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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present > Western philosophy, from c 1900 - > Phenomenology & Existentialism
This book re-evaluates the philosophical status of Samuel Taylor Coleridge by providing an extended comparison between his work and the phenomenological theory of Edmund Husserl. Examining Coleridge's accounts of the imagination, perception, poetic creativity and literary criticism, it draws a systematic and coherent structure out of a range of Coleridge's philosophical writing. In addition, it also applies the principles of Coleridge's philosophy to an interpretation of his own poetic output.
We need a new philosophy of the earth. Geological time used to refer to slow and gradual processes, but today we are watching land sink into the sea and forests transform into deserts. We can even see the creation of new geological strata made of plastic, chicken bones, and other waste that could remain in the fossil record for millennia or longer. Crafting a philosophy of geology that rewrites natural and human history from the broader perspective of movement, Thomas Nail provides a new materialist, kinetic ethics of the earth that speaks to this moment. Climate change and other ecological disruptions challenge us to reconsider the deep history of minerals, atmosphere, plants, and animals and to take a more process-oriented perspective that sees humanity as part of the larger cosmic and terrestrial drama of mobility and flow. Building on his earlier work on the philosophy of movement, Nail argues that we should shift our biocentric emphasis from conservation to expenditure, flux, and planetary diversity. Theory of the Earth urges us to rethink our ethical relationship to one another, the planet, and the cosmos at large.
This book studies the phenomenological ontology of breathing. It investigates breathing and air as a question of phenomenological philosophy and looks at phenomenological questions concerning respiratory methodology, ontological experience of respiration, respiratory spirituality and respiratory embodiment. Drawing on the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Luce Irigaray and David Kleinberg-Levin, the book argues for the ontological primacy of breathing and develops a new principle of philosophy that the author calls "Silence of Breath, Abyss/Yawn of Air". It asserts that breathing is not a thing- or person-oriented relation, but perpetual communication with the immense elemental atmosphere of open and free air. This new phenomenological method of breathing offers readers a chance to begin to wonder, rethink, re-experience and reimagine all questions of life in an innovative and creative way as aerial and respiratory questions of life. Part of the Routledge Critical Perspectives on Breath and Breathing series, the book breaks new ground in phenomenology and phenomenological ontology by offering a decisive and insightful treatment of breath. It will be indispensable for students and researchers of philosophy, phenomenology, and ontology. It will also be of special interest to Merleau-Ponty scholars as it investigates uncharted dimensions of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy.
A century ago the dominant philosophical outlook was not some form of materialism or naturalism, but idealism. However, this way of thinking about reality fell out of favour in the Anglo-American analytic tradition as well as the Continental schools of the twentieth century. The aim of this book is to restage and reassess the encounter between idealism and contemporary philosophy. The idealist side will be represented by the great figures of the 19th-century post-Kantian tradition in Germany, from Fichte and Schelling to Hegel, followed by the towering Hegelians in Britain led by T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet. Their 20th-century adversaries will be represented by the secular existentialists, especially the famous French trio of Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus, who sought to follow Nietzsche in philosophizing in light of the death of God. And the arena of encounter will be the philosophy of religion-more specifically, questions relating to the nature and existence of God, death and the meaning of life, and the problem of evil. The book argues that the existentialist critique of idealism enables an innovative as well as a more critical and adventurous approach that is sorely needed in philosophy of religion today. Idealism after Existentialism will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in the history of 19th- and 20th-century philosophy and philosophy of religion.
What does a truly democratic experience of political action look like today? In this provocative new work, Adriana Cavarero weighs in on contemporary debates about the relationship between democracy, happiness, and dissent. Drawing on Arendt's understanding of politics as a participatory experience, but also discussing texts by Emile Zola, Elias Canetti, Boris Pasternak, and Roland Barthes, along with engaging Judith Butler, Cavarero proposes a new view of democracy, based not on violence, but rather on the spontaneous experience of a plurality of bodies coming together in public. Expanding on the themes explored in previous works, Cavarero offers a timely intervention into current thinking about the nature of democracy, suggesting that its emergence thrives on the nonviolent creativity of a widespread, participatory, and relational power that is shared horizontally rather than vertically. From digital democracy to selfies to contemporary protest movements, Cavarero argues that we need to rethink our focus on individual happiness and turn toward rediscovering the joyful emotions of birth through plural interaction. Yes, let us be happy, she urges, but let us do so publicly, politically, together.
