Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno both turned to canonical literary narratives to determine why the Enlightenment project was derailed and how this failure might be remedied. The resultant works, Benjamin’s major essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities and Adorno’s meditation on the Odyssey in Dialectic of Enlightenment, are centrally concerned with the very act of narration. Márton Dornbach’s groundbreaking book reconstructs a hitherto unnoticed, wide-ranging dialogue between these foundational texts of the Frankfurt School.
At the heart of Dornbach’s argument is a critical model that Benjamin built around the concept of caesura, a model Adorno subsequently reworked. Countering an obscurantism that would become complicit in the rise of fascism, the two theorists aligned moments of arrest in narratives mired in unreason. Although this model responded to a specific historical emergency, it can be adapted to identify utopian impulses in a variety of works.
The Saving Line throws fresh light on the intellectual exchange and disagreements between Benjamin and Adorno, the problematic conjunction of secular reason and negative theology in their thinking, and their appropriations of ancient and modern legacies. It will interest scholars of philosophy and literature, critical theory, German Jewish thought, classical reception studies, and narratology.
The first collection of Eugene T. Gendlin’s groundbreaking essays in philosophical psychology, Saying What We Mean casts familiar areas of human experience, such as language and feeling, in a radically different light. Instead of the familiar scientific emphasis on what is conceptually explicit, Gendlin shows that the implicit also comprises a structure that can be made available for recognition and analysis.
Developing the traditions of phenomenology, existentialism, and pragmatism, Gendlin forges a new path that synthesizes contemporary evolutionary theory, cognitive psychology, and philosophical linguistics.First published in 1899,The School and Society describes John Dewey’s experiences with his own famous Laboratory School, started in 1896.
Dewey’s experiments at the Laboratory School reflected his original social and educational philosophy based on American experience and concepts of democracy, not on European education models then in vogue. This forerunner of the major works shows Dewey’s pervasive concern with the need for a rich, dynamic, and viable society.
In his introduction to this volume, Joe R. Burnett states Dewey’s theme. Industrialization, urbanization, science, and technology have created a revolution the schools cannot ignore. Dewey carries this theme through eight chapters: The School and Social Progress; The School and the Life of the Child; Waste in Education; Three Years of the University Elementary School; The Psychology of Elementary Education; Froebel’s Educational Principles; The Psychology of Occupations; and the Development of Attention.
Working on a large canvas, Science Unfettered contributes to the ongoing debates in the philosophy of science. The ambitious aim of its authors is to reconceptualize the orientation of the subject, and to provide a new framework for understanding science as a human activity. Mobilizing the literature of the philosophy of science, the history of science, the sociology of science, and philosophy in general, Professors McGuire and Tuchanska build on these fields with the view of transforming their insights into a new epistemological and ontological basis for studying the enterprise of science.
In this approach, McGuire and Tuchanska have combined work from both Anglo-American and Continental traditions of philosophy. As a result, the works of Popper, Kuhn, Quine, and Lakatos, as well as Heidegger, Gadamer, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Feyerabend, are called into play. In addition, Science Unfettered deals extensively with history and historicity, offering a theory of historicity of science as it emerges in sociocultural contexts.
Unorthodox in its approach, Science Unfettered articulates an alternative that views science ontologically as a “practice,” a perspective from which traditional issues concerning the relationship of experiment to theory, the cognitive to the social, the relation between historical change and epistemic validity, the meaning of “objectivity” and the like can be addressed in a more fruitful way than is possible by starting with the traditional, ontological framework of subject and object.
In A Search for Clarity, Jean‑Claude Milner argues that although Jacques Lacan’s writing is notoriously obscure his oeuvre is entirely clear. In a discussion that considers the difference between the esoteric and exoteric works of Plato and Aristotle, Milner argues that Lacan’s oeuvre is to be found in his published writings alone, not his transcribed seminars, and that these published writings contain his official doctrine. Thus, Lacan’s oeuvre is already complete, even though many of his seminars remain unpublished.
According to Milner, Lacan’s fundamental idea is that the subject psychoanalysis works on is the subject of science. Milner suggests that this is a supplement to Alexandre Koyré’s and Alexandre Kojève’s accounts of modern science, for which mathematization and a break from the ancient episteme were key.
