Philosophy

Private associations organized around a common cult, profession, ethnic identity, neighbourhood or family were common throughout the Greco-Roman antiquity, offering opportunities for sociability, cultic activities, mutual support and a context in which to display and recognize virtuous achievement. This volume collects a representative selection of inscriptions from associations in Attica, Central Greece, Macedonia, Thrace, published with English translations, brief explanatory notes, commentaries and full indices. This volume is essential for several areas of study: ancient patterns of social organization; the organization of diasporic communities in the ancient Mediterranean; models for the structure of early Christian groups; and forms of sociability, status-displays, and the vocabularies of virtue.

The late 18th century is characterized by two crucial events: the rise of Goethe as a dominating literary figure and the emergence of Kant’s critical philosophy and its productive reception not only in the philosophical but also literary discourse of the time. While the Tübingen School concreatively adopted Kant’s philosophy as a system of ideas, they also critically responded to its intellectualising impulse by positing the equiprimordiality of world and Self, of art and reason. Adhering to the self-critical impulse of Kant’s philosophy by positing the equiprimordiality of both the empirical world and the intelligible subject, and trying to overcome the “chorismos” between them through the classicist model of aesthetic Bildung, they argued for the co-extensiveness of the reality of both philosophy and literature.

The authors investigate how the latent antagonism between these divergent traditions of the so-called Goethezeit creates the thrust behind the intellectual firework of divergent literary and philosophical discourses from around 1800, throughout the 19th and into the 20th century.

In three comprehensive volumes, Logic of the Future presents a full
panorama of Charles S. Peirce’s important late writings. Among the
most influential American thinkers, Peirce took his existential graphs to
be his greatest contribution to human thought. The manuscripts
from 1895—1913, most of which are published here for the first time, testify the
richness and open-endedness of his theory of logic and its applications.
They also invite us to reconsider our ordinary conceptions of reasoning as
well as the conventional stories told about the evolution of modern logic.

This second volume collects Peirce’s writings on existential graphs related to his Lowell Lectures of 1903, the annus mirabilis of his that became decisive in the development of the mature theory of the graphical method of logic.

In three comprehensive volumes, Logic of the Future presents a full
panorama of Charles S. Peirce’s important late writings. Among the
most influential American thinkers, Peirce took his existential graphs to
be his greatest contribution to human thought. The manuscripts
from 1895—1913, most of which are published here for the first time, testify the
richness and open-endedness of his theory of logic and its applications.
They also invite us to reconsider our ordinary conceptions of reasoning as
well as the conventional stories told about the evolution of modern logic.

This second volume collects Peirce’s writings on existential graphs related to his Lowell Lectures of 1903, the annus mirabilis of his that became decisive in the development of the mature theory of the graphical method of logic.

Ab dem späten 8. Jahrhundert segelten Wikinger in die Irische See, und die Chroniken zeichnen über Jahrzehnte ein eindeutiges Bild von ihnen als Heiden und Piraten. Dass sie auch auf die Isle of Man gelangten und sich dort ansiedelten, belegen reiche archäologische Zeugnisse. In Bezug auf Chronologie und Charakter der skandinavischen Anwesenheit auf Man führen aber in der Forschung zwei unterschiedliche Herangehensweisen zu zwei ebenso unterschiedlichen und unvereinbaren Ergebnissen. So sind zentrale Punkte nicht gesichert: Zum einen, wann der erste Kontakt und wann eine dauerhafte Ansiedlung stattgefunden haben; zum anderen, ob die Insel Opfer von Raubzügen und gewaltsam erobert und besetzt wurde oder ob man sich eher friedlich ansiedeln konnte, und wie in der Folge beide Gruppen mit- oder gegeneinander auf Man lebten. Diesen Fragen wird hier erstmals detailliert nachgegangen: Eine sorgfältige quellenkritische Untersuchung der archäologischen, historischen, literarischen, kunsthistorischen und epigraphischen Zeugnisse stellt das verfügbare Quellenmaterial dar, hinterfragt traditionelle Paradigmen, diskutiert ihre Schlüsse und formuliert eine neue These zur Rekonstruktion der frühen Wikingerzeit auf der Isle of Man.

