The Power of Phenomenology took form when the two authors realized that a single theme has run through the course of their almost half-century-long collaboration like a red thread-namely, the power of phenomenological inquiry and understanding in a wide range of contexts. This book demonstrates how they have experienced the power of phenomenology in their therapeutic work with patients, especially those struggling with horrific trauma; in their encounters with psychological and philosophical theories; and in their efforts to comprehend destructive ideologies and the collective traumas that give rise to them. The Power of Phenomenology presents the trajectory of this work. Each chapter begins with a contribution written by one or both authors, extending the power of phenomenological inquiry to one or more of these diverse contexts. The contributions are followed, one or two at a time, by a dialogue between the authors, illustrating the dialectical process of their long collaboration. The unusual format seeks to bring the phenomenology of their collaborative efforts to life for the reader. The Power of Phenomenology will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and scholars of philosophy.

Why are the visual arts so important and what is it that makes their forms significant? Countering recent interpretations of meaning that understand visual artworks on the model of literary texts, Crowther formulates a theory of the visual arts based on what their creation achieves both cognitively and aesthetically. He develops a phenomenology that emphasizes how visual art gives unique aesthetic expression to factors that are basic to perception. At the same time, he shows how various artistic media embody these factors in distinctive ways. Attentive to both the creation and reception of all major visual art forms (picturing, sculpture, architecture, and photography), "Phenomenology of the Visual Arts" also addresses complex idioms, including abstract, conceptual, and digital art.

Boats in the Attic is a sweeping, poignant exploration of what it means to be an individual and, in particular, what it means to be a parent of young children, in our current time of crisis. Errands must be run, the radio plays, and the child wants the birthday girl's balloon-all while sea levels are rising and wild wolves roam the acres of Chernobyl, "developing a cryptography to a century / to which we are not invited." In this dynamic collection, Powell intersperses lyric flight and prose fragments with metacommentary, nuance, and a beguiling sense of humor. At the same time, these pieces are securely tethered to the material difficulties of being a human in today's world, where a child must participate in a lockdown drill at his preschool and a dying woman turns to Reddit to fund her efforts to be cryogenetically preserved. Conversations between the speaker and her children trace the beauty and terror of existential indeterminacy: "We begin to consider other planets - / Will they have us?" In a long piece titled "Book of Revelation," the speaker dreams that "below the bed / is an encyclopedia of lost things," a phrase that captures the collection's wide range and its categorizing eye. Powell turns to astronomy, Alice in Wonderland, Millerism, and culinary cruelty, with a uniquely celebratory and elegiac voice, all in an effort to understand the depths, and effects, of the human appetite for pleasure, power, and escape.

The problem of human knowing has been foundational for the enterprise of philosophy since the time of Descartes. The great philosophers have offered different accounts of the power and limits of human knowing but no generally acceptable system has emerged. Contemporary writers have almost given up on this most intractable issue. In this book, Brian Cronin suggests using the method of introspective description to identify the characteristics of the act of human understanding and knowing. Introspection--far from being private and unverifiable--can be public, communal, and verifiable. If we can describe our dreams and our feelings, then, we can describe our acts of understanding. Using concrete examples, one can identify the activities involved--namely, questioning, researching, getting an idea, expressing a concept, reflecting on the evidence and inferring a conclusion. Each of these activities can be described clearly and in great detail. If we perform these activities well, we can understand and know both truth and value. The text invites readers to verify each and every statement in their own experience of understanding. This is a detailed and verifiable account of human knowing: an extremely valuable contribution to philosophy and a solution to the foundational problem of knowing.

States of Nature investigates the removal of the animal and its moral import from accounts of the human in political thought. By engaging some of the most foundational Western political texts (from Plato's Republic to Locke's Two Treatises to Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality), this work shows how the human and animal are intertwined in the creation of government, and in particular, in social contract theory. These political transitions are connected to transformations in the view of human nature that lead to the suppression of the animality of human life, as seen in Descartes' account of the metaphysics of man. States of Nature concludes by arguing for a new, vital, and relational approach toward animality as a foundation for our animal and environmental obligations.

