Understanding Existentialism provides an accessible introduction to existentialism by examining the major themes in the work of Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and de Beauvoir. Paying particular attention to the key texts, Being and Time, Being and Nothingness, Phenomenology of Perception, The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex, the book explores the shared concerns and the disagreements between these major thinkers. The fundamental existential themes examined include: freedom; death, finitude and mortality; phenomenological experiences and 'moods', such as anguish, angst, nausea, boredom, and fear; an emphasis upon authenticity and responsibility as well as the denigration of their opposites (inauthenticity and Bad Faith); a pessimism concerning the tendency of individuals to become lost in the crowd and even a pessimism about human relations more generally; and a rejection of any external determination of morality or value. Finally, the book assesses the influence of these philosophers on poststructuralism, arguing that existentialism remains an extraordinarily productive school of thought.

Understanding Existentialism provides an accessible introduction to existentialism by examining the major themes in the work of Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and de Beauvoir. Paying particular attention to the key texts, Being and Time, Being and Nothingness, Phenomenology of Perception, The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex, the book explores the shared concerns and the disagreements between these major thinkers. The fundamental existential themes examined include: freedom; death, finitude and mortality; phenomenological experiences and 'moods', such as anguish, angst, nausea, boredom, and fear; an emphasis upon authenticity and responsibility as well as the denigration of their opposites (inauthenticity and Bad Faith); a pessimism concerning the tendency of individuals to become lost in the crowd and even a pessimism about human relations more generally; and a rejection of any external determination of morality or value. Finally, the book assesses the influence of these philosophers on poststructuralism, arguing that existentialism remains an extraordinarily productive school of thought.

For over fifty years the concept of memory has played a crucial role in a large number of academic and societal debates. The Work of Forgetting: Or, How Can We Make the Future Possible? draws attention to the limits of the academic field of memory studies. It argues that the faculty of memory offers an inadequate response to the challenges of the present. The book sets up a dialogue between the philosophies of forgetting that underlie the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, and the philosophies of memory that inform the work of Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. It builds on the idea that history is inseparable from a type of transience that cannot be counter-acted by the preserving work of memory and develops a new understanding of the phenomenon of forgetting in which the passage of time is asserted in thought and thus made productive.

Walter A. Brogan's long-awaited book exploring Heidegger's phenomenological reading of Aristotle's philosophy places particular emphasis on the Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, and Rhetoric. Controversial and challenging, Heidegger and Aristotle claims that it is Heidegger's sustained thematic focus and insight that governs his overall reading of Aristotle, namely, that Aristotle, while attempting to remain faithful to the Parmenidean dictum regarding the oneness and unity of being, nevertheless thinks of being as twofold. Brogan offers a careful and detailed analysis of several of the most important of Heidegger's treatises on Aristotle, including his assertion that Aristotle's twofoldness of being has been ignored or misread in the traditional substance-oriented readings of Aristotle. This groundbreaking study contributes immensely to the scholarship of a growing community of ancient Greek scholars engaged in phenomenological approaches to the reading and understanding of Aristotle.

Combining two a central topics in philosophy in the 20th Century, this book considers the ethics and impact of decision-making alongside the philosophy of time. When we make simple decisions, like the decision to wake up at 8 a.m. tomorrow, we make use of a linear model of the future. But when we make open-ended decisions, like the decision to get fitter, or more involved in politics, we presuppose a much more complex model of the future. We project a variety of virtual futures. We can carry out a decision in many different ways at once, which may converge and diverge at different points in time. Using a phenomenological approach, The Many Futures of a Decision explores what we learn about the structure of the future specifically from decision-making. Most theories of decision concentrate on the rationality: the evidence and value assessments that build up grounds for a rational decision. Instead, this book innovatively engages with the nature of the future as a multi-layered decisions project. Through interpretations of the theories of decision in philosophers like Husserl and Heidegger, Schmitt and Habermas, Derrida and Deleuze, along with other decision theories, Lampert develops an original theory of multiple futures.

