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4917 books match the query 'Philosophy' and 231 start with e

cover of Emblems of Mind: The Inner Life of Music and Mathematics

Emblems of Mind

The Inner Life of Music and Mathematics

Edward Rothstein

University of Chicago Press, 2006

One is a science, the other an art; one useful, the other seemingly decorative, but mathematics and music share common origins in cult and mystery and have been linked throughout history. Emblems of Mind is Edward Rothstein’s classic exploration of their profound similarities, a journey into their “inner life.” Along the way, Rothstein explains how mathematics makes sense of space, how music tells a story, how theories are constructed, how melody is shaped. He invokes the poetry of Wordsworth, the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, the imagery of Plato, and the philosophy of Kant. Math and music, Rothstein shows, apply comparable methods as they create their abstractions, display similar concerns with ratio and proportion, and depend on metaphors and analogies to create their meanings. Ultimately, Rothstein argues, they reveal the ways in which we come to understand the world. They are images of the mind at work and play; indeed, they are emblems of Mind itself. 

Jacques Barzun called this book “splendid.” Martin Gardner said it was “beautifully written, marvelous and entertaining.” It will provoke all serious readers to think in new ways about the grand patterns in art and life. 

“Lovely, wistful. . . . Rothstein is a wonderful guide to the architecture of musical space, its tensions and relations, its resonances and proportions. . . . His account of what is going on in the music is unfailingly felicitous.”—New Yorker

 “Provocative and exciting. . . . Rothstein writes this book as a foreign correspondent, sending dispatches from a remote and mysterious locale as a guide for the intellectually adventurous. The remarkable fact about his work is not that it is profound, as much of the writing is, but that it is so accessible.”—Christian Science Monitor

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cover of Embodied Care: Jane Addams, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Feminist Ethics

Embodied Care

Jane Addams, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Feminist Ethics

Maurice Hamington

University of Illinois Press, 2004

Until now, ethicists have said little about the body, limiting their comments on it to remarks made in passing or, at best, devoting a chapter to the subject. Embodied Care is the first work to argue for the body's centrality to care ethics, doing so by analyzing our corporeality at the phenomenological level. It develops the idea that our bodies are central to our morality, paying particular attention to the ways we come to care for one another.
 
Hamington's argues that human bodies are "built to care"; as a result, embodiment must be recognized as a central factor in moral consideration. He takes the reader on an exciting journey from modern care ethics to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the body and then to Jane Addams's social activism and philosophy. The ideas in Embodied Care do not lead to yet another competing theory of morality; rather, they progress through theory and case studies to suggest that no theory of morality can be complete without a full consideration of the body.
 
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cover of Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason: How Our Bodies Give Rise to Understanding

Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason

How Our Bodies Give Rise to Understanding

Mark Johnson

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Mark Johnson is one of the great thinkers of our time on how the body shapes the mind. This book brings together a selection of essays from the past two decades that build a powerful argument that any scientifically and philosophically satisfactory view of  mind and thought must ultimately explain how bodily perception and action give rise to cognition, meaning, language, action, and values.
 
A brief account of Johnson’s own intellectual journey, through which we track some of the most important discoveries in the field over the past forty years, sets the stage. Subsequent chapters set out Johnson’s important role in embodied cognition theory, including his cofounding (with George Lakoff) of conceptual metaphor theory and, later, their theory of bodily structures and processes that underlie all meaning, conceptualization, and reasoning. A detailed account of how meaning arises from our physical engagement with our environments provides the basis for a nondualistic, nonreductive view of mind that he sees as most congruous with the latest cognitive science. A concluding section explores the implications of our embodiment for our understanding of knowledge, reason, and truth. The resulting book will be essential for all philosophers dealing with mind, thought, and language.
 
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cover of Embodiments: From the Body to the Body Politic

Embodiments

From the Body to the Body Politic

James R. Mensch

Northwestern University Press, 2009

How does the body politic reflect the nature of human embodiment? To pursue this question in a new and productive way, James Mensch employs a methodology consistent with the fact of our embodiment; he uses Merleau-Ponty’s concept of "intertwining"—the presence of one’s self in the world and of the world in one’s self—to understand the ideas that define political life.

Mensch begins his inquiry by developing a philosophical anthropology based on this concept. He then applies the results of his investigation to the relations of power, authority, freedom, and sovereignty in public life. This involves confronting a line of interpretation, stretching from Hobbes to Agamben, which sees violence as both initiating and preserving the social contract. To contest this interpretation, Mensch argues against its presupposition, which is to equate freedom with sovereignty over others. He does so by understanding political freedom in terms of embodiment—in particular, in terms of the finitude and interdependence that our embodiment entails. Freedom, conceived in these terms, is understood as the gift of others. As a function of our dependence on others, it cannot exist apart from them. To show how public space and civil society presuppose this interdependence is the singular accomplishment of Embodiments. It accomplishes a phenomenological grounding for a new type of political philosophy.
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cover of Embodying Relation: Art Photography in Mali

Embodying Relation

Art Photography in Mali

Allison Moore

Duke University Press, 2020

In Embodying Relation Allison Moore examines the tensions between the local and the global in the art photography movement in Bamako, Mali, which blossomed in the 1990s after Malian photographers Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé became internationally famous and the Bamako Photography Biennale was founded. Moore traces the trajectory of Malian photography from the 1880s—when photography first arrived as an apparatus of French colonialism—to the first African studio practitioners of the 1930s and the establishment in 1994 of the Bamako Biennale, Africa's most important continent-wide photographic exhibition. In her detailed discussion of Bamakois artistic aesthetics and institutions, Moore examines the post-fame careers of Keïta and Sidibé, the biennale's structure, the rise of women photographers, cultural preservation through photography, and how Mali's shift to democracy in the early 1990s enabled Bamako's art scene to flourish. Moore shows how Malian photographers' focus on cultural exchange, affective connections with different publics, and merging of traditional cultural precepts with modern notions of art embody Caribbean philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant's notion of “relation” in ways that spark new artistic forms, practices, and communities.
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cover of Embodying Technesis: Technology beyond Writing

Embodying Technesis

Technology beyond Writing

Mark Hansen

University of Michigan Press, 2000

Critics of contemporary culture have argued that critical theory must keep pace with technological change and, in the process, have instituted a theoretical model that restricts consideration of technology's impact on human experience to those dimensions that can be captured in language. In this wide-ranging critical study of poststructuralism's legacy to contemporary cultural studies, Mark Hansen challenges the hegemony of this model, contending that technologies fundamentally alter our sensory experience and drastically affect what it means to live as embodied human agents.
Embodying Technesis examines how technological changes have rendered obsolete notions of technology as machine and as text. Voicing a sustained plea for rethinking the technological, Hansen argues that radical technological changes--from the steam engine to the internet and virtual reality--have fundamentally altered conditions of perception and, in so doing, changed the prevailing structures of modern experience. By emphasizing the dynamic interaction between technologies and bodies, between the diffuse effects of technological shifts and the collective embodied experiences of contemporary agents, Hansen opens the path for a radical revision of our understanding of the technological.
Mark Hansen is Assistant Professor of English, Princeton University.
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cover of Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred

Embracing the Void

Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred

Richard Boothby

Northwestern University Press, 2023

A radical reinterpretation of the origin of religion through a psychoanalytic theorization of the unknown
 
Renowned psychoanalytic philosopher Richard Boothby puts forward a novel theory of religion inspired by Jacques Lacan’s theory of das Ding, the disquieting, inaccessible dimension of fellow human beings. This notion of an unfathomable excess, originally encountered in the figure of the mother, led Lacan to break with Freud’s formulation of the Oedipus complex and underlies Lacan’s distinctive conception of unconscious dynamics. Leaning on this account, Boothby shows how our sense of the sacred arises from our relation to what we do not know.
 
