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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present > Western philosophy, from c 1900 -
Bernard Lonergan (1904-84) is acknowledged as one of the most
significant philosopher-theologians of the 20th century. Lonergan,
Meaning and Method in many ways complements Andrew Beards' previous
book on Lonergan, Insight and Analysis (Bloomsbury, 2010). Andrew
Beards applies Lonergan's thought and brings it into critical
dialogue and discussion with other contemporary philosophical
interlocutors, principally from the analytical tradition. He also
introduces themes and arguments from the continental tradition, as
well as offering interpretative analysis of some central notions in
Lonergan's thought that are of interest to all who wish to
understand the importance of Lonergan's work for philosophy and
Christian theology. Three of the chapters focus upon areas of
fruitful exchange and debate between Lonergan's thought and the
work of three major figures in current analytical philosophy: Nancy
Cartwright, Timothy Williamson and Scott Soames. The discussion
also ranges across such topics as meaning theory, metaphilosophy,
epistemology, philosophy of science and aesthetics.
Heidegger's influence in the twentieth century probably outstrips
that of any other philosopher, at least in the so-called
Continental tradition. The 'revolution' Heidegger brought about
with his compelling readings of the broader philosophical tradition
transformed German philosophy and spread quickly to most of Europe,
the United States and Japan. This volume examines Heidegger's
influence in a region where his reception has had a remarkable and
largely hidden history: Eastern Europe and Russia. The book begins
by addressing two important literary influences on Heidegger:
Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. It goes on to examine Heidegger's
philosophical influence, and features three crucial figures in the
reception of Heidegger's thought in Eastern Europe and Russia:
Vladimir Bibikhin, Krzysztof Michalski, and Jan Patocka. Finally
the volume deals with an often vexed issue in current treatments of
Heidegger: the importance of Heidegger's philosophy for politics.
The book includes essays by an international team of contributors,
including leading representatives of Heideggerian thought in Russia
today. Heidegger's thought plays a key role in debates over Russian
identity and the geopolitical role Russia has to play in the world.
The volume surveys the complicated landscape of post-Soviet
philosophy, and how the rise of widely differing appropriations of
Heidegger exploit familiar fault lines in the Russian reception of
Western thinkers that date back to the first stirrings of a
distinctively Russian philosophical tradition.
Philosophers often use the term "naturalism' in order to describe
their work. It is commonplace to see a metaphysical,
epistemological and/or ethical position self-described and
described by others as one that is "naturalized." But what, if
anything, does the term naturalized add--or subtract---to the
position being articulated? I demonstrate in The Problem of
Naturalism: Analytic and Continental Perspectives, that the term
naturalism connotes such a broad meaning that it is difficult to
demarcate naturalism from philosophy itself. Still, many
philosophers have tried to provide non-trivial and non-vacuous
definitions of the term. My book, by and large, argues that such
attempts are unsuccessful. Instead, I argue that naturalism is an
attitude and neither a methodology nor a substantive position. I
then articulate the guidelines the naturalist needs to follow, as
well as the virtues he or she needs to practice, in order for the
term naturalism to do any meaningful work. Much of the book
explains and then critiques the various attempts to define
naturalism in the Anglo-American secondary literature. Some of the
criticisms I raise seem to emanate from the internal logic of the
naturalistic position being expressed. However, others have emerged
from gleaning the work of such Continental thinkers as: Nietzsche,
Husserl, Heidegger and Foucault. I use these thinkers in order to
expose the unjustified implicit and sometimes explicit assumptions
that many naturalistic philosophers presume to hold when they
attempt to render a clear, distinct and robust naturalist position.
