Cathy Gere
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Maggie M. Cao
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Richard Neer
University of Chicago Press, 2025

Craig Staff
Intellect Books, 2020
This compelling new study considers contemporary painting’s relationship with time and with events, ideas, and paintings from the past. Following French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s determination of painting as entailing a series of temporal sites, Painting, History and Meaning examines works that tendentiously engage with aspects and events derived from the past. Craig Staff explores art that has encompassed strategies of excavation, anachronism, and memorialization, examining key works by artists including Dana Schutz, Tomma Abts, Gerhard Richter, Marlene Dumas, Johannes Phokela, and Taus Makhacheva. A scholarly examination of contemporary painting through an innovative interdisciplinary research methodology, this fascinating study illuminates the complex relationship between art and history.
Brian Massumi
Duke University Press, 2021
James Pilgrim
University of Chicago Press, 2026
David Evett
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2020
Annie Bourneuf
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Charles E. Reagan
University of Chicago Press, 1996

John O'Neill
Northwestern University Press, 1970
Phillip E. Wegner
Northwestern University Press, 2014
For a half century, the American intellectual Fredric Jameson has been a driving force in literary and cultural theory. In Periodizing Jameson, Phillip E. Wegner builds upon Jameson’s unique dialectical method to demonstrate the value of Jameson’s tools—periodization, the fourfold hermeneutic, and the Greimasian semiotic square, among others—and to develop virtuoso readings of Jameson’s own work and the history of the contemporary American university in which it unfolds.
Wegner shows how Jameson’s work intervenes in particular social, cultural, and political situations, using his scholarship both to develop original explorations of nineteenth-century fiction, popular films, and other promiment theorists, and to examine the changing fortunes of theory itself. In this way, Periodizing Jameson casts new light on the potential of and challenges to humanist intellectual work in the present.
Jacques Derrida
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Grace Lavery
Duke University Press, 2026
Panivong Norindr
Duke University Press, 1996
Robert Denoon Cumming
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Robert Denoon Cumming
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Robert Denoon Cumming
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Robert Denoon Cumming
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Aron Gurwitsch
Northwestern University Press, 1974
Edited by Danielle Smotherman Bennett, Guy Hedreen, SeungJung Kim, and Carolyn Laferrière
University of Wisconsin Press, 2026
Most people today encounter ancient Greek vases as static, untouchable artifacts safely out of reach behind glass, in the quiet of a museum gallery. Once, however, these vessels were also useful objects, made to be held, filled, and generally used in a variety of settings, from the ritual to the quotidian. This volume considers these ancient vases together with the theoretical frameworks developed by pioneers of phenomenology such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl, helping us encounter Greek vases as they once were. The principles of phenomenology require that we understand objects as active participants in shaping the manner in which humans experience the world. A phenomenological perspective allows us to see how the function and use of Greek vases shaped both their visual appearance and the perceptual experience of them—as well as our continued understanding of them today—while taking into account multisensory perspectives. With this alternative approach to the study of classical pottery, the authors offer new and illuminating insights not just into the objects in question but also into ancient Greek culture and life more broadly.
David Carr
Northwestern University Press, 2009
Maurice Natanson
Northwestern University Press, 1973
Herbert Spiegelberg
Northwestern University Press, 1972
Phenomenology in Psychology and Psychiatry is a historical introduction to phenomenology in psychology working from the general to the details of the subject.

Gary Brent Madison
Ohio University Press, 1981
The first study of its kind to appear in English, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty is a sustained ontological reading of Merleau-Ponty which traces the evolution of his philosophy of being from his early work to his late, unfinished manuscripts and working notes. Merleau-Ponty, who contributed greatly to the theoretical foundations of hermeneutics, is here approached hermeneutically.
Most commentators are agreed that towards the end Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy underwent a strange and interesting mutation. The exact nature of this mutation or conceptual shift is what this study seeks to disclose. Thus, although Madison proceeds in a generally progressive, chronological fashion, examining Merleau-Ponty’s major works in the order of their composition, his reading is ultmately regressive in that Merleau-Ponty’s earlier works are viewed in the light of the new and enigmatic ontological orientation which makes its appearance in his later work. The merit of this approach is that, as Paul Ricoeur has remarked, it enables the author to expose the “anticipatory, hollowed-out presence” of Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy “in the difficulties of his early phenomenology,” such that “the unifying intention between his first philosophy of meaning and the body and the late, more ontological philosophy is made manifest.”
This book begins with a detailed study of Merleau-Ponty’s two major early works, The Structure of BehaviorThe Phenomenology of Perception. In the following three chapters, Madison traces the development of Merleau-Ponty’s thought from the beginning to the end of his philosophical career in regard to three topics of special concern to the French phenomenologist: painting, language, philosophy. In the final chapter, he is concerned to articulate, as much as the unfinished state of Merleau-Ponty’s final work allows, the unspoken thought of this work and of The Visible and Invisible in particular. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “wild being” and his attempt to work out an “indirect” or “negative” ontology are thoroughly analyzed.
In the end the reader will see that through his self-criticism and the development in his own phenomenology Merleau-Ponty has brought phenomenology itself to its limits and to the point where it must transcend itself as a philosophy of consciousness in the Husserlian sense if it is to remain faithful to Husserl’s own goal of bringing “experience to the full expression of its own meaning.” Because Madison submits Merleau-Ponty to the same kind of interpretive retrieval as the latter did with Husserl, Roger Cailloise has said of this “clear and very complete book” that it “goes will beyond a simple exposition and merits being read as an original work.”
Alfred Schutz
Northwestern University Press, 1967
J.N. Mohanty
Northwestern University Press, 1997