A Search for Clarity is the definitive statement on how Lacan viewed the relationship between psychoanalysis and science, and on how Lacan’s thinking evolved as he struggled to draw out the consequences of the equation he posited between psychoanalysis and science. Milner’s work on Lacan has been essential reading in French for decades. This English translation will make his illuminating work accessible to a broader audience.
In what kind of world and for what kind of thought is time real, history open, and novelty possible? In what kind of world and for what kind of thought does it make sense for a human being to look for trouble rather than to stay out of trouble?In this long-awaited work of general philosophy, Roberto Mangabeira Unger proposes a radical reorientation of established ideas about nature, mind, society, politics, and religion. He shows how we have to change our beliefs if we are to succeed in doing justice to our most distinctive contemporary experiences, discoveries, and ideals.
The Self Awakened mobilizes the resources of several philosophical traditions, and develops the unrecognized revolutionary implications of the most influential of these traditions today--pragmatism. Avoiding technical jargon and needless complication, this book makes a case for philosophy as the supreme activity of the intellect at war, insisting on its power to deal with what matters most.
Self-Consciousness and Objectivity undermines a foundational dogma of contemporary philosophy: that knowledge, in order to be objective, must be knowledge of something that is as it is, independent of being known to be so. Sebastian Rödl revives the thought—as ancient as philosophy but largely forgotten today—that knowledge, precisely on account of being objective, is self-knowledge: knowledge knowing itself. Thus he intervenes in a discussion that runs through the work of Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel, Adrian Moore, and others, who seek to comprehend the claim to objectivity we raise in making judgments. While these authors think that the quest for objectivity demands that we transcend the first person, Rödl argues that it is through the first-person thought contained in every judgment that our judgments possess the objectivity that defines knowledge.
Self-Consciousness and Objectivity can be read as an introduction to absolute idealism, for it dismantles a stubborn obstacle to absolute idealism’s reception: the notion that it is a species of idealism, which is understood to be the assertion that the world depends upon the mind. As Rödl brings out, absolute idealism is the resolute rejection of that idea.
The implications of this work are profound. It undercuts a number of contemporary presumptions, such as that judgment is a propositional attitude, that inference is a mental process, and that there is an empirical science of the capacity for objective knowledge. All of these presumptions flow from the erroneous notion that the objectivity of knowledge stands opposed to its first-person character.
The Sensible World and the World of Expression was a course of lectures that Merleau-Ponty gave at the Collège de France after his election to the chair of philosophy in 1952. The publication and translation of Merleau-Ponty’s notes from this course provide an exceptional view into the evolution of his thought at an important point in his career.
In these notes, we see that Merleau-Ponty’s consideration of the problem of the perception of movement leads him to make a self-critical return to Phenomenology of Perception in order to rethink the perceptual encounter with the sensible world as essentially expressive, and hence to revise his understanding of the body schema accordingly in terms of praxical motor possibilities. Sketching out an embodied dialectic of expressive praxis that would link perception with art, language, and other cultural and intersubjective phenomena, up to and including truth, Merleau-Ponty’s notes for these lectures thus afford an exciting glimpse of how he aspired to overcome the impasse of ontological dualism.
Situated midway between Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible, these notes mark a juncture of crucial importance with regard to Merleau-Ponty’s later efforts to work out the ontological underpinnings of phenomenology in terms of a new dialectical conception of nature and history.
By exploring the life and work of the influential feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir, this book shows how each of us lives within political and social structures that we can--and must--play a part in transforming. It argues that Beauvoir’s careful examination of her own existence can also be understood as a dynamic method for political thinking.
As the contributors illustrate, Beauvoir's political thinking proceeds from the bottom up, using examples from individual lives as the basis for understanding and transforming our collective existence. For example, she embraced her responsibility as a French citizen as making her complicit in the French war against Algeria. Here, she sees her role as an oppressor. In other contexts, she looks to the lives of individual women, including herself, to understand the dimensions of gender inequality.
This volume’s six tightly connected essays home in on the individual’s relationship to community, and how one’s freedom interacts with the freedom of other people. Here, Beauvoir is read as neither a liberal nor a communitarian. The authors focus on her call for individuals to realize their freedom while remaining consistent with ethical obligations to the community. Beauvoir's account of her own life and the lives of others is interpreted as a method to understand individuals in relations to others, and as within structures of personal, material, and political oppression. Beauvoir's political thinking makes it clear that we cannot avoid political action. To do nothing in the face of oppression denies freedom to everyone, including oneself.
