From early in his career Jacques Derrida was intrigued by law. Over time, this fascination with law grew more manifest and he published a number of highly influential analyses of ethics, justice, violence and law. This book brings together leading scholars in a variety of disciplines to assess Derrida's importance for and impact upon legal studies.

An exploration of the relationship between cinema and existentialism, in terms of their mutual ability to describe the human condition, this book combines analyses of topics in the philosophy of film with an exploration of specific existentialist themes expressed in the films of Fellini, Bergman and Woody Allen, among others.

This volume provides a critical assessment of the wide spectrum of Hayek's celebrated work as economist and social philosopher. Included are papers on Hayek's early writings in the field of monetary economics, on which his later campaign against inflation, his controversial proposal for competing currencies, and his negative view of the impact of trade unions on the economy are based. Hayek's social philosophy, often regarded as the centre piece of his famous work, and the fundamental findings about human thinking, society, the market system and social rules of conduct it is based on, is evaluated by leading contemporary social philosophers. The volume leaves little doubt as to the considerable impact of Hayek's thinking on economic policy and social philosophy.

Like artists, important writers defy unequivocal interpretations. Gao Xingjian, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, is a cosmopolitan writer, deeply rooted in the Chinese past while influenced by paragons of Western Modernity. The present volume is less interested in a general discussion on the multitude of aspects in Gao's works and even less in controversies concerning their aesthetic value than in obtaining a response to the crucial issues of freedom and fate from a clearly defined angle. The very nature of the answer to the question of freedom and fate within Gao Xingjian's works can be called a polyphonic one: thereare affirmative as well as skeptical voices. But polyphony, as embodied by Gao, is an even more multifaceted phenomenon. Most important for our contention is the fact that Gao Xingjian's aesthetic experience embodies prose, theater, painting, and film. Taken together, they form a Gesamtkunstwerk whose diversity of voices characterizes every single one of them.

Spinoza's political thought has been subject to a significant revival of interest in recent years. As a response to difficult times, students and scholars have returned to this founding figure of modern philosophy as a means to help reinterpret and rethink the political present. Spinoza's Authority Volume I: Resistance and Power in Ethics makes a significant contribution to this ongoing reception and utilization of Spinoza's political thought by focusing on his posthumously published Ethics. By taking the concept of authority as an original framework, this books asks: How is authority related to ethics, ontology, and epistemology? What are the social, historical and representational processes that produce authority and resistance? And what are the conditions of effective resistance? Spinoza's Authority features a roster of internationally established theorists of Spinoza's work, and covers key elements of Spinoza's political philosophy, including: questions of authority, the resistance to authority, sovereign power, democratic control, and the role of Spinoza's "multitudes".

This is a critical study of French philosopher Julia Kristeva (born 1841) which explores many different aspects of Kristeva's work.

Romantic Organicism attempts to reassess the much maligned and misunderstood notion of organic unity. Following organicism from its crucial radicalization in German Idealism, it shows how both Coleridge and Wordsworth developed some of their most profound ideas and poetry on its basis. Armstrong shows how the tenets and ideals of organicism--despite much criticism--remain an insistent, if ambivalent, backdrop for much of our current thought, including the work of Derrida amongst others.

"Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason" examines Coleridge's understanding of the Pantheism Controversy - the crisis of reason in German philosophy - and reveals the context informing Coleridge's understanding of German thinkers. It challenges previous accounts of Coleridge's philosophical engagements, forcing a reconsideration of his reading of figures such as Schelling, Jacobi and Spinoza. This exciting new study establishes the central importance of the contested status of reason for Coleridge's poetry, accounts of the imagination and later religious thought.

