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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present > Western philosophy, from c 1900 - > Phenomenology & Existentialism
Includes summary but substantial accounts of the thought of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Marcel, Heidegger and Sartre, and a concluding essay that attempts to interpret the whole Existentialist movement.
The articles in this collection focus on philosophical approaches to proper names. The issues discussed include abstract names, empty names, naming and name-using practices, definite descriptions, individuals, reference, designation, sense and semantics. The contributions show the importance and lasting influence of theories proposed by John Stuart Mill, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Donald Davidson, and Saul Kripke. Individual chapters assess traditional analyses and modern controversies, and contribute to the debate on proper names in contemporary philosophy of language.
In recent years interest in the thought of Kierkegaard has grown dramatically, and with it the body of secondary literature has expanded so quickly that it has become impossible for even the most conscientious scholar to keep pace. The problem of the explosion of secondary literature is made more acute by the fact that much of what is written about Kierkegaard appears in languages that most Kierkegaard scholars do not know. Kierkegaard has become a global phenomenon, and new research traditions have emerged in different languages, countries and regions. The present volume is dedicated to trying to help to resolve these two problems in Kierkegaard studies. Its purpose is, first, to provide book reviews of some of the leading monographic studies in the Kierkegaard secondary literature so as to assist the community of scholars to become familiar with the works that they have not read for themselves. The aim is thus to offer students and scholars of Kierkegaard a comprehensive survey of works that have played a more or less significant role in the research. Second, the present volume also tries to make accessible many works in the Kierkegaard secondary literature that are written in different languages and thus to give a glimpse into various and lesser-known research traditions. The six tomes of the present volume present reviews of works written in Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, and Swedish.
The Universe We Think In arises from a tradition of realism, both philosophical and political, a universe in which the common sense understanding of things is included in our judgement about them. The scope is both vast and narrow - vast because it is aware of the reality of things, narrow because it is the individual person who can and wants to know them. The abiding undercurrent of this book is that the cosmos, the universe, does not look at us human beings, but we look at it, seek to understand it, and do understand much of it. Why is this so? The book seeks to begin with the basic question that we each ought to pose to ourselves; namely: "Why do I exist?" Nothing is more immediate than the relation of what is not ourselves to ourselves. We have the strange experience that we cannot even `know ourselves' unless we know something that is not ourselves. In a sense, we have two related worlds, the one that exists, a universe, as it were, that includes each of us, and the same world that we think about. What is so striking about our personal existence is that we can know what is not ourselves. Indeed, we not only want to know what is not ourselves, but this knowledge of what is not ourselves is also, in part, the reason for our existence in the first place. Our thinking about the world is not unrelated to the world that is. Yet, once we understand what is in the world, both systematically and casually, we find ourselves free in a world of others who also think and communicate with one another. Thus, to know ourselves includes knowing what is not ourselves in its own diversity. Ultimately, we seek to know why it all is rather than is not, why it all belongs together in the same universe.
This volume of essays brings a phenomenological focus to bear on the subject of education in order to provide a fruitful stimulus for educational philosophy. It is for philosophers, psychologists, sociologists and indeed anyone who seeks to understand the perennially interesting questions about the nature of self-consciousness and how our view of it might affect our thinking about education. Originally published in 1978, the essays explore some of the main phenomenological and existentialist themes in relation to the development of consciousness. Two deal with Kierkegaard's concern for our need to know the world that is true for ourselves, and with the part that imagination plays here. There are two on the development of thinking based round Piaget's work on the child's concept of causality and an alternative view proposed by Merleau-Ponty. The role of memory in education is considered and a distinction drawn between mere memorizing and that process of remembering which enables an individual to develop his self-image. Other essays discuss some of the child's problems in establishing himself in the adult world, and explore the contact between child and teacher. The effects of bringing up a child in isolation from other children is considered with reference to Jean-Paul Sartre's account of his childhood.
Sociology is an established academic discipline but there has been continuing debate over its status as a science and the nature of its subject matter. This led to the emergence of a phenomenological sociology and to critiques of positivist sociology. This critical reappraisal of the relevance of Marxian analysis for a science of society shows how these developments within sociology have had their counterpart in Marxism. The author analyses the status of Marx's work and the Marxist 'tradition' in sociology. He focuses upon those concerns which are common to both Marxian analysis and sociology - the question of subjectivity; the nature of social reality; and the dialectical relationship of the 'doing' or practice of a science of society to the social world within which such social analyses are situated. Originally published in 1976.
