This collection offers the first comprehensive and definitive account of Martin Heidegger's philosophy of technology. It does so through a detailed analysis of canonical texts and recently published primary sources on two crucial concepts in Heidegger's later thought: Gelassenheit and Gestell. Gelassenheit, translated as 'releasement', and Gestell, often translated as 'enframing', stand as opposing ideas in Heidegger's work whereby the meditative thinking of Gelassenheit counters the dangers of our technological framing of the world in Gestell. After opening with a scholarly overview of Heidegger's philosophy of technology as a whole, this volume focuses on important Heideggerian critiques of science, technology, and modern industrialized society as well as Heidegger's belief that transformations in our thought processes enable us to resist the restrictive domain of modern techno-scientific practice. Key themes discussed in this collection include: the history, development, and defining features of modern technology; the relationship between scientific theories and their technological instantiations; the nature of human agency and the essence of education in the age of technology; and the ethical, political, and environmental impact of our current techno-scientific customs. This volume also addresses the connection between Heidegger's critique of technology and his involvement with the Nazis. Finally, and with contributions from a number of renowned Heidegger scholars, the original essays in this collection will be of great interest to students of Philosophy, Technology Studies, the History of Science, Critical Theory, Environmental Studies, Education, Sociology, and Political Theory.

Cefalu offers the first sustained assessment of the ways in which recent contemporary philosophy and cultural theory -- including the work of Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Eric Santner, Slavoj Zižek, and Alenka Zupancic -- can illuminate Early Modern literature and culture. The book argues that when selected Early Modern devotional poets set out to represent subject-God relations, they often encounter some sublime aspect of God that, in Slovenian-Lacanian terms, seems "Other" to himself. This divine Other, while sometimes presented directly as a void or empty place, is more often filled in and presented instead as some form of divine excess. While Donne, and to a lesser extent Traherne, disavow those numinous aspects of God that might subsist beneath such excesses, Crashaw, and especially Milton, attempt to represent the intimate relationship between any creature's and God's intrinsic alterity. Cefalu introduces new ways of theorizing not only seventeenth-century religious ideologies, but also the nature of Early Modern subjectivity.

Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance is the first monograph to provide an in-depth study of the implications of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy for theatre and performance. Engaging with a wide range of interdisciplinary practitioners including Goat Island, Butoh, Artaud, John Cage, the Living Theatre, Robert Wilson and Allan Kaprow, as well as with the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari, Henri Bergson and Francois Laruelle, the book conceives performance as a way of thinking 'immanence': the open and endlessly creative whole of which all things are a part.
Theatres of Immanence builds upon Deleuze's emphasis on immanence, affect, change and movement to provide new approaches to five key topics in theatre and performance: 1) authorship and collaboration, 2) voice and language, 3) animals in performance, 4) audience participation and 5) time or duration. The book provides an accessible introduction to Deleuze's ideas and draws attention to the ethical dimensions of performance, asking: 'what good is theatre, and particularly immanent theatre, anyway?'

Gerhard Richter examines, in the work of Walter Benjamin, one of the central problems of modernity: the question of how to receive an intellectual inheritance. Covering aspects of Benjamin's complex relationship to the legacies of such writers as Kant, Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger, and Derrida, each chapter attends to a key concern in Benjamin's writing, while reflecting on the challenges that this issue presents for the question of inheritability and transmissibility. Both reading Benjamin and watching himself reading Benjamin, Richter participates in the act of inheriting while also inquiring into the conditions of possibility for inheriting Benjamin's corpus today.

This book highlights the intersection between theory and lived experience, academic description and the personal narrative of Lou Sullivan. Sullivan puzzled in his diaries over the conundrum of his desire to transition from female to male in order to be a gay man. The reader will follow Sullivan as he struggles with his feelings of maleness, in his troubled relationship with his lover, Tom, through his many sexual escapades, and finally, as he begins taking hormones. Alongside the diaries is an engagement with body and gender theories, accessible to the introductory reader, yet also taking up current debates especially in transgender studies.