This book advances an integrative approach to understanding the phenomenon of psychosocial maturation. Through a rigorous, dialectically-informed interpretation of psychoanalytic and humanistic-existential-phenomenological sources, Mufid James Hannush distils thirty essential markers of maturity. The dialectical approach is described as a process whereby lived, affect-and-value laden polar meanings are transformed, through deep insight, into complementary and integrative meta-meanings. The author demonstrates how responding to the call of maturation can be viewed as a life project that serves the ultimate purpose of living a balanced life. The book will appeal to students and scholars of human development, psychotherapy, social work, philosophy, and existential, humanistic, and phenomenological psychology.

Delving beneath the principal discourses of philosophy from Descartes through Kant, Bernard Freydberg plumbs the previously concealed dark forces that ignite the inner power of modern thought. He contends that reason itself issues from an implicit and unconscious suppression of the nonrational. Even the modern philosophical concerns of nature and limits are undergirded by a dark side that dwells in them and makes them possible. Freydberg traces these dark sources to the poetry of Hesiod, the fragments of Heraclitus and Parmenides, and the Platonic dialogues and claims that they rear their heads again in the work of Spinoza, Schelling, and Nietzsche. Freydberg does not set forth a critique of modern philosophy but explores its intrinsic continuity with its ancient roots.

This book is an introduction to French phenomenology in the post-1945 period. While many of phenomenology's greatest thinkers-Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty-wrote before this period, Steven DeLay introduces and assesses the creative and important turn phenomenology took after these figures. He presents a clear and rigorous introduction to the work of relatively unfamiliar and underexplored philosophers, including Jean-Louis Chretien, Michel Henry, Jean-Yves Lacoste, Jean-Luc Marion and others. After an introduction setting out the crucial Husserlian and Heideggerian background to French phenomenology, DeLay explores Emmanuel Levinas's ethics as first philosophy, Henry's material phenomenology, Marion's phenomenology of givenness, Lacoste's phenomenology of liturgical man, Chretien's phenomenology of the call, Claude Romano's evential hermeneutics, and Emmanuel Falque's phenomenology of the borderlands. Starting with the reception of Husserl and Heidegger in France, DeLay explains how this phenomenological thought challenges boundaries between philosophy and theology. Taking stock of its promise in light of the legacy it has transformed, DeLay concludes with a summary of the field's relevance to theology and analytic philosophy, and indicates what the future holds for phenomenology. Phenomenology in France: A Philosophical and Theological Introduction is an excellent resource for all students and scholars of phenomenology and continental philosophy, and will also be useful to those in related disciplines such as theology, literature, and French studies.

To understand play, we need a bottom-up phenomenology of play. This phenomenology highlights the paradox that it is the players who play the game, but it is also the game which makes us players. Yet what is it that plays us, when we play? Do we play the game, or does the game play us? These questions concern the relation between the playing subject and play as something larger than the individual - play as craft, play as rhythm, play between normality and otherness, even play as religion, as a sense of spiritual play between self and other. This goes deeper than the welfare-political or educational intention to make people play or play more, or to advise individuals to play in a correct and useful way. Exploring topics such as identity, otherness, and disability, as well as activities including skiing, yoga, dance and street sport, this interdisciplinary study continues the work of the late Henning Eichberg and sheds new light on the questions that play at the borders of philosophy, anthropology, and the sociology of sport and leisure. Play in Philosophy and Social Thought is a fascinating resource for students of philosophy of sport, cultural studies, sport sciences and anthropological studies. It is also a thought-provoking read for sport and play philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, cultural studies scholars, and practitioners working with play.

The Power of Phenomenology took form when the two authors realized that a single theme has run through the course of their almost half-century-long collaboration like a red thread-namely, the power of phenomenological inquiry and understanding in a wide range of contexts. This book demonstrates how they have experienced the power of phenomenology in their therapeutic work with patients, especially those struggling with horrific trauma; in their encounters with psychological and philosophical theories; and in their efforts to comprehend destructive ideologies and the collective traumas that give rise to them. The Power of Phenomenology presents the trajectory of this work. Each chapter begins with a contribution written by one or both authors, extending the power of phenomenological inquiry to one or more of these diverse contexts. The contributions are followed, one or two at a time, by a dialogue between the authors, illustrating the dialectical process of their long collaboration. The unusual format seeks to bring the phenomenology of their collaborative efforts to life for the reader. The Power of Phenomenology will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and scholars of philosophy.

What is truth? This fascinating spectrum of studies into the various rationalities of our human dealings with life - psychological, aesthetic, economic, spiritual - reveals their joints and calls for a new approach to truth. Putting both classical and contemporary conceptions aside, we find the primogenital ground of truth in the networks of correspondences, adequations, relevancies, and rationales at work in life's becoming.

