In Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind, some of the scholars who have become essential for our understanding of Stanley Cavell's writing on film gather to use his landmark contributions to help us read new films-from Hollywood and elsewhere-that exist beyond his immediate reach and reading. In extending the scope of Cavell's film philosophy, we naturally find ourselves contending with it and amending it, as the case may be. Through a series of interpretive vignettes, the group effort situates, for the expert and novitiate alike, how Cavell's writing on film can profitably enrich one's experience of cinema generally and also inform how we might continue the practice of serious philosophical criticism of specific films mindful of his sensibility. The resulting conversations between texts, traditions, disciplines, genres, and generations creates propitious conditions for discovering what it means to watch and listen to movies with Stanley Cavell in mind.

When our smartphones distract us, much more is at stake than a momentary lapse of attention. Our use of smartphones can interfere with the building-blocks of meaningfulness and the actions that shape our self-identity. By analyzing social interactions and evolving experiences, Roholt reveals the mechanisms of smartphone-distraction that impact our meaningful projects and activities. Roholt's conception of meaning in life draws from a disparate group of philosophers - Susan Wolf, John Dewey, Hubert Dreyfus, Martin Heidegger, and Albert Borgmann. Central to Roholt's argument are what Borgmann calls focal practices: dinners with friends, running, a college seminar, attending sporting events. As a recurring example, Roholt develops the classification of musical instruments as focal things, contending that musical performance can be fruitfully understood as a focal practice. Through this exploration of what generates meaning in life, Roholt makes us rethink the place we allow smartphones to occupy in the everyday. But he remains cautiously optimistic. This thoughtful, needed interrogation of smartphones shows how we can establish a positive role for technologies within our lives.

Horst Ruthrof revisits Husserl's phenomenology of language and highlights his late writings as essential to understanding the full range of his ideas. Focusing on the idea of language as imaginable as well as the role of a speech community in constituting it, Ruthrof provides a powerful re-assessment of his methodological phenomenology. From the Logical Investigations to untranslated portions of his Nachlass, Ruthrof charts all the developments and amendments in his theorizations. Ruthrof argues that it is the intersubjective character to linguistic meaning that is so emblematic of Husserl's position. Bringing his study up to the present day, Ruthrof discusses mental time travel, the evolution of language, and protosyntax in the context of Husserl's late writings, progressing a comprehensive new phenomenological ontology of language with wide-ranging implications for philosophy, linguistics, and cultural studies.

In this Modern Master on Jacques Lacan (1901-81), Malcolm Bowie presents a clear, coherent introduction to the work of one of the most influential and forbidding thinkers of our century. A practising psychoanalyst for almost 50 years, Lacan first achieved notoriety with his pioneering article on Freud in the 1930s. After the Second World War, he emerged as the most original and controversial figure in French psychoanalysis, and because a guiding light in the Parisian intellectual resurgence of the 1950s, Lacan initiated and subsequently steered the crusade to reinterpret Freud's work in the light of the new structuralist theories of linguistics, evolving an elaborate, dense, systematic analysis of the relations between language and desire, focusing on the human subject as he or she is defined by linguistic and social pressures. His lectures and articles were collected and published as Ecrits in 1966, a text whose influence has been immense and persists to this day. Knowledge of Lacan's revolutionary ideas, which underpin those of his successors across the disciplines, is useful to an understanding of the work of many modern thinkers - literary theoriest, linguists, psychoanalysts, anthropologists. Malcolm Bowie's accessible critical introduction provides the perfect starting point for any exploration of the work of this formidable thinker.

The Essential Berkeley and Neo-Berkeley is an introduction to the life and work of one of the most significant thinkers in the history of philosophy and a penetrating philosophical assessment of his lasting legacy. Written in clear and user-friendly style, Berman provides: * A concise summary of George Berkeley (1685-1753)'s life and writings * An accessible introduction to the structure of Berkeley's most authoritative work, The Principles of Human Knowledge * An overview of common misunderstandings of Berkeley's philosophy, and how to avoid them Beyond solely an introduction, Berman also gives us a broader and deeper appreciation of Berkeley as a philosopher. He argues for Berkeley's work as a philosophical system with coherence and important key themes hitherto unexplored and provides an analysis of why he thinks Berkeley's work has had such lasting significance. With a particular focus on Berkeley's dualist thinking and theories of 'mental types', Berman provides students and scholars with a key to unlocking the significance of this work. This introductory text will provide an insight into Berkeley's full body of work, the distinctiveness of his thinking and how deeply relevant this key thinker is to contemporary philosophy.

This book compiles James L. Cox's most important writings on a phenomenology of Indigenous Religions into one volume, with a new introduction and conclusion by the author. Cox has consistently exemplified phenomenological methods by applying them to his own field studies among Indigenous Religions, principally in Zimbabwe and Alaska, but also in Australia and New Zealand. Included in this collection are his articles in which he defines what he means by the category 'religion' and how this informs his precise meaning of the classification 'Indigenous Religions'. These theoretical considerations are always illustrated clearly and concisely by specific studies of Indigenous Religions and their dynamic interaction with contemporary political and social circumstances. This collection demonstrates the continued relevance of the phenomenological method in the study of religions by presenting the method as dynamic and adaptable to contemporary social contexts and as responsive to intellectual critiques of the method.

Jesuit engagement with natural philosophy during the late 16th and early 17th centuries transformed the status of the mathematical disciplines and propelled members of the Order into key areas of controversy in relation to Aristotelianism. Through close investigation of the activities of the Jesuit 'school' of mathematics founded by Christoph Clavius, The Scientific Counter-Revolution examines the Jesuit connections to the rise of experimental natural philosophy and the emergence of the early scientific societies. Arguing for a re-evaluation of the role of Jesuits in shaping early modern science, this book traces the evolution of the Collegio Romano as a hub of knowledge. Starting with an examination of Clavius's Counter-Reformation agenda for mathematics, Michael John Gorman traces the development of a collective Jesuit approach to experimentation and observation under Christopher Grienberger and analyses the Jesuit role in the Galileo Affair and the vacuum debate. Ending with a discussion of the transformation of the Collegio Romano under Athanasius Kircher into a place of curiosity and wonder and the centre of a global information gathering network, this book reveals how the Counter-Reformation goals of the Jesuits contributed to the shaping of modern experimental science.

This study illuminates the complex interplay between Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy and architecture. Presenting their wide-ranging impact on late 20th- and 21st-century architecture, each chapter focuses on a core Deleuzian/Guattarian philosophical concept and one key work of architecture which evokes, contorts, or extends it. Challenging the idea that a concept or theory defines and then produces the physical work and not vice versa, Chris L. Smith positions the relationship between Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy and the field of architecture as one that is mutually substantiating and constitutive. In this framework, modes of architectural production and experimentation become inextricable from the conceptual territories defined by these two key thinkers, producing a rigorous discussion of theoretical, practical, and experimental engagements with their ideas.