The term 'phenomenology' has become almost as over-used and emptied of meaning as that other word from Continental Philosophy, namely 'existentialism'. Yet Husserl, who first put forward the phenomenological method, considered it a rigorous alternative to positivism, and in the hands of Merleau-Ponty, a disciple of Husserl in France, phenomenology became a way of gaining a disciplined and coherent perspective on the world in which we live. When this study originally published in 1977 there were only a few books in English on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. It introduced the reader and suggested how his thought might throw light on some of the assumptions and presuppositions of certain contemporary forms of Anglo-Saxon philosophy and social science. It also demonstrates how phenomenology seeks to unite philosophy and social science, rather than define them as mutually exclusive domains of knowledge.
The value of psychology as a science has been challenged in phenomenology and in other epistemological trends. The main objective of this book is to draw the attention of students of human and animal behaviour to important achievements in phenomenological psychology and comparative physiology which are mostly overlooked, although they offer a genuine approach to subjective experience in relation to behavioural regulations. The work of Brentano, Stumpf, Husserl, Politzer, Katz, Michotte, Buytendijk and many others is analysed from this epistemological standpoint. The significance of the phenomenological approach for the biology of behaviour is discussed. The meaning of Sherrington's physiology of the behavioural field is evaluated in the same framework. Basic reading for students of experimental psychology, comparative psychology and ethology, this book will appeal particularly to those interested in the philosophy of psychology and biology. Originally published in 1977.
This book provides an encompassing and thorough study of Martin Heidegger's thought. It is not only a presentation but also a profound critique of the thinker's beliefs. In the context of Heidegger's cooperation with Nazism, the author reflects on the reasons behind his inability to confront the problem of evil and vulnerability to the threats of totalitarianism.
Novelty is real. Cause-effect relationships come into existence that cannot be attributed to repetition of the relationships that came before them. This idea is relevant to everything from historical sciences, philosophy, religion, to our own subjective experience. But why, in the most general possible sense, do new things happen? It is argued here that novelty results from a kind of "symbiosis" between systems that function in similar ways, but are made from different stuff. Similarly, novelty within consciousness derives from an interactive overlap between logical thought that is representable in language, and subjective thought that is not. These ideas are developed through a consideration of a conceptual history of the new, a logical formalization of how novelty occurs, a discussion of the relevance of novelty to scientific questions surrounding Earth, life and consciousness, and an integrative reading of the respective philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger.
The Yearbook on History and Interpretation of Phenomenology 2015 is dedicated to the question of generativity, and more broadly to the generative aspects of and in contemporary phenomenology. We continue to proceed in Husserlian research as well as to address newly emerging contemporary cultural, political, and ecological phenomena. This invites and welcomes a creative involvement with a generative phenomenological approach, which tries to address such phenomena as the liminality and volatility of experience, interpersonal and intercultural communication, home and alienness, identity and difference, globalization and fundamentalism, migration and interculturalism, and searches for the meaning of authentic sociality, morality or religiosity of human persons.
This book offers a concise exposition of the content theory of intentionality, which lies at the root of Husserl's phenomenology, for student and scholar. Originally published in 1982. The first part traces the history of phenomenology from its beginnings in Aristotle and Aquinas through Hume, Reid and the Brentano school to its first clear formulation in Frege and Husserl. Part two analyses some special problems involved in two important types of mental phenomena - perception and emotion - without abandoning the historical approach. Husserl's theory of perception is extensively discussed and a Husserlian analysis of so-called de re acts is attempted.
Since its first publication in 1970 this book has become one of the most widely read introductory books on phenomenology and is used as a standard text in many universities from Germany to Korea and China. Praised for its accessibility and clarity the book has attracted a wide readership both within and outside the academia. Its author has over the years published a number of other books on Philosophy in which he has developed important theories of his own. This clear and elegant introduction traces Husserl's philosophical development from his early preoccupation with numbers and his conflict with Frege to the transcendental phenomenology of his mature period. There is also a brief critical exposition of the views of Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre and other philosopher influenced by Husserl.
Stolorow and his collaborators' post-Cartesian psychoanalytic perspective - intersubjective-systems theory - is a phenomenological contextualism that illuminates worlds of emotional experience as they take form within relational contexts. After outlining the evolution and basic ideas of this framework, Stolorow shows both how post-Cartesian psychoanalysis finds enrichment and philosophical support in Heidegger's analysis of human existence, and how Heidegger's existential philosophy, in turn, can be enriched and expanded by an encounter with post-Cartesian psychoanalysis. In doing so, he creates an important psychological bridge between post-Cartesian psychoanalysis and existential philosophy in the phenomenology of emotional trauma.