This book explores Hegel's theory of modality (actuality,
possibility, necessity, contingency) through extremely close
textual analysis of the "Actuality" chapter of Hegel's Science of
Logic. The "Actuality" chapter is the equivalence of Aristotle's
momentous Metaphysics book 9. Because of this, Hegel's chapter
deserves the same thorough investigation into its complex insights
and argumentation. This book situates Hegel's insights about
possibility and necessity within historical and contemporary
debates about metaphysics, while analyzing some of the most
controversial themes of Hegel's theory, such as the question of the
ontological status of unactualized possibilities, the relationship
between contradiction and possibility, and the claim that necessity
leads to freedom. This book also contributes to an ongoing
philosophical inquiry into the nature of dialectics by articulating
Hegel's "Actuality" chapter as a coherent argument divided into
twenty-seven premises.
The eight essays contained in Philosophical Feminism and Popular
Culture explore the portrayal of women and various philosophical
responses to that portrayal in contemporary post-civil rights
society. The essays examine visual, print, and performance media
stand-up comedy, movies, television, and a blockbuster trilogy of
novel. These philosophical feminist analyses of popular culture
consider the possibilities, both positive and negative, that
popular culture presents for articulating the structure of the
social and cultural practices in which gender matters, and for
changing these practices if and when they follow from, lead to, or
perpetuate discrimination on the basis of gender. The essays bring
feminist voices to the conversation about gender and attests to the
importance of feminist critique in what is sometimes claimed to be
a post-feminist era."
Wisdom and Philosophy: Contemporary and Comparative Approaches
questions the nature of the relationship between wisdom and
philosophy from an intercultural perspective. Bringing together an
international mix of respected philosophers, this volume discusses
similarities and differences of Western and Asian pursuits of
wisdom and reflects on attempts to combine them. Contributors cover
topics such as Confucian ethics, the acquisition of wisdom in
pre-Qin literature and anecdotes of stupidity in the classical
Chinese tradition, while also addressing contemporary topics such
as global Buddhism and analytic metaphysics. Providing original
examples of comparative philosophy, contributors look at ideas and
arguments of thinkers such as Confucius, Zhuangzi and Zhu Xi
alongside the work of Aristotle, Plato and Heidegger. Presenting
Asian perspectives on philosophy as practical wisdom, Wisdom and
Philosophy is a rare intercultural inquiry into the relation
between wisdom and philosophy. It provides new ways of
understanding how wisdom connects to philosophy and underlines the
need to reintroduce it into philosophy today.
This book for the first time brings together considerations upon
the feminine in relation to Paul Ricoeur's thinking. The collection
of renowned scholars who have published extensively on Ricoeur and
promising younger scholars together shows the rich potential of his
thought for feminist theory, without failing to critically
scrutinize it and to show its limitations with respect to thinking
gender differences. In the first part, "Ricoeur, Women, and
Gender," Ricoeur's work is taken as the starting point for the
reflection upon the position of women and the feminine, and for
rethinking the notion of universalism. In the second part, "Ricoeur
in Dialogue,"his work is related to feminist thinkers such as
Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, and Nancy Fraser and to the work
of artist Kara Walker. These dialogues aim at thinking through
socially relevant notions such as discourse, recognition, and
justice. In the third part, "Ricoeur and Feminist Theology,"
Ricoeurian notions and ideas are the starting point for new
perspectives upon feminist theology. The insights developed in this
book will be of particular value to students and scholars of
Ricoeur, feminist theory, and the limits of hermeneutics and
phenomenology.
This is a study of vulnerability as a dominant cultural discourse
today, especially as it manifests in 'extreme cultures'. These are
cultural practices and representations of humans in risky, painful
or life-threatening conditions where the limits of their humanity
are tested, and producing heightened sensations of pain and
pleasure. Extreme cultures in this book signal the social ontology
of humans where, in specific conditions, vulnerability becomes
helplessness. We see in these cultures the exploitation of the
body's immanent vulnerability in involuntary conditions of torture
or deprivation, the encounter with extreme situations where the
body is rendered incapacitated from performing routine functions
due to structural conditions or in a voluntary embracing of risk in
sporting events wherein the body pits itself against enormous
forces and conditions. The Extreme in Contemporary Culture studies
vulnerability across various conditions: torture, disease,
accident. It studies spaces of vulnerability and helplessness, the
aesthetics and representations of vulnerability, the extreme in the
everyday and, finally, the witnessing of (in)human extremes.
