SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy
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Freedom and Ground
A Study of Schelling's Treatise on Freedom
by Mark J. Thomas
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
This book is a new interpretation of Schelling's path-breaking 1809 treatise on freedom, the last major work published during his lifetime. The treatise is at the heart of the current Schelling renaissance-indeed, Heidegger calls it "one of the most profound works of German, thus of Western, philosophy." It is also one of the most demanding and complex texts in German Idealism. By tracing the problem of the ground through Schelling's treatise, Mark J. Thomas provides a unified reading of the text, while unlocking the meaning of its most challenging passages through clear, detailed analysis. He shows how Schelling's implicit distinction between senses of ground is the key to his project of constructing a system that can satisfy reason while accommodating objects that seem to defy rational explanation-including evil, the origins of nature, and absolute freedom. This allows Schelling to unite reason and mystery, providing a rich model for philosophizing about freedom and evil today.
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Dialogue on the Threshold
Heidegger and Trakl
by Ian Alexander Moore
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
In the early 1950s, German philosopher Martin Heidegger proclaimed the Austrian expressionist Georg Trakl to be the poet of his generation and of the hidden Occident. Trakl, a guilt-ridden lyricist who died of a cocaine overdose in the early days of World War I, thus became for Heidegger a redemptive successor to Hölderlin. Drawing on Derrida's “Geschlecht” series and substantial archival research, “Dialogue on the Threshold” explores the productive and problematic tensions that pervade Heidegger's reading of Trakl and reflects more broadly on the thresholds that separate philosophy from poetry, gathering from dispersion, the same from the other, and the native from the foreigner. Ian Alexander Moore examines why Heidegger was reluctant to follow Trakl's invitation to cross these thresholds, even though his encounter with the poet did compel him to take up, in astounding ways, many underrepresented topics in his philosophical corpus such as sexual difference, pain, animality, and Christianity. A contribution not just to Heidegger and Trakl studies but also, more modestly, to the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry, “Dialogue on the Threshold” concludes with new translations of eighteen poems by Trakl.
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Adult Life
Aging, Responsibility, and the Pursuit of Happiness
by John Russon
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Drawing from philosophy and psychology, offers a clear and compelling interpretation of what it means to be an adult.
What does it mean to be an adult? In this original and compelling work, John Russon answers that question by leading us through a series of rich reflections on the psychological and social dimensions of adulthood and by exploring some of the deepest ethical and existential issues that confront human life: intimacy, responsibility, aging, and death. Using his knowledge of the history of philosophy along with the combined resources of psychology, sociology, and anthropology, he explores the behavioral challenges of becoming an adult and examines the intimate relationships that are integral to healthy development. He also studies our experiences of time and space, which address both aging and the crucial role that our material environments play in the formation of our personalities. Of special note is Russon's provocative assessment of the economic and political contexts of contemporary adult life and the distinctive problems they pose. Engaging and accessible, Adult Life is for anyone seeking the profound lessons our human culture has learned about living well.
John Russon is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph and the Director of the Toronto Summer Seminar in Philosophy. He is the author of Bearing Witness to Epiphany: Persons, Things, and the Nature of Erotic Life and Human Experience: Philosophy, Neurosis, and the Elements of Everyday Life, both also published by SUNY Press.
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Heidegger and Classical Thought
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Despite a sustained and fruitful relationship with the classical philologists of his day, Martin Heidegger's status among classicists has long since been strained, especially in the Anglophone tradition. Heidegger and Classical Thought reemphasizes both Heidegger's importance to classical discourse and the significance of classical discourse for Heidegger's own work. The essays found in this book demonstrate the depth and breadth of Heidegger's engagement with classical thought throughout his life, from his early engagements with Aristotle and Plato to his profound readings of the early Greek thinkers. At the same time, this book shows how reading Heidegger's interpretation of classical thought offers new and innovative ways to approach and study antiquity.
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Contribution to the Correction of the Public's Judgments on the French Revolution
by J. G. Fichte
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
First translation into English of Fichte's major work on the French Revolution.
The reception history of the French Revolution in France and England is well documented among Anglophone scholars; however, the debate over the Revolution in Germany is much less well known. Fichte's Contribution played an important role in this debate. Presented here for the first time in English, Fichte's work provides a distinctive synthesis of Locke's "possessive individualism," Rousseau's general will, and Kant's moral philosophy. This eclectic blend results in an unusual rights theory that at times veers close to a form of anarchism. Written in 1792—93, just before Fichte moved to Jena to develop his philosophical system in a series of works-above all the Wissenschaftslehre of 1794-the Contribution provides invaluable insight into Fichte's early development. In addition, Fichte's work predates much of Kant's political philosophy, and can shed light on the rich dialogue in German political thought in the 1790s.
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The World after the End of the World
A Spectro-Poetics
by Kas Saghafi
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Examines themes of loss and mourning in the late work of Derrida.
In this book, Kas Saghafi argues that the notion of "the end the world" in Derrida's late work is not a theological or cosmological matter, but a meditation on mourning and the death of the other. He examines this and several other tightly knit motifs in Derrida's work: mourning, survival, the phantasm, the event, and most significantly, the term salut, which in French means at once greeting and salvation. An underlying concern of The World after the End of the World is whether a discourse on salut (saving, being saved, and salvation) can be dissociated from discourse on religion. Saghafi compares Derrida's thought along these lines with similar concerns of Jean-Luc Nancy's. Combining analysis of these themes with reflections on personal loss, this book maintains that, for Derrida, salutation, greeting, and welcoming is resistant to the economy of salvation. This resistance calls for what Derrida refers to as a "spectro-poetics" devoted to and assigned to the other's singularity.