We live today surrounded by countless digital gadgets and navigate through cyberspace as if it were the most natural thing in the world. This digital cast of being, however, comes from a long history of philosophical and mathematical thinking in which the Western will to productive power over movement has attained its consummation. This study traces the digital dissolution of beings from the Pythagoreans, Plato and Aristotle's ontology via Cartesian mathematical science through to our digitized economy and telecommunications. With an appendix reinterpreting quantum mechanical indeterminacy phenomenologically.

This edition includes the letters exchanged between Charles S. Peirce and the Open Court Publishing Company between 1890 and 1913. Open Court published more of Peirce’s philosophical writings than any other publisher during his lifetime, and played a critical role in what little recognition and financial income he received during these difficult, yet philosophically rich, years. This correspondence is the basis for much of what is known surrounding Peirce’s publications in The Monist and The Open Court—two of the publisher´s most popular forums for philosophical, scientific, and religious thought—and is therefore referenced heavily in Peirce editions dealing partly or wholly with his later work, including The Essential Peirce series and Writings of Charles S. Peirce.

The edition provides for the first time a complete text of this oft-cited correspondence, with textual apparatus, contextual annotation, and careful replications of existential graphs and other complex illustrations. By so doing, this edition sheds critical light not only on Peirce and Open Court, but also on the context, relationships, and concepts that influenced the development of Progressive Era intellectual history and philosophy.

The book explores Peirce's non standard thoughts on a synthetic continuum, topological logics, existential graphs, and relational semiotics, offering full mathematical developments on these areas.

More precisely, the following new advances are offered: (1) two extensions of Peirce's existential graphs, to intuitionistic logics (a new symbol for implication), and other non-classical logics (new actions on nonplanar surfaces); (2) a complete formalization of Peirce's continuum, capturing all Peirce's original demands (genericity, supermultitudeness, reflexivity, modality), thanks to an inverse ordinally iterated sheaf of real lines; (3) an array of subformalizations and proofs of Peirce's pragmaticist maxim, through methods in category theory, HoTT techniques, and modal logics.

The book will be relevant to Peirce scholars, mathematicians, and philosophers alike, thanks to thorough assessments of Peirce's mathematical heritage, compact surveys of the literature, and new perspectives offered through formal and modern mathematizations of the topics studied.

Husserls "Logische Untersuchungen" sind eines der detailliertesten Bücher, die je über die Phänomenologie des Bewusstseins geschrieben wurden. Die beiden 1900 ("Prolegomena") und 1901 ("Logische Untersuchungen") erschienenen Bände enthalten nicht nur Beiträge zu den in den Logikbüchern der Zeit vielfach diskutierten Themen Bedeutung, Begriff, Urteil, Erkenntnis und Wahrheit, sie weiten diese Analysen auch auf Bewusstseinsakte, wie Wahrnehmungen, Imaginationen, Gefühle und die Intentionalität schlechthin aus. Immer wieder Erkenntnisse früherer Kapitel aufnehmend, verbinden sie sich schließlich zu einem umfassenden Gesamtbild der Struktur von mentalen Erlebnissen. Damit liefern sie wichtige Beiträge zu heute hochaktuellen Debatten in der Erkenntnistheorie und der Philosophie des Geistes. Die phänomenologische Methode erweist sich in der Philosophie immer mehr als unverzichtbare Quelle der Information und Argumentation, die empirischen Bestimmungen vorgeschaltet und deshalb auch für die Einzelwissenschaften von Bedeutung ist. Sowohl für die analytische wie für die kontinentale Philosophie bieten die "Logischen Untersuchungen" zahlreiche Anknüpfungspunkte. Ganz im Sinne Husserls vereinigt der Kommentarband Forscher aus unterschiedlichen Schulen zu einer Kooperation in Sachen Phänomenologie.