Although a key aspect of the phenomenological movement is its contribution to value theory (axiology) and value perception (almost all the major figures devoted a great part of their labors to these topics), there has been relatively little attention paid to these themes. This volume in part makes up for this lacuna by being the first anthology on value-theory in the phenomenological movement. It indicates the scope of the issues by discussing, e.g., the distinctive acts of valuing, openness to value, the objectivity of values, the summation and combination of values, the deconstruction of values, the value of absence, and the value of nature. It also contains discussions of most of the major representative figures not only in their own right but also in relationship to one another: Von Ehrenfels, Brentano, Scheler, Hartmann, Husserl, Heidegger, Schutz, and Derrida.

This volume centers on the exploration of the ways in which the canonical texts and thinkers of the phenomenological and existential tradition can be utilized to address contemporary, concrete philosophical issues. In particular, the included essays address the key facets of the work of Charles Guignon, and as such, honor and extend his thought and approach to philosophy. To this end, the four main sections of the volume deal with the question of authenticity, i.e. what it means to be an authentic person, the ways in which the phenomenological and existential traditions can impact the sciences, how best to understand the fact of human mortality, and, finally, the ways philosophical reflection can help address current questions of value. The volume is designed primarily to serve as a secondary resource for students and specialists interested in rediscovering the practical application of existential and phenomenological thought. The collection of scholarly essays, then, could be used in conjunction with some of the more recent scholarship concerning the practical value of philosophy. Along with contributing to previous scholarship, the essays in this proposed volume attempt to update and expand the scope of phenomenological and existential inquiry.

Earthly Engagements: Reading Sartre after the Holocene brings together scholars from the Sartre studies community to think through the planetary ecological crisis. Edited by Matthew C. Ally and Damon Boria, the collection explores ways in which Sartre's existential thought can be read socio-ecologically, illuminating the tightly imbricated earthly and worldly crises of our post-Holocene epoch. Contributors variously discuss phenomenology, ethics, politics, ontology, and metaphysics. Earthly locations include the Icelandic coast, the Minnesota woods, the Indiana Dunes, the Chinese Great Plain, the Venetian Lagoon, and more; worldly situations include that of the artist, the activist, the consumer, the tourist, and more. Through their diversity of methods and substantive concerns, the chapters reveal a wealth of critical and heuristic resources within Sartre's thought for thinking through and engaging the planetary ecological crisis and its direct ties to global social, economic, and political crises. In full recognition of Sartre's personal distaste for agrarian settings and wilderness, and some ostensibly anti-environmental philosophical and literary moments, the contributors take the proper Sartrean line that how we view nature and our relationship to nature is neither closed nor predetermined. Like life itself, our worldly relationship to earthly nature is rooted in the sufficiency and open-endedness of freedom.

Philosophers often have tried to either reduce "disagreeable" objects or concepts to (more) acceptable objects or concepts. Reduction is regarded attractive by those who subscribe to an ideal of ontological parsimony. But the topic is not just restricted to traditional metaphysics or ontology. In the philosophy of mathematics, abstraction principles, such as Hume's principle, have been suggested to support a reconstruction of mathematics by logical means only. In the philosophy of language and the philosophy of science, the logical analysis of language has long been regarded to be the dominating paradigm, and liberalized projects of logical reconstruction remain to be driving forces of modern philosophy. This volume collects contributions comprising all those topics, including articles by Alexander Bird, Jaakko Hintikka, James Ladyman, Rohit Parikh, Gerhard Schurz, Peter Simons, Crispin Wright and Edward N. Zalta.

This is a new monograph examining Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and its implications for historical rationality and the community. Maurice Merleau-Ponty is widely known for his emphasis on embodied perceptual experience. This emphasis initially relied heavily on the positive results of Gestalt psychology in addressing issues in philosophical psychology and philosophy of mind from a phenomenological standpoint. However, far less work has been done in addressing his evolving conception of how such an account influenced more general philosophical issues in epistemology, accounts of rationality, or its status of theoretical discourse. Developing the work he has already done in "In the Shadow of Phenomenology" to address this gap in the literature, Stephen H. Watson further examines the responses to Merleau-Ponty's contributions to these issues. This book emphasises the historical and intersubjective underpinnings of Merleau-Ponty's late accounts, in relation to rationality, institution and community, and examines its implications.

