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Several philosophers have developed theological perspectives out of Heidegger's ontology. Yet the question of God in Heidegger's thought itself has never received full elucidation. In this revealing new study, George Kovacs poses the problem of analyzing the idea of God as a process of questioning and thus subjects Heidegger's phenomenological existentialism to a process of exposition Heidegger himself employed.

Between present and past, visible and invisible, and sensation and idea, there is resonance—so philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued and so Jessica Wiskus explores in The Rhythm of Thought. Holding the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, the paintings of Paul Cézanne, the prose of Marcel Proust, and the music of Claude Debussy under Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological light, she offers innovative interpretations of some of these artists’ masterworks, in turn articulating a new perspective on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy.

 

More than merely recovering Merleau-Ponty’s thought, Wiskus thinks according to it. First examining these artists in relation to noncoincidence—as silence in poetry, depth in painting, memory in literature, and rhythm in music—she moves through an array of their artworks toward some of Merleau-Ponty’s most exciting themes: our bodily relationship to the world and the dynamic process of expression. She closes with an examination of synesthesia as an intertwining of internal and external realms and a call, finally, for philosophical inquiry as a mode of artistic expression. Structured like a piece of music itself, The Rhythm of Thought offers new contexts in which to approach art, philosophy, and the resonance between them.

The Sensible World and the World of Expression was a course of lectures that Merleau-Ponty gave at the Collège de France after his election to the chair of philosophy in 1952. The publication and translation of Merleau-Ponty’s notes from this course provide an exceptional view into the evolution of his thought at an important point in his career. 

In these notes, we see that Merleau-Ponty’s consideration of the problem of the perception of movement leads him to make a self-critical return to Phenomenology of Perception in order to rethink the perceptual encounter with the sensible world as essentially expressive, and hence to revise his understanding of the body schema accordingly in terms of praxical motor possibilities. Sketching out an embodied dialectic of expressive praxis that would link perception with art, language, and other cultural and intersubjective phenomena, up to and including truth, Merleau-Ponty’s notes for these lectures thus afford an exciting glimpse of how he aspired to overcome the impasse of ontological dualism. 

Situated midway between Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible, these notes mark a juncture of crucial importance with regard to Merleau-Ponty’s later efforts to work out the ontological underpinnings of phenomenology in terms of a new dialectical conception of nature and history.

We surround ourselves with material things that are invested with memories but can only stand for what we have lost. Physical objects—such as one’s own body—situate and define us; yet at the same time they are fundamentally indifferent to us. The melancholy of this rift is a rich source of inspiration for artists. 

Peter Schwenger deftly weaves together philosophical and psychoanalytical theory with artistic practice. Concerned in part with the act of collecting, The Tears of Things is itself a collection of exemplary art objects—literary and cultural attempts to control and possess things—including paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and René Magritte; sculpture by Louise Bourgeois and Marcel Duchamp; Joseph Cornell’s boxes; Edward Gorey’s graphic art; fiction by Virginia Woolf, Georges Perec, and Louise Erdrich; the hallucinatory encyclopedias of Jorge Luis Borges and Luigi Serafini; and the corpse photographs of Joel Peter Witkin. 

However, these representations of objects perpetually fall short of our aspirations. Schwenger examines what is left over—debris and waste—and asks what art can make of these. What emerges is not an art that reassembles but one that questions what it means to assemble in the first place. Contained in this catalog of waste is that ultimate still life, the cadaver, where the subject-object dichotomy receives its final ironic reconciliation. 

Peter Schwenger is professor of English at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning, Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word, and Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth-Century Literature.

In The Tenets of Cognitive Existentialism, Dimitri Ginev draws on developments in hermeneutic phenomenology and other programs in hermeneutic philosophy to inform an interpretative approach to scientific practices. At stake is the question of whether it is possible to integrate forms of reflection upon the ontological difference in the cognitive structure of scientific research. A positive answer would have implied a proof that (pace Heidegger) “science is able to think.” This book is an extended version of such a proof. Against those who claim that modern science is doomed to be exclusively committed to the nexus of objectivism and instrumental rationality, the interpretative theory of scientific practices reveals science’s potentiality of hermeneutic self-reflection. Scientific research that takes into consideration the ontological difference has resources to enter into a dialogue with Nature.

Ginev offers a critique of postmodern tendencies in the philosophy of science, and sets out arguments for a feminist hermeneutics of scientific research.

In this first English publication of a well-known and widely respected Italian scholar, readers will encounter the preeminent interpreter of the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty engaged in a dialogue of critical concern to contemporary philosophy. In subtle and sensitive language eminently suited to the style and substance of Merleau-Ponty's own writings, Mauro Carbone fashions four essays around a central theme-the relations of the sensible and the intelligible, and of philosophy and non-philosophy-that occupied Merleau-Ponty in his later work.