Published in honor of Sergio Galvan, this collection concentrates on the application of logical and mathematical methods for the study of central issues in formal philosophy. The volume is subdivided into four sections, dedicated to logic and philosophy of logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, metaphysics and philosophy of religion. The contributions adress, from a logical point of view, some of the main topics in these areas. The first two sections include formal treatments of: truth and paradoxes; definitions by abstraction; the status of abstract objects, such as mathematical objects and universal concepts; and the structure of explicit knowledge. The last two sections include papers on classical problems in philosophy of science, such as the status of subjective probability, the notion of verisimilitude, the notion of approximation, and the theory of mind and mental causation, and specific issues in metaphysics and philosophy of religion, such as the ontology of species, actions, and intelligible worlds, and the logic of religious belonging.

Trotz zahlreicher Publikationen, die der Konstellation „Heidegger und Nietzsche“ gewidmet sind, bildet eine entwicklungsgeschichtliche Studie, die den gesamten Textkorpus des nahezu zwei Jahrzehnte überspannenden, intensiven Zwiegesprächs von 1936-1953 unvoreingenommen beleuchtet, nach wie vor ein Desiderat der Forschung.

Die vorliegende Arbeit verfolgt das Hauptziel, das Verhältnis zwischen Friedrich Nietzsche und Martin Heidegger in entwicklungsgeschichtlicher Perspektive zu erschließen und es in systematischer Hinsicht als spannungsreichen Austragungsort einer philosophischen Selbstbesinnung auf den Nexus von Metaphysik, Geschichtlichkeit und Lebenswelt zu konturieren. Als leitendes Ordnungsprinzip fungiert die These, dass Heidegger seine modernediagnostische Konzeption des Willens zum Willens nicht nur als letzte Stufe der Entfaltung des Seins des Seienden als Wille etabliert, sondern diesen Entwurf selbst durch die Synthese der Willensbegriffe Schellings, Schopenhauers und Nietzsches gewinnt.

Insgesamt sollen die zahlreichen Relationsverschiebungen und veränderten Durchblicksbahnen in Heideggers Nietzsche-Vorlesungen nachvollzogen werden.

The word "antinomy" lets us think of Kant. One thing this book attempts to show is that Kant's antinomies open a way towards an overcoming of that nihilism that is a corollary of the understanding of reality that presides over our science and technology. But when I am speaking of the antinomy of Being I am thinking not so much of Kant, as of Heidegger. Not that Heidegger speaks of an antinomy of Being. But his thinking of Being leads him and will lead those who follow him on his path of thinking into this antinomy. At bottom, however, I am concerrned with neither Heidegger’s nor Kant’s thought: I shall try to show that our thinking inevitably leads us into some version of this antinomy whenever it attempts to grasp reality in toto, without loss. All such attempts will fall short of their goal. And that they do so, I will claim, is not something to be grudgingly accepted, but embraced as a necessary condition of living a meaningful life. That is why the antinomy of Being matters and should concern us all.

Two questions often shape our view of the world. On the one hand, we ask what there is, on the other hand, we ask what there ought to be. Empirical research and normative theory, the methodological traditions concerned with these questions, entered a difficult relationship, from at least as early as around the time of the advent of modern sciences. To this day, there remains a strong separation between the two domains, with both tending to neglect discourses and results from the other. Contrary to a verdict of strict segregation between "is" and "ought," there are, nowadays, various attempts to integrate both theoretical approaches. This calls for a discourse on the relation between empirical research and normative theory. In this volume, scholars from different disciplines – including psychology, sociology, economics, and philosophy – discuss the possible desired or undesired influences on, and limits of, the integration of these two approaches.

Boethius gehört zu den herausragenden Denkern der spätantiken Geistesgeschichte. Anders, als man vielleicht meinen würde, ist diese Sicht auf Boethius in der Forschung allerdings nicht unumstritten und verhältnismäßig neu. Sie lässt eine Tendenz zur Neubewertung erkennen, die nicht nur Boethius, sondern auch das Denken seiner Zeit immer mehr in seiner Eigenständigkeit zu würdigen beginnt. So werden Boethius wie auch die Spätantike immer weniger nur als Instanzen der Vermittlung klassisch antiken Wissens in das christliche Mittelalter angesehen. Worin aber besteht die Originalität des Boethius und des durch ihn wesentlich geprägten spätantiken Denkens? Kann die Spätantike als eine eigene geistesgeschichtliche Epoche betrachtet werden? Wie ist sie dann zu charakterisieren? Inwiefern ist Boethius als eine oder vielleicht sogar die paradigmatische Gestalt der Spätantike zu beschreiben? Diesen und weiteren Fragen gehen die Autorinnen und Autoren des vorliegenden Sammelbandes nach.