Soren Kierkegaard is one of the key figures of nineteenth century thought, whose influence on subsequent philosophy, theology and literature is both extensive and profound. Fear and Trembling, which investigates the nature of faith through an exploration of the story of Abraham and Isaac, is one of Kierkegaard's most compelling and widely read works. It combines an arresting narrative, an unorthodox literary structure and a fascinating account of faith and its relation to 'the ethical'. The Routledge Guidebook to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling introduces and assesses: Kierkegaard's life and the background to Fear and Trembling, including aspects of its philosophical and theological context The text and key ideas of Fear and Trembling, including the details of its account of faith and its connection to trust and hope The book's reception history, the diversity of interpretations it has been given and its continuing interest and importance This Guidebook assumes no previous knowledge of Kierkegaard's work and will be essential reading for anyone studying the most famous text of this important thinker.
This study explores the increasingly troubled relationship between humankind and the Earth, with the help of a simple example and a complicated interlocutor. The example is a pond, which, it turns out, is not so simple as it seems. The interlocutor is Jean-Paul Sartre, novelist, playwright, biographer, philosopher, and, despite his several disavowals, doyen of twentieth-century existentialism. Standing with the great humanist at the edge of the pond, the author examines contemporary experience in the light of several familiar conceptual pairs: nature and culture, fact and value, reality and imagination, human and nonhuman, society and ecology, Earth and world. The theoretical challenge is to reveal the critical complementarity and experiential unity of this family of ideas. The practical task is to discern the heuristic implications of this lived unity-in-diversity in these times of social and ecological crisis. Interdisciplinary in its aspirations, the study draws upon recent developments in biology and ecology, complexity science and systems theory, ecological and Marxist economics, and environmental history. Comprehensive in its engagement of Sartre's oeuvre, the study builds upon his best-known existentialist writings, and also his critique of colonialism, voluminous ethical writings, early studies of the imaginary, and mature dialectical philosophy. In addition to overviews of Sartre's distinctive inflections of phenomenology and dialectics and his unique theories of praxis and imagination, the study also articulates for the first time Sartre's incipient philosophical ecology. In keeping with Sartre's lifelong commitment to freedom and liberation, the study concludes with a programmatic look at the relative merits of pragmatist, prefigurative, and revolutionary activism within the burgeoning global struggle for social and ecological justice. We learn much by thinking with Sartre at the water's edge: surprising lessons about our changing humanity and how we have come to where we are; timely lessons about the shifting relation between us and the broader community of life to which we belong; difficult lessons about our brutal degradation of the planetary system upon which life depends; and auspicious lessons, too, about a participatory path forward as we work to preserve a habitable planet and build a livable world for all earthlings.
This edited collection explores the problem of violence from the vantage point of meaning. Taking up the ambiguity of the word 'meaning', the chapters analyse the manner in which violence affects and in some cases constitutes the meaningful structure of our lifeworld, on individual, social, religious and conceptual levels. The relationship between violence and meaning is multifaceted, and is thus investigated from a variety of different perspectives within the continental tradition of philosophy, including phenomenology, post-structuralism, critical theory and psychoanalysis. Divided into four parts, the volume explores diverging meanings of the concept of violence, as well as transcendent or religious violence- a form of violence that takes place between humanity and the divine world. Going on to investigate instances of immanent and secular violence, which occur at the level of the group, community or society, the book concludes with an exploration of violence and meaning on the individual level: violence at the level of the self, or between particular persons. With its focus on the manifold of relations between violence and meaning, as well as its four part focus on conceptual, transcendent, immanent and individual violence, the book is both multi-directional and multi-layered.
This collection is the first book-length study to re-evaluate all of James Joyce's major fictional works through the lens of cognitive studies. Cognitive Joyce presents Joyce's relationship to the scientific knowledge and practices of his time and examines his texts in light of contemporary developments in cognitive and neuro-sciences. The chapters pursue a threefold investigation-into the author's "extended mind" at work, into his characters' complex and at times pathological perceptive and mental processes, and into the elaborate responses the work elicits as we perform the act of reading. This volume not only offers comprehensive overviews of the oeuvre, but also detailed close-readings that unveil the linguistic focus of Joyce's drama of cognition.