An original and innovative interpretation of the ontology of Merleau-Ponty--and themselves a significant contribution to the field of Continental thought--these essays constitute a sustained exploration of what Merleau-Ponty detected, and greeted, as a "mutation within the relations of man and Being," which would provide him with the basis for a new idea of philosophy or "a-philosophy." In lucid, often elegant terms, Carbone analyzes key elements of Merleau-Ponty's thought in relation to Proust's Recherche, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, the new biology of Von Uexküll, Rimbaud's Lettre du voyant, and Heidegger's conception of "letting-be." His work clearly demonstrates the vitality of Merleau-Ponty's late revolutionary philosophy by following its most salient, previously unexplored paths. This is essential reading for any scholar with an interest in Merleau-Ponty, in the questions of embodiment, temporality and Nature, or in the possibility of philosophy today.

The Visible and the Invisible contains the unfinished manuscript and working notes of the book Merleau-Ponty was writing when he died. The text is devoted to a critical examination of Kantian, Husserlian, Bergsonian, and Sartrean method, followed by the extraordinary "The Intertwining–The Chiasm," that reveals the central pattern of Merleau-Ponty's own thought. The working notes for the book provide the reader with a truly exciting insight into the mind of the philosopher at work as he refines and develops new pivotal concepts.

A tour de force by one of Hungary's most interesting contemporary philosophers The Wild Region in Life-History outlines a phenomenological approach to some of the main topics of theoretical philosophy, such as meaning, sense, temporality, unity of life, narrative history, self-identity, and intersubjectivity, as well as an ethics of alterity. In his investigations, László Tengelyi's point of departure is a critical examination of what is commonly referred to as "the narrative view of the self," which tends to equate life-history and personal identity. Challenging this view as too one-dimensional and reflective, Tengelyi reveals a hidden area of sense-formation in life-history--an area in which force and meaning do not merely blend but in many ways undermine each other. It is this hidden area that The Wild Region in Life-History describes.

In this landmark study, Emmanuel Levinas discusses the aspects and function of intuition in Husserl's thought and its meaning for philosophical self-reflection. An essential, and illuminating explication of central issues in Husserl's phenomenology, it is also important as a formative work of one of this century's most distinguished philosophers.

Thinking between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty is the first book-length examination of the relation between these two major thinkers of the twentieth century. Questioning the dominant view that the two have little of substance in common, Judith Wambacq brings them into a compelling dialogue to reveal a shared, historically grounded concern with the transcendental conditions of thought. Both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze propose an immanent ontology, differing more in style than in substance. Wambacq’s synthetic treatment is nevertheless critical; she identifies the limitations of each thinker’s approach to immanent transcendental philosophy and traces its implications—through their respective relationships with Bergson, Proust, Cézanne, and Saussure—for ontology, language, artistic expression, and the thinking of difference. Drawing on primary texts alongside current scholarship in both French and English, Thinking between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty is comprehensive and rigorous while remaining clear, accessible, and lively. It is certain to become the standard text for future scholarly discussion of these two major influences on contemporary thought.

Christophe Bouton's Time and Freedom addresses the problem of the relationship between time and freedom as a matter of practical philosophy, examining how the individual lives time and how her freedom is effective in time. Bouton first charts the history of modern philosophy's reengagement with the Aristotelian debate about future contingents, beginning with Leibniz. While Kant, Husserl, and their followers would engage time through theories of knowledge, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Kierkegaard, and (later), Heidegger, Sartre, and Levinas applied a phenomenological and existential methodology to time, but faced a problem of the temporality of human freedom. Bouton's is the first major work of its kind since Bergson's Time and Free Will (1889), and Bouton's "mystery of the future," in which the individual has freedom within the shifting bounds dictated by time, charts a new direction.

This collection is the first extended investigation of the relation between time and memory in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thought as a whole and the first to explore in depth the significance of his concept of institution. It brings the French phenomenologist’s views on the self and ontology into contemporary focus. Time, Memory, Institution argues that the self is not a self-contained or self-determining identity, as such; it is gathered out of a radical openness to what is not self, and that it gathers itself in a time that is not merely a given dimension, but folds back upon, gathers, and institutes itself.

Access to previously unavailable texts, in particular Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on institution and expression, has presented scholars with new resources for thinking about time, memory, and history. These essays represent the best of this new direction in scholarship; they deepen our understanding of self and world in relation to time and memory; and they give occasion to reexamine Merleau-Ponty’s contribution and relevance to contemporary Continental philosophy.

This volume is essential reading for scholars of phenomenology and French philosophy, as well as for the many readers across the arts, humanities, and social sciences who continue to draw insight and inspiration from Merleau-Ponty.