Die drei Begriffe 'grounding', 'rhetoric' und 'earth' spiegeln die dreiteilige Struktur des Buches wider. Mit philologischen Methoden zeigt Del Caro einen 'ökologischen' Nietzsche, dessen Lehren Strategien für eine verantwortungsvolle und kreative Partnerschaft zwischen Menschen und Erde darstellen.

Er weist nach, dass die wichtigsten Lehren in organischer Beziehung zu frühen Schriften stehen, die sich mit Paganismus beschäftigen, mit Alltäglichem und mit den ersten und letzten Dingen in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Dabei verschiebt sich die Perspektive von der Zeit zum Raum in der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen, und von der Macht zur Ermächtigung im Willen zur Macht.

This renewed edition of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, exactly a century after Wittgenstein’s release, presents the text in a hierarchical manner, “which is the way in which the book was composed and in which Wittgenstein arranged (selected and supplemented) the best of the philosophical remarks that he had been writing since 1913” (Peter Hacker). That tree-like reading is recommended by Wittgenstein himself in the sole footnote of his book, in which he suggests that the inner logical structure of the text is set by the decimal numbers of its propositions. “They alone – the Author will add – give the book perspicuity and clearness, and without this numbering it would be an incomprehensible jumble”. Indeed, the compact and intricate sequence of the traditional presentation is only a rigorous logical bet, but only a logical machine or a robot can unravel the tangle: for an ordinary human understanding that does not exploit its numbering, the book remains “an incomprehensible jumble”.

In the present disposition, instead, all horizontal and vertical references become directly manifest and any reader can enjoy the fine architecture and the elegant reasoning of Wittgenstein's work. Every page is an actual reading unit, perfectly coherent and complete. The Tractatus becomes comprehensible also to unskilled readers, of course at more or less deep levels, while a scholar or a more practised reader can detect suggestions and meanings that had remained, until now, completely hidden. A historical note shows in which manner the new structural perspective sheds new light also in the compositional manuscript we have, which “writing units” are very similar, actually, to the pages of the present edition. Besides, this allows to rebuild the list of “Supplements” (here in the Appendix) that Wittgenstein gathered after he roughly finished his manuscript, but that he used very little in the final book.

Printing the Tractatus following Wittgenstein's decimal prescriptions required meticulous philological care and some discretional conventions: for instance, at the top of each page the commented-upon proposition is printed again, to make the sight complete and self-sufficient. On the other hand, some forcing of the text by the translators in their sequential reading could be eliminated, restoring a more literal translation. Also the famous and intriguing picture of the eye and its visual field (5.6331) has been restored as Wittgenstein drafted it, making the entire page perfectly understandable and coherent. This documented and editorial work on one of the most referenced books of the last century was conceived to obtain, and in fact gained, a perspicuous and crystal clear text, philologically faithful and relaxingly readable at the same time.

This book is unique in its dedicated tackling of the subject of death in the work of Jean Baudrillard. Through new readings of his work, juxtaposed with philosophical (Schopenhauer, Kant) and artistic (Jeremy Millar, Ron Mueck) examples along with films (Norte, the End of History; Ida), the book makes so patently clear the importance of Baudrillard’s tendency to poeticize, his core indebtedness to Georges Bataille, Alfred Jarry, and others, and his reliance on paradox. Ultimately, Stratagem of the Corpse is less a making sense of death and more a transcript of what occurred when death made sense of us, a reverse thanatology in which death delineates the variant forms of our encroachment, not so much death as seen by Baudrillard but Baudrillard as seen by death.