In Social Justice: Theories, Issues, and Movements, Loretta Capeheart and Dragan Milovanovic respond to the need for a comprehensive introduction to this topic. The authors argue that common conceptions of criminal justice--which accept, for the most part, a politically established definition of crime--are too limited. Instead, they show the relevancy of history, political economy, culture, critique, and cross-cultural engagement to the advancement of justice.
Drawing on contemporary issues ranging from globalization to the environment, this essential textbook--ideal for course use--encourages practitioners, reformists, activists, and scholars to question the limits of the law in its present state in order to develop a fairer system at the local, national, and global levels.
Kreeft takes the reader through the world of existentialist philosophy, posing questions that challenge the concepts that Sartre proposed. Based on an imagination dialogue between Socrates and Sartre that takes place in the afterlife, this profound and witty book makes an entertaining and informative exploration of modern philosophy
“Peter Kreeft’s work is (1) unfailingly brilliant, (2) intellectually agile, (3) astonishingly perspicacious, (4) gloriously orthodox, (5) Chestertonian aphoristic.” – Thomas Howard, author of On Being Catholic
Forty years in the making, this long-awaited reinterpretation of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit is a landmark contribution to philosophy by one of the world’s best-known and most influential philosophers.
In this much-anticipated work, Robert Brandom presents a completely new retelling of the romantic rationalist adventure of ideas that is Hegel’s classic The Phenomenology of Spirit. Connecting analytic, continental, and historical traditions, Brandom shows how dominant modes of thought in contemporary philosophy are challenged by Hegel.
A Spirit of Trust is about the massive historical shift in the life of humankind that constitutes the advent of modernity. In his Critiques, Kant talks about the distinction between what things are in themselves and how they appear to us; Hegel sees Kant’s distinction as making explicit what separates the ancient and modern worlds. In the ancient world, normative statuses—judgments of what ought to be—were taken to state objective facts. In the modern world, these judgments are taken to be determined by attitudes—subjective stances. Hegel supports a view combining both of those approaches, which Brandom calls “objective idealism”: there is an objective reality, but we cannot make sense of it without first making sense of how we think about it.
According to Hegel’s approach, we become agents only when taken as such by other agents. This means that normative statuses such as commitment, responsibility, and authority are instituted by social practices of reciprocal recognition. Brandom argues that when our self-conscious recognitive attitudes take the radical form of magnanimity and trust that Hegel describes, we can overcome a troubled modernity and enter a new age of spirit.
What kind of university is possible when digital tools are not taken for granted, but hacked for a more experimental future?
The global pandemic has underscored contemporary reliance on digital environments. This is particularly true among schools and universities, which, in response, shifted much of their instruction online. Because the rise of e-learning logics, ed-tech industries, and enterprise learning-management systems all threaten to further commodify and instrumentalize higher education, these technologies and platforms have to be creatively and critically struggled over.
Studious Drift intervenes in this struggle by reviving the relationship between studying and the generative space of the studio in service of advancing educational experimentation for a world where digital tools have become a permanent part of education. Drawing on Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics, the “science of imaginary solutions,” this book reveals how the studio is a space-time machine capable of traveling beyond the limits of conventional online learning to redefine education as interdisciplinary, experimental, public study.
Responding to the ongoing “objectal turn” in contemporary humanities and social sciences, the essays in Subject Lessons present a sustained case for the continued importance— indeed, the indispensability—of the category of the subject for the future of materialist thought.
Approaching matters through the frame of Hegel and Lacan, the contributors to this volume, including the editors, as well as Andrew Cole, Mladen Dolar, Nathan Gorelick, Adrian Johnston, Todd McGowan, Borna Radnik, Molly Anne Rothenberg, Kathryn Van Wert, and Alenka Zupančič—many of whom stand at the forefront of contemporary Hegel and Lacan scholarship—agree with neovitalist thinkers that material reality is ontologically incomplete, in a state of perpetual becoming, yet they maintain that this is the case not in spite of but, rather, because of the subject.
Incorporating elements of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary and cultural studies, Subject Lessons contests the movement to dismiss the subject, arguing that there can be no truly robust materialism without accounting for the little piece of the Real that is the subject.
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