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283 books match the query 'Phenomenology' and 16 start with s

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Sade My Neighbor

Pierre Klossowski

Northwestern University Press, 1991

Enlightenment ideals of a society rooted in liberationist reason and morality were trampled in the wake of the savagery of the Second World War. That era's union of cold technology and ancient hatreds gave rise to a dark, alternative reason—an ethic that was value-free and indifferent with regard to virtue and vice, freedom, and slavery. In a world where "the unthinkable" had become reality, it is small wonder that theorists would turn to the writings of a man whose eighteenth-century imagination preceded twentieth-century history in its unbridled exploration of viciousness, perversion, and monstrosity: the Marquis de Sade.

Klossowski was one of the first philosophers in postwar Europe to ask whether Sade's reason, although aberrant and perverted to evil passions, could be taken seriously. Klossowski's seminal work inspired virtually all subsequent study of Sadean thought, including that of de Beauvoir, Deleuze, Derrida, Bataille, Blanchot, Paulhan, and Lacan.

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Saying What We Mean

Implicit Precision and the Responsive Order

Selected Works by Eugene T. Gendlin, Edited by Edward S. Casey and Donata M. Schoeller; Foreword by Edward S. Casey

Northwestern University Press, 2018

The first collection of Eugene T. Gendlin’s groundbreaking essays in philosophical psychology, Saying What We Mean casts familiar areas of human experience, such as language and feeling, in a radically different light. Instead of the familiar scientific emphasis on what is conceptually explicit, Gendlin shows that the implicit also comprises a structure that can be made available for recognition and analysis.

Developing the traditions of phenomenology, existentialism, and pragmatism, Gendlin forges a new path that synthesizes contemporary evolutionary theory, cognitive psychology, and philosophical linguistics.

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Selected Philosophical Essays

Max Scheler

Northwestern University Press, 1973

Included are essays in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophical psychology by one of the most important twentieth-century continental philosophers.

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Self-Awareness and Alterity

A Phenomenological Investigation

Dan Zahavi

Northwestern University Press, 1999

Winner of the 2000 The Edward Goodwin Ballard Prize in Phenomenology

In the rigorous and highly original Self-Awareness and Alterity, Dan Zahavi provides a sustained argument that phenomenology, especially in its Husserlian version, can contribute something decisive to the analysis of self-awareness. Taking on recent discussions within both analytical philosophy (Shoemaker, Castaneda, Nagel) and contemporary German philosophy (Henrich, Frank, Tugendhat), Zahavi argues that the phenomenological tradition has much more to offer when it comes to the problem of self-awareness than is normally assumed. As a contribution to the current philosophical debate concerning self-awareness, the book presents a comprehensive reconstruction of Husserl's theory of pre-reflective self-awareness, thereby criticizing a number of prevalent interpretations and a systematic discussion of a number of phenomenological insights related to this issue, including analyses of the temporal, intentional, reflexive, bodily, and social nature of the self.

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Self-Awareness and Alterity

A Phenomenological Investigation

Dan Zahavi

Northwestern University Press, 2020

In the rigorous and highly original Self-Awareness and Alterity, Dan Zahavi provides a sustained argument that phenomenology, especially in its Husserlian version, can make a decisive contribution to discussions of self-awareness. Engaging with debates within both analytic philosophy (Elizabeth Anscombe, John Perry, Sydney Shoemaker, Héctor-Neri Castañeda, David Rosenthal) and contemporary German philosophy (Dieter Henrich, Manfred Frank, Ernst Tugendhat), Zahavi argues that the phenomenological tradition has much more to offer when it comes to the problem of self-awareness than is normally assumed.

As a contribution to the current philosophical debate concerning self-awareness, the book presents a comprehensive reconstruction of Husserl’s theory of pre-reflective self-awareness, thereby criticizing a number of prevalent interpretations. In addition, Zahavi also offers a systematic discussion of a number of phenomenological insights related to the issue of self-awareness, including analyses of the temporal, intentional, reflexive, bodily, and social nature of the self.

The new edition of this prize-winning book has been updated and revised, and all quotations have been translated into English. It also contains a new preface in which Zahavi traces the developments of the debates around self-awareness over the last twenty years and situates this book in the context of his subsequent work.

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Self-Relation

A Phenomenology of Ambiguity

Ellie Anderson

Northwestern University Press, 2027

A perceptive new look at the perennial subject of selfhood

In the wake of the so-called death of the subject, some philosophers within or adjacent to phenomenology have come to embrace the idea that the self does indeed exist but is multiplicitous in nature. Many today appeal to the idea that the self is therefore relational: that the self exists only in and through its relations to others. Though this is true, there is also more to the relationality of the self than the fact that we are always relating to what is beyond ourselves. In this book, Ellie Anderson argues that the defining feature of the self is that it is self-relating. That is, the self has identity by virtue of its own self-relationality.