Examples of Baudrillardian simulacra, depersonalization, detachment, violence, obscenity, Baudrillard’s notion of the ‘perfect crime’, and nihilism are incisively discussed. The book makes a compelling case for why Baudrillard is relevant and necessary.

Wittgenstein’s remarks on colour have been accorded little critical examination, the sole exception being the explanation in the Tractatus of the logical impossibility of a point in the visual field having two colours simultaneously, a gap the present work is primarily meant to fill. Remarks on Colour, a compilation of writings on the subject drafted in the last fifteen months of Wittgenstein’s life, is subjected to sustained critical scrutiny and is shown that it does not deserve to languish in the limbo to which it has been mostly consigned, but it indeed is deeper and more illuminating than other more studied writings, to say nothing of peripheral writings on ethics, aesthetics and religion.

The Remarks would warrant a careful look if only because it is, as it has been billed, ‘one of the few documents which shows [Wittgenstein] concentratedly at work on a single philosophical issue’. But it also deserves special consideration and is worth grappling with since it shows Wittgenstein thinking through a problem from scratch and, what is still less common, without knowing where he will end up. In particular no other extended stretch of writing so clearly shows him as engaged in an unconstrained investigation of a topic of huge general interest and setting the agenda for philosophers, indeed as pioneering a still insufficiently investigated subject. And following in his footsteps pays since it brings to light a great deal about how he approaches philosophy and proves to be a good way into the philosophy.

Wittgenstein’s once said: ‘Sometimes a sentence can be understood only if it is read at the right tempo’, and the present work takes him at his word and accords him the courtesy of treating his own sentences as ‘all to be read slowly’. His remarks are examined one by one in the order he wrote them rather than the order they appear in the published text with close attention to his toing-and-froing and changes of tack. The result is a picture of a serious philosopher at work, one grappling with rare scrupulousness to a series of problems. Just as importantly one sees that the thrust of his deliberations is routinely misidentified, that there are significant similarities as well as significant differences between his late and early thinking about colour, and that much folklore, both laudatory and disparaging, that has sprung up regarding the thinness of his reasoning and the thickness of his conclusions is substantially off-base.

The two volumes on Wittgenstein and AI aim to trace and suggest Wittgensteinian influences in some of the most cutting-edge areas of research in Artificial Intelligence (such as Computation, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and the use of automation in legal settings). The collection is driven by an essentially interdisciplinary approach, featuring articles from philosophers, computer scientists and legal scholars, writing on a broad range of topics in AI.

The chapters across these two volumes are grouped into two sets of themes: Mind and Language and Value and Governance. These themes correspond to two major areas of research in the philosophical study of AI: the computational mind and the ethics of artificial intelligence. These volumes make a significant and unprecedented contribution to the question of what Wittgenstein’s philosophy can offer to the ever-growing field of AI. It aims to provide insight for both philosophers and non-philosophers alike, offering reflection on the significance of Wittgenstein’s work for AI, and on the implications of advancements in AI technology for Wittgenstein’s philosophy and philosophy influenced by Wittgenstein.

VOLUME I: Wittgenstein and AI (Volume I): Mind and Language. This volume includes chapters on Wittgenstein and Turing’s views on AI, the question of whether machines can think, intentionality, AI language models, analogical reasoning and logic.

This renewed edition of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, exactly a century after Wittgenstein’s release, presents the text in a hierarchical manner, “which is the way in which the book was composed and in which Wittgenstein arranged (selected and supplemented) the best of the philosophical remarks that he had been writing since 1913” (Peter Hacker). That tree-like reading is recommended by Wittgenstein himself in the sole footnote of his book, in which he suggests that the inner logical structure of the text is set by the decimal numbers of its propositions. “They alone – the Author will add – give the book perspicuity and clearness, and without this numbering it would be an incomprehensible jumble”. Indeed, the compact and intricate sequence of the traditional presentation is only a rigorous logical bet, but only a logical machine or a robot can unravel the tangle: for an ordinary human understanding that does not exploit its numbering, the book remains “an incomprehensible jumble”.