Does this plurivocal differentiation mean that the status of truth is relative? On the contrary, submits Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, given the universal significance of the crucial instrument of the logos of life, "truth is the vortex of life's ontopoietic unfolding."

Wonder, Silence, and Human Flourishing: Toward a Rehumanization of Health, Education, and Welfare approaches humanization and the process of re-enchantment in a radical new way. For more than a decade the call for rehumanization in education, care and welfare has been heard and discussed primarily in critical thinking, political theory, and sociological discourses. This critique is mainly based on a social constructivist and naturalistic worldview that keeps the discussion in an anthropocentric perspective. By focusing on the phenomenology and ethics of wonder as an ontological and even spiritual event, and by listening to the silence that follows this contemplative wonder, the contributors offer an existential, phenomenological, and hermeneutic way of understanding humanization. Edited by Finn Thorbjorn Hansen, Solveig Eide Botnen, and Carlo Leget, the book shows, from various perspectives, that the force of wonder and the silence that follows from it can nurture our ability to be receptive to and present in human relations and in resonance with the meaning-giving life phenomena that surround us.

Hegel is most often mentioned - and not without good reason - as one of the paradigmatic exponents of Eurocentrism and racism in Western philosophy. But his thought also played a crucial and formative role in the work of one of the iconic thinkers of the 'decolonial turn', Frantz Fanon. This would be inexplicable if it were not for the much-quoted 'lord-bondsman' dialectic - frequently referred to as the 'master-slave dialectic' - described in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Fanon takes up this dialectic negatively in contexts of violence-riven (post-)slavery and colonialism; yet in works such as Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth he upholds a Hegelian-inspired vision of freedom. The essays in this collection offer close readings of Hegel's text, and of responses to it in the work of twentieth-century philosophers, that highlight the entangled history of the translations, transpositions and transformations of Hegel in the work of Fanon, and more generally in colonial, postcolonial and decolonial contexts.

Levinas's account of responsibility challenges dominant notions of time, autonomy, and subjectivity according to Cynthia D. Coe. Employing the concept of trauma in Levinas's late writings, Coe draws together his understanding of time and his claim that responsibility is an obligation to the other that cannot be anticipated or warded off. Tracing the broad significance of these ideas, Coe shows how Levinas revises our notions of moral agency, knowledge, and embodiment. Her focus on time brings a new interpretive lens to Levinas's work and reflects on a wider discussion of the fragmentation of human experience as an ethical subject. Coe's understanding of trauma and time offers a new appreciation of how Levinas can inform debates about gender, race, mortality, and animality.

Engaging the development of Heidegger's non-public writings on the event between 1936 and 1941, Daniela Vallega-Neu reveals what Heidegger's private writings kept hidden. Vallega-Neu takes readers on a journey through these volumes, which are not philosophical works in the traditional sense as they read more like fragments, collections of notes, reflections, and expositions. In them, Vallega-Neu sees Heidegger searching for a language that does not simply speak about being, but rather allows a sense of being to emerge in his thinking and saying. She focuses on striking shifts in the tone and movement of Heidegger's thinking during these important years. Skillfully navigating the unorthodox and intimate character of these writings, Vallega-Neu provides critical insights into questions of attunement, language, the body, and historicity in Heidegger's thinking.

Despite the fact that we have been studying posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) since at least the late 1800s, it remains prevalent and, in many cases intractable. Merleau-Ponty and a Phenomenology of PTSD: Hidden Ghosts of Traumatic Memory begins with the assertion that we struggle to successfully treat PTSD because we simply do not understand it well enough. Using the phenomenological approach of Maurice Merleau-Ponty - which focuses on the first-person, lived experience of the trauma victim - Merleau-Ponty and a Phenomenology of PTSD: Hidden Ghosts of Traumatic Memory focuses on reframing our understanding of combat trauma in two fundamental ways. First, the concepts of embodiment and adaptation give us an understanding of the human being as fundamentally adaptive. This allows us to view traumatic responses as adaptive as well. When the roots of traumatic injury become reframed in this way, combat-related PTSD can be understood more accurately as a set of symptoms borne of strength and survival rather than weakness or disorder. Second, phenomenology reveals that a different ghost haunts those who are afflicted by trauma. For the past century, trauma studies across disciplines have all assumed that the ghost of a singular traumatic event haunts the sufferer. While this is likely a part of the problem, further study shows that those who suffer from trauma are also haunted by the specter of a world without meaning. In other words, phenomenology reveals that what is injured in trauma is not just the mind or the body but the entire worldview of the individual. It is this aspect of the injury - the shattering loss of one's blueprint of the world - that is missing from other accounts of trauma. Rather than aim to upend previous research in the fields of psychology and neuroscience, Merleau-Ponty and a Phenomenology of PTSD: Hidden Ghosts of Traumatic Memory uses the phenomenological approach to bring them together and expand then. It is in this expansion that we are able to consider what we may have previously missed - which stands to improve our understanding and treatment of trauma in general.