Extreme cultures suggest shared precarity as a foundational
condition of humanity. A witness culture emerges through the
cultural discourse of vulnerability, the representations of the
victim and/or survivor, and the accounts of witnesses. They offer,
in short, an entire new way of speaking about and classifying the
human.
This monograph offers a new interpretation of Melville's work
(focusing on "Moby-Dick", "Pierre" and "Benito Cereno") in the
light of scholarship on globalization from critics in 'new'
American studies. In "Melville, Mapping and Globalization", Robert
Tally argues that Melville does not belong in the tradition of the
American Renaissance, but rather creates a baroque literary
cartography, artistically engaging with spaces beyond the national
model. At a time of intense national consolidation and cultural
centralization, Melville discovered the postnational forces of an
emerging world system, a system that has become our own in the era
of globalization. Drawing on the work of a range of literary and
social critics (including Deleuze, Foucault, Jameson, and Moretti),
Tally argues that Melville's distinct literary form enabled his
critique of the dominant national narrative of his own time and
proleptically undermined the national literary tradition of
American Studies a century later. Melville's hypercanonical status
in the United States makes his work all the more crucial for
understanding the role of literature in a post-American epoch.
Offering bold new interpretations and theoretical juxtapositions,
Tally presents a postnational Melville, well suited to establishing
new approaches to American and world literature in the twenty-first
century.
This is a unique and much needed book exploring the debt Deleuze
owes to Kantian arguments and principles. The way in which we read
Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" has profound consequences for our
understanding of his thought in relation to the work of other
thinkers. "Kant, Deleuze and Architectonics" presents a unified
reading of this text in order to respond to the concerns
surrounding the method and arguments Kant employs. In showing us
how the 'first critique' comes to make greater sense when read as a
whole or in terms of its 'architectonic' unity, Edward Willatt
breathes new life into a text often considered rigid and artificial
in its organisation. On the basis of this reading, Kant's relation
to Deleuze is revealed to be much more productive than is often
realized. Deftly relating the unifying method of Kant's "Critique
of Pure Reason" with Deleuze's account of experience, and using
Kant's concern to secure the conditions that make experience
possible to develop Deleuze's attempt to convincingly relate 'the
actual' and 'the virtual', this book constitutes an important step
in our understanding of Deleuze and his philosophical project.
"Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy" presents cutting-edge
scholarship in the field of modern European thought. The wholly
original arguments, perspectives and research findings in titles in
this series make it an important and stimulating resource for
students and academics from across the discipline.
During the first quarter of the twentieth century, the French
philosopher Henri Bergson became an international celebrity,
profoundly influencing contemporary intellectual and artistic
currents. While Bergsonism was fashionable, L. Susan Stebbing,
Bertrand Russell, Moritz Schlick, and Rudolf Carnap launched
different critical attacks against some of Bergson's views. This
book examines this series of critical responses to Bergsonism early
in the history of analytic philosophy. Analytic criticisms of
Bergsonism were influenced by William James, who saw Bergson as an
'anti-intellectualist' ally of American Pragmatism, and Max
Scheler, who saw him as a prophet of Lebensphilosophie. Some of the
main analytic objections to Bergson are answered in the work of
Karin Costelloe-Stephen. Analytic anti-Bergsonism accompanied the
earlier refutations of idealism by Russell and Moore, and later
influenced the Vienna Circle's critique of metaphysics. It
eventually contributed to the formation of the view that 'analytic'
philosophy is divided from its 'continental' counterpart.
The transcendental turn of Husserl's phenomenology has challenged
philosophers and scholars from the beginning. This volume inquires
into the profound meaning of this turn by contrasting its Kantian
and its phenomenological versions. Examining controversies
surrounding subjectivity, idealism, aesthetics, logic, the
foundation of sciences, and practical philosophy, the chapters
provide a helpful guide for facing current debates.