This volume explores Andrew Feenberg's work in critical theory. Feenberg is considered one of the key 'second generation' critical theorists, with a keen interest in philosophy of technology. He has made a vital contribution to critical theory in ways that remain of interest given the pressing technological issues of our time. The authors of this book highlight not only the ways that Feenberg has begun to make good on what is often characterized as "the broken promise of critical theory" to address issues of technology, but also the continued importance of critical theory more generally, and of Feenberg's contributions to understanding this tradition.
Through a curated selection of papers written over four decades by one of Australia's leading philosophers, this collection demonstrates the impact of Continental philosophy on philosophical thought in Australia. The development of specific philosophical problems, over a period of more than forty years by a philosopher whose first training was 'pre-continental', shows that it is possible to achieve interaction between 'continental' and 'pre-continental' methods in philosophy, even while recognizing their distinctiveness. These essays 'work towards' continental philosophy in the ways they pay attention to language, to how we experience things and are experienced by others, and to the structures of language and power that frame what it is possible to say and to hear, to write and to read.
This book argues that global crises such as the present Covid-19 pandemic are correlates of the contemporary thought regime that it calls technohumanism. Taking up the pandemic as the central case in point, the book shows how the basic assumptions of technohumanism encourage large-scale dependencies and a consequent loss of endurance in the populace. Next, it shows that a form of recuperation can be pedagogically attempted by means of a "psychoanalysis" of thought which releases it from the humanist limits placed on it. To do this, it introduces the notion of a living unconscious as distinct from the Freudian Unconscious, and argues that in the living unconscious there is no distinction between the prehuman and the posthuman, and a posthumanist pedagogy can be constructed on the basis of an adequate transfer of prehuman dynamism.
Existentialisms arise when the foundations of being, such as meaning, morals, and purpose come under assault. In the first-wave of existentialism, writings typified by Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche concerned the increasingly apparent inability of religion, and religious tradition, to support a foundation of being. Second-wave existentialism, personified philosophically by Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir, developed in response to similar realizations about the overly optimistic Enlightenment vision of reason and the common good. The third-wave of existentialism, a new existentialism, developed in response to advances in the neurosciences that threaten the last vestiges of an immaterial soul or self. Given the increasing explanatory and therapeutic power of neuroscience, the mind no longer stands apart from the world to serve as a foundation of meaning. This produces foundational anxiety. In Neuroexistentialism, a group of contributors that includes some of the world's leading philosophers, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and legal scholars, explores the anxiety caused by third-wave existentialism and possible responses to it. Together, these essays tackle our neuroexistentialist predicament, and explore what the mind sciences can tell us about morality, love, emotion, autonomy, consciousness, selfhood, free will, moral responsibility, law, the nature of criminal punishment, meaning in life, and purpose.
Perfect for use at advanced undergraduate and graduate level, this is the first text to offer students a unified narrative regarding the place of the body in Western thinking. The book investigates the ways in which the fact of human embodiment makes the notion of ambiguity central to all major areas of philosophy. The body is both active and passive, powerful and vulnerable, and it provides both access through perception and limitation through localisation. As such, it fundamentally informs ontological, political, ethical and epistemological issues. The book takes as its starting point the devaluation of the body by philosophers from Plato to Descartes and then focuses on several dimensions of the body as investigated by post-Kantian philosophy through a discussion of the intentional body, embodied cognition and the politicization of the body. The book engages with both the 'Continental' and 'Anglo-American' philosophical traditions and includes a broad range of sources and texts. The unified approach and clear writing make this lively text accessible to those working in other disciplines such as Anthropology, Cultural Studies and Gender Studies.
philosophers with both hermeneutic-phenomenological and scientific back- grounds (such as Heelan, Ihde, Theodore Kisiel, Joseph Kockelmans) have begun to read the work of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, and others as also entailing a positive re-evaluation of practices of the natural sciences. A few professional scientists with a scholarly background in hermeneutic- phenomenological philosophy (among whom is Martin Eger) have begun to do the same. A number of more mainstream philosophers of science are utilizing hermeneutical insights effectively and perceptively (Joseph Rouse), while many sociologically-trained scholars who speak with the terminolo- gy and often the assumptions of analytic philosophy reveal in their work a deep appreciation for the hermeneutical insight into the nature of his tori- cally situated knowledge (Harry Collins, Bruno Latour, Andrew Pickering, Simon Schaffer, Steve Shapin and others inftuenced by social constructivism). of these initiatives manifest the rediscovery that all dis course is situat- All ed culturally and historically. The days are gone when it could be seriously 2 debated whether a hermeneutical perspective on the natural sciences exists. The challenge remains today to understand more explicitly the hermeneutical dimension of the natural sciences in terms of an overarching hermeneutic of all knowledge.