The Performativity of Value: On the Citability of Cultural Commodities addresses the increased commodification of language in the U.S. cultural economy. The marketing of cultural commodities in formats such as websites, videos, movies, books, online games, or television episodes-as distributed across a wide range of technological devices-means that language is moving across situational contexts to an unprecedented degree. Just as authors quote or paraphrase sources in the construction of a text, subjects "cite" the commodified words, images, and works of others as they construct their social identities. Steve Sherlock discusses how consumer citational practices generate demand for those cultural commodities which align the self with particular subcultural groups. By "re-citing" the exchange value frame within which language itself has acquired an economic worth, consumer citational practices have become performative of the U.S. cultural economy. In order to describe this process, the book extends the work of Judith Butler on the performativity of gender to the performativity of exchange value, as well as to the performativity of subcultural values. The book also develops a critique of the increasing commodification of language in the contemporary economy. Sherlock follows Butler in developing a model of performativity based on Jacques Derrida's work, particularly regarding the citability of language into new situational contexts. Derrida's critique of the metaphysics of presence in Western philosophy and culture is extended toward a critique of the assumed presence of exchange value in the cultural marketplace. The book also incorporates the work of the Bakhtin Circle into this framework-especially their insight into how everyday utterances, which "report on" the words of others, become a site for the re-negotiation of values between self and others. The re-citational process used in contemporary identity construction can thus either re-cite the current cultural economy, or resist it. The Performativity of Value contributes to themes examined in social theory, social psychology, literary theory, continental philosophy, and cultural studies, and thus will be of interest to students and scholars working in those areas.

Delving beneath the principal discourses of philosophy from Descartes through Kant, Bernard Freydberg plumbs the previously concealed dark forces that ignite the inner power of modern thought. He contends that reason itself issues from an implicit and unconscious suppression of the nonrational. Even the modern philosophical concerns of nature and limits are undergirded by a dark side that dwells in them and makes them possible. Freydberg traces these dark sources to the poetry of Hesiod, the fragments of Heraclitus and Parmenides, and the Platonic dialogues and claims that they rear their heads again in the work of Spinoza, Schelling, and Nietzsche. Freydberg does not set forth a critique of modern philosophy but explores its intrinsic continuity with its ancient roots.

Repetition, Difference, and Knowledge dialogues with novels, theatre, philosophy, and literary theory in order to explore how three thinkers - Samuel Beckett, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze - employ repetition as a means with which to radically unsettle some of the most fundamental notions of the human experience (among them, time, presence, originality, and being). Due to its interdisciplinary scope and its focus on repetition as an epistemological concept, this book will attract a broad audience of academic specialists across the humanities from the fields of literary criticism, philosophy, French studies, and poststructural studies. Its simplicity of style, deliberate avoidance of complex jargon, and clarity of argument - particularly when dealing with complicated theoretical ideas and texts - also makes it an invaluable tool for use in both graduate- and undergraduate-level literature and philosophy courses. Repetition, Difference, and Knowledge provides experienced and beginning scholars alike with greater insight into the works of Beckett, Derrida, and Deleuze and into the role that repetition has played and continues to play in determining how we read our world and come to meaning.