This volume consists of the revised and expanded versions of the papers presented at the International Conference "Nietzsche On Instinct and Language", held at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal) in December 2009. The list of contributors includes top Nietzsche scholars, like Werner Stegmaier, Patrick Wotling, and Scarlett Marton. The volume as a whole represents a fresh look at Nietzsche's attempt to connect language to the instinctive activity of the human body. Four of the papers focus on Nietzsche's early Nachlass notes and writings, including The Birth of Tragedy and On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense; the other seven deal with his mature views on this important subject, especially in Beyond Good and Evil, The Gay Science, and the Nachlass. In focusing on how Nietzsche tries to dissolve the traditional opposition between instinct and language, as well as between instinct and consciousness and instinct and reason, the different papers consider, from this viewpoint, such Nietzschean themes as morality, value, the concept of philosophy, dogmatism, naturalization, metaphor, affectivity and emotion, health and sickness, tragedy, and laughter.

This book, bringing together contributions by forty-five authors from fourteen countries, represents mostly new material from both emerging and seasoned scholars in the field of philosophy of education. Topics range widely both within and across the four parts of the book: Wittgenstein's biography and style as an educator and philosopher, illustrating the pedagogical dimensions of his early and late philosophy; Wittgenstein's thought and methods in relation to other philosophers such as Cavell, Dewey, Foucault, Hegel and the Buddha; contrasting investigations of training in relation to initiation into forms of life, emotions, mathematics and the arts (dance, poetry, film, and drama), including questions from theory of mind (nativism vs. initiation into social practices), neuroscience, primate studies, constructivism and relativity; and the role of Wittgenstein's philosophy in religious studies and moral philosophy, as well as their profound impact on his own life. This collection explores Wittgenstein not so much as a philosopher who provides a method for teaching or analyzing educational concepts but rather as one who approaches philosophical questions from a pedagogical point of view. Wittgenstein's philosophy is essentially pedagogical: he provides pictures, drawings, analogies, similes, jokes, equations, dialogues with himself, questions and wrong answers, experiments and so on, as a means of shifting our thinking, or of helping us escape the pictures that hold us captive.

Tauber, a leading figure in history and philosophy of science, offers a unique autobiographical overview of how science as a discipline of thought has been characterized by philosophers and historians over the past century. He frames his account through science's - and his own personal - quest for explanatory certainty. During the 20th century, that goal was displaced by the probabilistic epistemologies required to characterize complex systems, whether in physics, biology, economics, or the social sciences. This "triumph of uncertainty" is the inevitable outcome of irreducible chance and indeterminate causality. And beyond these epistemological limits, the interpretative faculties of the individual scientist (what Michael Polanyi called the "personal" and the "tacit") invariably affects how data are understood. Whereas positivism had claimed radical objectivity, post-positivists have identified how a web of non-epistemic values and social forces profoundly influence the production of knowledge. Tauber presents a case study of these claims by showing how immunology has incorporated extra-curricular social elements in its theoretical development and how these in turn have influenced interpretive problems swirling around biological identity, individuality, and cognition. The correspondence between contemporary immunology and cultural notions of selfhood are strong and striking. Just as uncertainty haunts science, so too does it hover over current constructions of personal identity, self knowledge, and moral agency. Across the chasm of uncertainty, science and selfhood speak.