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) is widely regarded as the founding
figure of the philosophical movement of "phenomenology." Husserl's
philosophical program was both embraced and rejected by many, but
in either case, his ideas set the stage for and exercised an
enormous influence on the development of much of the philosophy
that followed. In particular, his thought provides the backdrop and
impetus for movements such as existentialism, hermeneutics, and
deconstruction. Also, because of his career-long concerns with
logic and mathematics, there are many points of contact between
Husserl's phenomenology and so-called "analytical philosophy,"
further cementing study of Husserl's thought across the
philosophical spectrum. The A to Z of Husserl's Philosophy provides
the means to approach the texts of Husserl, as well as those of his
major commentators. This is done through a chronology, an
introductory essay, an extensive bibliography, and hundreds of
cross-referenced dictionary entries on key terms and neologisms, as
well as brief discussions of Husserl's major works and of some of
his most important predecessors, contemporaries, and successors.
Despite hundreds of millions of visitors each year, zoos have
remained outside of the realm of philosophical analysis. This lack
of theoretical examination is interesting considering the
paradoxical position within which a zoo is situated, being a space
of animal confinement as well as a site that provides valuable
tools for species conservation, public education, and
entertainment. Why Do We Go to the Zoo? argues that the zoo is a
legitimate space of academic inquiry. The modes of communication
taking place at the zoo that keep drawing us back time and time
again beg for a careful investigation. In this book, the meaning of
the zoo as communicative space is explored. This book relies on the
phenomenological method from Edmund Husserl and a rhetorical
approach to examine the interaction between people and animals in
the zoo space. Phenomenology, the philosophy of examining the
engaged everyday lived experience, is a natural method to use in
the project. Despite its rich history and tradition it is
interesting that there are very few books explaining "how to do"
phenomenology. Why Do We Go to the Zoo? provides a detailed account
of how to actually conduct a phenomenological analysis. The author
spent thousands of hours in zoos watching people and animals
interact as well as talking with people both formally and
informally. This book asks readers to bracket their preconceptions
of what goes on in the zoo and, instead, to explore the meaning of
powerful zoo experiences while reminding us of the troubled history
of zoos.
Available in English for the first time, this first draft of
Heidegger's opus, "Being and Time", provides a unique insight into
Heidegger's Phenomenology. "The Concept of Time" presents
Heidegger's so-called Dilthey review, widely considered the first
draft of his celebrated masterpiece, "Being and Time". Here
Heidegger reveals his deep commitment to Wilhelm Dilthey and Count
Yorck von Wartenburg. He agrees with them that historicity must be
at the centre of the new philosophy to come. However, he also
argues for an ontological approach to history. From this
ontological turn he develops the so-called categories of Dasein.
This work demonstrates Heidegger's indebtedness to Yorck and
Dilthey and gives further evidence to the view that thought about
history is the germ cell of "Being and Time". However, it also
shows that Heidegger's commitment to Dilthey was not without
reservations and that his analysis of Dasein actually employs
Husserl's phenomenology. The work reopens the question of history
in a broader sense, as Heidegger struggles to thematize history
without aligning it with world-historical events. The text also
provides a concise and readable summary of the main themes of
"Being and Time" and as such is an ideal companion to that text.
Exploring the latest research in Husserl Studies, this collection
presents fifteen new essays on key topics in the field from an
international team of writers. "Epistemology, Archaeology, Ethics:
Current Investigations of Husserl's Corpus" presents fifteen
original essays by an international team of expert contributors
that together represent a cross-section of Husserl Studies today.
The collection manifests the extent to which single themes in
Husserl's corpus cannot be isolated, but must be considered in
relation to their overlap with each other. Many of the accepted
views of Husserl's philosophy are currently in a state of flux,
with positions that once seemed incontestable now finding
themselves relegated to the status of one particular school of
thought among several. Among all the new trends and approaches,
this volume offers a representative sample of how Husserlian
research should be conducted given the current state of the corpus.