Embracing the Void lays out the range of Freud’s attempts at a psychoanalytic theory of religion and then sketches the rough contours of Lacan’s contrasting approach. From there, Boothby offers the theoretical tools for interpreting the religious impulse and analyzes key religious traditions, from ancient Greek polytheism to Judaism and Christianity, and from Hinduism and Buddhism to Islam, finally turning to modern capitalist culture and the seductive deity that dominates it—money. Lucid, accessible, and compelling, the book provides a cogent intervention in one of the psychoanalytic tradition’s most contentious topics and offers a new approach to our understanding of religion.

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cover of Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis

Emergency

Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis

Edgar Garcia

University of Chicago Press, 2022

Nine short essays exploring the K’iche’ Maya story of creation, the Popol Vuh.
 
Written during the lockdown in Chicago in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, these essays consider the Popol Vuh as a work that was also written during a time of feverish social, political, and epidemiological crisis as Spanish missionaries and colonial military deepened their conquest of indigenous peoples and cultures in Mesoamerica. What separates the Popol Vuh from many other creation texts is the disposition of the gods engaged in creation. Whereas the book of Genesis is declarative in telling the story of the world’s creation, the Popol Vuh is interrogative and analytical: the gods, for example, question whether people actually need to be created, given the many perfect animals they have already placed on earth.
 
Emergency uses the historical emergency of the Popol Vuh to frame the ongoing emergencies of colonialism that have surfaced all too clearly in the global health crisis of COVID-19. In doing so, these essays reveal how the authors of the Popol Vuh—while implicated in deep social crisis—nonetheless insisted on transforming emergency into scenes of social, political, and intellectual emergence, translating crisis into creativity and world creation.
 
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cover of Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice

Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice

Michael M. J. Fischer

Duke University Press, 2003

Anthropology as Cultural Critique helped redefine cultural anthropology in the 1980s. Now, with Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice, pathbreaking scholar Michael M. J. Fischer moves the discussion to a consideration of the groundwork laid in the 1990s for engagements with the fast-changing worlds of technoscience, telemedia saturation, and the reconstruction of societies after massive trauma. Fischer argues that new methodologies and conceptual tools are necessitated by the fact that cultures of every kind are becoming more complex and differentiated at the same time that globalization and modernization are bringing them into exponentially increased interaction. Anthropology, Fischer explains, now operates in a series of third spaces well beyond the nineteenth- and twentieth-century dualisms of us/them, primitive/civilized, East/West, or North/South. He contends that more useful paradigms—such as informatics, multidimensional scaling, autoimmunity, and visual literacy beyond the frame—derive from the contemporary sciences and media technologies.

A vigorous advocate of the anthropological voice and method, Fischer emphasizes the ethical dimension of cultural anthropology. Ethnography, he suggests, is uniquely situated to gather and convey observations fundamental to the creation of new social institutions for an evolving civil society. In Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice Fischer considers a dazzling array of subjects—among them Iranian and Polish cinema, cyberspace, autobiographical and fictional narrative, and genomic biotechnologies—and, in the process, demonstrates a cultural anthropology for a highly networked world. He lays the groundwork for a renewed and powerful twenty-first-century anthropology characterized by a continued insistence on empirical fieldwork, engagements with other disciplines, and dialogue with interlocutors around the globe.

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cover of Emerging Trends in Continental Philosophy

Emerging Trends in Continental Philosophy

Edited by Todd May

University of Chicago Press, 2010

From Kant to Kierkegaard, from Hegel to Heidegger, continental philosophers have indelibly shaped the trajectory of Western thought since the eighteenth century. Although much has been written about these monumental thinkers, students and scholars lack a definitive guide to the entire scope of the continental tradition. The most comprehensive reference work to date, this eight-volume History of Continental Philosophy will both encapsulate the subject and reorient our understanding of it. Beginning with an overview of Kant’s philosophy and its initial reception, the History traces the evolution of continental philosophy through major figures as well as movements such as existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. The final volume outlines the current state of the field, bringing the work of both historical and modern thinkers to bear on such contemporary topics as feminism, globalization, and the environment. Throughout, the volumes examine important philosophical figures and developments in their historical, political, and cultural contexts.

The first reference of its kind, A History of Continental Philosophy has been written and edited by internationally recognized experts with a commitment to explaining complex thinkers, texts, and movements in rigorous yet jargon-free essays suitable for both undergraduates and seasoned specialists. These volumes also elucidate ongoing debates about the nature of continental and analytic philosophy, surveying the distinctive, sometimes overlapping characteristics and approaches of each tradition. Featuring helpful overviews of major topics and plotting road maps to their underlying contexts, A History of Continental Philosophy is destined to be the resource of first and last resort for students and scholars alike.

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cover of Emerson and the Defense of Equality

Emerson and the Defense of Equality

Greg Garvey

University of Massachusetts Press, 2025

Arguing for equality as the necessary foundation of liberty

During Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lifetime, the idea of universal human equality was under intensive assault. Repeatedly—in contexts ranging from slavery, to marriage, to politics and workers’ rights—Americans of the time were being told that equality was an obsolete ideal and that the future would belong to those who accepted the hard truth that liberty lies not in egalitarian values but in hierarchies of domination and submission. Greg Garvey’s Emerson and the Defense of Equality focuses on Emerson as a real-time defender of equality during the antebellum culture wars.

In contrast to studies that treat individual liberty as Emerson’s primary concern, Garvey argues that Emerson’s works define a broad and sustained defense of equality as the necessary foundation of liberty. When read as part of a debate about equality, Emerson’s Nature is a treatise on individuality and the common weal; his anti-slavery speeches and English Traits advance evolutionary theories to rebut polygenesist arguments for white supremacy; the essays “Love” and “Domestic Life” challenge gender spheres and explore equality in marriage, friendship, and citizenship. As Emerson speculates on the future, “Politics” and “The Young American” anticipate a “beneficent socialism” in which human rights will always have priority over property rights. In his career-long effort to defend a threatened ideal, Emerson develops an aspirational vision of society that understands equality to be a fundamental aspect of liberty.

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cover of Emerson's Nonlinear Nature

Emerson's Nonlinear Nature

Christopher J. Windolph

University of Missouri Press, 2007

  In this provocative study, Christopher Windolph analyzes Emersonian naturalism from the standpoint of nonlinearity, offering new ways of reading and thinking about Emerson’s stance toward naturalism and the influence of science on his thought. Drawing on ideas in perspective theory, architecture, and nonlinear dynamics to argue that Emerson’s natural philosophy follows from his analysis of the development of organic forms, Windolph breaks new ground in Emerson studies by exploring how considerations of shape and the act of seeing underpin all of Emerson’s theories about nature.