The question of causality has haunted the history of Western metaphysics since the time of the Pre-Socratic philosophy. Hand-in-hand with attempts to address this question is the promise of unlocking larger and more complicated questions pertaining to human freedom. But what of novelty? In this brilliant extended essay Donald A. Crosby contends that though novelty can't be comprehended without efficient causality, causality requires a concept of novelty; without it cause and effect relations are unintelligible and, indeed, impossible. Crosby, in an excellent, strong, and controversial way makes the claim that freedom is consciously directed novelty. In this way, novelty is distinctive; it is not to be mistaken with either unexpected intersections of causal chains or chaos. Crosby exposes the reality of novelty throughout the book and how it applies to time, possibility, forms of materiality and embodiment, the emergence of life from nonlife, the evloution and nature of consciousness, the methods and goals of education, the character of human history and the task of historians, and also the traits of a good society. In situating novelty so firmly in the crevices of daily life, Crosby connects it to our concept of ourself, our freedom, and how we understand our relationship to the world. Through masterful readings of Isaiah Berlin, Buber, Descartes, Plato, Smart, Whitehead, and especially Henri Bergson Donald Crosby sheds new light on an elusive yet foundational concept in the history of Western thought. This book is essential to process philosophy, humanism, existentialism, philosophy of mind and consciousness, and continental thought in general.

This book assesses the respective prospects of two competing methodological approaches to the study of meaning and communication, as well truth and inference, each figuring prominently within the analytic tradition of philosophy of language. The first, 'logistical' approach is characterized by the employment of de-compositional logical analysis designed to resolve various theoretically problematic semantic and logical puzzles. The representative proponents of this approach are the three great early analytic philosophers (Frege, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein). The second, 'phenomenological' approach, by contrast, instead advocates careful inspection and detailed description of our actual linguistic practices, along with general features of the ordinary circumstances, and lived experiences, in which they are situated. The aim of such description is then to dissolve the aforementioned puzzles by showing them to derive from key misunderstandings of these practices and circumstances. The principle proponent here is the later Wittgenstein. Expanding upon the work of the later Wittgenstein, this book argues that considerations regarding the nature of following a rule, and deriving from the impossibility of private languages, decisively recommend the phenomenological over the logistical methodology, in particular because these considerations demand that we identify linguistic meanings with the disciplined uses of words within public, and proto-typically social, linguistic practices.

This highly original collection of essays contributes to a critique of the common understanding of modernity as an enlightened project that provides rational grounds for orientation in all aspects and dimensions of the world. An international team of contributors contend that the modern principles of foundation show in themselves rather how modernity is disorienting itself. The book brings together discussions on the writings of philosophers who treat more systematically the questions of foundation and orientation, such as Kant, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Pascal, and Patocka, and studies of literary works that explicitly thematize this question, such as Novalis, Hoelderlin, Beckett, Platonov, and Benjamin. This multi-disciplinary approach brings to the fore the paradox that modern figures of grounding and orientation unground and disorient and demonstrates a critical path to review current understandings of modernity and post-modernity.

As one of the most respected voices of Continental philosophy today, Rodolphe Gasche pulls together Aristotle's conception of rhetoric, Martin Heidegger's debate with theory, and Hannah Arendt's conception of judgment in a single work on the centrality of these themes as fundamental to human flourishing in public and political life. Gasche's readings address the distinctively human space of the public square and the actions that occur there, and his valorization of persuasion, reflection, and judgment reveals new insight into how the philosophical tradition distinguishes thinking from other faculties of the human mind.

Philosophy, art criticism and popular opinion all seem to treat the aesthetics of the comic as lightweight, while the tragic seems to be regarded with greater seriousness. Why this favouring of sadness over joy? Can it be justified? What are the criteria by which the significance of comedy can be estimated vis A vis tragedy? Questions such as these underlie the present selection of studies, which casts new light on the comic, the joyful and laughter itself. This challenge to the popular attitude strikes into new territory, relating such matters to the profundity with which we enjoy life and its role in the deployment of the Human Condition. In her Introduction Tymieniecka points out that the tragic and the comic might be complementary in their respective sense-bestowing modes as well as in their dynamic functions; they might both share in the primogenital function of promoting the self-individualising progress of human existence. For the first time in philosophy, laughter, mirth, joy and the like are revealed as the modalities of the essential enjoyment of life, being brought to bear in an illumination of the human condition.

Distinguished feminist philosophers consider the future of their field and chart its political and ethical course in this forward-looking volume. Engaging with themes such as the historical trajectory of feminist phenomenology, ways of perceiving and making sense of the contemporary world, and the feminist body in health and ethics, these essays affirm the base of the discipline as well as open new theoretical spaces for work that bridges bioethics, social identity, physical ability, and the very nature and boundaries of the female body. Entanglements with thinkers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, and Arendt are evident and reveal new directions for productive philosophical work. Grounded in the richness of the feminist philosophical tradition, this work represents a significant opening to the possible futures of feminist phenomenological research.