In Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind, some of the scholars who have become essential for our understanding of Stanley Cavell's writing on film gather to use his landmark contributions to help us read new films-from Hollywood and elsewhere-that exist beyond his immediate reach and reading. In extending the scope of Cavell's film philosophy, we naturally find ourselves contending with it and amending it, as the case may be. Through a series of interpretive vignettes, the group effort situates, for the expert and novitiate alike, how Cavell's writing on film can profitably enrich one's experience of cinema generally and also inform how we might continue the practice of serious philosophical criticism of specific films mindful of his sensibility. The resulting conversations between texts, traditions, disciplines, genres, and generations creates propitious conditions for discovering what it means to watch and listen to movies with Stanley Cavell in mind.

When our smartphones distract us, much more is at stake than a momentary lapse of attention. Our use of smartphones can interfere with the building-blocks of meaningfulness and the actions that shape our self-identity. By analyzing social interactions and evolving experiences, Roholt reveals the mechanisms of smartphone-distraction that impact our meaningful projects and activities. Roholt's conception of meaning in life draws from a disparate group of philosophers - Susan Wolf, John Dewey, Hubert Dreyfus, Martin Heidegger, and Albert Borgmann. Central to Roholt's argument are what Borgmann calls focal practices: dinners with friends, running, a college seminar, attending sporting events. As a recurring example, Roholt develops the classification of musical instruments as focal things, contending that musical performance can be fruitfully understood as a focal practice. Through this exploration of what generates meaning in life, Roholt makes us rethink the place we allow smartphones to occupy in the everyday. But he remains cautiously optimistic. This thoughtful, needed interrogation of smartphones shows how we can establish a positive role for technologies within our lives.

Horst Ruthrof revisits Husserl's phenomenology of language and highlights his late writings as essential to understanding the full range of his ideas. Focusing on the idea of language as imaginable as well as the role of a speech community in constituting it, Ruthrof provides a powerful re-assessment of his methodological phenomenology. From the Logical Investigations to untranslated portions of his Nachlass, Ruthrof charts all the developments and amendments in his theorizations. Ruthrof argues that it is the intersubjective character to linguistic meaning that is so emblematic of Husserl's position. Bringing his study up to the present day, Ruthrof discusses mental time travel, the evolution of language, and protosyntax in the context of Husserl's late writings, progressing a comprehensive new phenomenological ontology of language with wide-ranging implications for philosophy, linguistics, and cultural studies.

In this Modern Master on Jacques Lacan (1901-81), Malcolm Bowie presents a clear, coherent introduction to the work of one of the most influential and forbidding thinkers of our century. A practising psychoanalyst for almost 50 years, Lacan first achieved notoriety with his pioneering article on Freud in the 1930s. After the Second World War, he emerged as the most original and controversial figure in French psychoanalysis, and because a guiding light in the Parisian intellectual resurgence of the 1950s, Lacan initiated and subsequently steered the crusade to reinterpret Freud's work in the light of the new structuralist theories of linguistics, evolving an elaborate, dense, systematic analysis of the relations between language and desire, focusing on the human subject as he or she is defined by linguistic and social pressures. His lectures and articles were collected and published as Ecrits in 1966, a text whose influence has been immense and persists to this day. Knowledge of Lacan's revolutionary ideas, which underpin those of his successors across the disciplines, is useful to an understanding of the work of many modern thinkers - literary theoriest, linguists, psychoanalysts, anthropologists. Malcolm Bowie's accessible critical introduction provides the perfect starting point for any exploration of the work of this formidable thinker.

This book compiles James L. Cox's most important writings on a phenomenology of Indigenous Religions into one volume, with a new introduction and conclusion by the author. Cox has consistently exemplified phenomenological methods by applying them to his own field studies among Indigenous Religions, principally in Zimbabwe and Alaska, but also in Australia and New Zealand. Included in this collection are his articles in which he defines what he means by the category 'religion' and how this informs his precise meaning of the classification 'Indigenous Religions'. These theoretical considerations are always illustrated clearly and concisely by specific studies of Indigenous Religions and their dynamic interaction with contemporary political and social circumstances. This collection demonstrates the continued relevance of the phenomenological method in the study of religions by presenting the method as dynamic and adaptable to contemporary social contexts and as responsive to intellectual critiques of the method.

This study illuminates the complex interplay between Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy and architecture. Presenting their wide-ranging impact on late 20th- and 21st-century architecture, each chapter focuses on a core Deleuzian/Guattarian philosophical concept and one key work of architecture which evokes, contorts, or extends it. Challenging the idea that a concept or theory defines and then produces the physical work and not vice versa, Chris L. Smith positions the relationship between Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy and the field of architecture as one that is mutually substantiating and constitutive. In this framework, modes of architectural production and experimentation become inextricable from the conceptual territories defined by these two key thinkers, producing a rigorous discussion of theoretical, practical, and experimental engagements with their ideas.