In this first English translation of one of his most important works, " Statues: The Second Book of Foundations, "Michel Henry""presents a statue as more than a static entity. A statue for Serres is the basis for knowledge, society, the subject and object, the world and experience. Through his prescient analysis of statues and how we create and respond to art, Henry demonstrates how sacrificial art founded society and through this reflects on the centrality of death and the dead body to the human condition.Approaching the problem from multiple angles, Serres comments on Verne's "Around the Moon," Rodin's "The Gates of Hell," the Eiffel Tower, cemeteries, short stories by Maupassant, fables by La Fontaine, clothing and the paintings of Carpaccio, the Challenger disaster and Baal. Each section covers a different time period and statuary topic, ranging from four thousand years ago to 1986. Expository, lyrical, fictionalized and hallucinatory, "Statues" does not follow a linear time sequence but rather plays with time and place, history and story in order to provoke us into thinking in entirely new ways.Through mythic and poetic meditations on various kinds of descent into the underworld and new insights into the relation of the subject and object and their foundation in death, "Statues" contains great treasures and provocations for philosophers, literary critics, art historians and sociologists.

Elsewhere 1 we were concerned with fundamental aspects of the question how man can comprehend his fellow-men. We analyzed man's subjective experiences of the Other and found in them the basis for his understanding of the Other's subjective processes of consciousness. The very assumption of the existence of the Other, however, introduces the dimension of intersub jectivity. The world is experienced by the Self as being inhabited by other Selves, as being a world for others and of others. As we had occasion to point out, intersubjective reality is by no means homogeneous. The social world in which man finds himself exhibits a complex structure; fellow-men appear to the Self under different aspects, to which correspond different cognitive styles by which the Self perceives and apprehends the Other's thoughts, motives, and actions. In the present investigation it will be our main task to describe the origin of the differentiated structures of social reality as well as to reveal the principles underlying its unity and coherence. It must be stressed that careful description of the processes which enable one man to understand another's thoughts and actions is a prerequisite for the methodology of the empirical social sciences. The question how a scientific interpretation of human action is possible can be resolved only if an adequate * From: De, sinnha/te A II/ball tler sowuen WeU, Vienna, 1932; 2nd ed. 1960 (Sektion IV: Strukturanalyse der Sozialwelt, Soziale Umwelt, Mitwelt, Vorwelt, English adaptation by Professor Thomas Luckmann.

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Contents:
Acknowledgments Editor's Introduction 1. Merleau-Ponty's prospectus 2. Selections from The Structure of Behavior 3. Selections from The Phenomenology of Perception (i) Preface (ii) Part I: The Body (a) Introduction
(b) From Chapter 1 - The Body as Object and Mechanistic Physiology (c) From Chapter 3 - The Spatiality of one's own Body and Mobility (iii) Part II: The World as Perceived (a) From introduction (b) From Chapter 1 - Sense-Experience (c) From Chapter 3 - The Thing and the Natural World (d) From Chapter 4 - Other Selves and the Human World (iv) Part III: Being-for-itself and Being-in-the-world (a) Chapter 1 - The Cogito (b) Chapter 3 - Freedom 4. Selection from The Prose of the World Chapter 4 - The Algorithm and the Mystery of Language 5. Selection from The Visible and the Invisible Chapter 4 - The Intertwining - The Chiasm 6. Painting (i) 'Cezanne's Doubt' (ii) 'Eye and Mind' 7. History 'The Crisis of Understanding'

The 17 original essays of this volume explore the relevance of the phenomenological approach to contemporary debates concerning the role of embodiment in our cognitive, emotional and practical life. The papers demonstrate the theoretical vitality and critical potential of the phenomenological tradition both through critically engagement with other disciplines (medical anthropology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, the cognitive sciences) and through the articulation of novel interpretations of classical works in the tradition, in particular the works of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre. The concrete phenomena analyzed in this book include: chronic pain, anorexia, melancholia and depression."