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Rethinking Interiority
Phenomenological Approaches
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
A philosophical exploration of the concept of interiority, Rethinking Interiority presents readers with its unmined aspects and senses, including ideas of an inner world and life, personal identity, auto-affection, and its social and political dimensions as well as its ethical possibilities. Internationally recognized scholars and philosophers investigate figures in the history of phenomenology as well as recent developments in psychology and the neurosciences to uncover not only the depths of interiority but also how it comes to connect with and structure external reality. Western and Eastern philosophical positions are addressed, creating a fruitful dialogue in which readers are invited to participate.
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Adorno, Heidegger, and the Politics of Truth
by Lambert Zuidervaart
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
An elusive and complex idea of truth lies at the center of Theodor Adorno's thought. Yet he never spells out what it is. Through close readings of Negative Dialectics, Aesthetic Theory, and related course lectures, Lambert Zuidervaart reconstructs Adorno's conception of truth, contrasts it with the conceptions of Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault, and explores its relevance for contemporary philosophy, art, and politics. Adorno regards truth as a dynamic constellation in which various dialectical polarities intersect. The most decisive polarity, Zuidervaart argues, occurs between society as it has developed and the historical possibility of a completely transformed world. Critically reconstructed, Adorno's conception of truth can help inspire hopeful critiques of an allegedly post-truth society.
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Critical Studies on Heidegger
The Emerging Body of Understanding
by David Michael Kleinberg-Levin
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
In these boldly original studies, Heidegger's thought is carried critically and constructively beyond its original limitations, re-presenting his project in terms of an emerging body of understanding, making sense of this project not only in its historical, cultural significance but also in its bearing on the emergence of future possibilities. Continuing Heidegger's commitment to a way of thinking that is formed from reflectively lived experience, David Michael Kleinberg-Levin suggests what can be learned regarding the character of our typical and habitual ways of looking and seeing, hearing and listening, and touching, holding, handling, and gesturing. The body of ontological understanding consequently emerges as we learn how to take responsibility for the meaning of being in forming and developing the character of our relationship to all the beings in our world. In this original reading of Heidegger's thought, Kleinberg-Levin suggests what his project could mean for an ethical way of life.
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The Politics of Orientation
Deleuze Meets Luhmann
by Hannah Richter
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
“The Politics of Orientation” provides the first substantial exploration of a surprising theoretical kinship and its rich political implications, that between Gilles Deleuze's philosophy and the sociological systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. Through their shared theories of sense, Hannah Richter draws out how the works of Luhmann and Deleuze complement each other in creating worlds where chaos is the norm and order the unlikely and yet remarkably stable exception. From the encounter between Deleuze and Luhmann, Richter develops a novel take on postfoundational ontology where subjects and societies unfold in self-productive relations of sense against a background of complexity. “The Politics of Orientation” breaks and rebuilds theoretical alliances by reading core concepts and thinkers of Continental Philosophy, from Leibniz to Whitehead and Marx, through this encounter. Most importantly, the book puts Luhmann and Deleuze to work to offer urgently needed insight into the rise of post-truth populism. In our complex democratic societies, Richter argues, orientation against complexity has become the ground of political power, privileging the simplistic narratives of the populist right.
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God and the Self in Hegel
Beyond Subjectivism
by Paolo Diego Bubbio
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Argues that Hegel's conception of God and the self holds the key to overcoming subjectivism in both philosophy of religion and metaphysics.
God and the Self in Hegel proposes a reconstruction of Hegel's conception of God and analyzes the significance of this reading for Hegel's idealistic metaphysics. Paolo Diego Bubbio argues that in Hegel's view, subjectivism-the tenet that there is no underlying "true" reality that exists independently of the activity of the cognitive agent-can be avoided, and content can be restored to religion, only to the extent that God is understood in God's relation to human beings, and human beings are understood in their relation to God. Focusing on traditional problems in theology and the philosophy of religion, such as the ontological argument for the existence of God, the Trinity, and the "death of God," Bubbio shows the relevance of Hegel's view of religion and God for his broader philosophical strategy. In this account, as a response to the fundamental Kantian challenge of how to conceive the mind-world relation without setting mind over and against the world, Hegel has found a way of overcoming subjectivism in both philosophy and religion.
Paolo Diego Bubbio is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Western Sydney University, Australia. His books include Sacrifice in the Post-Kantian Tradition: Perspectivism, Intersubjectivity, and Recognition, also published by SUNY Press.
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The Closed Commercial State
by J. G. Fichte
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Critical scholarly edition of J. G. Fichte's Closed Commercial State.
Appearing for the first time in a complete English translation, The Closed Commercial State represents the most sustained attempt of J. G. Fichte, the famed author of The Doctrine of Science, to apply idealistic philosophy to political economy. In the accompanying interpretive essay, Anthony Curtis Adler challenges the conventional scholarly view of The Closed Commercial State as a curious footnote to Fichte's thought. The Closed Commercial State, which Fichte himself regarded as his "best, most thought-through work," not only attests to a life-long interest in economics, but is of critical importance to his entire philosophical project. Carefully unpacking the philosophical nuances of Fichte's argument and its complex relationship to other texts in his oeuvre, Adler argues that The Closed Commercial State presents an understanding of the nature of history, and the relation of history to politics, that differs significantly from the teleological notions of history advanced by Schelling and later Hegel.
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Virtue in Being
Towards an Ethics of the Unconditioned
by Andrew Benjamin
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
A radical rethinking of ethics set within the development of a philosophical anthropology.
In his last book, Towards a Relational Ontology, Andrew Benjamin provided a philosophical account of what he terms anoriginal relationality, demonstrating how this concept can be seen to be at work throughout the history of philosophy. In Virtue in Being, he builds on that project to argue for a new way of understanding the relationship between ontology and ethics through insightful readings of texts by Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida. Structuring the book around the themes of violence, evil, and pardon, Benjamin builds a convincing case for the connections he draws between thinkers not commonly associated with one another.
