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.

Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, written between 1929 and 1935, are the work of one of the most original thinkers in twentieth century Europe. Gramsci has had a profound influence on debates about the relationship between politics and culture. His complex and fruitful approach to questions of ideology, power and change remains crucial for critical theory. This volume was the first selection published from the Notebooks to be made available in Britain, and was originally published in the early 1970s. It contains the most important of Gramsci's notebooks, including the texts of The Modern Prince, and Americanism and Fordism, and extensive notes on the state and civil society, Italian history and the role of intellectuals. 'Far the best informative apparatus available to any foreign language readership of Gramsci.' Perry Anderson, New Left Review 'A model of scholarship' New Statesman

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.

A special issue of New German Critique The posthumous publication of Theodor W. Adorno's works on music continues to reveal the special relationship between music and philosophy in his thinking. These important works have not, however, received as much scholarly attention as they deserve. Contributors to this issue seek to provide insight into some of the key themes raised in these works, including the sociology of musical genre, the historical transformation of music from the "heroic" or high-bourgeois era to late modernity, the meaning of both performance and listening in the era of mass communication, and the specific challenges or deformations of the radio on musical form, a theme that implicates many of the digital practices of our own age. There is much left to discover in these new publications, and they pose again, with renewed vigor, the question of Adorno's Aktualitat-his polyvalent, untranslatable term for, among other things, the intellectual relationship between the present and the past. Contributors Daniel K. L. Chua, Lydia Goehr, Peter E. Gordon, Martin Jay, Brian Kane, Max Paddison, Alexander Rehding, Fred Rush, Martin Scherzinger