Edited by Leonard Lawlor
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.
Hugh J. Silverman
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Larry Witham
University Press of New England, 2013
Suzanne Preston Blier
Duke University Press, 2019
Leo Steinberg
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Robert Sokolowski
Catholic University of America Press, 2022
Stephanie O'Rourke
University of Chicago Press, 2025
Ghassan Hage
Duke University Press, 2025
Mitchell B. Merback
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Robert E. Wood
Ohio University Press, 2000
Examining select high points in the speculative tradition from Plato and Aristotle through the Middle Ages and German tradition to Dewey and Heidegger, Placing Aesthetics seeks to locate the aesthetic concern within the larger framework of each thinker’s philosophy.
In Professor Robert Wood’s study, aesthetics is not peripheral but rather central to the speculative tradition and to human existence as such. In Dewey’s terms, aesthetics is “experience in its integrity.” Its personal ground is in “the heart,” which is the dispositional ground formed by genetic, cultural , and personal historical factors by which we are spontaneously moved and, in turn, are inclined to move, both practically and theoretically, in certain directions.
Prepared for use by the student as well as the philosopher, Placing Aesthetics aims to recover the fullness of humanness within a sense of the fullness of encompassing Being. It attempts to overcome the splitting of thought, even in philosophy, into exclusive specializations and the fracturing of life itself into theoretical, practical, and emotive dimensions.
Erika Mary Boeckeler
University of Iowa Press, 2017
James Housefield
Dartmouth College Press, 2016
Rachel Eisendrath
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Edited by Peter Fenves, Kevin McLaughlin, and Marc Redfield
Northwestern University Press, 2016
Halina Goldberg
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Roland Boer
Duke University Press, 2009
Boer elaborates a theory of political myth in dialogue with Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Alain Badiou, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Žižek. Through close readings of well-known biblical stories he then scrutinizes the nature of political myth in light of feminism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. Turning to contemporary politics, he examines the statements of prominent American and Australian politicians to show how the stories of Creation, conquest, Paradise, and the Promised Land have been distorted into a fantasy of Israel as a perpetual state in the making and a land in need of protection. Boer explains how this fantasy of Israel shapes U.S. and Australian foreign and domestic policies, and he highlights the links between it and the fantasy of unfettered global capitalism. Contending that political myths have repressed dimensions which if exposed undermine the myths’ authority, Boer urges the Left to expose the weakness in the Right’s mythos. He suggests that the Left make clear what the world would look like were the dream of unconstrained capitalism to be realized.
Dingxin Zhao
University of Chicago Press, 2026
Susan M. Wager
University of Delaware Press, 2027
Pompadour's Medium reveals the depth of patron, amateur artist, and royal mistress Madame de Pompadour's contributions to the visual arts, long dismissed as superficial and trivial. Her artistic activities centered on an innovative exploration of the relationships between painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts at a moment when advances in reproductive printmaking threatened to flatten the differences between individual mediums. Eighteenth-century France experienced an unprecedented surge in the circulation of images. Increasingly faithful and affordable reproductive prints introduced works of art to ever-widening audiences, while a culture of reproduction was simultaneously thriving at the highest end of the artistic and economic spectrum—in luxury media, such as ceramics, textiles, and metalwork. This book recovers the pivotal role of luxury reproduction in Pompadour’s artistic endeavors, and her essential role in cultivating the intermedial approach of her frequent collaborator, painter François Boucher, who tended to think between media. It is only by restoring the centrality of reproductive media in this artist-patron relationship that we can understand the magnitude of Pompadour’s and Boucher’s contributions to the history of modern art.

Hiroko Ikegami
University of Chicago Press, 2027
How Pop artists confronted the legacies of modern Empire of Japan and post-1945 American imperialism from the 1960s to the present.
Looking at a pivotal period spanning the 1960s to the present, Hiroko Ikegami explores how artists in Japan, Okinawa, and the United States have adopted Pop strategies to critique legacies of imperialism.
Ikegami focuses on locales—Tokyo, Okinawa, Minidoka, and New York—that were deeply impacted by the complex relationship between the Japanese and American empires and considers artists across different situations and generations. The book begins with Tokyo Pop artists and graphic designers, including Shinohara Ushio and Tanaami Keiichi, who critically parodied American Pop during the long 1960s. It then turns to Okinawa, where Tom Max probed Okinawans’ convoluted reality regarding the American Occupation and the Vietnam War. Artists in the second half of the volume confronted legacies of the Asia-Pacific War as a historical condition of the present. Roger Shimomura, the third-generation Japanese American who had been incarcerated in the Minidoka camp as a child, dealt with the subject by appropriating motifs of ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Takashi Murakami, now a global art star, created otaku-inspired art and capitalized on his country’s experience of the atomic bombs in promoting his “Superflat” enterprise. The book concludes with a new generation of artists protesting repercussions of empire in the twenty-first century. This is the first study to treat artists of post-1945 Japan, Okinawa, and the US diaspora in a single volume as mutually independent yet interrelated, using Pop’s criticality as a connecting thread.
Andreas Bandak and Daniel M. Knight, editors
Duke University Press, 2024
Edited by Margaret Hutchison and Steven Trout
University of Alabama Press, 2020
Jacques Derrida
University of Chicago Press, 1982
Bo Earle
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
Steve Baker
Reaktion Books, 2000