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Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Philosophical Writings
by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
The definitive scholarly edition of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's philosophical aphorisms.
Admired by philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud, Benjamin, and Wittgenstein, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742—1799) is known to the English-speaking world mostly as a satirist. An eminent experimental physicist and mathematician, Lichtenberg was knowledgeable about the philosophical views of his time, and interested in uncovering the philosophical commitments that underlie our common beliefs. In his notebooks (which he called his Waste Books) he often reflects on, challenges, and critiques these philosophical commitments and the dominant views of the Enlightenment, German idealism, and British empiricism. This scholarly collection of Lichtenberg's philosophical aphorisms contains hundreds of trenchant observations drawn from these notebooks, many of which have been translated into English here for the first time. It also includes a historical and philosophical introduction to his writings, situating him in the history of philosophy and ideas, and is supplemented with a chronology, suggestions for further reading, and extensive introductory and textual notes explaining his references.
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Hermeneutics and Education
by Shaun Gallagher
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Shaun Gallagher is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Canisius College, and co-editor of the forthcoming book, Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, which will be published by SUNY Press.
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An Unprecedented Deformation
Marcel Proust and the Sensible Ideas
by Mauro Carbone
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Philosophical interpretation of Proust based on the work of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze.
French novelist Marcel Proust made famous "involuntary memory," a peculiar kind of memory that works whether one is willing or not and that gives a transformed recollection of past experience. More than a century later, the Proustian notion of involuntary memory has not been fully explored nor its implications understood. By providing clarifying examples taken from Proust's novel and by commenting on them using the work of French philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, Italian philosopher Mauro Carbone interprets involuntary memory as the human faculty providing the involuntary creation of our ideas through the transformation of past experience. This rethinking of the traditional way of conceiving ideas and their genesis as separated from sensible experience-as has been done in Western thought since Plato-allows the author to promote a new theory of knowledge, one which is best exemplified via literature and art much more than philosophy.
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In the Spirit of Critique
Thinking Politically in the Dialectical Tradition
by Andrew J. Douglas
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Offers a new perspective on the political significance of the Hegelian dialectical legacy.
Focusing on the critical postures of Hegel, Marx, and a series of twentieth-century intellectuals, including Sartre, Adorno, and C. L. R. James, this book explores what dialectical thinking entails and how such thinking might speak to the lived realities of the contemporary political moment. What is revealed is not a formal method or a grand philosophical system, but rather a reflective energy or disposition-a dialectical spirit of critique-that draws normative sustenance from an emancipatory moral vision but that remains attuned principally to conflict and tension, and to the tragic uncertainties of political life. In light of the unique challenges of the late-modern age, as theorists and citizens struggle to sustain an active and coherent critical agenda, In the Spirit of Critique invites serious reconsideration of a rich and elusive intellectual tradition.
Andrew J. Douglas is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Morehouse College.
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The Barbarian Principle
Merleau-Ponty, Schelling, and the Question of Nature
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Essays exploring a rich intersection between phenomenology and idealism with contemporary relevance.
Toward the end of his life, Maurice Merleau-Ponty made a striking retrieval of F. W. J. Schelling's philosophy of nature. The Barbarian Principle explores the relationship between these two thinkers on this topic, opening up a dialogue with contemporary philosophical and ecological significance that will be of special interest to philosophers working in phenomenology and German idealism.
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Thinking the Poetic Measure of Justice
Holderlin-Heidegger-Celan
by Charles Bambach
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
A new reading of justice engaging the work of two philosophical poets who stand in conversation with the work of Martin Heidegger.
What is the measure of ethics? What is the measure of justice? And how do we come to measure the immeasurability of these questions? Thinking the Poetic Measure of Justice situates the problem of justice in the interdisciplinary space between philosophy and poetry in an effort to explore the sources of ethical life in a new way. Charles Bambach engages the works of two philosophical poets who stand as the bookends of modernity-Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) and Paul Celan (1920-1970)-offering close textual readings of poems from each that define and express some of the crucial problems of German philosophical thought in the twentieth century: tensions between the native and the foreign, the proper and the strange, the self and the other. At the center of this philosophical conversation between Hölderlin and Celan, Bambach places the work of Martin Heidegger to rethink the question of justice in a nonlegal, nonmoral register by understanding it in terms of poetic measure. Focusing on Hölderlin's and Heidegger's readings of pre-Socratic philosophy and Greek tragedy, as well as on Celan's reading of Kabbalah, he frames the problem of poetic justice against the trauma of German destruction in the twentieth century.
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The Philosophical Rupture between Fichte and Schelling
Selected Texts and Correspondence (1800-1802)
by J. G. Fichte
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Correspondence and texts by Fichte and Schelling illuminate their thought and the trajectory of their philosophical falling out.
The disputes of philosophers provide a place to view their positions and arguments in a tightly focused way, and also in a manner that is infused with human temperaments and passions. Fichte and Schelling had been perceived as "partners" in the cause of Criticism or transcendental idealism since 1794, but upon Fichte's departure from Jena in 1799, each began to perceive a drift in their fundamental interests and allegiances. Schelling's philosophy of nature seemed to move him toward a realistic philosophy, while Fichte's interests in the origin of personal consciousness, intersubjectivity, and the ultimate determination of the agent's moral will moved him to explore what he called "faith" in one popular text, or a theory of an intelligible world. This volume brings together the letters the two philosophers exchanged between 1800 and 1802 and the texts that each penned with the other in mind.
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Plato's Statesman
Dialectic, Myth, and Politics
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Explores the interplay between the dramatic form of the dialogue and the basic themes it addresses.