In the present disposition, instead, all horizontal and vertical references become directly manifest and any reader can enjoy the fine architecture and the elegant reasoning of Wittgenstein's work. Every page is an actual reading unit, perfectly coherent and complete. The Tractatus becomes comprehensible also to unskilled readers, of course at more or less deep levels, while a scholar or a more practised reader can detect suggestions and meanings that had remained, until now, completely hidden. A historical note shows in which manner the new structural perspective sheds new light also in the compositional manuscript we have, which “writing units” are very similar, actually, to the pages of the present edition. Besides, this allows to rebuild the list of “Supplements” (here in the Appendix) that Wittgenstein gathered after he roughly finished his manuscript, but that he used very little in the final book.

Printing the Tractatus following Wittgenstein's decimal prescriptions required meticulous philological care and some discretional conventions: for instance, at the top of each page the commented-upon proposition is printed again, to make the sight complete and self-sufficient. On the other hand, some forcing of the text by the translators in their sequential reading could be eliminated, restoring a more literal translation. Also the famous and intriguing picture of the eye and its visual field (5.6331) has been restored as Wittgenstein drafted it, making the entire page perfectly understandable and coherent. This documented and editorial work on one of the most referenced books of the last century was conceived to obtain, and in fact gained, a perspicuous and crystal clear text, philologically faithful and relaxingly readable at the same time.

Few are aware that since antiquity, there has always been the philosophy of love at the core of Western culture. It articulates what makes life meaningful and worthwhile, and how we can live a good life together through an ethic of love. This book fills this significant gap, not only reconnecting the reader with such important wisdom, and more crucially, also reorienting our socio-economic institutions and collective actions towards more loving and caring, and more concerned with the qualities of our lived experiences. 

By re(dis)covering the gifts of love, we may challenge the existing systemic dehumanisation, and draw from knowledge and understanding already present in our culture. This is timely because the global crises we are facing are catastrophic, especially when it comes to climate change. Therefore we must respond from a place of love rather than fear. Whether it is reducing the use of fossil fuels, lowering greenhouse emission, choosing the right food to eat, or advocating for structural transformation, our concerted endeavours start with an appropriate appreciation of the nature of our well-being which includes the planet’s well-ness. This book highlights a clear pathway forward: to ensure collective healing and co-flourishing with nature, we must practise the art of loving. 

Although introducing conceptions of love developed throughout Western history of thought, this book is not a book of philosophy. Instead, it makes philosophical ideas of love more accessible to anyone who is interested in developing a better understanding of love and its evolution. It intends to awaken the reader to such claims about love that have been quietly speaking to humanity from the depth of the Western culture. In doing so, this book invites the reader to become curious about how and why love has been side-lined if not almost forgotten in the contemporary Western socio-economic systems and national and international politics. Ultimately, by re-familiarising ourselves with these articulations of love, this book urges us to embark on the paths of love and engage in those activities, processes, experiences and relationships that constitute the good life, and embrace the practices of love.

How to live wisely and well in the twenty-first century—an introduction to the modern art of emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence affects every aspect of the way we live, from romantic to professional relationships, from our inner resilience to our social success. It is arguably the single most important skill for surviving the twenty-first century. But what does it really mean?

One decade ago, Alain de Botton founded The School of Life, an institute dedicated to understanding and improving our emotional intelligence. Now he presents the gathered wisdom of those ten years in a wide-ranging and innovative compendium of emotional intelligence which forms an introduction to The School of Life. Using his trademark mixture of analysis and anecdote, philosophical insight and practical wisdom, he considers how we interact with each and with ourselves, and how we can do so better.

From the reigning master of popular philosophy, The School of Life: An Emotional Education is an essential look at the skill set that defines our modern lives.

A Stanford University Press classic.

A Stanford University Press classic.

America has always been committed to the idea that citizens can work together to build a common world. Today, three afflictions keep us from pursuing that noble ideal. The first and most obvious affliction is identity politics, which seeks to transform America by turning politics into a religious venue of sacrificial offering. For now, the sacrificial scapegoat is the white, heterosexual, man. After he is humiliated and purged, who will be the object of cathartic rage? White women? Black men? Identity politics is the anti-egalitarian spiritual eugenics of our age. It demands that pure and innocent groups ascend, and the stained transgressor groups be purged.