            Bringing to his study a focused attention to the history of Western science and philosophy, Windolph reexamines Emerson’s understanding of how the act of seeing occurs and of the eye’s ability to see through appearances to organizing principles, showing how Emerson’s naturalism extends beyond the narrow confines of traditional linear science. Through extensive readings of Emerson’s journals, essays, and lectures, Windolph shows that Emerson was an empirical idealist who integrated a scientific approach to nature with an exploration of nonlinear principles, revealing him to be more prescient in his writings about certain recent developments in scientific thought than has been realized.

            This work makes a major contribution to the ongoing study of Emerson and science, expanding Emerson’s role as a major American philosopher while rebutting those who see him primarily as a rhetorician or poetic propagandist. Emerson’s Nonlinear Nature opens new ways of thinking about Emerson’s work in its nineteenth-century contexts, reassesses his reception in twentieth-century criticism, and makes a strong case for his continuing relevance in the century ahead.

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cover of Emily Dickinson's Approving God: Divine Design and the Problem of Suffering

Emily Dickinson's Approving God

Divine Design and the Problem of Suffering

Patrick J. Keane

University of Missouri Press, 2008

As much a doubter as a believer, Emily Dickinson often expressed views about God in general—and God with respect to suffering in particular. In many of her poems, she contemplates the question posed by countless theologians and poets before her: how can one reconcile a benevolent deity with evil in the world?
            Examining Dickinson’s perspectives on the role played by a supposedly omnipotent and all-loving God in a world marked by violence and pain, Patrick Keane initially focuses on her poem “Apparently with no surprise,” in which frost, a “blonde Assassin,” beheads a “happy Flower,” a spectacle presided over by “an Approving God.” This tiny lyric,Keane shows, epitomizes the poet’s embattled relationship with the deity of her Calvinist tradition.
            Although the problem of sufferingis usually couched in terms of natural disasters or human injustice, Dickinson found new ways of considering it. By choosing a flower as her innocent “victim,” she bypassed standard “answers” to the dilemma (suffering as justified punishment for wickedness, or as attributable to the assertion of free will) in order to focus on the problem in its purest symbolic form. Keane goes on toprovide close readings of many of Dickinson’s poems and letters engaging God, showing how she addressed the challenges posed—by her own experience and by an innate skepticism reinforced by a nascent Darwinism—to the argument from design and the concept of a benevolent deity.
            More than a dissection of a single poem, Keane’s book is a sweeping personal reflection on literature and religion, faith and skepticism, theology and science. He traces the evolving history of the Problem of Suffering from the Hebrew Scriptures (Job and Ecclesiastes), through the writings of Paul, Augustine, and Aquinas, to the most recent theological and philosophical studies of the problem. Keane is interested in how readers today respond to Emily Dickinson’s often combative poems about God; at the same time, she is located as a poet whose creative life coincided with the momentous changes and challenges to religious faith associated with Darwin andNietzsche.Keane also considers Dickinson’s poems and letters in the context of the great Romantic tradition, as it runs fromMilton throughWordsworth, demonstrating how thework of these poets (perhaps surprisingly in the case of the latter)helps illuminate Dickinson’s poetry and thought.  
            Because Dickinson the poet was also Emily the gardener, her love of flowers was an appropriate vehicle for her observations on mortality and her expressions of doubt. Emily Dickinson’s Approving God is a graceful study that reveals not only the audacity of Dickinson’s thought but also its relevance to modern readers. In light of ongoing confrontations between Darwinism and design, science and literal conceptions of a divine Creator, it is an equally provocative read for students of literature and students of life.
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cover of Emotions in History – Lost and Found

Emotions in History – Lost and Found

Ute Frevert

Central European University Press, 2011

Coming to terms with emotions and how they influence human behaviour, seems to be of the utmost importance to societies that are obsessed with everything "neuro." On the other hand, emotions have become an object of constant individual and social manipulation since "emotional intelligence" emerged as a buzzword of our times. Reflecting on this burgeoning interest in human emotions makes one think of how this interest developed and what fuelled it. From a historian's point of view, it can be traced back to classical antiquity. But it has undergone shifts and changes which can in turn shed light on social concepts of the self and its relation to other human beings (and nature). The volume focuses on the historicity of emotions and explores the processes that brought them to the fore of public interest and debate.

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cover of Emphatics

Emphatics

Paul Weiss

Vanderbilt University Press, 2000

Defining an "emphatic" as an intrusion that alters the import of what it intrudes on, Weiss sets the stage for an exquisitely systematic, speculative study of the major themes confronting modern metaphysics. The idea of an emphatic has its roots in Weiss's long-developed pluralistic ontology, with special focus on what we experience as an "emphasis." The most obvious examples are grammatical devices such as changed pitch in speech or exclamation and question marks in writing. Weiss also analyzes emphatics in etiquette, social status, nature, art, conventional behavior, encyclopedias, psychiatry, and religion.

Brilliant in every respect, Emphatics rewrites Weiss's systematic ontology in new terms. Not only are the lineaments of the system reexamined, but this book floods the reader with new perspectives and insights on relationship, signs, truth, particularity, space-time causality, education, mind-body issues, Being and other ultimate philosophical categories, and good and evil.

Weiss engages the various objections to his position in a series of question-and-answer epilogues at the end of each chapter that allow the reader to follow step-by-step a great philosophical mind at work. He takes his critics seriously, grapples with their objections, and answers them honestly. His discourse creatively revisits age-old questions and in reimagining new answers establishes the continuing relevance of philosophy as an academic discipline.

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cover of Empire Of Meaning: The Humanization Of The Social Sciences

Empire Of Meaning

The Humanization Of The Social Sciences

Francois Dosse

University of Minnesota Press, 1998

After the brilliance of Derrida, Foucault, Barthes--what? By most accounts, the French intellectual scene, poststructuralism, has split in two. On one side, a few select philosophers as media stars are pressed for their opinions on virtually every subject; on the other side, an atomized community of scholars in the social sciences are bound up in technicalities and muffled by the lack of a common language. This great divide, Francois Dosse contends, augurs a tremendous change in the structure and conduct of intellectual life. What this shift means--how it has occurred and what parts various thinkers have played in shaping it--is the subject of Empire of Meaning. An outgrowth of Dosse's magisterial History of Structuralism, Empire of Meaning is an extended encounter with some of the most influential French intellectuals. Through interviews and readings, Dosse reveals what has become of the intellectuals of the generation of '68 as they have tried to work out the implications of their revolt against structuralism and the problem of Cold War existence. Paul Ricoeur, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Roger Chartier, Marcel Gauchet, Dany-Robert Dufour, and Michel Serres are among the many figures whose words and work unfold in these pages. A thorough and thoroughly engrossing work of intellectual history, Empire of Meaning is a firsthand look at the reshaping of French intellectual life in our time. "For the reader seeking rich historical detail, including names, places, schools, and research agendas, Empire of Meaning proves a veritable gold mine of information. The territory covered by Dosse is vast and impressive; the detail of his surveillance is overwhelming." --Rhetoric & Public Affairs "Dosse reveals a new paradigm that might make us forget the great old ones: functionalism, structuralism, and Marxism. . . . Decidedly, this book is full of good news." --Le Nouveau Politis "The immediate history of ideas is an undertaking as daring as it is risky, and Dosse here forces the relationships of trajectory and thought. . . . This book offers, in a very readable way, an overview of the current research in the social sciences." --Le Monde Francois Dosse is a historian and author of numerous books, including History of Structuralism, Volume 1 and Volume 2. Hassan Melehy is assistant professor of French at the University of Connecticut
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cover of Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom

Empire of Liberty

Power, Desire, and Freedom

Anthony Bogues

Dartmouth College Press, 2010

In this thoughtful and timely consideration of the nature of American power and empire, Anthony Bogues argues that America’s self-presentation as the bastion of liberty is an attempt to force upon the world a single universal truth, which has the objective of eradicating the radical imagination. Central to this project of American supremacy is the elaboration and construction of a language of power in which a form of self-government appears as the form of sovereignty. Grappling with issues of power, race, slavery, violence, and the nature of postcolonial criticism and critical theory, Bogues offers reconsiderations of the writings of W. E. B. DuBois and Frantz Fanon in order to break holes in this accepted structure of empire. At its heart this is a work of radical humanistic theory that seeks to glean from the postcolonial world and empire an alternative to its imperial form of freedom.
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cover of Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change

Empirical Ecocriticism

Environmental Narratives for Social Change

Matthew Schneider-Mayerson

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

Finalist for the 2025 ASLE Ecocritical Book Award

A groundbreaking book that combines the environmental humanities and social sciences to study the impact of environmental stories

There is a growing consensus that environmental narratives can help catalyze the social change necessary to address today’s environmental crises; however, surprisingly little is known about their impact and effectiveness. In Empirical Ecocriticism, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Alexa Weik von Mossner, W. P. Malecki, and Frank Hakemulder combine an environmental humanities perspective with empirical methods derived from the social sciences to study the influence of environmental stories on our affects, attitudes, and actions.

Empirical Ecocriticism provides an approachable introduction to this growing field’s main methods and demonstrates their potential through case studies on topics ranging from the impact of climate fiction on readers’ willingness to engage in activism to the political empowerment that results from participating in environmental theater. Part manifesto, part toolkit, part proof of concept, and part dialogue, this introductory volume is divided into three sections: methods, case studies, and reflections. International in scope, it points toward a novel and fruitful synthesis of the environmental humanities and social sciences.

Contributors: Matthew Ballew, Yale U; Helena Bilandzic, U of Augsburg; Rebecca Dirksen, Indiana U; Greg Garrard, UBC Okanagan; Matthew H. Goldberg, Yale U; Abel Gustafson, U of Cincinnati; David I. Hanauer, Indiana U of Pennsylvania; Ursula K. Heise, UCLA; Jeremy Jimenez, SUNY Cortland; Anthony Leiserowitz, Yale U; David M. Markowitz, U of Oregon; Marcus Mayorga; Jessica Gall Myrick, Penn State U; Mary Beth Oliver, Penn State U; Yan Pang, Point Park U; Mark Pedelty, U of Minnesota; Seth A. Rosenthal, Yale U; Elja Roy, U of Memphis; Nicolai Skiveren, Aarhus U; Paul Slovic, U of Oregon; Scott Slovic, U of Idaho; Nicolette Sopcak, U of Alberta; Paul Sopcak, MacEwan U; Sara Warner, Cornell U.

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cover of Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity, and Drift

Empty Moments

Cinema, Modernity, and Drift

Leo Charney

Duke University Press, 1998

In Empty Moments, Leo Charney describes the defining quality of modernity as “drift”—the experience of being unable to locate a stable sense of the present. Through an exploration of artistic, philosophical, and scientific interrogations of the experience of time, Charney presents cinema as the emblem of modern culture’s preoccupation with the reproduction of the present.
Empty Moments creates a catalytic dialogue among those who, at the time of the invention of film, attempted to define the experience of the fleeting present. Interspersing philosophical discussions with stylistically innovative prose, Charney mingles Proust’s conception of time/memory with Cubism’s attempt to interpret time through perspective and Surrealism’s exploration of subliminal representations of the present. Other topics include Husserl’s insistence that the present can only be fantasy or fabrication and the focus on impossibility, imperfection, and loss in Kelvin’s laws of thermodynamics. Ultimately, Charney’s work hints at parallels among such examples, the advent and popularity of cinema, and early film theory.
A book with a structural modernity of its own, Empty Moments will appeal to those interested in cinema and its history, as well as to other historians, philosophers, literary, and cultural scholars of modernity.


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Empty Names, Fiction and the Puzzles of Non-Existence

Edited by Anthony Everett and Thomas Hofweber

CSLI, 2000

Philosophers and theorists have long been puzzled by humans' ability to talk about things that do not exist, or to talk about things that they think exist but, in fact, do not. Empty Names, Fiction, and the Puzzles of Non-Existence is a collection of 13 new works concerning the semantic and metaphysical issues arising from empty names, non-existence, and the nature of fiction. The contributors include some of the most important researchers working in these fields. Some of the papers develop and defend new positions on these matters, while others offer important new perspectives and criticisms of the existing approaches. The volume contains a comprehensive introductory essay by the editors, which provides a survey of the philosophical issues concerning empty names, the various responses to these issues, and the literature on the subject to date.
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cover of Enacting Decolonization: Political Subjectivity in Contemporary Arab Thought

Enacting Decolonization

Political Subjectivity in Contemporary Arab Thought

Yasmeen Daifallah

Duke University Press, 2027

In Enacting Decolonization, Yasmeen Daifallah examines the forms that intellectual decolonization takes after the demise of anticolonial revolutions. Daifallah argues that rather than crafting political visions, decolonization operates through anticolonial thinkers’ efforts to cultivate a political subjectivity capable of mastering and critically reworking a colonially imparted modernity. She recovers this argument through Abdallah Laroui and Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, two of the most consequential Arab thinkers of the twentieth century. Although they are typically read as opponents over the fate of the Islamic tradition, Daifallah argues that Laroui and Jabri share a diagnosis: Colonialism produced an epistemological rupture that cannot be wished away. What differs is the ecology of critique each cultivates in response. Laroui wields Marxist historicism to submit anticolonial Arab thought to critique, recovering its possibilities for a subject capable of contesting the postcolonial present, while Jabri deploys structuralism to reinterpret the Islamic tradition, modeling a relationship of command and critical distance toward it. Through close readings of their work, Daifallah shows how these thinkers inventively weave conceptual and rhetorical devices to bring decolonized political subjects into being.
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cover of Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, 1929-1976

Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, 1929-1976

Heinrich Wiegand Petzet

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Despite his predominance in twentieth-century philosophy, no intellectual biography of Martin Heidegger has yet appeared. This account of Heidegger's personal relations, originally published in German and extensively corrected by the author for this translation, enlarges our understanding of a complex figure.