The Statesman is among the most widely ranging of Plato's dialogues, bringing together in a single discourse disparate subjects such as politics, mathematics, ontology, dialectic, and myth. The essays in this collection consider these subjects and others, focusing in particular on the dramatic form of the dialogue. They take into account not only what is said but also how it is said, by whom and to whom it is said, and when and where it is said. In this way, the contributors approach the text in a manner that responds to the dialogue itself rather than bringing preconceived questions and scholarly debates to bear on it. The essays are especially attuned to the comedic elements that run through much of the dialogue and that are played out in a way that reveals the subject of the comedy. In the Statesman, these comedies reach their climax when the statesman becomes a participant in a comedy of animals and thereby is revealed in his true nature.
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Complicated Presence
Heidegger and the Postmetaphysical Unity of Being
by Jussi Backman
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
A synthetic assessment of Heidegger's entire path of thinking as a radical attempt to thematize and rethink the fundamental notions of unity dominating the Western metaphysical tradition.
From its Presocratic beginnings, Western philosophy concerned itself with a quest for unity both in terms of the systematization of knowledge and as a metaphysical search for a unity of being-two trends that can be regarded as converging and culminating in Hegel's system of absolute idealism. Since Hegel, however, the philosophical quest for unity has become increasingly problematic. Jussi Backman returns to that question in this book, examining the place of the unity of being in the work of Heidegger. Backman sketches a consistent picture of Heidegger as a thinker of unity who throughout his career in different ways attempted to come to terms with both Parmenides's and Aristotle's fundamental questions concerning the singularity or multiplicity of being-attempting to do so, however, in a "postmetaphysical" manner rooted in rather than above and beyond particular, situated beings. Through his analysis, Backman offers a new way of understanding the basic continuity of Heidegger's philosophical project and the interconnectedness of such key Heideggerian concepts as ecstatic temporality, the ontological difference, the turn (Kehre), the event (Ereignis), the fourfold (Geviert), and the analysis of modern technology.
Jussi Backman is University Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
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Reading Kant's Geography
by Stuart Elden
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Perspectives on Kant's teachings on geography and how they relate his understanding of the world.
For almost forty years, German enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant gave lectures on geography, more than almost any other subject. Kant believed that geography and anthropology together provided knowledge of the world, an empirical ground for his thought. Above all, he thought that knowledge of the world was indispensable to the development of an informed cosmopolitan citizenry that would be self-ruling. While these lectures have received very little attention compared to his work on other subjects, they are an indispensable source of material and insight for understanding his work, specifically his thinking and contributions to anthropology, race theory, space and time, history, the environment and the emergence of a mature public. This indispensable volume brings together world-renowned scholars of geography, philosophy and related disciplines to offer a broad discussion of the importance of Kant's work on this topic for contemporary philosophical and geographical work.
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Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Assesses the importance of Merleau-Ponty to current and ongoing concerns in contemporary philosophy.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty is widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century philosophy. The recent publication of his lecture courses and posthumous working notes has opened new avenues for both the interpretation of his thought and philosophy in general. These works confirm that, with a surprising premonition, Merleau-Ponty addressed many of the issues that concern philosophy today. With the benefit of this fuller picture of his thought, Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy undertakes an assessment of the philosopher's relevance for contemporary thinking. Covering a diverse range of topics, including ontology, epistemology, anthropology, embodiment, animality, politics, language, aesthetics, and art, the editors gather representative voices from North America and Europe, including both Merleau-Ponty specialists and thinkers who have come to the philosopher's work through their own thematic interest.
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Remnants of Hegel
Remains of Ontology, Religion, and Community
by Felix Duque
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
An original philosophical exploration of the limits of Hegel's thought.
In the preface to the second edition of the Science of Logic, Hegel speaks of an instinctive and unconscious logic whose forms and determinations "always remain imperceptible and incapable of becoming objective even as they emerge in language." In spite of Hegel's ambitions to provide a philosophical system that might transcend messy human nature, Félix Duque argues that human nature remains stubbornly present in precisely this way. In this book, he responds to the "remnants" of Hegel's work not to explicate his philosophy, but instead to explore the limits of his thought. He begins with the tension between singularity and universality, both as a metaphysical issue in terms of substance and subject and as a theological issue in terms of ideas about the human and divine nature of Jesus. Duque argues that the questions these issues bring out require a search for some antecedent authority, for which he turns to Hegel's theory of "second nature" and the idea of nature as reflected in the nation-state. He considers Hegel's evaluation of the French Revolution in the context of political and civil life, and, in a religious context, how Hegel saw considerations of authority and guilt sublimated and purified in the development of Christianity.
Félix Duque is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Nicholas Walker has translated many books, including Thomas Hobbes (by Otfried Höffe), also published by SUNY Press.
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The Voice of Misery
A Continental Philosophy of Testimony
by Gert-Jan Van der Heiden
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
A systematic study of testimony rooted in contemporary continental philosophy and drawing on literary case studies.
From analytic epistemology to gender theory, testimony is a major topic in philosophy today. Yet, one distinctive approach to testimony has not been fully appreciated: the recent history of contemporary continental philosophy offers a rich source for another approach to testimony. In this book, Gert-Jan van der Heiden argues that a continental philosophy of testimony can be developed that is guided by those forms of bearing witness that attest to limit experiences of human existence, in which the human is rendered mute, speechless, or robbed of a common understanding. In the first part, Van der Heiden explores this sense of testimony in a reading of several literary texts, ranging from Plato's literary inventions to those of Kierkegaard, Melville, Soucy, and Mortier. In the second part, based on the orientation offered by the literary experiments, Van der Heiden offers a more systematic account of testimony in which he distinguishes and analyzes four basic elements of testimony. In the third part, he shows what this analysis implies for the question of the truth and the truthfulness of testimony. In his discussion with philosophers such as Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, Agamben, Foucault, Ricoeur, and Badiou, Van der Heiden also provides an overview of how the problem of testimony emerges in a number of thinkers pivotal to twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought.