This collection is intercultural philosophy at its best. It contextualizes the global significance of the leading figures of Western phenomenology, including Husserl, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Buber and Levinas, enters them into intercultural dialogue with the Daoism of Laozi and Zhuangzi and in doing so, breaks new ground. By presenting the first sustained analysis of the Daoist worldview by way of phenomenological experience, this book not only furthers our understanding of Daoism and phenomenology, but delves deeper into the roots of human thinking, aesthetic expression, and its impact on the modern social world. The international team of philosophers approach the phenomenological tradition in the broadest sense possible, looking beyond the phenomenological language of Husserl. With chapters on art, ethics, death and the metaphor of dream and hermeneutics, this collection encourages scholars and students in both Asian and Western traditions to rethink their philosophical bearings and engage in meaningful intercultural dialogue.

Reissuing works originally published between 1927 and 1992, this collection offers excellent scholarship on Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz and other philosophers, covering a wide array of subjects. Political theory, ethics and education are all represented in these volumes, with one book particularly focusing on the Soviet interpretation of Spinoza's thought. The last two texts are translations of Spinoza's correspondence and his oldest biography. This is a comprehensive collection for a philosophy library.

It is rare that we feel ourselves to be participating in history. Yet, as Bertrand Russell observed, philosophy develops in response to the challenges of socio-cultural problems and situations. The present-day philosophical endeavor is prompted not by one or two, but by a conundrum of problems and controversies in which the forces carrying life are set against each other. The struggles in which contemporary mankind is fiercely engaged are not confined, as in the past, to economic, territorial, or religious rivalries, nor to the quest for power, but extend to the primary conditions of human existence. They under mine man's primogenital confidence in life and shatter the intimacy of his home on earth. Philosophical reflection today cannot fail to feel the pressure of the current situation within which it unfolds. Since this situation now involves the ultimate conditions of human existence, its demands have at last given to philosophy the impetus and direction needed for conceiving that the first and last of its concerns should be life itself."

The Promise of Phenomenology: Posthumous Papers of John Wild includes articles that remained unpublished during Wild's lifetime, a journal, wherein he recorded conversations with major British and Continental philosophers during 1957-8, as well as a masterful exposition and commentary on Emmanuel Levinas's book Totality and Infinity. It also contains a complete bibliography of all of Wild's unpublished writings open for research at the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University. More personal and less reserved than Wild's published scholarship, yet containing Wild's characteristic clarity and rigor, the writings in this book cover such subjects as a phenomenological approach to moral relativism, an exploration of lived time, and reflections on the other and religious transcendence. The Promise of Phenomenology gives a lively picture of a master philosopher at work conveying the vitality and importance of philosophy to everyday life.

Patocka, like few others before or since, combined what was best in Husserl and Heidegger, but at the same time found for himself a distinct, original philosophical voice. Both his originality and his synthesis of the two dominant strands of classical phenomenology are evident here, as Patocka pursues the threefold theme of subject body, human community, and the phenomenological understanding of "world." This volume is an excellent introduction to philosophy in the phenomenological tradition.

Since the 1930s, philosophy has been divided into two camps: the analytic tradition which prevails in the Anglophone world and the continental tradition which holds sway over the European continent. A Parting of the Ways looks at the origins of this split through the lens of one defining episode: the disputation in Davos, Switerzland, in 1929, between the two most eminent German philosophers, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger. This watershed debate was attended by Rudolf Carnap, a representative of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists. Michael Friedman shows how philosophical differences interacted with political events. Both Carnap and Heidegger viewed their philosophical efforts as tied to their radical social outlooks, with Carnap on the left and Heidegger on the right, while Cassirer was in the conciliatory classical tradition of liberal republicanism. The rise of Hitler led to the emigration from Europpe of most leading philosophers, including Carnap and Cassirer, leaving Heidegger alone on the continent