The second affliction is that citizens oscillate back and forth, in bipolar fashion, at one moment feeling invincible on their social media platforms and, the next, feeling impotent to face the everyday problems of life without the guidance of experts and global managers. Third, Americans are afflicted by a disease that cannot quite be named, characterized by an addictive hope that they can find cheap shortcuts that bypass the difficult labors of everyday life. Instead of real friendship, we seek social media “friends.”

Instead of meals at home, we order “fast food.” Instead of real shopping, we “shop” online. Instead of counting on our families and neighbors to address our problems, we look to the state to take care of us. In its many forms, this disease promises release from our labors, yet impoverishes us all. American Awakening chronicles all of these problems, yet gives us hope for the future.

This book has two currents. The first is an analysis of the three concepts of freedom that are called, respectively, negative, positive, and inner. Negative freedom is defined as an absence of coercion, positive freedom as an ability to rule oneself and others, inner freedom as being oneself; that is, being the author of one’s decisions. Each concept is analyzed both in terms of its development in the history of ideas and in terms of its internal logic. The major problem of negative freedom is to find widely accepted rules according to which this freedom can be distributed. Positive freedom’s major difficulty is to define what constitutes a free person. The greatest dilemma with inner freedom is how to correlate it with the proper interpretation of the human self. The book advances the thesis, and this constitutes the other current of its narrative—that we have been witnessing the advent of a new form of despotism, much of it being the effect of liberalism’s dominant position. Precisely because it took a reductionist position, liberalism has impoverished our view of freedom and, consequently, our notion of human nature with its political, moral, and metaphysical dimensions.

What does a truly democratic experience of political action look like today? In this provocative new work, Adriana Cavarero weighs in on contemporary debates about the relationship between democracy, happiness, and dissent. Drawing on Arendt's understanding of politics as a participatory experience, but also discussing texts by Émile Zola, Elias Canetti, Boris Pasternak, and Roland Barthes, along with engaging Judith Butler, Cavarero proposes a new view of democracy, based not on violence, but rather on the spontaneous experience of a plurality of bodies coming together in public. Expanding on the themes explored in previous works, Cavarero offers a timely intervention into current thinking about the nature of democracy, suggesting that its emergence thrives on the nonviolent creativity of a widespread, participatory, and relational power that is shared horizontally rather than vertically. From digital democracy to selfies to contemporary protest movements, Cavarero argues that we need to rethink our focus on individual happiness and turn toward rediscovering the joyful emotions of birth through plural interaction. Yes, let us be happy, she urges, but let us do so publicly, politically, together.

The division between analytic and continental political theory remains as sharp as it is wide, rendering basic problems seemingly intractable. Across the Great Divide offers an accessible and compelling account of how this split has shaped the field of political philosophy and suggests means of addressing it. Rather than advocating a synthesis of these philosophical modes, author Jeremy Arnold argues for aporetic cross-tradition theorizing: bringing together both traditions in order to show how each is at once necessary and limited.

Across the Great Divide engages with a range of fundamental political concepts and theorists—from state legitimacy and violence in the work of Stanley Cavell, to personal freedom and its civic institutionalization in Philip Pettit and Hannah Arendt, and justice in John Rawls and Jacques Derrida—not only illustrating the shortcomings of theoretical synthesis but also demonstrating a productive alternative. By outlining the failings of "political realism" as a synthetic cross-tradition approach to political theory and by modeling an aporetic mode of engagement, Arnold shows how we can better understand and address the pressing political issues of civil freedom and state justice today.

Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory.

The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context.

With its challenging argument concerning violence, law, and justice—which addresses such topical matters as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of religion—Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its publication in Weimar Germany a century ago.