Gert-Jan van der Heiden is Full Professor of Metaphysics at Radboud University in the Netherlands. His books include Ontology after Ontotheology: Plurality, Event, and Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy and The Truth (and Untruth) of Language: Heidegger, Ricoeur, and Derrida on Disclosure and Displacement.
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Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement
by Ian Alexander Moore
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Provides the first systematic interpretation of Heidegger's relation to Eckhart, centering on the idea that we must release ourselves in order to know the truth.
In the late Middle Ages the philosopher and mystic Meister Eckhart preached that to know the truth you must be the truth. But how to be the truth? Eckhart's answer comes in the form of an imperative: release yourself, let be. Only then will you be able to understand that the deepest meaning of being is releasement and become who you truly are. This book interprets Eckhart's Latin and Middle High German writings under the banner of an imperative of releasement, and then shows how the twentieth-century thinker Martin Heidegger creatively appropriates this idea at several stages of his career. Heidegger had a lifelong fascination with Eckhart, referring to him as "the old master of letters and life." Drawing on archival material and Heidegger's marginalia in his personal copies of Eckhart's writings, Moore argues that Eckhart was one of the most important figures in Heidegger's philosophy. This book also contains previously unpublished documents by Heidegger on Eckhart, as well as the first English translation of Nishitani Keiji's essay "Nietzsche's Zarathustra and Meister Eckhart," which he initially gave as a presentation in one of Heidegger's classes in 1938.
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Heidegger and the Human
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
The human being stands at the center of the humanities and social sciences. In an age that some have dubbed the Anthropocene, this book addresses Heidegger's conception of the human being and its role in the world. Contributors discuss how Heidegger envisages and interprets the human being and what we can learn from his thought. Pluralistic in outlook, this volume covers a broad range of divergent views on Heidegger and his complex conception of the human. A short introductory chapter orients the reader to the significance of the question of the human in Heidegger's works, its topicality, and its relevance for interpreting Heidegger's oeuvre. Chapters are divided into three thematic groups: anthropology and philosophy; human being, otherness, and world; and life, identity, and finitude. This organization facilitates discussions of the systematic interconnection between Heidegger's philosophy and his critical thoughts on anthropology and humanism, as well as his relation to contemporary philosophers and their views on the subject. Various problems in Heidegger's concept of the human are addressed, and moral dimensions and practical imperatives implicit in Heidegger explored in discussions about intersectionality and oppression, the frailty of the human, and the embeddedness of the human being in nature, society, and history.
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Fichte's 1804 Wissenschaftslehre
Essays on the "Science of Knowing"
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Fichte's 1804 Wissenschaftslehre, or The Science of Knowing, consists of a series of lectures he delivered in his Berlin home to members of the city's political and cultural elite in 1804. The lectures mark a dramatic shift in the terminology and methodology he uses to explore the nature of knowledge and reality as presented in his philosophical system, the Wissenschaftslehre. Although not published during his lifetime, Fichte's 1804 lectures provide a systematic update to his philosophy of knowledge and being, which was only hinted at in print in popular presentations like “Characteristics of the Present Age” (1805) and “The Way Towards the Blessed Life” (1806). In fact, these lectures contain Fichte's first public articulation of his philosophical position in the wake of the professional disaster of the "atheism controversy." This volume of new essays offers readers not only novel interpretations of the lectures, but it also introduces and clarifies key concepts, debates the relationship of the lectures to Fichte's Jena presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre, and examines issues related to his method and system of idealism.
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Philosophy-Screens
From Cinema to the Digital Revolution
by Mauro Carbone
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Draws from twentieth-century French thought on film and aesthetics to address the philosophical significance of the pervasiveness of screens in contemporary technological life as well as the mutation of philosophy that such a pervasiveness seems to require.
In The Flesh of Images, Mauro Carbone analyzed Merleau-Ponty's interest in film and modern painting as it relates to his aesthetic theory and as it illuminates our contemporary relationship to images. Philosophy-Screens broadens the work undertaken in this earlier book, looking at the ideas of other twentieth-century thinkers concerning the relationship between philosophy and film, and extending that analysis to address our experience of electronic and digital screens in the twenty-first century. In the first part of the book, Carbone examines the ways that Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard, and Deleuze grappled with the philosophical significance of cinema as a novel aesthetic medium unfolding in the twentieth century. He then considers the significance of this philosophical framework for understanding the digital revolution, in particular the extent to which we are increasingly and comprehensively connected with screens. Smartphones, tablets, and computers have become a primary referential optical apparatus for everyday life in ways that influence the experience not only of seeing but also of thinking and desiring. Carbone's Philosophy-Screens follows Deleuze's call for "a philosophy-cinema" that can account for these fundamental changes in perception and aesthetic production, and adapts it to twenty-first-century concerns.
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Heidegger's Conversations
Toward a Poetic Pedagogy
by Katherine Davies
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Reading Martin Heidegger's five conversational texts together for the first time, Heidegger's Conversations elaborates not only what Heidegger thought but how he did so by attending to the philosophical possibilities of the genre of these under-studied texts written between 1944 and 1954. Though he wrote little on the topic of teaching and learning explicitly, Katherine Davies shows Heidegger performed an implicit poetic pedagogy in his conversations that remains to be recognized. Heidegger launched an experimental attempt to enact a learning of non-representational, non-metaphysical thinking by cultivating a distinctly collaborative sensitivity to the call of the poetic. Davies illustrates how each conversation emphasizes a particular pedagogical element-non-oppositionality, making mistakes, thinking in community, poetic interpretation, and the dangers of such pedagogy-which together constitute the developmental arc of these texts. Whether Heidegger is revising or reinforcing his own earlier pedagogical practices, Davies argues that attending to the dramatic staging of the conversations offers a distinct vantage point from which to contend with Heidegger's philosophy and politics in the post-war period.