Merleau-Ponty was a pivotal figure in twentieth century French philosophy. He was responsible for bringing the phenomenological methods of the German philosophers - Husserl and Heidegger - to France and instigated a new wave of interest in this approach. His influence extended well beyond the boundaries of philosophy and can be seen in theories of politics, psychology, art and language.
This is the first volume to bring together a comprehensive selection of Merleau-Ponty's writing.
Sections from the following are included:
The Primacy of Perception
The Structure of Behaviour
The Phenomenology of Perception
The Prose of the World
The Visible and the Invisible
Sense and Non-Sense
The Adventures of the Dialectic
In a substantial critical introduction Thomas Baldwin provides a critical discussion of the main themes of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, connecting it to subsequent philosophical debates and setting it in the context of the ideas of Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre. Each text is also prefaced with an explanation which sets it in its context in Merleau-Ponty's work; and there are extensive suggestions for further reading to enable students to pursue the issues raised by Merleau-Ponty. Thus the book provides the ideal materials for students studying Merleau-Ponty for the first time.

Noted Kierkegaard scholar Edward Mooney guides the reader through the major themes of the Danish philosopher's life and thought. Each chapter frames a striking issue, usually encapsulated in a short passage from Kierkegaard, and pursues it directly and deeply. Kierkegaard speaks to our need for self-understanding, our need to negotiate the tensions between surprisingly subtle capacities for communication and surprisingly easy descent into cliches and banality. The chapter of this book follow and re-animate Kierkegaard's brilliant and humorous discussions of death and authenticity, of the maternal and paternal in faith and self-transformations, of self-deception and obsessive judgmentalism, of love and the search for stable centers, of subjectivity as refinement of responsiveness to others, the world, and all we can value. These evocative explications aim to match his stride in tracking deep human concerns that evade academic and cultural pigeonholes. Like Hamlet, Kierkegaard gives us a "poem unlimited" that is open to endless reflection. Mooney's aim is to bring his matchless impulse and aspiration once more alive.

In his uncompleted last work, The Visible and the Invisible, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote of the thesis of "interanimality," a project that was to "make explicit" the connections between humans and other creatures. David Dillard-Wright uses the suggestions in the Working Notes to re-read Merleau-Ponty's textual corpus through the lens of animality. The "wild meanings" that result suggest new directions for philosophical anthropology as well as environmental ethics and animal philosophy. The fact that humans know the world through a fleshly engagement with other animals and non-sentient entities means that reason is unseated from its throne as the ruling attribute of human nature and that consciousness can no longer be viewed as something interior to an individual self. The human cultural world is constituted through contact with extra-human nature, such that everything held to be distinctively human traces its origins back to the Earth, the source of human rationality.

The second volume in this four volume set covers the period from shortly after the publication of Being and Time up to the Letter on Humanism - that is, the period of Heidegger's notorious 'turn'.

The third volume in this four volume set will address the 'late' Heidegger, his thought from the 1940s until his death in 1976. It will focus on language and poetry, his renewed encounter with pre-Socratic philosophy, his development of the doctrine of the fourfold of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities, and his repeated attempts to radicalize his earlier accounts of Being and unconcealment.

Contents:
1. The Inorganic Body and the Ambiguity of Freedom
2. Value, Rationality and the Environment
3. Unhewn Demonstrations
4. Critical Realism and the Heritage of the Enlightenment
5. On Slave Rebellions in Morals
6. The Right Rebellion in the Wrong Cause: Heidegger, Technology and the Market
7. Sartre: Intimations of Authenticity
8. Sartre's Mistaken Approach to Marxism
9. Berdyaev's Socialism
10. In Defence of Objectivity

Recent philosophy has seen the idea of the transcendental, first introduced in its modern form in the work of Kant, take on a new prominence.
Bringing together an international range of younger philosophers and established thinkers, this volume opens up the idea of the transcendental, examining it not merely as a mode of argument, but as naming a particular problematic and a philosophical style.
With contributions engaging with both analytic and continental approaches, this book will be of essential interest to philosophers and philosophy students interested in the idea of the transcendental and the part that it plays in modern and contemporary philosophy.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203219570