The book is divided into four parts, each dedicated to an area of
Husserl Studies that is currently gaining prominence: Husserlian
epistemology; his views on intentionality; the archaeology of
constitution; and, ethics, a relatively recent field of study in
phenomenology.
Following the core principle of phenomenology as a return "to the
things themselves," Body Matters attends to the phenomena of bodily
afflictions and examines them from three different standpoints:
from society in general that interprets them as "sicknesses," from
the medical professions that interpret them as "diseases," and from
the patients themselves who interpret them as "illnesses." By
drawing on a crucial distinction in German phenomenology between
two senses of the body the quantifiable, material body (Korper) and
the lived-body(Leib) the authors explore the ways in which
sickness, disease, and illness are socially and historically
experienced and constructed. To make their case, they draw on
examples from a multiplicity of disciplines and cultures as well as
a number of cases from Euro-American history. The intent is to
unsettle taken-for-granted assumptions that readers may have about
body troubles. These are assumptions widely held as well by medical
and allied health professionals, in addition to many sociologists
and philosophers of health and illness. To this end, Body Matters
does not simply deconstruct prejudices of mainstream biomedicine;
it also constructively envisions more humane and artful forms of
therapy."
In our contemporary age aesthetics seems to crumble and no longer
be reducible to a coherent image. And yet given the vast amount of
works in aesthetics produced in the last hundred years, this age
could be defined "the century of aesthetics." "20th Century
Aesthetics" is a new account of international aesthetic thought by
Mario Perniola, one of Italy's leading contemporary thinkers.
Starting from four conceptual fields - life, form, knowledge,
action - Perniola identifies the lines of aesthetic reflection that
derive from them and elucidates them with reference to major
authors: from Dilthey to Foucault (aesthetics of life), from
Wolfflin to McLuhan and Lyotard (aesthetics of form), from Croce to
Goodman (aesthetics and knowledge), from Dewey to Bloom (aesthetics
and action). There is also a fifth one that touches on the sphere
of affectivity and emotionality, and which comes to aesthetics from
thinkers like Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Lacan, Derrida and
Deleuze. The volume concludes with an extensive sixth chapter on
Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Islamic, Brazilian, South Korean and
South East Asian aesthetic thought and on the present decline of
Western aesthetic sensibility.
Martin Heidegger's Impact on Psychotherapy is the first
comprehensive presentation in English of the background, theory and
practice of Daseinsanalysis, the analysis of human existence. It is
the work of the co-founding member of a radical re-envisioning of
psychoanalysis initiated by the work of the Swiss psychiatrist,
Medard Boss (1903-1990). Originally published in 1998, this new
edition of Gion Condrau's (1919-2006) book acquaints new
generations of psychotherapists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts
with an alternative to psychodynamic, humanistic and existential
forms of the therapy of the word that is currently experience a
renaissance of interest, especially in the United States and the
UK. The volume presents the basic ideas of Martin Heidegger
(1889-1976) that made possible this unique approach to
psychotherapy. It is arranged in sections on (1) the foundations of
Daseinsanalysis in Heidegger's thought, (2) understanding
psychopathology, (3) daseinsanalytic psychotherapy in practice, (4)
working with the dying person, and (5) the preparation of the
professional Daseinsanalyst. Several extended cases are presented
to illustrate daseinsanalytic practice at work (narcissistic
personality disorder and obsessive compulsive personality
disorder). Since dreaming and dream life are central to
Daseinsanalysis, a number of dreams are analyzed from its
perspective. Daseinsanalysis originated as a form of psychoanalysis
and retains a number of its features: free association, optional
use of the couch, and attention to dreams. It differs from
psychoanalysis by abandoning the natural science perspective which
understands human experience and behavior in terms of causality.
Instead, human existence is seen to be utterly different from every
other kind of sentient animal life. Taking a phenomenological
perspective, Daseinsanalysis is based on letting the existence of
the human being in all his or her uniqueness show itself. In
practice, Daseinsanalysis avoids intervening in the life of the
person in favor of maximizing the conditions in which existence can
come into its own with maximum freedom.
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