Husserl's phenomenology has often been criticized for its Cartesian, fundamentalistic, idealistic and solipsistic nature. Today, this widespread interpretation must be regarded as being outdated, since it gives but a very partial and limited picture of Husserl's thinking. The continuing publication of Husserl's research manuscripts has disclosed analyses which have made it necessary to revise and modify a number of standard readings. This anthology documents the recent development in Husserl research. It contains contributions from a number of young phenomenologists, who have all defended their dissertation on Husserl in the nineties, and it presents a new type of interpretation which emphasizes the dimensions of facticity, passivity, alterity and ethics in Husserl's thinking.

-Selected papers on phenomenology offers the best work in this field by the acclaimed historian of philosophy, Karl Schuhmann (1941-2003), displaying the extraordinary range and depth of his unique scholarship,
-Topics covered include the development of Husserl's concept of intentionality, Husserl and Indian philosophy, the origins of speech act theory in Munich phenomenology, the historical background of the notion of "phenomenology," and Johannes Daubert's critique of Martin Heidegger,
-This book brings together, in chronological arrangement, fourteen papers. Though thirteen of these were published before in some form, several were not easily accessible so far. In addition, a substantial piece of research, Schuhmann's chronicle of Johannes Daubert, appears here for the first time,
-All articles have been edited in accordance with the author's wishes, and incorporate his later additions and corrections.

IF WITI'GENSTEIN COULD TALK, COULD WE UNDERSTAND HIM? Perusing the secondary literature on Wittgenstein, I have frequently experienced a perfect Brechtean Entfremdungseffekt. This is interesting, I have felt like saying when reading books and papers on Wittgenstein, but who is the writer talking about? Certainly not Ludwig Wittgenstein the actual person who wrote his books and notebooks and whom I happened to meet. Why is there this strange gap between the ideas of the actual philosopher and the musings of his interpreters? Wittgenstein is talking to us through the posthumous publication of his writings. Why don't philosophers understand what he is saying? A partial reason is outlined in the first essay of this volume. Wittgenstein was far too impatient to explain in his books and book drafts what his problems were, what it was that he was trying to get clear about. He was even too impatient to explain in full his earlier solutions, often merely referring to them casually as it were in a shorthand notation. For one important instance, in The Brown Book, Wittgenstein had explained in some detail what name-object relationships amount to in his view. There he offers both an explanation of what his problem is and an account of his own view illustrated by means of specific examples of language-games. But when he raises the same question again in Philosophical Investigations I, sec.

Edith Stein has become almost a legend in recent years largely because of her heroic personality and her death in Auschwitz at the hands of the Nazis. She is known also as an eminent German-jewish-Christian intellectual and feminist, but more in the realm of the sacred than of the secular. Both are essential to understanding her. To know the real Edith Stein one must have some knowledge of her as philosopher, for philosophy was central to her very being. For this reason the present work is designed to be of interest to the general reader as well as to philosophers. Many of the latter have given evidence of interest in Stein's phenomenology and may welcome an introduction that gives clues to its substance and quality. Those who knew Edith Stein personally and professionally--Edmund Husser , Roman lngarden, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Peter Wust, and other friends at the universities of G6ttingen and Freiburg--affirm her genius and her passionate pursuit of truth in philosophy. james Collins, distinguished American historian of philosophy, who discovered some of her works about the time she died, wrote that "we may expect critical studies on her philosophy to multiply rapidly with the issuance of her collected works and the recognition of her high philosophical genius."l The fact is that this has not happened, although fourteen of her major works have been published posthumously by Nauwelaerts and Herder, and many are available from other sources.