Ironically, the philosophy of love has long been neglected by philosophers, so-called "lovers of wisdom," who would seemingly need to understand how one best becomes a lover. In Kierkegaard and the Philosophy of Love, Michael Strawser shows that the philosophy of love lies at the heart of Kierkegaard's writings, as he argues that the central issue of Kierkegaard's authorship can and should be understood more broadly as the task of becoming a lover. Strawser starts by identifying the questions (How should I love the other? Is self-love possible? How can I love God?) and themes (love's immediacy, intentionality, unity, and eternity) that are central to the philosophy of love, and he develops a rich context that includes analyses of the conceptions of love found in Plato, Spinoza, and Hegel, as well as prominent contemporary thinkers. Strawser provides an original and wide-ranging analysis of Kierkegaard's writings-from the early The Concept of Irony and Edifying Discourses to the late The Moment, while maintaining the prominence of Works of Love- to demonstrate how Kierkegaard's writings on love are relevant to the emerging study of the philosophy of love today. The most unique perspective of this work, however, is Strawser's argument that Kierkegaard's writings on love are most fruitfully understood within the context of a phenomenology of love. In interpreting Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist of love, Strawser claims that it is not Husserl and Heidegger that we should look to for a connection in the first instance, but rather Max Scheler, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Emmanuel Levinas, and most importantly, Jean-Luc Marion, who for the most part center their thinking on the phenomenological nature of love. Based on an analysis of the works of these thinkers together with Kierkegaard's writings, Strawser argues that Kierkegaard presents readers with a first phenomenology of love, a point of view that serves as a unifying perspective throughout this work while also pointing to areas for future scholarship. Overall, this work brings seemingly divergent perspectives into a unity brought about through a focus on love-which is, after all, a unifying force.
In the Western world it is usually taken as given that we all want happiness, and our educational arrangements tacitly acknowledge this. Happiness, Hope, and Despair argues, however, that education has an important role to play in deepening our understanding of suffering and despair as well as happiness and joy. Education can be uncomfortable, unpredictable, and unsettling; it can lead to greater uncertainty and unhappiness. Drawing on the work of Soren Kierkegaard, Miguel de Unamuno, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Simone Weil, Paulo Freire, and others, Peter Roberts shows why these features of educational life need not be feared; to the contrary, they can be seen as a source of hope and human fulfilment. After years of negotiating an education system dominated by the language of competition, performance, and economic advancement, students and teachers often long for something different; they seek not just measurable success but also opportunities to ask searching questions of themselves and the world they encounter. Happiness, Hope, and Despair makes an important contribution toward meeting this need. It fosters a rethinking of the nature, purpose, and value of education, and opens up possibilities for further scholarly and professional inquiry.
In God and Human Freedom: A Kierkegaardian Perspective Tony Kim discusses Soren Kierkegaard's concept of historical unity between the divine and human without disparaging their absolute distinction. Kim's central analysis between the relation of God and human freedom in Kierkegaard presents God's absoluteness as superseding human freedom, intervening at every point of His relation with the world and informing humanity of their existentially passive being. Kim argues Kierkegaard is not a strict voluntarist but deeply acknowledges God's absoluteness and initiative over and against human life. Moreover, the author's exploration of unity in Kierkegaard points to the very ethics of who God is, one who loves the world. Ultimately, God manifests that love in Jesus Christ, representing God's ultimate reconciliation with the world in his humility.
Tymieniecka's phenomenology of life reverses current priorities, stressing the primogenital role of aesthetic enjoyment, rather than cognition, as typifying the Human Condition. The present collection offers clues to a crucial breakthrough in the perennial uncertainties about the powers and prerogatives of the human mind. It proposes human creativity as the pivot of the mind's genesis and its endowment. In the midst of the current defiance of the transcendental certainties of cognition, this turn to the creative act of the human being represents a radical reversion to an approach to human powers that is predominated by the aesthetic virtualities of the Human Condition. The collection lays down the foundations for a new discovery of the human mind, addressing the plumbing' of the functional system that originates in the creative potentiality of the Human Condition, undercutting the currently prevalent empirical reductionism.