Contributors: Elizabeth Behnke, Edward Casey, Véronique Fóti, Donald Landes, Kirsten Jacobson, Galen Johnson, Michael Kelly, Scott Marratto, Glen Mazis, Caterina Rea, John Russon, Robert Vallier, and Bernhard Waldenfels

A philosophical inquiry into how action is constituted by language, materiality, and performance

The concept of “flesh” in philosophical terms derives from the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This was the word he used to name the concrete realm of sentient bodies and life processes that has been eclipsed by the abstractions of science, technology, and modern culture. Topology, to conventional understanding, is the branch of mathematics that concerns itself with the properties of geometric figures that stay the same when the figures are stretched or deformed.

Topologies of the Flesh is an original blend of continental thought and mathematical imagination. Steven M. Rosen opens up a new area of philosophical inquiry: topological phenomenology. Through his unique application of qualitative mathematics, he extends the approaches of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger so as to offer a detailed exploration of previously uncharted dimensions of human experience and the natural world.

Rosen’s unprecedented marriage of topology and phenomenology is motivated by the desire to help overcome the pervasive dualism of contemporary philosophy and Western culture at large. To carry this to completion, he must address his own dualistic stance as author. Challenging the author’s traditional posture of detachment and anonymity, Rosen makes his presence vividly felt in his final chapter, and his philosophical analysis is transformed into a living reality.

How are we to think and act constructively in the face of today’s environmental and political catastrophes? Gail Stenstad finds inspiring answers in the thought of German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Rather than simply describing or explaining Heidegger’s transformative way of thinking, Stenstad’s writing enacts it, bringing new insight into contemporary environmental, political, and personal issues. Readers come to understand some of Heidegger’s most challenging concepts through experiencing them. This is a truly creative scholarly work that invites all readers to carry Heidegger’s transformative thinking into their own areas of deep concern.

Transversality is the keyword that permeates the spirit of these thirteen essays spanning almost half a century, from 1965 to 2009. The essays are exploratory and experimental in nature and are meant to be a transversal linkage between phenomenology and East Asian philosophy.

Transversality is the concept that dispels all ethnocentrisms, including Eurocentrism. In the globalizing world of multiculturalism, Eurocentric universalism falls far short of being universal but simply parochial at the expense of the non-Western world. Transversality is intercultural, interspecific, interdisciplinary, and intersensorial. Transversal Rationality and Intercultural Texts means to transform the very way of philosophizing itself by infusing or hybridizing multiple traditions in the history of the world.

Like no other scholar, Jung bridges the gap between Asian and Western cultures. By engaging Western philosophers as diverse as Bacon, Descartes, Heidegger, Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Glissant, Barthes, Fenollosa, McLuhan, and Eastern philosophers such as Wang Yang-ming, Nishida Kitaro, Nishitani Keiji, Watsuji Tetsuro, Nhat Hanh, and Suzuki Daisetz Teitaro, this book marks an unparalleled contribution to comparative philosophy and the study of philosophy itself.

In recent years, Richard Kearney has emerged as a leading figure in the field of continental philosophy, widely recognized for his work in the areas of philosophical and religious hermeneutics, theory and practice of the imagination, and political thought. This much-anticipated—and long overdue—study is the first to reflect the full range and impact of Kearney's extensive contributions to contemporary philosophy.

The book opens with Kearney's own "prelude" in which he traces his intellectual itinerary as it traverses the three imaginaries explored in the volume: the dialogical, the political, and the narrative. The interviews that follow the first section allow readers to listen in on conversations between Kearney and some of the most interesting and respected thinkers of our time—Noam Chomsky, Charles Taylor, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricouer, and Martha Nussbaum—as they reveal new and unexpected aspects of their thought on stories and mourning, ethics and narrative, terror and religion, intellectuals and ideology. The next section, on the political imaginary, looks at Kearney's distinctive contribution to the political situation in Ireland and in Europe more generally; and in the last, on narrative, writers including David Wood, Terry Eagleton, and Mark Dooley focus on Kearney's novels as instances of narrative theory put into literary practice. Concluding with Kearney's postscript, an essay on "Traversals and Epiphanies in Joyce and Proust," the volume comes full circle, encompassing the full extent of Richard Kearney's engagement and offerings as a philosopher,

In Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison, Steven Shankman reflects on his remarkable experience teaching texts by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vasily Grossman, and Emmanuel Levinas in prison to a mix of university students and inmates. These persecuted writers—Shankman argues that Dostoevsky’s and Levinas’s experiences of incarceration were formative—describe ethical obligation as an experience of being turned inside out by the face-to-face encounter. Shankman relates this experience of being turned inside out to the very significance of the word “God,” to Dostoevsky’s tormented struggles with religious faith, to Vasily Grossman’s understanding of his Jewishness in his great novel Life and Fate, and to the interpersonal encounters the author has witnessed reading these texts with his students in the prison environment.
 
Turned Inside Out will appeal to readers with interests in the classic novels of Russian literature, in prisons and pedagogy, or in Levinas and phenomenology. At a time when the humanities are struggling to justify the centrality of their mission in today’s colleges and universities, Steven Shankman by example makes an undeniably powerful case for the transformative power of reading great texts.