Advancing a phenomenological approach to deep time
 

Our imagination today is dominated by the end of the world, from sci-fi and climate fiction to actual predictions of biodiversity collapse, climate disruption, and the emergence of the Anthropocene. This obsession with the world’s precarity, The Memory of the World contends, relies on a flawed understanding of time that neglects the past and present with the goal of managing the future. Not only does this mislead sustainability efforts, it diminishes our encounters with the world and with human and nonhuman others.

 

Here, Ted Toadvine takes a phenomenological approach to deep time to show how our apocalyptic imagination forgets the sublime and uncanny dimensions of the geological past and far future. Guided by original readings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others, he suggests that reconciling our embodied lives with the memory of the earth transforms our relationship with materiality, other forms of life, and the unprecedented future.

 

Integrating insights from phenomenology, deconstruction, critical animal studies, and new materialism, The Memory of the World argues for a new philosophy of time that takes seriously the multiple, pleated, and entangled temporal events spanning cosmic, geological, evolutionary, and human durations.

In Multispecies Dialogues Eva Meijer develops a new understanding of the concept ‘dialogue’, which includes embodied, material and spatial interaction. Meijer does not do this alone: each chapter of the book is devoted to a dialogue, or set of dialogues – with street dog Olli, a community of former lab mice, amphibian neighbours, the North Sea, and many other beings. Taking multispecies dialogues seriously is a way to do justice to more-than-human agency and to become more worldly in a time dominated by humans. Rethinking the model of the dialogue also opens up new ways of doing philosophy in multispecies world, which is urgently needed to address the ecological, political and philosophical problems of our time.

A compelling argument for adopting the concept of “mutual integration” to overcome injustice and enhance social solidarity.

The public culture of the receiving society and the dominant understanding of belonging and political membership can influence the social participation of immigrants as much as immigration law. However, current discussions of integration focus primarily on the distribution of rights and neglect the role of tacit knowledge. Through a systematical and philosophical analysis of identity’s role in policymaking, governance, and social practice, Bodi Wang shows how a one-sided understanding of integration resembles “assimilation” and why integration should be expected from locals as well. This argument weaves together extensive findings in sociology, history, critical race theory, and Chinese philosophy with ethics and migration studies.