Acoustic Technics opens with the 19th century discovery of radiation which exceeds our human bodily perceptual experience, light beyond light, sound beyond sound and on into what today we call the electromagnetic spectrum. Claiming a second scientific revolution through imaging technologies and drawing from both instrumental sensory mediation and animal studies, Acoustic Technics follows listening in its new forms into music, echo-location, infra and ultra-sounds, medical diagnosis, surveillance, and subsurface and interplanetary domains. Synthesized sounds, sonification, in both esoteric and popular technologies such as earbuds, cellphones, television are analyzed from a postphenomenological perspective.

Two decades ago, Schelling first resurfaced in Zizek's Indivisible Remainder, and the same argumentative move of redeploying Schellingian themes for contemporary ends has continued to play a significant role in critical theory since (Markus Gabriel, Iain Hamilton Grant, Jean-Luc Nancy). All the articles in this volume attempt to take seriously the idea of Schelling as a contemporary philosopher: Schelling is read in dialogue with key figures in the canon of European philosophy and critical theory (Alain Badiou, Emilie du Chatelet, Gilles Deleuze, Paul de Man, Quentin Meillassoux, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilbert Simondon, Slavoj Zizek), as well as in light of recent trends in analytic philosophy (Brandomian pragmatism, powers-based metaphysics and semantic naturalism) - and such readings are not meant merely to highlight Schellingian influences or resonances in contemporary thinking but rather to challenge and interrogate current orthodoxies by insisting upon the contemporaneity of Schellingian speculation. That is, the aim is both to evaluate and constructively build upon this repeated return to Schelling: to probe, to diagnose and to experiment on the latent Schellingianisms of the present and the future. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

Hegel is most famous for his view that conflicts between contrary positions are necessarily resolved. Whereas this optimism, inherent in modernity as such, has been challenged from Kierkegaard onward, many critics have misconstrued Hegel's own intentions. Focusing on the "Science of Logic," this transformative reading of Hegel on the one hand exposes the immense force of Hegel's conception of tragedy, logic, nature, history, time, language, spirit, politics, and philosophy itself. Drawing out the implications of Hegel's insight into tragic conflicts, on the other hand, De Boer brings into play a form of negativity that allows us to understand why the entanglement of complementary positions always tends to turn into their conflict, but not necessarily into its resolution.

In much recent thinking, social and cultural realms are thought of as existing prior to-or detached from-things, materiality, and landscape. It is often assumed, for example, that things are entirely 'constructed' by social or cultural perceptions and have no existence in and of themselves. Bjornar Olsen takes a different position. Drawing on a range of theories, especially phenomenology and actor-network-theory, Olsen claims that human life is fully mixed up with things and that humanity and human history emerge from such relationships. Things, moreover, possess unique qualities that are inherent in our cohabitation with them-qualities that help to facilitate existential security and memory of the past. This important work of archaeological theory challenges us to reconsider our ideas about the nature of things, past and present, demonstrating that objects themselves possess a dynamic presence that we must take into account if we are to understand the world we and they inhabit.

This volume contains English translations of Frege's early writings in logic and philosophy and of relevant reviews by other leading logicians. Professor Bynum has contributed a biographical essay, introduction, and extensive bibliography.

Phenomenology, according to Husserl, is meant to be philosophy as rigorous science. It was Franz Brentano who inspired him to pursue the ideal of scientific philosophy. Though Husserl began his philosophical career as an orthodox disciple of Brentano, he eventually began to have doubts about this orientation. The Logische Unterschungen is the result of such doubts. Especially after the publication of that work, he became increasingly convinced that, in the interests of scientific philosophy, he had to go in a direction which diverged from Brentano and other members of this school (Brentanists') who believed in the same ideal. An attempt is made here to ascertain Husserl's philosophical relation to Brentano and certain other Brentanists (Carl Stumpf, Benno Kerry, Kasimir Twardowski, Alexius Meinong, and Anton Marty). The crucial turning point in the development of these relations is to be found in the essay which Husserl wrote in 1894 (particularly in response to Twardowski) under the title Intentional Objects' (which is translated as an appendix in this volume). This study will be of interest to historians of philosophy and phenomenology in particular, but also to anyone concerned with the ideal of scientific philosophy.