A well-known art historian and an intimate friend of Heidegger's, Heinrich Wiegand Petzet provides a rich portrait of Heidegger that is part memoir, part biography, and part cultural history. By recounting chronologically a series of encounters between the two friends from their meeting in 1929 until the philosopher's death in 1976, as well as between Heidegger and other contemporaries, Petzet reveals not only new aspects of Heidegger's thought and attitudes toward the historical and intellectual events of his time but also the greater cultural and social context in which he articulated his thought.
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cover of End of the World as We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century

End of the World as We Know It

Social Science for the Twenty-First Century

Immanuel Wallerstein

University of Minnesota Press, 2001

A respected thinker points the way ahead. "Immanuel Wallerstein has long conceived of social science grandly. He was an innovator of world systems analysis, which portrays societies, sectors within societies, and the very disciplines of the social science as linked, bound, and analytically inseparable: To parse them is to misconceive them. As recent president of the International Sociological Association (1994 to 1998), Wallerstein continued to develop such grand thinking through numerous addresses on the state of the social sciences, capitalism, political justice, and the world. Here, he offers these collectively. He divides them into two topics-the world of capitalism and the world of knowledge. Toward both grand worlds, his thesis is similar: they are in crisis. . . . The scope of his career's thought is remarkable, his expertise impressively broad." Political Science Quarterly This book is nothing short of a state-of-the-world address, delivered by a scholar uniquely suited to the task. Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the most prominent social scientists of our time, documents the profound transformations our world is undergoing. With these transformations, he argues, come equally profound changes in how we understand the world. Wallerstein divides his work between an appraisal of significant recent events and a study of the shifts in thought influenced by those events. The book's first half reviews the major happenings of recent decades--the collapse of the Leninist states, the exhaustion of national liberation movements, the rise of East Asia, the challenges to national sovereignty, the dangers to the environment, the debates about national identity, and the marginalization of migrant populations. Wallerstein places these events and trends in the context of the changing modern world-system as a whole and identifies the historical choices they put before us. The second half of the book takes up current issues in the world of knowledge--the vanishing faith in rationality, the scattering of knowledge activities, the denunciation of Eurocentrism, the questioning of the division of knowledge into science and humanities, and the relation of the search for the true and the search for the good. Wallerstein explores how these questions have arisen from larger social transformations, and why the traditional ways of framing such debates have become obstacles to resolving them. The End of the World As We Know It concludes with a crucial analysis of the momentous intellectual challenges to social science as we know it and suggests possible responses to them. Immanuel Wallerstein is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and director of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University. Among his numerous books are The Modern World-System (1974, 1980, 1989), Unthinking Social Science (1991), and After Liberalism (1995).
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cover of Endings: Questions of Memory in Hegel and Heidegger

Endings

Questions of Memory in Hegel and Heidegger

Edited by Rebecca Comay and John McCumber

Northwestern University Press, 1999

In this collection of essays, leading scholars provide a variety of models from which to view the unique relationship between the bodies of thought of Heidegger and Hegel, revealing how these philosophers offer ways of thinking historically that understand such thinking not merely as extensions and elaborations of a given paradigm but as actively engaged in the critical and transformative revisioning of the world.

Beginning at the point where Heidegger encountered Hegel, this volume of provocative essays addresses the respective philosophies of the two men. Leading scholars provide a variety of models from which to view the unique relationship between the bodies of thought of Heidegger and Hegel: bodies of thought that cannot be taken as two objects to be compared, contrasted, and finally evaluated but that must be viewed in dynamic terms, as a relationship in which self-transformations lead to mutual transformations and vice versa.
[more]
cover of Endless Intervals: Cinema, Psychology, and Semiotechnics around 1900

Endless Intervals

Cinema, Psychology, and Semiotechnics around 1900

Jeffrey West Kirkwood

University of Minnesota Press, 2022

Revealing cinema’s place in the coevolution of media technology and the human

Cinema did not die with the digital, it gave rise to it. According to Jeffrey West Kirkwood, the notion that digital technologies replaced analog obscures how the earliest cinema laid the technological and philosophical groundwork for the digital world. In Endless Intervals, he introduces a theory of semiotechnics that explains how discrete intervals of machines came to represent something like a mind—and why they were feared for their challenge to the uniqueness of human intelligence.

Examining histories of early cinematic machines, Kirkwood locates the foundations for a scientific vision of the psyche as well as the information age. He theorizes an epochal shift in the understanding of mechanical stops, breaks, and pauses that demonstrates how cinema engineered an entirely new model of the psyche—a model that was at once mechanical and semiotic, discrete and continuous, physiological and psychological, analog and digital.

Recovering largely forgotten and untranslated texts, Endless Intervals makes the case that cinema, rather than being a technology assaulting the psyche, is in fact the technology that produced the modern psyche. Kirkwood considers the ways machines can create meaning, offering a fascinating theory of how the discontinuous intervals of soulless mechanisms ultimately produced a rich continuous experience of inner life.

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Ends Of Globalization

Mohammed A. Bamyeh

University of Minnesota Press, 2000

A uniquely broad perspective that challenges current ideas about worldwide cultural and political change.

Political and Social Theory/Cultural Studies

A uniquely broad perspective that challenges current ideas about worldwide cultural and political change. An intervention into current debates about globalization, nationalism, imperialism, and culture, this book offers a cogent critique of much of what is being said about globalization, by both the Right and the Left. In doing so, it charts the complex processes of globalization, drawing out their historical and philosophical roots and outlining the connections between cultural, political, and economic life that globalization has made, historically and in our day.The author’s orientation toward political theory and comparative civilizations-a rarity in globalization studies-allows him to detect in specific terms what is most dangerous and opportune in what is happening in the world today. Mohammed A. Bamyeh makes a compelling argument that we are witnessing a process typified by massive disjunctions between political, cultural, and economic logics on a world scale. Bamyeh demonstrates how the disruptions caused by globalization, while they blur our vision and block our rational approaches, also possess the potential to liberate the autonomous and convivial human possibilities and capabilities long shackled by such modernist institutions of governance as the nation-state.Translation Inquiries: University of Minnesota Press
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cover of Ends in Sight: Marx/Fukuyama/Hobsbawm/Anderson

Ends in Sight

Marx/Fukuyama/Hobsbawm/Anderson

Gregory Elliott

Pluto Press, 2008

Following the disappearance of the Soviet Union, scholars across the political spectrum tackled the world-historical significance of the end of communism. This book addresses the balance-sheets of modern political history offered by three writers---Francis Fukuyama, Eric Hobsbawm and Perry Anderson---comparing them with the future projected by Marx in The Communist Manifesto.



Gregory Elliott argues that Marx is central to all three accounts and that, along with the Manifesto, they form a quartet of analyses of the results and prospects of capitalism and socialism, which are of enduring significance for the Left.



Senses of an Ending provides a readable survey of key historical and political thinkers that will appeal to anyone interested in modern political thought.

[more]
cover of Enemies from the East?: V. S. Soloviev on Paganism, Asian Civilizations, and Islam

Enemies from the East?

V. S. Soloviev on Paganism, Asian Civilizations, and Islam

Edited by Vladimir Wozniuk

Northwestern University Press, 2007

As cultural conflicts roil the world, the idea of a “clash of civilizations” has lately taken hold, with commentators from both East and West weighing the religious and political disparities that affect global unity. For all its present currency and urgency, the idea is nothing new.  In various contexts V. S. Soloviev (1853–1900), the most distinguished representative of nineteenth-century Russian religious philosophy, anticipated our current global dilemma by more than a hundred years. These essays, presented together for the first time in English, consider from a number of perspectives how a future clash of cultures between East and West threatens human progress toward the harmonic unity that, for Soloviev, represented the ultimate human telos.