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Gadamer and the Social Turn in Epistemology
by Carolyn Culbertson
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
While some take Gadamer's Truth and Method to be a departure from epistemological questions and concerns, author Carolyn Culbertson reads Gadamer's work as offering a valuable reflection on the nature of understanding-one that is deeply resonant with the recent social turn in epistemology. Like social epistemologists, Gadamer worries about the epistemic irresponsibility that we encourage when we treat an attitude of objectivity, wherein the inquirer lacks any awareness of their social and historical situation, as an epistemic ideal. Like social epistemologists too, Gadamer argues that understanding that one is socially and historically situated does not mean believing that one is fated to simply repeat traditional ideas without critique or modification-a concern frequently raised in response to critiques of Enlightenment epistemology. By developing such parallels, Gadamer and the Social Turn in Epistemology offers seasoned readers of Gadamer a new context in which to appreciate his discussion of understanding in Truth and Method and readers unfamiliar with Gadamer a productive point of access into his major work.
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Kant and the Feeling of Life
Beauty and Nature in the "Critique of Judgment"
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Kant and the Feeling of Life positions Kant's concept of life as a guiding thread for understanding not only Kant's approach to aesthetics and teleology but the underlying unity of the Critique of Judgment itself. The "feeling of life," which Kant describes as affecting us in various ways-as animating, enlivening, and quickening the mind-lies at the heart of Kant's philosophical project, but it has remained understudied for a theme of such centrality. This volume brings together, for the first time, essays focused on the topic of life in Kant's work, providing a wealth of perspectives and analyses ranging from the Critique of Judgment to Kant's early aesthetics, his social and political philosophy, his work connected to the body and health, and his moral theory.
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Deconstructive Constitutionalism
Derrida Reading Kant
by Jacques De Ville
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
“Deconstructive Constitutionalism” explores the relationship between the thinking of Immanuel Kant and Jacques Derrida concerning modern constitutionalism. Kant is widely recognized as one of the philosophical forebears of modern constitutionalism; that is, the notion that state powers should be defined and limited through a constitution. Kant laid the foundation of constitutionalism through his exposition of freedom, practical reason, and moral law. However, constitutionalism is under severe strain due to the challenges posed by inter alia climate change, global health, global conflict, authoritarianism, authoritarian populism, religious fundamentalism, migration, and inequality. “Deconstructive Constitutionalism” investigates, by way of Derrida's engagements with Kant, how the foundations of constitutionalism can be conceived differently to address some of these twenty-first-century challenges. The book examines the possible implications of such a re-reading of Kant for democracy, the human-animal relation, criminal law and punishment, as well as for a global constitutional order.
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The Scene of the Voice
Thinking Language after Affect
by Michael Eng
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
The recent turns to affect and aesthetics in the humanities and the interpretive social sciences have been productive for reflecting on the crucial role sensibility plays in the constitution of the social. However, these scholarly developments construct their interventions by dismissing the attention to language that was central to the linguistic and cultural turns of previous eras and by claiming that language is an obstacle to experiencing the reality of difference to which they maintain only sensibility can grant access. By analyzing the figure of the voice in the work of Martin Heidegger and the continental thinkers who follow him, “The Scene of the Voice” shows that the dismissal of language in favor of sensibility requires overlooking their common connection in the problem of mimesis. As this book ultimately argues, artificially separating language and sensibility results in a failure to encounter affect, the relation to difference affect is said to name, and the experience of thinking affect is taken to provoke.
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Returning to Judgment
Bernard Stiegler on Technics, Totalization, and the Limits of Political Ontology
by Ben Turner
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
“Returning to Judgment” provides the first extensive treatment of political judgment in the work of Bernard Stiegler and the first account of his significance for contemporary continental political thought. Ben Turner argues that Stiegler breaks with his predecessors in continental philosophy by advocating for, rather than retreating from, the task of proposing totalizing judgments on political problems that extend beyond the local and the particular. He shows that the reconciliation of judgment with continental political thought's commitment to anti-totalization structures the entirety of Stiegler's philosophy and demonstrates that this theory of the political decision highlights the difficulties that contemporary political ontology faces when addressing global and large-scale political problems. The book provides an overview of Stiegler's philosophy useful for those unfamiliar with his thought, shows how he draws on key influences including Deleuze, Derrida, Freud, and Simondon to develop his conception of judgment, and considers the challenges and consequences of his embrace of totalizing political decisions.
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The Promise of Friendship
Fidelity within Finitude
by Sarah Horton
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
“The Promise of Friendship” investigates what makes friendship possible and good for human beings. In dialogue with authors ranging from Aristotle and Montaigne to Proust, Levinas, and Derrida, Sarah Horton argues that friendship is suited to our finitude-that is, to the limits within which human beings live-and proposes a novel understanding of friendship as translation: friends translate the world for each other so that each one experiences the world not as the other does but in light of the friend's always-unknowable experience. The very distance between friends that makes it impossible for them to know each other wholly also makes it possible for them to be transformed by friendship. Friendship, then, is possible and good for those who love precisely that they can never wholly know the friend. Friendship is a profound, mutual self-giving that highlights the irreplaceability of each person, fundamentally shapes the self, and is one of the greatest joys of human existence.