A Theory of the Microdynamics of Occurrent Thought (T2) is based on a reflective analysis of occurrent thoughts (OTs) in the spirit of phenomenological philosophy and proposes that such thoughts consist of a specific combination of ten or fewer micro phases possessing phenomenal contents that are so brief that most of us are unaware of their existence. The theory specifies the "movements" of an operating I or central executive in, as, and among these phases in the service of "processing" their contents by fleetingly "becoming" them, followed by one of several transitions of attention that bring about different degrees of their objectification. The relatively fixed sequences of the phases of OTs, along with an operating I's immersion in and "face-up" or "face-down" surfacing from their phenomenal contents, form a structure that carries and drives "on-line" cognition, supporting the view that they play a causal role in human information processing. Two categories, two forms, and fifteen different types of OTs are defined based on the transitions of an operating I therein. This book includes detailed illustrations of the different types of OTs.
Human thinking depends not only on words but also on visual imagery. Visual argumentation directly exploits the logic of the pictorial, while verbal arguments, too, draw on figurative language, and thus ultimately on images. In the centuries of handwritten documents and the printed book, our educational culture has been a predominantly verbal one. Today the challenge of the pictorial is explicit and conspicuous. In the digital world, we are experiencing an unprecedented wealth of images, animations and videos. But how should visual content be combined with traditional texts? This volume strives to present a broad humanities background showing how going beyond the word was always an issue in, and by now has become an inevitable challenge to, pedagogy and philosophy.
A cornerstone of Sartre's philosophy, The Imaginary was first published in 1940. Sartre had become acquainted with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl in Berlin and was fascinated by his idea of the 'intentionality of consciousness' as a key to the puzzle of existence. Against this background, The Imaginary crystallized Sartre's worldview and artistic vision. The book is an extended examination of the concepts of nothingness and freedom, both of which are derived from the ability of consciousness to imagine objects both as they are and as they are not - ideas that would drive Sartre's existentialism and entire theory of human freedom.
This innovative volume argues that flourishing is achieved when individuals successfully balance their responsiveness to three kinds of normative claim: self-fulfilment, moral responsibility, and intersubjective answerability. Applying underutilised resources in existential phenomenology, Irene McMullin reconceives practical reason, addresses traditional problems in virtue ethics, and analyses four virtues: justice, patience, modesty, and courage. Her central argument is that there is an irreducible normative plurality arising from the different practical perspectives we can adopt - the first-, second-, and third-person stances - which each present us with different kinds of normative claim. Flourishing is human excellence within each of these normative domains, achieved in such a way that success in one does not compromise success in another. The individual virtues are solutions to specific existential challenges we face in attempting to do so. This book will be important for anyone working in the fields of moral theory, existential phenomenology, and virtue ethics.
This book investigates the philosophy of education implicit in the semiotics of Charles Peirce. It is commonly accepted that the acts of learning and teaching imply affection of some sort, and Charles Peirce's evolutionary semiotics thoroughly explains learning as an act of love. According to Peirce, we evolved to learn and to love; learning from other people has proved to be one of the best ways to carry out our infinite pursuit of truth, since love is the very characteristic of truth. As such, the teacher and the student practise love in their relation with one another. Grounded within an edusemiotics framework and also exploring the iconic turn in semiotics and recent developments in biosemiotics, this is the first book-length study of Peirce's contribution to the philosophy of education.
What are phenomena of contemporary biopolitics in the twenty-first century? Foucault's theory of biopolitics as neoliberalism is opposed to post-political theories developed by Agamben, Hardt and Negri and as such - more instructive. Because microstrategy of power is not Foucault's final word on politics, political genealogy opens the space for creative and local critique of biopolitics. And if military interventions, terrorism and wars against terrorism are exemplary phenomena of biopolitics, bellum justum is a contradictio in adjecto. In response to such biopolitics, the relation between sovereignty and democracy is re-examined and we are entering a time of small revolutions.
Under the title of "Phenomenology: Continuation and Crit icism," the group of essays in this volume are presented in honor of Dorion Cairns on his 70th birthday. The contributors comprise friends, colleagues and former students of Dorion Cairns who, each in his own way, share the interest of Dorion Cairns in Husserlian phenomenology. That interest itself may be best defined by these words of Edmund Husserl: "Philosophy - wis dom (sagesse) - is the philosopher's quite personal affair. It must arise as his wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from the beginning . . . " 1 It is our belief that only in the light of these words can phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy be continued, but always reflexively, critically. For over forty years Dorion Cairns has, through his teaching and writing, selflessly worked to bring the idea expressed by Husserl's words into self conscious exercise. In so doing he has, to the benefit of those who share his interest, confirmed Husserl's judgement of him that he is "among the rare ones who have penetrated into the deepest sense of my phenomenology, . . . who had the energy and persist ence not to desist until he had arrived at real understanding." |
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