A vital book for understanding the use of political violence in pursuit of political ends, by one of the major French philosophers of the 20th century Includes a fascinating chapter on Arthur Koestler's famous novel about the 1930s 'show trials' in Moscow, Darkness at Noon Extremely clearly written and still highly relevant for dealing with questions of political power and authoritarianism This Routledge Classics edition includes a new foreword by William McBride, helpfully placing the book in the context of Merleau-Ponty's thought as a whole

Joseph 1. Kockelmans Pennsylvania State University In July of 1999, Prof. Dr. Thomas M. Seebohm turned 65 years old, and thus en tered mandatory retirement. His friends, colleagues, and former students thought that it would be fitting to celebrate the event of his retirement with a volume of essays in his honor, in order to render homage to a great human being, an outstanding and dedicated teacher, a highly regarded philosopher and scholar, but above all a dear friend and colleague. When the editors thought about a unifying theme for the anthology, they finally settled on the research interests of Professor Seebohm; in their view the vast do main of his competence and interests would leave all participants the freedom to select a topic of their own choice that would nonetheless lie within this large realm as well as within the area of their own research interests. Professor Seebohm's research interests encompass work in Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, German Idealism (Kant in particular), History of Philosophy, Phi losophy of the formal sciences (of Logic in particular), Philosophy of History, Methodology and Philosophy of the Human Sciences, (including Psychology and Sociology), History of 19th Century British Empiricism (Mill), American Pragma tism, Analytic Philosophy, Philosophy of Law and Practical Philosophy, the devel opment of the history of philosophy in Eastern Europe, especially in the Middle Ages, but also in the nineteenth century."

In this collection of original papers, leading international authorities turn their attention to one of the most important questions in theoretical philosophy: what is truth? To arrive at an answer, two further questions need to be addressed in this context: 1) Does truth possess any essence, any inner nature? and 2) If so, what does this nature consist of? The present discussion focuses on the antagonism between substantial or robust theories of truth, with correspondence theory taking the lead, and deflationist or minimalist views, which have been commanding an increasing amount of attention in recent years. Whereas substantial theories proceed from the premise that truth has an essence, and that therefore the objective is to discover this essence, the challenge presented by deflationism is to dispense with this very premise.

The world was first introduced to the expertise and originality of Japanese scholars in phenomenology in Analecta Husserliana Vol. IX (1979). The third generation of Japanese scholars, belonging to the newly-founded Merleau-Ponty Japanese Circle, are now presented. Following Merleau-Ponty's tendency, the studies collected here seem to make a fresh phenomenological start in relation to classical Husserlian phenomenology, turning deliberately towards the `concrete', `the wild world', `flesh', `embodiment', `natural signs', `primal nature'. The rule of intentionality, natural language is thereby devalued. The wealth of insights, the freshness of intuition and the seminal power of these fascinating enquiries well merit a close reading.

Why does knowledge of philosophy presuppose knowledge of reality? What are the characters in Deleuze's theatre and philosophy? How are his famous metaphysical distinctions secondary to the concept of philosophy as practice and politics? These questions are answered through careful analysis and application of Deleuzian principles.

This book investigates Hegel's interpretation of the mystical philosophy of Jakob Boehme (1575-1624), considered in the context of the reception of Boehme in the 18th and 19th centuries, and of Hegel's own understanding of mysticism as a philosophical approach. The three sections of this book present: the historical background of Hegel's encounter with Boehme's writings; the development of two different conceptions of mysticism in Hegel's work; and finally Hegel's approach to Boehme's philosophy, discussing in detail the references to Boehme both in published writings and manuscripts. According to Hegel, Boehme is "the first German philosopher". The reason for placing Boehme at the very beginning of German philosophy is that Hegel considers him to be a profound thinker, despite his rudimentary education. Hegel's fascination with Boehme mainly concerns the mystic's understanding of the symbiotic relation between God and his opposite, the Devil: he considers this to be the true speculative core of Boehme's thought. By interpreting Boehme, Hegel intends to free the speculative content of his thought from the limitations of the inadequate, barbarous form in which the mystic expressed it, and also to liberate Boehme from the prejudices surrounding his writings, placing him firmly in the territory of philosophy and detaching him from the obscurity of esotericism. Combining historical reconstructions and philosophical argumentation, this book guides the reader through an important phase in German philosophy, and ultimately into an inquiry about the relationship between mysticism and philosophy itself.

