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A glimpse into philosopher Giorgio Agamben's formative encounter with Martin Heidegger, told through his notes from the Le Thor seminars. 

What does it mean for thought to have a time of its own? In The Time of Thinking, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben presents the notes he took during two seminars with Martin Heidegger at Le Thor, Provence, preserving the compressed, working rhythm of a notebook while clarifying only what might otherwise be opaque. Throughout these pages, vignettes from Agamben's time in Le Thor—walking among pines to a precipitous viewpoint once painted by Paul Cézanne, sitting in quiet recollection—open onto reflections on memory, youth, and the shape of a life not yet “filled in.” Illustrated with archival materials, the book offers a small, carefully composed record of philosophical attention: not a retrospective monument, but a living trace of thought as it happens in time and place.

How the form of the case history became an important way of studying the individual as an exemplary case in medicine, psychoanalysis, law, and the novel.

What does it mean when we address ourselves to a specific problem and treat it as a “case” that needs resolution, a resolution that may in turn offer us more general lessons? The “case history” has become a central form of thought and analysis in our culture, but rarely has it been studied on its own. In Thinking in Cases, the distinguished critic Peter Brooks zeroes in on a kind of thinking that we all know—and often use—without understanding its dimensions and its history.

This book ponders what we do and mean when we think in cases—when we take up specific instances with a view to making them exemplary. Brooks brings to this study decades of reflection on the psychoanalytic case history, on the rhetoric of the legal case, and on novels that unfold as cases seeking solutions. Brooks focuses on the case-history’s emergence in the late nineteenth century: first, he examines how Henry James’s uses of narrative parallel case-study methods in law, medicine, and psychoanalysis. Elsewhere, he traces the case history from Hippocratic medicine through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective fiction to a startling legal case from Victorian England involving shipwreck and cannibalism. Other chapters discuss a tale of madness by Balzac and Freud’s most speculative works, especially Moses and Monotheism. A final chapter examines recent novels—Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Coetzee’s Disgrace, Modiano’s Dora Bruder, and Erpenbeck’s Kairos—as case studies.

Knowledge emerges from contexts, which are shaped by people’s experiences. The varied essays in Thinking the US South: Contemporary Philosophy from Southern Perspectives demonstrate that Southern identities, borders, and practices play an important but unacknowledged role in ethical, political, emotional, and global issues connected to knowledge production. Not merely one geographical region among others, the US South is sometimes a fantasy and other times a nightmare, but it is always a prominent component of the American national imaginary. In connection with the Global North and Global South, the US South provides a valuable perspective from which to explore race, class, gender, and other inter- and intra-American differences. The result is a fresh look at how identity is constituted; the role of place, ancestors, and belonging in identity formation; the impact of regional differences on what counts as political resistance; the ways that affect and emotional labor circulate; practices of boundary policing, deportation, and mourning; issues of disability and slowness; racial and other forms of suffering; and above all, the question of whether and how doing philosophy changes when done from Southern standpoints. Examining racist tropes, Indigenous land claims, Black Southern philosophical perspectives, migrant labor, and more, this incisive anthology makes clear that roots matter.

An intellectual journey through 250 million years of stone

In the San Rafael Swell, geologic forces have tilted and exposed the strata so that over 250 million years of geologic history can be observed simply by traveling across the rocky landscape, with its dramatic variety of colors and forms. Largely neglected by visitors to the state’s national parks and monuments and overlooked by many nature writers of the Colorado Plateau, the exceptional “Swell” offers a unique opportunity to think about people’s connections to the layers of earth beneath our feet. 

Thinking with Stone takes readers on an intellectual journey across the Swell, moving from the youngest rocks at its edges to the oldest near its center and guiding readers through the features and histories of each geological layer. Drawing on personal experience and scientific research, Brian Rajski explores how creatively engaging with geology by using rocks as the foundation for thinking can generate new ideas about art, ethics, and the environment. Ultimately, the book reimagines the relationships between history and deep time, humanity and geology, and the individual and the stories told by stone.

What is "art"? Why have human societies through all time and around the globe created those objects we call works of art? Is there any way of defining art that can encompass everything from Paleolithic objects to the virtual images created by the latest computer technology? Questions such as these have preoccupied Esther Pasztory since the beginning of her scholarly career. In this authoritative volume, she distills four decades of research and reflection to propose a pathbreaking new way of understanding what art is and why human beings create it that can be applied to all cultures throughout time.

At its heart, Pasztory's thesis is simple and yet profound. She asserts that humans create things (some of which modern Western society chooses to call "art") in order to work out our ideas—that is, we literally think with things. Pasztory draws on examples from many societies to argue that the art-making impulse is primarily cognitive and only secondarily aesthetic. She demonstrates that "art" always reflects the specific social context in which it is created, and that as societies become more complex, their art becomes more rarefied.

Pasztory presents her thesis in a two-part approach. The first section of the book is an original essay entitled "Thinking with Things" that develops Pasztory's unified theory of what art is and why we create it. The second section is a collection of eight previously published essays that explore the art-making process in both Pre-Columbian and Western societies. Pasztory's work combines the insights of art history and anthropology in the light of poststructuralist ideas. Her book will be indispensable reading for everyone who creates or thinks about works of art.