Anderson develops a relational account of the self, drawing on the French philosophical tradition of existential phenomenology—in particular, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simone de Beauvoir. Anderson contends that a throughline in their work is an emergent account of self-relation, which both provides a phenomenologically grounded alternative to some of the more popular views of the self today and highlights the ethical character of the self. Through novel approaches to the topics of self-objectification, bad faith, self-affection, and responsibility, Self-Relation develops an account of the self as having a peculiar kind of identity—ipseity—that is grounded in the structure of consciousness, and a selfhood that not only accommodates but also requires difference.

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Sense and Non-Sense

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Northwestern University Press, 1992

Written between 1945 and 1947, the essays in Sense and Non-Sense provide an excellent introduction to Merleau-Ponty's thought. They summarize his previous insights and exhibit their widest range of application-in aesthetics, ethics, politics, and the sciences of man. Each essay opens new perspectives to man's search for reason.

The first part of Sense and Non-Sense, "Arts," is concerned with Merleau-Ponty's concepts of perception, which were advanced in his major philosophical treatise, Phenomenology of Perception. Here the analysis is focused and enriched in descriptions of the perceptual world of Cezanne, the encounter with the Other as expressed in the novels of Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre, and the gestalt quality of experience brought out in the film art form. In the second part, "Ideas," Merleau-Ponty shows how the categories of the phenomenology of perception can be understood as an outgrowth of the behavioral sciences and how a model of existence based on perception sensitizes us to the insights and limitations of previous philosophies and suggests constructive criticisms of contemporary philosophy. The third part, "Politics," clarifies the political dilemmas facing intellectuals in postwar France.

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Sense and Uncertainty

A Phenomenology of Rational Actions in an Uncertain World

Esteban Marín-Ávila

Ohio University Press, 2025

Sense and Uncertainty presents a phenomenological account of the possibility of rational action amid the challenges posed by violence, volatile conditions, uncertain outcomes, and social dependence. The book asks us to consider the following:

We are often forced through violence to do things that do not make sense for us except to avoid retaliations, punishments, or the various evils that others might inflict on us.
We inhabit a world that escapes our control. This involves living in uncertainty concerning the things that we might suffer and do, that is, the things that might happen to us and the results of our actions.
We are dependent on others and collaborate with them in ways that make it impossible to fully understand the sense of our own actions and practical intentions.

Rationality involves insightful thinking about the world and our emotional responses to it, something we do in our everyday lives, whether consciously or without awareness. Sense and Uncertainty attempts to make explicit and to clarify the implications of this conceptually neglected aspect of our rationality: namely, that it involves paying attention to our emotions and values. An ethical life in which we can act meaningfully in the face of violence and uncertainty, and in which we can make sense of our vulnerability and dependence on others, demands that we think about and seek insight into how we love, why we hope, and in whom or in what we trust. The phenomenological ethics presented in Sense and Uncertainty draws on the works of Western canonical philosophers like Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, Simone de Beauvoir, Anthony Steinbock, and José Ortega y Gasset, as well as on those of Latin American thinkers such as Luis Villoro, Rita Segato, and Augusto Salazar Bondy, among others.

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Signs

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Northwestern University Press, 1964

"Speech is a way of tearing out a meaning from an undivided whole."

Thus does Maurice Merleau-Ponty describe speech in this collection of his important writings on the philosophy of expression, composed during the last decade of his life. For him, expression is a category of human behavior and existence much broader than language alone. He maintains that man is essentially expressive, even prior to speaking: in his silence, gestures, and lived behavior.

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Solitary Confinement

Social Death and Its Afterlives

Lisa Guenther

University of Minnesota Press, 2013

Prolonged solitary confinement has become a widespread and standard practice in U.S. prisons—even though it consistently drives healthy prisoners insane, makes the mentally ill sicker, and, according to the testimony of prisoners, threatens to reduce life to a living death. In this profoundly important and original book, Lisa Guenther examines the death-in-life experience of solitary confinement in America from the early nineteenth century to today’s supermax prisons. Documenting how solitary confinement undermines prisoners’ sense of identity and their ability to understand the world, Guenther demonstrates the real effects of forcibly isolating a person for weeks, months, or years.

Drawing on the testimony of prisoners and the work of philosophers and social activists from Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis, the author defines solitary confinement as a kind of social death. It argues that isolation exposes the relational structure of being by showing what happens when that structure is abused—when prisoners are deprived of the concrete relations with others on which our existence as sense-making creatures depends. Solitary confinement is beyond a form of racial or political violence; it is an assault on being.

A searing and unforgettable indictment, Solitary Confinement reveals what the devastation wrought by the torture of solitary confinement tells us about what it means to be human—and why humanity is so often destroyed when we separate prisoners from all other people.

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