
Universita Lateranense he has found a colleague who has drawn up a
comprehensive philological analysis of volumes GA 94 through GA 97
of the Complete Edition. The fact that Heidegger designated the
hitherto published "black notebooks" as Ponderings (UEberlegungen)
and as Observations (Anmerkungen) has been given little
consideration. He intentionally placed them at the conclusion of
the Complete Edition because without acquaintance with the
lectures, and above all, with the being-historical treatises that
would come to be published in the framework of the Complete
Edition, they would not be comprehensible. (Arnulf Heidegger)
What is the point of living? If we are all going to die anyway, if
nothing will remain of whatever we achieve in this life, why should
we bother trying to achieve anything in the first place? Can we be
mortal and still live a meaningful life? Questions such as these
have been asked for a long time, but nobody has found a conclusive
answer yet. The connection between death and meaning, however, has
taken centre stage in the philosophical and literary work of some
of the world's greatest writers: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy,
Soren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, Herman Melville, Friedrich
Nietzsche, William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Marcel Proust, and
Albert Camus. This book explores their ideas, weaving a rich
tapestry of concepts, voices and images, helping the reader to
understand the concerns at the heart of those writers' work and
uncovering common themes and stark contrasts in their understanding
of what kind of world we live in and what really matters in life.
This book, itself a study of two books on the Baroque, proposes a
pair of related theses: one interpretive, the other argumentative.
The first, enveloped in the second, holds that the significance of
allegory Gilles Deleuze recognized in Walter Benjamin's 1928
monograph on seventeenth century drama is itself attested in key
aspects of Kantian, Leibnizian, and Platonic philosophy (to wit, in
the respective forms by which thought is phrased, predicated, and
proposed).The second, enveloping the first, is a literalist claim
about predication itself - namely, that the aesthetics of agitation
and hallucination so emblematic of the Baroque sensibility (as
attested in its emblem-books) adduces an avowedly metaphysical
'naturalism' in which thought is replete with predicates. Oriented
by Barbara Cassin's development of the concerted sense in which
homonyms are critically distinct from synonyms, the philosophical
claim here is that 'the Baroque' names the intervallic [ ] relation
that thought establishes between things. On this account, any
subject finds its unity in a concerted state of disquiet - a
state-rempli in which, phenomenologically speaking, experience
comprises as much seeing as reading (as St Jerome encountering
Origen's Hexapla).
This edition includes the letters exchanged between Charles S.
Peirce and the Open Court Publishing Company between 1890 and 1913.
Open Court published more of Peirce's philosophical writings than
any other publisher during his lifetime, and played a critical role
in what little recognition and financial income he received during
these difficult, yet philosophically rich, years. This
correspondence is the basis for much of what is known surrounding
Peirce's publications in The Monist and The Open Court-two of the
publishers most popular forums for philosophical, scientific, and
religious thought-and is therefore referenced heavily in Peirce
editions dealing partly or wholly with his later work, including
The Essential Peirce series and Writings of Charles S. Peirce. The
edition provides for the first time a complete text of this
oft-cited correspondence, with textual apparatus, contextual
annotation, and careful replications of existential graphs and
other complex illustrations. By so doing, this edition sheds
critical light not only on Peirce and Open Court, but also on the
context, relationships, and concepts that influenced the
development of Progressive Era intellectual history and philosophy.
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