1.1. Why the Ontology 0/ Time? The intention that directs this research consists in an attempt to provide a herme- neutic analysis ofthe drastic changes, which have occurred in 20th century philoso- phy, in identifying the new role ascribed to the subject of time and temporality within the scope ofontology. Afterthe fundamental works ofE. Husserl, M. Heid- egger. P. Rica:ur. and E. Levinas, it has been understood that the traditional issue (which could be traced back to Parmenides) between being and time, between the eternal and the transient (or historical), must once again be re-examined. Time it- self is recognized now as the deepest ground of ontological inquiry, which sets in motion the entire system offundamental philosophical concepts. This does not mean, of course, that our understanding of time did not change in the course of these fundamental transformations. In order to comprehend the new role oftime within "first philosophy," the concept o/time itselfis to be subjected to a careful investigation and interpretation. It is necessary to come back to Aristotle's quest ions in Physics IV: In what sense can we ascribe being to time itself. and what is the "nature" of time as (a) being'! In other words, to understand the role oftime within the scope of ontology means to develop simultaneously the ontology 0/ time. This is what the title ofthis work intends to designate. Moreover, my aim is to dem- onstrate that in a defmite sense the postmodern onto-Iogy is chrono-Iogy.

Topophobia: A Phenomenology of Anxiety is a vivid second-person inquiry into how anxiety plays a formative part in the constitution of subjectivity. While anxiety has assumed a central role in the history of philosophy - and phenomenology in particular - until now there has been no sustained study of how it shapes our sense of self and being in the world. This book seeks to address that lacuna. Calling upon the author's own experience of being agoraphobic, it asks a series of critical questions: How is our experience of the world affected by our bodily experience of others? What role do moods play in shaping our experience of the world? How can we understand the role of conditions such as agoraphobia in relation to our normative understanding of the body and the environment? What is the relation between anxiety and home? The reader will gain an insight into the strange experience of being unable to cross a bridge, get on a bus, and enter a supermarket without tremendous anxiety. At the same time, they will discover aspects of their own bodily experience that are common to both agoraphobes and non-agoraphobes alike. Integrating phenomenological inquiry with current issues in the philosophy of mind, Trigg arrives at a renewed understanding of identity, which arranges self, other and world as a unified whole. Written with a sense of vividness often lacking in academic discourse, this is living philosophy.

In this fresh translation of five lectures delivered in 1907 at the University of Goettingen, Edmund Husserl lays out the philosophical problem of knowledge, indicates the requirements for its solution, and for the first time introduces the phenomenological method of reduction. For those interested in the genesis and development of Husserl's phenomenology, this text affords a unique glimpse into the epistemological motivation of his work, his concept of intentionality, and the formation of central phenomenological concepts that will later go by the names of `transcendental consciousness', the `noema', and the like. As a teaching text, The Idea of Phenomenology is ideal: it is brief, it is unencumbered by the technical terminology of Husserl's later work, it bears a clear connection to the problem of knowledge as formulated in the Cartesian tradition, and it is accompanied by a translator's introduction that clearly spells out the structure, argument, and movement of the text.

Revisit one of the most important pillars in modern philosophy with this new English translation—the first in more than 60 years—of Jean-Paul Sartre’s seminal treatise on existentialism. “This is a philosophy to be reckoned with, both for its own intrinsic power and as a profound symptom of our time” (The New York Times).

In 1943, Jean-Paul Sartre published his masterpiece, Being and Nothingness, and laid the foundation of his legacy as one of the greatest twentieth century philosophers. A brilliant and radical account of the human condition, Being and Nothingness explores what gives our lives significance.

In a new and more accessible translation, this foundational text argues that we alone create our values and our existence is characterized by freedom and the inescapability of choice. Far from being an internal, passive container for our thoughts and experiences, human consciousness is constantly projecting itself into the outside world and imbuing it with meaning.

Now with a new foreword by Harvard professor of philosophy Richard Moran, this clear-eyed translation guarantees that the groundbreaking ideas that Sartre introduced in this resonant work will continue to inspire for generations to come.