Focusing mainly upon language, communication, textuality, etc., as is overwhelmingly today's fashion, we miss the very raison d'etre of literature and language itself. Moving a step further in our investigation of the anthropologico-ontopoietic sources of the life-significance of literature by unravelling the function of imaginatio creatrix in man's self interpretation-in-existence, this collection seeks to bring forth the royal role of allegory in the fostering of culture. A conjoint work of human elemental passions and of the human spirit, allegory mediates between lofty ideals of the highest human strivings and the pedestrian realm of facts. Interpretative or theoretical studies encompass allegory -- mediaeval, modern and post-modern -- in various literatures. Among the authors are: Tymieniecka, Kronegger, Jorge Garcia Gomez, V. Osadnik, H. Hellerstein, H. Rudnick, R. Kiefer, V. Fichera, K. Haney, Ch. Raffini, J. Williamson, B. Ross and Sitansu Ray. "
Kyoto School Philosophy in Comparative Perspective: Ideology, Ontology, Modernity presents the thought of the Kyoto School, the most famous Japanese philosophical movement of the twentieth century, by comparing the philosophy of its most representative members-Nishida and Nishitani-with some better known thinkers in the West: Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, and Michel Henry. Bernard Stevens highlights the proximity of this movement of thought to the European phenomenological current that influenced it. However, the book also addresses an eminently problematic reality: the affiliation of some of its members with the militarism of the 1930s and 1940s. The political philosophers Arendt and Maruyama provide useful guidance here, in clarifying one of the central issues of this episode: the ideology of "overcoming modernity", supported by some of the younger disciples of Nishida. This book proposes intellectual conditions for both critical and appreciative receptions of one of the most fascinating philosophical adventures of the twentieth century.
Taking the term "phenomenologist" in a fairly broad sense, Early Phenomenology focuses on those early exponents of the intellectual discipline, such as Buber, Ortega and Scheler rather than those thinkers that would later eclipse them; indeed the volume precisely means to bring into question what it means to be a phenomenologist, a category that becomes increasingly more fluid the more we distance ourselves from the gravitational pull of philosophical giants Husserl and Heidegger. In focusing on early phenomenology this volume seeks to examine the movement before orthodoxies solidified. More than merely adding to the story of phenomenology by looking closer at thinkers without the same fame as Husserl or Heidegger and the representatives of their legacy, the essays relate to one of the earlier thinkers with figures that are either more contemporary or more widely read, or both. Beyond merely filling in the historical record and reviving names, the chapters of this book will also give contemporary readers reasons to take these figures seriously as phenomenologists, radically reordering of our understanding of the lineage of this major philosophical movement.
A central criticism emerging from Black and Creole thinkers is that mainstream, white dominated, culture, consumes sounds and images of Creole and Black people in music, theater, and the white press, while ignoring critiques of the white consumption of black culture. Ironically, critiques of whiteness are found not only in black literature and media, but also within the blues, jazz, and spirituals that whites listened to, loved, collected, and archived. This book argues that whiteness is not only a visual orientation; it is a way of hearing. Inspired by formulations of the race and whiteness in the existential writings of Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Lewis Gordon, Angela Davis, bell hooks and Sara Ahmed, T Storm Heter introduces the notion of the white sonic gaze. Through case studies and musical examples from the history of American jazz, the book builds a phenomenological archive to demonstrate the bad habits of 'white listening', drawing from black journalism, the autobiographies of Creole musicians, and the lyrics and sonic content of early jazz music emerging from New Orleans. Studying white listening orientations on the plantation, in vaudeville minstrel shows, and in cabarets, the book portrays six types of bad faith white listeners, including the white minstrel listener, the white savior listener, white hipster listener, and the white colorblind listener. Connecting critical race studies, music studies, philosophy of race and existentialism, this book is for students to learn how to critique the phenomenology of whiteness and practice decolonial listening.