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Beyond the Secular
Jacques Derrida and the Theological-Political Complex
by Andrea Cassatella
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Through an in-depth, critical analysis of Jacques Derrida's later writings, Beyond the Secular examines the contemporary nexus between religion and politics. Reconnecting these writings to his early works, Andrea Cassatella explores distinctive topics that are thematically linked by the theological-political problematic and theoretically informed by Derrida's relational approach to language, time, religion and politics. The result is a critical investigation into under-examined assumptions of modern secular discourse that questions its binary logics and illuminates such discourse's exclusionary character by tracing its roots in racialized understandings about language, epistemology, politics and religion that travel worldwide through global processes of assimilatory translation. By exposing the discriminatory hierarchies that the Western-Christian, sexualized, and racialized presuppositions of secular discourse keep producing and maintaining, Cassatella ultimately sheds light on the deep entanglements of secularism with the legacy of race and colonialism.
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Phenomenology and Future Generations
Generativity, Justice, and Amor Mundi
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
In the face of widespread environmental and social destabilization and growing uncertainty about the future of humanity, this collection of essays brings the philosophical tradition of phenomenology to the question of relations between generations to examine our ethical, political, and environmental obligations to future people. Emphasizing phenomenology's rich reflections on the role of time in the constitution of the social-historical world and its relation to the environment, the essays interweave the central themes of mortality, natality, generativity, and amor mundi to build vital bridges between new developments in both eco- and critical phenomenology and important work in intergenerational ethics. Together, the chapters reevaluate the traditional scope and foundational concepts of environmental ethics and social justice, paving the way for a revised understanding of intergenerational responsibilities, culminating in the key insight that future people are of us. The result is an invaluable conceptual toolkit for phenomenologists, ethicists, theorists, students, and activists concerned with environmental justice and climate ethics.
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Plato's Stranger
An Essay
by Rodolphe Gasché
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
The dramatic introduction in two of Plato's late dialogues-the Sophist and the Statesman, both part of a trilogy that also includes the Theaetetus-of a stranger, the Eleatic Stranger, who replaces Socrates, is a consequential move, especially since it occurs in the context of decidedly new insights into the philosophical logos and life together in a community. The introduction of a radical stranger, a stranger to all native identity, has theoretical implications, and, rather than a rhetorical or merely literary device, is of the order of an argument. Plato's “Stranger” argues that in these late dialogues, Plato bestows on the West a philosophical and political legacy at the core of which the stranger holds a prominent place because it provides the foreigner-the other-with a previously unheard-of constitutive role in the way thinking, as well as life in community, is understood. What is to be learned from these late dialogues is that, without a constitutive relation to otherness, discursive and political life in a community-in other words, also of the way one relates to oneself-remain lacking.
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In the Brightness of Place
Topological Thinking with and After Heidegger
by Jeff Malpas
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
The work of Jeff Malpas is well-known for its contribution to contemporary thinking about place and space. In the Brightness of Place takes that contribution further, as Malpas develops it in new ways and in relation to new topics. At the same time, the volume also develops Malpas' distinctively topological approach to the work of Martin Heidegger. Not limited simply to a reading of the topological in Heidegger, In the Brightness of Place also takes up the idea of topology after Heidegger, showing how topological thinking provides a way of rethinking Heidegger's own work and of rethinking our own being in the world.
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Statement on the True Relationship of the Philosophy of Nature to the Revised Fichtean Doctrine
An Elucidation of the Former
by F. W. J. Schelling
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Schelling's 1806 polemic against Fichte, and his last major work on the philosophy of nature.
The heat of anger can concentrate the mind. Convinced that he had been betrayed by his former collaborator and colleague, Schelling attempts in this polemic to reach a final reckoning with Fichte. Employing the format of a book review, Schelling directs withering scorn at three of Fichte's recent publications, at one point likening them to the hell, purgatory, and would-be paradise of Fichtean philosophy. The central bone of contention is the understanding of nature: Fichte sees it as lifeless matter in motion, sheer opposition to be overcome, while Schelling waxes poetic in his defense of a living, organic nature of which humanity is a vital part. Indeed, we do not know ourselves without understanding our connection to nature, argues Schelling, anticipating many thinkers in contemporary environmental ethics.
Dale E. Snow's introduction sets the stage and explains the larger context of the conflict, which was already visible in the correspondence of the two philosophers, which broke off by 1802. Notes are included throughout the text, providing background information and identifying the many references to Fichte.
Dale E. Snow is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University of Maryland and the author of Schelling and the End of Idealism, also published by SUNY Press.
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Between Levinas and Heidegger
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Investigates the philosophical relationship between Levinas and Heidegger in a nonpolemical context, engaging some of philosophy's most pressing issues.
Although both Levinas and Heidegger drew inspiration from Edmund Husserl's phenomenological method and helped pave the way toward the post-structuralist movement of the late twentieth century, very little scholarly attention has been paid to the relation of these two thinkers. There are plenty of simple-and accurate-oppositions and juxtapositions: French and German, ethics and ontology, and so on. But there is also a critical intersection between Levinas and Heidegger on some of the most fundamental philosophical questions: What does it mean to be, to think, and to act in late modern life and culture? How do our conceptions of subjectivity, time, and history both reflect the condition of this historical moment and open up possibilities for critique, resistance, and transformation? The contributors to this volume take up these questions by engaging the ideas of Levinas and Heidegger relating to issues of power, violence, secularization, history, language, time, death, sacrifice, responsibility, memory, and the boundary between the human and humanism.
John E. Drabinski is Professor of Black Studies at Amherst College. He is the author of several books, including Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Levinas, also published by SUNY Press. Eric S. Nelson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the coeditor (with François Raffoul) of Rethinking Facticity, also published by SUNY Press.
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Biodeconstruction
Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences
by Francesco Vitale
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Analyzes Derrida's 1975 seminar "La vie la mort" as a deconstruction of biology with relevance to his work more broadly.
