Legendary director, actor, author, and provocateur Werner Herzog has incalculably influenced contemporary cinema for decades. Until now there has been no sustained effort to gather and present a variety of diverse philosophical approaches to his films and to the thinking behind their creation. The Philosophy of Werner Herzog, edited by M. Blake Wilson and Christopher Turner, collects fourteen essays by professional philosophers and film theorists from around the globe, who explore the famed German auteur's notions of "ecstatic truth" as opposed to "accountants' truth," his conception of nature and its penchant for "overwhelming and collective murder," his controversial film production techniques, his debts to his philosophical and aesthetic forebears, and finally, his pointed objections to his would-be critics--including, among others, the contributors to this book themselves. By probing how Herzog's thinking behind the camera is revealed in the action he captures in front of it, The Philosophy of Werner Herzog shines new light upon the images and dialog we see and hear on the screen by enriching our appreciation of a prolific--yet enigmatic--film artist.

Building on the thriving discussion on the role of attention within the phenomenological tradition, from Aron Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty to Bernhard Waldenfels, this book investigates the enigmatic role of attention as a faculty that enables change within subjective and intersubjective experience. The aim of the book is to reveal some characteristics of the processes in which subjects are unmade and remade, and to highlight how we are able to change our relation to an empirical world that nevertheless has unity and constancy in our perception.