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The first English translation of Gilbert Simondon’s wide-ranging course on the philosophical and scientific histories of perception

Translated into English for the first time, Gilbert Simondon’s A Course on Perception: 1964–1965 engages in a wide-ranging inquiry into the structure, operation, and activity of perception. Investigating its history throughout the centuries, Simondon shows how perception continually shapes and is reshaped by various strands of philosophical and scientific thought.

Prior to the advent of the natural sciences, perception functioned as the foundation of philosophical reflection and the sole instrument for acquiring knowledge and truth. Tracing his subject from these roots in antiquity, Simondon’s course draws on the work of other prominent philosophers such as Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, and Bergson to follow the evolving trajectory of perception in the wake of classical Cartesian rationalism. As the realms of biology, physiology, and positivism in the natural sciences emerged with the Modern epoch, perception became a necessary theoretical starting point for philosophical investigations of an organism’s relation to its particular milieu.

Emerging from a course delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris between 1964 and 1965, Simondon utilizes a transdisciplinary approach to better understand the sensitivities that various life forms use to orient themselves in the world, offering a nuanced examination of perception in all its philosophical complexity.

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“For generations, my family has had the great privilege of serving the people of Wisconsin. In Wisconsin for Kennedy, B.J. Hollars performs his own act of service, recounting the riveting and untold story of Wisconsin’s politically perilous 1960 primary. A poignant contribution to political history that reads like a page-turner.” 
—Former Wisconsin Governor James Doyle Jr. 


"A hopeful quality . . . pervades Wisconsin for Kennedy, written about a time and place when politics was conducted in a less severe and divisive way than it is now. Hollars further succeeds in showing how political history is made by a wide range of citizens. Wisconsinites, Midwesterners, and indeed Americans of all political persuasions can be grateful to B.J. Hollars for these important reminders." 
— Middle West Review 

A cultural and legal history intertwined with a deeply emotional meditation on the course of life, memory, and the documents that define us.

During the 1940s and 1950s, an untold number of American children suffered devastating injuries when the fur-like fabric on the chaps of their Gene Autry–branded cowboy playsuits exploded into flame. Barbara Young Welke was researching this history when her teenage daughter unexpectedly died.

The shock of Welke’s loss transformed her understanding of the children and their families. Her experience also led her to question the norms of scholarship and of writing. Historians are trained to separate the personal from the intellectual, to be suspicious of emotion. These and other norms are embedded in and reinforced by the calling card of academics, the curriculum vitae. Welke wondered how that cold document—with its literal meaning, “the course of life”—had become a form that excludes so much of what gives life meaning. What impact did that have on what we know, how we know it, and how we understand ourselves? Similarly, Welke wondered, what might we see if we looked at the history of the cowboy suit tragedy as more than a matter of lawsuits brought by grieving families? Here, Welke traces the making, marketing, and selling of the cowboy suits; the lengths the defendants went to avoid and limit liability; and the meaning of the injuries, deaths, and legal settlements in the course of these children’s and families’ lives.

Writing with Fire interweaves the histories of the cowboy suit tragedy and the curriculum vitae. Grounded in archival and legal research, oral histories, and letters Welke wrote her daughter following her death, Welke offers an inimitable examination of trauma, law, autobiography, and identity. The result is revelatory and unforgettable: a provocative historical reflection on life and death, depression and war, markets and families, law, power, and precarity in modern America.