The six essays comprising this book span Soloviev’s publishing career, beginning with “The Mythological Process in Ancient Paganism,” written at the age of twenty, and ending with “Muhammad, His Life and Religious Teaching,” which appeared four years before Soloviev’s death at forty-seven.  Throughout, Soloviev grapples with commonalities and differences apparent in the moral frameworks of civilizations since antiquity; and in religious and cultural practices, from Europe through the Middle East to Asia.   His probing of the sources of religious morality and political authority in human history reinvigorated Russian intellectual interest in the East/West question in his time and still resonates powerfully in our own.
[more]
cover of Enemies of All Humankind: Fictions of Legitimate Violence

Enemies of All Humankind

Fictions of Legitimate Violence

Sonja Schillings

Dartmouth College Press, 2016

Hostis humani generis, meaning “enemy of humankind,” is the legal basis by which Western societies have defined such criminals as pirates, torturers, or terrorists as beyond the pale of civilization. Sonja Schillings argues that the legal fiction designating certain persons or classes of persons as enemies of all humankind does more than characterize them as inherently hostile: it supplies a narrative basis for legitimating violence in the name of the state. The book draws attention to a century-old narrative pattern that not only underlies the legal category of enemies of the people, but more generally informs interpretations of imperial expansion, protest against structural oppression, and the transformation of institutions as “legitimate” interventions on behalf of civilized society. Schillings traces the Anglo-American interpretive history of the concept, which she sees as crucial to understanding US history, in particular with regard to the frontier, race relations, and the war on terror.
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cover of Energy Culture: Art and Theory on Oil and Beyond

Energy Culture

Art and Theory on Oil and Beyond

Imre Szeman

West Virginia University Press, 2019

Energy Culture is a provocative book about oil’s firm grip on our politics and everyday lives. It brings together essays and artwork produced in a collaborative environment to stimulate new ways of thinking and to achieve a more just and sustainable world.

The original work collected in Energy Culture creatively engages energy as a social form through lively arguments and artistic research organized around three vectors of inquiry. The first maps how fossil fuels became, and continue to be, embedded in North American society, from the ideology of tar sands reclamation projects to dreams of fiber optic cables running through the Northwest Passage. The second comprises creative and artistic responses to the dominance of fossil fuels in everyday life and to the challenge of realizing new energy cultures. The final section addresses the conceptual and political challenges posed by energy transition and calls into question established views on energy. Its contributions caution against solar capitalism, explore the politics of sabotage, and imagine an energy efficient transportation system called “the switch.” Imbued with a sense of urgency and hope, Energy Culture exposes the deep imbrications of energy and culture while pointing provocatively to ways of thinking and living otherwise.

[more]
cover of Engaged Anthropology: Research Essays on North American Archaeology, Ethnobotany, and Museology

Engaged Anthropology

Research Essays on North American Archaeology, Ethnobotany, and Museology

Edited by Michelle Hegmon and B. Sunday Eiselt

University of Michigan Press, 2005

This collection of essays is based on the 2005 Society for American Archaeology symposium and presents research that epitomizes Richard I. Ford’s approach of engaged anthropology. This transdisciplinary approach integrates archaeological research with perspectives from ethnography, history, and ecology, and engages the anthropologist with Native partners and with socio-natural landscapes. Research papers largely focus on the U.S. Southwest, but also consider other areas of North America, issues related to museums collections, and indigenous approaches to materials research.
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cover of Engaged Observer: Anthropology, Advocacy, and Activism

Engaged Observer

Anthropology, Advocacy, and Activism

Sanford, Victoria

Rutgers University Press, 2006

Anthropology has long been associated with an ethos of “engagement.” The field’s core methods and practices involve long-term interpersonal contact between researchers and their study participants, giving major research topics in the field a distinctively human face. Can research findings be authentic and objective? Are anthropologists able to use their data to aid the participants of their study, and is that aid always welcome?

In Engaged Observer, Victoria Sanford and Asale Angel-Ajani bring together an international array of scholars who have been embedded in some of the most conflict-ridden and dangerous zones in the world to reflect on the role and responsibility of anthropological inquiry.  They explore issues of truth and objectivity, the role of the academic, the politics of memory, and the impact of race, gender, and social position on the research process. Through ethnographic case studies, they offer models for conducting engaged research and illustrate the contradictions and challenges of doing so.

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cover of Engaging Ambience: Visual and Multisensory Methodologies and Rhetorical Theory

Engaging Ambience

Visual and Multisensory Methodologies and Rhetorical Theory

Brian McNely

Utah State University Press, 2024

Engaging Ambience is an in-depth exploration of contemporary rhetorical theory, drawing from rich traditions of visual and sensory research. It is the first book to develop comprehensive empirical approaches to ambient rhetoric and the first to offer systematic approaches to visual research in studies of rhetoric and writing. These approaches address the complexities of everyday life and offer practical advice for understanding the factors that shape individuals and communities, how they understand one another, and the kind of world they envision.
 
By articulating theoretically sound methodologies and methods for the empirical study of rhetoric conceived as originary, immanent, and enveloping, Brian McNely contributes a methodological perspective that furthers new materialist theories of rhetoric. McNely demonstrates how scholars’ emergent theories of rhetoric call for new methodologies that can extend their reach, and in the process, he proposes a new conception of visual rhetoric. Engaging Ambience delineates methodologies and methods that help researchers in rhetoric and writing studies discover the ambient environments that condition and support everyday communication in all its forms.
 
Engaging Ambiencedetails and demonstrates visual and multisensory methodologies and methods for exploring the wondrous complexity of everyday communication. It will appeal to scholars and students of rhetorical theory, visual and multisensory rhetorics, and composition and writing studies.
 
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Engaging Mbembe

Sindre Bandstad and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen, editors. Foreword by Arjun Appadurai.

Duke University Press, 2027

Over the course of a career spanning forty years, the Cameroonian-born political scientist, historian, and philosopher Achille Mbembe has become the most widely read and cited African intellectual of our times. In this edited volume, Sindre Bangstad and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen invite distinguished and emergent scholars from Africa and the West to engage critically with Mbembe’s body of work. Drawing from the thinkers in a continuous constructive and generative dialogue with Mbembe's scholarship and wider Black Atlantic intellectual traditions, the contributors demonstrate the impacts and influence of Mbembe's contributions across postcolonial, decolonial, and political thought. Including a foreword by Arjun Appadurai, this collection examines Mbembe’s refusal to be categorized and his regenerative approach to humanity to better understand the legacy of his intellectual work.
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cover of Enigmas of Sacrifice: A Critique of Joseph M. Plunkett and the Dublin Insurrection of 1916

Enigmas of Sacrifice

A Critique of Joseph M. Plunkett and the Dublin Insurrection of 1916

W. J. Mc Cormack

Michigan State University Press, 2016

Enigmas of Sacrifice: A Critique of Joseph M. Plunkett and the Dublin Insurrection of 1916 is the first critical study of the religious poet and militarist Joseph M. Plunkett, who was executed with the other leaders of the Dublin insurrection of 1916. Through Plunkett the author gains access to areas of nationalist thought that were more often assumed or repressed than publicly formulated. In this eye-opening book, W. J. Mc Cormack explores and analyzes Plunkett’s brief life, work, and influence, beginning with his wealthy but dysfunctional family, irregular Jesuit education, and self-canceling sexuality. Mc Cormack continues through Plunkett’s active phase when amateur theatricals and a magazine editorship brought him into the emergent neonationalist discourse of early twentieth-century Ireland. Finally, the author arrives at Holy Week 1916, when Plunkett masterminded the forgery of official documentation in order to provoke and justify the insurrection he planned. Mc Cormack analyzes Plunkett’s significant texts and provides context through critical perspectives on his milieu. Enigmas of Sacrifice is unique in its effort to understand a major figure of Irish nationalism in terms that reach beyond political identity.
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cover of Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens

Enlightenment Biopolitics

A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens

William Max Nelson

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A wide-ranging history tracing the birth of biopolitics in Enlightenment thought and its aftermath.