This is the first major response to the new challenge of neuroscience to religion. There have been limited responses from a purely Christian point of view, but this takes account of eastern as well as western forms of religious experience. It challenges the prevailing naturalistic assumption of our culture, including the idea that the mind is either identical with or a temporary by-product of brain activity. It also discusses religion as institutions and religion as inner experience of the Transcendent, and suggests a form of spirituality for today.

This book presents a new introduction to Hume, guiding the student through the key concepts of Hume's work by examining the overall development of his ideas. David Hume is widely regarded as the greatest English thinker in the history of philosophy. His contributions to a huge range of philosophical debates are as important and influential now as they were in the eighteenth century. Covering all the key concepts of his work, "Starting with Hume" provides an accessible introduction to the ideas of this hugely significant thinker. Clearly structured according to Hume's central ideas, the book leads the reader through a thorough overview of the development of his thought, resulting in a more thorough understanding of the roots of his philosophical concerns. Offering comprehensive coverage of Hume's philosophical method, the book explores his contributions to philosophy of mind, causation, the foundation of ethics, natural virtues and philosophy or religion. Crucially the book introduces the major philosophical movements and thinkers whose work proved influential in the development of Hume's thought, including Nicolas Malebranche, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke. This is the ideal introduction for anyone coming to the work of this hugely important thinker for the first time. "Continuum's Starting with..." series offers clear, concise and accessible introductions to the key thinkers in philosophy. The books explore and illuminate the roots of each philosopher's work and ideas, leading readers to a thorough understanding of the key influences and philosophical foundations from which his or her thought developed. Ideal for first-year students starting out in philosophy, the series will serve as the ideal companion to study of this fascinating subject.

The book discusses how we can cross-fertilize relationship between roots and routes with and beyond the logic of closure, monological assertions and violence. The book draws upon multiple philosophical, historical, religious and spiritual traditions of the world to rethink our conceptions and productions of identity as well as our conventional understanding of roots and routes. The book particularly explores the vision and practice of creativity, socio-cultural regeneration and planetary realizations to cultivate new pathways of identity realization and new relationship between identities and differences in our fragile world today. Trans-disciplinary in engagement and trans-civilizational in its dialogical pathway, the book is a unique contribution to our contemporary scholarship about ethnicity, identity, social creativity, cultural regeneration and planetary realizations.

This volume deals with the connection between thinking-and-speaking and our form(s) of life. All contributions engage with Wittgenstein's approach to this topic. As a whole, the volume takes a stance against both biological and ethnological interpretations of the notion "form of life" and seeks to promote a broadly logico-linguistic understanding instead. The structure of this book is threefold. Part one focuses on lines of thinking that lead from Wittgenstein's earlier thought to the concept of form of life in his later work. Contributions to part two examine the concrete philosophical function of this notion as well as the ways in which it differs from cognate concepts. Contributions to part three put Wittgenstein's notion of form of life in perspective by relating it to phenomenology, ordinary language philosophy and problems in contemporary analytic philosophy.

An examinations of Vattimo's work asking to what extent his insights present new challenges to Christian thought. Gianni Vattimo, who has long been a prominent postmodern European philosopher, has recently taken a more significant interest in religion. His claim is that postmodern philosophy, with its incisive critique of rationalist, objectifying ways of thinking, can help religion once again find a voice in a largely disinterested Europe and an often fundamentalist America. To accomplish this, Vattimo contends, religion must attend to certain contemporary philosophical themes that, he argues, are ultimately consistent with biblical intentions. To this end, Vattimo employs his theoretical insights on themes such as: the nature of modernity/post modernity, the importance of 'weak' as opposed to 'strong' thought, the dissolution of metaphysics; and the end of the authoritarian, moralistic God. This book will examine the entire range of Vattimo's work asking to what extent his insights present new challenges to Christian thought. "The Philosophy and Theology" series looks at major philosophers and explores their relevance to theological thought as well as the response of theology.