Fifty years after his death in 1965 the essays in this collection return to Paul Tillich to investigate his theology and its legacy, with a focus on contemporary British scholarship. Originating in a conference held in Oxford in 2014, the book contains 16 original contributions from a mixture of junior and more established scholars, most of whom have a connection to Britain. The contributions are diverse, but four themes emerge throughout the volume. Several essays are concerning with a characterisation of Tillich's theology. In dialogue with recent emphases on the radical Tillich, some essays suggest a more conservative estimation of Tillich's theology, rooted in the Idealist and classical Christian platonic traditions, whilst in constant engagement with changing existential situations. Secondly, and perhaps reflecting the context of religious diversity and theories of religious pluralism in Britain, many essays engage Tillich's approach to non-Christian religions. Thirdly, some essays address the importance of existentialist philosophy for Tillich, notably via an engagement with Sartre. Finally, a number of essays take up the diagnostic potential of Tillich's theology as a resource for engaging contemporary challenges.
A central criticism emerging from Black and Creole thinkers is that mainstream, white dominated, culture, consumes sounds and images of Creole and Black people in music, theater, and the white press, while ignoring critiques of the white consumption of black culture. Ironically, critiques of whiteness are found not only in black literature and media, but also within the blues, jazz, and spirituals that whites listened to, loved, collected, and archived. This book argues that whiteness is not only a visual orientation; it is a way of hearing. Inspired by formulations of the race and whiteness in the existential writings of Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Lewis Gordon, Angela Davis, bell hooks and Sara Ahmed, T Storm Heter introduces the notion of the white sonic gaze. Through case studies and musical examples from the history of American jazz, the book builds a phenomenological archive to demonstrate the bad habits of 'white listening', drawing from black journalism, the autobiographies of Creole musicians, and the lyrics and sonic content of early jazz music emerging from New Orleans. Studying white listening orientations on the plantation, in vaudeville minstrel shows, and in cabarets, the book portrays six types of bad faith white listeners, including the white minstrel listener, the white savior listener, white hipster listener, and the white colorblind listener. Connecting critical race studies, music studies, philosophy of race and existentialism, this book is for students to learn how to critique the phenomenology of whiteness and practice decolonial listening.
This volume expands the concept and role of the schema, with three goals in mind: 1) to outline the continuing issues in the schema concept as the legacy of Kant's concept and analysis, 2) to show that Kant's challenges resulted in successful but truncated views of the schema and its functions, 3) to reconstruct Otto Selz's schema concept by proposing an alternative. The basis and scope of Selz's schema were intended to yield a more complete follow-up to Kant's challenges. These had emerged out of his unresolved view of the schema as knowledge, on one hand, and thought, on the other. Sel'z concepts-'anticipatory schema,' 'coordinate relations,' and 'knowledge complex'-are more inclusive and psychologically dynamic than those of the influential but reductionist theorists: Piaget, Bartlett, and Craik. Harwood Fisher explores Sel'z ideas in past, present, and future temporal contexts. His predecessors' and his contemporaries' ideas influenced him. Present-day needs and future prospects round out a Selzian conception of the schema that would enrich a psychology of thought and knowledge.
Western philosophical orthodoxy places many aspects of other people's lives outside the scope of our knowledge. Demonstrating an alternative to this view, however, this book argues that Jean-Paul Sartre's application of his unique psychoanalytic method to Gustave Flaubert is the culmination of his project to show that it is possible to know everything there is to know about another person. It examines how Sartre aims to revolutionize our way of thinking about others by presenting his existential psychoanalysis as the means to knowledge of both ourselves and others. By so doing, it highlights how his determination to solve the longstanding philosophical conundrum about other minds drives him not only to incorporate insights from Descartes, Hegel, Husserl, Freud, Marx, and Beauvoir into his philosophy, but also to supplement and enhance his philosophy through the development and application of a new form of psychoanalysis. Sartre's Existential Psychoanalysis integrates, for the first time, Sartre's psychoanalysis into his overarching philosophical project. By offering a critical interrogation of the role his psychoanalytical studies played in the development of his existentialism, Mary Edwards uncovers the overlooked philosophical significance of his existential psychoanalysis and brings it into a new and productive dialogue with current research in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and psychotherapy. |
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