In Enlightenment Biopolitics, historian William Max Nelson pursues the ambitious task of tracing the context in which biopolitical thought emerged and circulated. He locates that context in the Enlightenment when emancipatory ideals sat alongside the horrors of colonialism, slavery, and race-based discrimination. In fact, these did not just coexist, Nelson argues; they were actually mutually constitutive of Enlightenment ideals.

In this book, Nelson focuses on Enlightenment-era visions of eugenics (including proposals to establish programs of selective breeding), forms of penal slavery, and spurious biological arguments about the supposed inferiority of particular groups. The Enlightenment, he shows, was rife with efforts to shape, harness, and “organize” the minds and especially the bodies of subjects and citizens. In his reading of the birth of biopolitics and its transformations, Nelson examines the shocking conceptual and practical connections between inclusion and exclusion, equality and inequality, rights and race, and the supposed “improvement of the human species” and practices of dehumanization.
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Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture

Rey Chow

Duke University Press, 2012

How might the pornographic be associated with Brecht's and Benjamin's media theories? How are Foucault's and Deleuze's writings on visibilities "postcolonial"? What happens when Rancière's discussions of art are juxtaposed with cultural anthropology? What does a story by Lao She about collecting reveal about political collectivism in modern China? How does Girard's notion of mimetic violence speak to identity politics? How might Arendt's and Derrida's reflections on forgiveness be supplemented by a film by Lee Chang-dong? What can Akira Kurosawa's films about Japan say about American Studies? How is Asia framed transnationally, with what consequences for those who self-identify as Asian?

These questions are dispersively heterologous yet mutually implicated. This paradoxical character of their discursive relations is what Rey Chow intends with the word "entanglements," by which she means, first, an enmeshment of topics: the mediatized image in modernist reflexivity; captivation and identification; victimhood; the place of East Asia in globalized Western academic study. Beyond enmeshment, she asks, can entanglements be phenomena that are not defined by affinity or proximity? Might entanglements be about partition and disparity rather than about conjunction and similarity?
Across medial forms (including theater, film, narrative, digitization, and photographic art), and against more popular trends of declaring things and people to be in flux, Chow proposes conceptual frames that foreground instead aesthetic, ontological, and sentient experiences of force, dominance, submission, fidelity, antagonism, masochism, letting-go, and the attraction to self-annihilation. Boundary, trap, capture, captivation, sacrifice, and mimesis: these riveting terms serve as analytic pressure points in her readings, articulating perversity, madness, and terror to pursuits of freedom.

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Enthusiasm And Divine Madness

Josef Pieper

St. Augustine's Press, 1999

Plato's famous dialogue, the Phaedrus, was variously subtitled in antiquity: "On Beauty," "On Love," "On the Psyche." It is also concerned with the art of rhetoric, of thought and communication.

Pieper gives interpretation of the dialogue. Leaving the more recondite scholarly preoccupations aside, he concentrates on the content, bringing the actual situation in the dialogue – Athens and its intellectuals engaged in spirited debate – alive. Equally alive is the discussion of ideas, which are brought to bear on contemporary experience and made to prove the perennial validity of Socratic wisdom, and its power to excite the mind. The main thesis – that in poetry and in love man is "beside himself," that is, divinely inspired - is discussed with reference to modern poets, novelists, and modern psychology.
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Entre Nous

Between the World Cup and Me

Grant Farred

Duke University Press, 2019

In Entre Nous Grant Farred examines the careers of international football stars Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez, along with his own experience playing for an amateur township team in apartheid South Africa, to theorize the relationship between sports and the intertwined experiences of relation, separation, and belonging. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy's concept of relation and Heideggerian ontology, Farred outlines how various relationships—the significantly different relationships Messi has with his club team FC Barcelona and the Argentine national team; Farred's shifting modes of relation as he moved between his South African team and his Princeton graduate student team; and Suarez's deep bond with Uruguay's national team coach Oscar Tabarez—demonstrate the ways the politics of relation both exist within and transcend sports. Farred demonstrates that approaching sports philosophically offers particularly insightful means of understanding the nature of being in the world, thereby opening new paths for exploring how the self is constituted in its relation to the other.
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Enumerations

Data and Literary Study

Andrew Piper

University of Chicago Press, 2018

For well over a century, academic disciplines have studied human behavior using quantitative information. Until recently, however, the humanities have remained largely immune to the use of data—or vigorously resisted it. Thanks to new developments in computer science and natural language processing, literary scholars have embraced the quantitative study of literary works and have helped make Digital Humanities a rapidly growing field. But these developments raise a fundamental, and as yet unanswered question: what is the meaning of literary quantity?
          In Enumerations, Andrew Piper answers that question across a variety of domains fundamental to the study of literature. He focuses on the elementary particles of literature, from the role of punctuation in poetry, the matter of plot in novels, the study of topoi, and the behavior of characters, to the nature of fictional language and the shape of a poet’s career. How does quantity affect our understanding of these categories? What happens when we look at 3,388,230 punctuation marks, 1.4 billion words, or 650,000 fictional characters? Does this change how we think about poetry, the novel, fictionality, character, the commonplace, or the writer’s career? In the course of answering such questions, Piper introduces readers to the analytical building blocks of computational text analysis and brings them to bear on fundamental concerns of literary scholarship. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Digital Humanities and the future of literary study.
 
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cover of Environmental Ethics in the Midwest: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Environmental Ethics in the Midwest

Interdisciplinary Approaches

Ian Smith

Michigan State University Press, 2022

The American Midwest is environmentally rich and complex, home to some of the world’s largest freshwater lakes and streams as well as cities, prairies, forests, and farmlands. Nevertheless, the unique environmental opportunities and challenges the region presents have been left underappreciated and underexplored by environmental ethicists. The close integration of the natural and built environments of the Midwest prompts interdisciplinary inquiry in a particularly pointed way. To remedy the lack of scholarly attention to this area, this volume attends to the way that the broad concerns of environmental ethics manifest in the region. These eight original essays cover a wide range of topics, including agrarian ethics and Stoicism; the Dakota access pipeline and Indigenous women’s activism; philosophy of law and species classification; environmental justice and the Flint water crisis; hog farming and antimicrobial drug resistance; science education standards and climate change education; virtue ethics and ecological restoration; environmental pragmatism and the Clean Water Act; and more. Each accessibly written chapter brings multidisciplinary complexity to bear on this complex region. The authors include philosophers working in environmental ethics and other subfields of philosophy, and together with scholars in fields such as environmental sociology, American Indian studies, and environmental studies, they provide a fresh and necessary perspective on the American Midwest.
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Epicurus and His Philosophy

Norman Wentworth DeWitt

University of Minnesota Press, 1954

Epicurus and His Philosophy was first published in 1954. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In this volume, the first comprehensive book in English about Epicurus, existing data on the life of the ancient philosopher is related to the development of his doctrine. The result is a fascinating account that challenges traditional theories and interpretations of Epicurean philosophy. Professor DeWitt demonstrates the fallacy of centuries of abuse of Epicurus and the resulting distortion of most discussions of Epicureanism that appear in standard philosophical works. Of major significance to students of philosophy and theology are the findings that show the importance of Epicureanism as a source of numerous Christian beliefs.