In Biodeconstruction, Francesco Vitale demonstrates the key role that the question of life plays in Jacques Derrida's work. In the seminar La vie la mort (1975), Derrida engages closely with the life sciences, especially biology and evolution theory. Connecting this line of thought to his analysis of cybernetics in Of Grammatology, Vitale shows how Derrida develops a notion of biological life as itself a sort of text that is necessarily open onto further articulations and grafts. This sets the stage for the deconstruction of the traditional opposition between life and death, conceiving of death as an internal condition of the constitution of the living rather than being the opposite of life. It also provides the basis for the deconstruction of the rigidly deterministic concept of the genetic program, an insight that anticipates recent achievements of biological research in epigenetics and sexual reproduction. Finally, Vitale argues that this framework can enrich our understanding of Derrida's late work devoted to political issues, connecting his use of the auto immunitarian lexicon to the theory of cellular suicide in biology.
Francesco Vitale is Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Salerno, Italy. He is the author of The Last Fortress of Metaphysics: Jacques Derrida and the Deconstruction of Architecture, also published by SUNY Press, and the author and editor of several books in Italian on Derrida and contemporary French philosophy. Mauro Senatore is a British Academy Fellow at Durham University in the United Kingdom and Adjunct Professor of Contemporary French Philosophy at the Instituto de Humanidades, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile. He is the author of Germs of Death: The Problem of Genesis in Jacques Derrida, also published by SUNY Press.
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The Flesh of Images
Merleau-Ponty between Painting and Cinema
by Mauro Carbone
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Highlights Merleau-Ponty's interest in film and connects it to his aesthetic theory.
In The Flesh of Images, Mauro Carbone begins with the point that Merleau-Ponty's often misunderstood notion of "flesh" was another way to signify what he also called "Visibility." Considering vision as creative voyance, in the visionary sense of creating as a particular presence something which, as such, had not been present before, Carbone proposes original connections between Merleau-Ponty and Paul Gauguin, and articulates his own further development of the "new idea of light" that the French philosopher was beginning to elaborate at the time of his sudden death. Carbone connects these ideas to Merleau-Ponty's continuous interest in cinema-an interest that has been traditionally neglected or circumscribed. Focusing on Merleau-Ponty's later writings, including unpublished course notes and documents not yet available in English, Carbone demonstrates both that Merleau-Ponty's interest in film was sustained and philosophically crucial, and also that his thinking provides an important resource for illuminating our contemporary relationship to images, with profound implications for the future of philosophy and aesthetics. Building on his earlier work on Marcel Proust and considering ongoing developments in optical and media technologies, Carbone adds his own philosophical insight into understanding the visual today.
Mauro Carbone is Full Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lyon 3 and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. His books include An Unprecedented Deformation: Marcel Proust and the Sensible Ideas (translated by Niall Keane), also published by SUNY Press. Marta Nijhuis is Lecturer in Philosophy and Theory of Images at the University of Lyon 3 and at EAC Lyon.
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Phantoms of the Other
Four Generations of Derrida's Geschlecht
by David Farrell Krell
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Features a reconstruction of an unfinished text by Jacques Derrida from his most penetrating series of readings of Heidegger's philosophy.
During the 1980s Jacques Derrida wrote and published three incisive essays under the title Geschlecht, a German word for "generation" and "sexuality." These essays focused on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, taking up the rarely discussed issue of sexual difference in Heidegger's thought. A fourth essay-actually the third in the series-was never completed and never published. In Phantoms of the Other, David Farrell Krell reconstructs this third Geschlecht on the basis of archival materials and puts it in the context of the entire series. Touching on the themes of sexual difference, poetics, politics, and criticism as practiced by Heidegger, Derrida's unfinished third essay offers a penetrating critical analysis of Heidegger's views on sexuality and Heidegger's reading of the love poems of Georg Trakl, one of the greatest Expressionist poets of the German language, who died during the opening days of the First World War.
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David Hume
Platonic Philosopher, Continental Ancestor
by Bernard Freydberg
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
An original, rigorous, and daring reappraisal and recategorization of David Hume.
In the first book of its kind, Bernard Freydberg places David Hume firmly in the tradition of the Platonic dialogues, and regards him as a proper ancestor of contemporary continental philosophy. Although Hume is largely confined to his historical context within British Empiricism, his skepticism resonates with the Socratic Ignorance expressed by Plato, and his account of experience points toward very contemporary concerns in continental thought. Through close readings of An Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, and the essay "On the Standard of Taste," Freydberg traces a philosophy of imagination that will set the stage for wider consideration of Hume within continental thought.
Bernard Freydberg is Scholar in Residence at Duquesne University. He is the author of several books, including Philosophy and Comedy: Aristophanes, Logos, and Eros and Schelling's Dialogical Freedom Essay: Provocative Philosophy Then and Now, also published by SUNY Press.
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The Ages of the World (1811)
by F. W. J. Schelling
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
The first English translation of the first of three versions of this unfinished work by Schelling.
In 1810, after establishing a reputation as Europe's most prolific philosopher, F. W. J. Schelling embarked on his most ambitious project, The Ages of the World. For over a decade he produced multiple drafts of the work before finally conceding its failure, a "failure" in which Heidegger, Jaspers, Voegelin, and many others have discerned a pivotal moment in the history of philosophy. Slavoj Žižek calls this text the "vanishing mediator," the project that, even while withheld and concealed from view, connects the epoch of classical metaphysics that stretches from Plato to Hegel with the post-metaphysical thinking that began with Marx and Kierkegaard. Although drafts of the second and third versions from 1813 and 1815 have long been available in English, this translation by Joseph P. Lawrence is the first of the initial 1811 text. In his introductory essay, Lawrence argues for the importance of this first version of the work as the one that reveals the full sweep of Schelling's intended project, and he explains its significance for concerns in modern science, history, and religion.