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cover of Epicurus in Lycia: The Second-Century World of Diogenes of Oenoanda

Epicurus in Lycia

The Second-Century World of Diogenes of Oenoanda

Pamela Gordon

University of Michigan Press, 1996

Brings to life the controversial philosophers Diogenes and Epicurus
[more]
cover of Epidemic Subjects - Radical Ontology

Epidemic Subjects - Radical Ontology

Edited by Elisabeth von Samsonow

Diaphanes, 2016

Modern philosophy continues to grapple with the idea of subjectivity—and, as the concept of subjectivity has consequently been repeatedly refined and redefined, the struggle has spread to the ways we conceive of sovereignty, collectivity, nationality, and identity as a result. Yet, in the absence of an authoritative account of these central philosophical concepts, exciting new ways of thinking have emerged which continue to develop and evolve.
           
Epidemic Subjects—Radical Ontology brings together a renowned team of contributors, including  Levi Bryant, Angela Melitopoulos, and Susan Stryker, who together forge a radically inclusive definition of subjectivity. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the “girl” as a heuristic device for examining modern society and its foundations, they tie together recent trends in philosophy and offer a concrete way forward from the conception of the “thing” or “object” privileged by new materialism, speculative realism, and other theories of subjectivity.
[more]
cover of Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor

Epigenetic Landscapes

Drawings as Metaphor

Susan Merrill Squier

Duke University Press, 2017

Devised in the 1940s by the biologist C. H. Waddington, the epigenetic landscape is a metaphor for how gene regulation modulates cellular development. As a scientific model, it fell out of use in the late 1960s but returned at the beginning of the twenty-first century with the advent of big-data genomic research because of its utility among scientists across the life sciences to think more creatively about and to discuss genetics. In Epigenetic Landscapes Susan Merrill Squier follows the model’s cultural trail, from its first visualization by the artist John Piper to its use beyond science. Squier examines three cases in which the metaphor has been imaginatively deployed to illustrate complex systems that link scientific and cultural practices: graphic medicine, landscape architecture, and bioArt. Challenging reductive understandings of epigenetics, Squier boldly reclaims the broader significance of the epigenetic landscape as a figure at the nexus of art, design, and science.
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Epistemologies of Aesthetics

Dieter Mersch

Diaphanes, 2015

The ideas of “art as research” and ”research as art” have risen over the past two decades as important critical focuses for the philosophy of media, aesthetics, and art. Of particular interest is how the methodologies of art and science might be merged to create a better conceptual understanding of art-based research.
           
In Epistemologies of Aesthetics, Dieter Mersch deconstructs and displaces the terminology that typically accompanies the question of the relationship between art and scientific truth. Identifying artistic practices as modes of thought that do not make use of language in a way that can easily be translated into scientific discourse, Mersch advocate for an aesthetic mode of thought beyond the “linguistic turn,” a way of thinking that cannot be substituted by any other disciplinary system. A sophisticated reflection on the epistemological status of the aesthetic by one of Germany’s leading philosophers, Epistemologies of Aesthetics will be of great interest within this growing field of study.
[more]
cover of Epistemology and Inference

Epistemology and Inference

Henry E. Kyburg, Jr.

University of Minnesota Press, 1983

Epistemology and Inference was first published in 1983. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Henry Kyburg has developed an original and important perspective on probabilistic and statistical inference. Unlike much contemporary writing by philosophers on these topics, Kyburg's work is informed by issues that have arisen in statistical theory and practice as well as issues familiar to professional philosophers. In two major books and many articles, Kyberg has elaborated his technical proposals and explained their ramifications for epistemology, decision-making, and scientific inquiry. In this collection of published and unpublished essays, Kyburg presents his novel ideas and their applications in a manner that makes them accessible to philosophers and provides specialists in probability and induction with a concise exposition of his system.

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cover of Epoché as a Guideline to (Inter)Subjectivity: On the Extent of Husserl’s Methodological Influence on Levinas and Sartre

Epoché as a Guideline to (Inter)Subjectivity

On the Extent of Husserl’s Methodological Influence on Levinas and Sartre

Josef Matoušek

Karolinum Press, 2026

Offers a comparative study of Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Paul Sartre through the lens of their engagement with Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. 

Focusing on the notions of epoché, phenomenological reduction, intentionality, and the cogito, Josef Matoušek traces how both Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Paul Sartre appropriate and transform Husserl’s methodological framework in developing their respective accounts of subjectivity, transcendence, and the encounter with the Other. Building on and critically extending Kris Sealey’s influential comparison of both thinkers, Epoché as a Guideline to (Inter)Subjectivity argues that despite their significant philosophical differences, both remain deeply indebted to Husserl’s project and that their mature accounts of le visage and le regard can be better understood through this shared phenomenological background.

[more]
cover of Equal Freedom

Equal Freedom

Stephen Darwall, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1995

"Egalitarian" and "libertarian" are frequently seen as opposing political labels. These two views and their oppositions are the topic of this collection of important essays by an exceptionally distinguished group of thinkers.This collection of essays can be read as a critique of libertarianism. A libertarian, in contemporary discussion, is one who supports no more than a minimal state--a government that protects individuals from assault, murder, theft, and other invasions of their "Lockean" rights, but otherwise does not interfere with voluntary economic or personal activity. "Egalitarian," on the other hand, generally refers to someone who is prepared to favor such interference if it is necessary to reduce substantial inequalities of certain kinds and if, perhaps, it is democratically authorized.Several of the essays, those of John Rawls, T. M. Scanlon, G. A. Cohen, and Ronald Dworkin, advance different versions of this liberal egalitarian line of argument. Each maintains that the ideas of freedom and equality enter into moral and political philosophy at a more fundamental level than the substantive, rights-determining norms on which libertarianism makes its stand. Each proposes a distinctive vision of this fundamental role. And each argues, on this basis, for egalitarian moral or political principles. Amartya Sen's essay can also be placed within a broadly liberal egalitarian tradition, although it is less an argument for substantive equality (and against libertarianism) than a discussion of what form a reasonable egalitarianism might take. Finally, Quentin Skinner directly criticizes libertarianism in ways that arguably tend to support egalitarianism, although this is not his primary aim.This book offers deep thinking across one of the main fissures of current political debate. It will thus be of interest to all with a serious interest in the fundamentals of political beliefs and action.
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cover of Equaliberty: Political Essays

Equaliberty

Political Essays

Étienne Balibar

Duke University Press, 2014

First published in French in 2010, Equaliberty brings together essays by Étienne Balibar, one of the preeminent political theorists of our time. The book is organized around equaliberty, a term coined by Balibar to connote the tension between the two ideals of modern democracy: equality (social rights and political representation) and liberty (the freedom citizens have to contest the social contract). He finds the tension between these different kinds of rights to be ingrained in the constitution of the modern nation-state and the contemporary welfare state. At the same time, he seeks to keep rights discourse open, eschewing natural entitlements in favor of a deterritorialized citizenship that could be expanded and invented anew in the age of globalization. Deeply engaged with other thinkers, including Arendt, Rancière, and Laclau, he posits a theory of the polity based on social relations. In Equaliberty Balibar brings both the continental and analytic philosophical traditions to bear on the conflicted relations between humanity and citizenship.
[more]