Possibility is a concept central to both philosophy and social theory. But in what philosophical soil, if any, does the possibility of a better society grow? At the intersection of metaphysics and social theory, What Would Be Different looks to Theodor W. Adorno to reflect on the relationship between the possible and the actual. In repeated allusions to utopia, redemption, and reconciliation, Adorno appears to reference a future that would break decisively with the social injustices that have characterized history. To this end, and though he never explains it in any detail—let alone in the form of a full-blown theory or metaphysics—he also makes extensive technical use of the concept of possibility. Taking Adorno's critical readings of other thinkers, especially Hegel and Heidegger, as his guiding thread, Iain Macdonald reflects on possibility as it relates to Adorno's own writings and offers answers to the question of how we are to articulate such possibilities without lapsing into a vague and naïve utopianism.

In a world that promotes assertion, agency, and empowerment, this book challenges us to revalue a range of actions and attitudes that have come to be disregarded or dismissed as merely passive. Mercy, resignation, politeness, restraint, gratitude, abstinence, losing well, apologizing, taking care: today, such behaviors are associated with negativity or lack. But the capacity to give way is better understood as positive action, at once intricate and demanding. Moving from intra-human common courtesies, to human-animal relations, to the global civility of human-inhuman ecological awareness, the book's argument unfolds on progressively larger scales. In reminding us of the existential threat our drives pose to our own survival, Steven Connor does not merely champion a family of behaviors; he shows that we are more adept practitioners of them than we realize. At a time when it is on the wane, Giving Way offers a powerful defense of civility, the versatile human capacity to deflect aggression into sociability and to exercise power over power itself.

Neoliberalism has become a dirty word. In political discourse, it stigmatizes a political opponent as a market fundamentalist; in academia, the concept is also mainly wielded by its critics, while those who might be seen as actual neoliberals deny its very existence. Yet the term remains necessary for understanding the varieties of capitalism across space and time. Arguing that neoliberalism is widely misunderstood when reduced to a doctrine of markets and economics alone, this book shows that it has a political dimension that we can reconstruct and critique. Recognizing the heterogeneities within and between both neoliberal theory and practice, The Political Theory of Neoliberalism looks to distinguish between the two as well as to theorize their relationship. By examining the views of state, democracy, science, and politics in the work of six major figures—Eucken, Röpke, Rüstow, Hayek, Friedman, and Buchanan—it offers the first comprehensive account of the varieties of neoliberal political thought. Ordoliberal perspectives, in particular, emerge in a new light. Turning from abstract to concrete, the book also interprets recent neoliberal reforms of the European Union to offer a diagnosis of contemporary capitalism more generally. The latest economic crises hardly brought the neoliberal era to an end. Instead, as Thomas Biebricher shows, we are witnessing an authoritarian liberalism whose reign has only just begun.

This volume of The Complete Works provides the first English translation of all Nietzsche's unpublished notes from April 1885 to the summer of 1886, the period in which he wrote his breakthrough philosophical books Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality. Keen to reinvent himself after Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the philosopher used these unpublished notes to chart his search for a new philosophical voice. The notebooks contain copious drafts of book titles; critical retrospection on his earlier projects; a critique of the feminine; prophetic commentary on Germany; and forays into metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and language. They also reveal his deep concern for Europe and its future and a burgeoning presence of the Dionysian. We learn what Nietzsche was reading and from whom he borrowed, and we find a considerable portion of notes and fragments from the non-book "Will to Power," though here they are unembellished and unmediated. Richly annotated and accompanied by a detailed translator's afterword, this landmark volume sheds light on the controversy surrounding the Nachlass of the 1880s.

Sonic Intimacy asks us who—or what—deserves to have a voice, beyond the human. Arguing that our ears are far too narrowly attuned to our own species, the book explores four different types of voices: the cybernetic, the gendered, the creaturely, and the ecological. Through both a conceptual framework and a series of case studies, Dominic Pettman tracks some of the ways in which these voices intersect and interact. He demonstrates how intimacy is forged through the ear, perhaps even more than through any other sense, mode, or medium. The voice, then, is what creates intimacy, both fleeting and lasting, not only between people, but also between animals, machines, and even natural elements: those presumed not to have a voice in the first place. Taken together, the manifold, material, actual voices of the world, whether primarily natural or technological, are a complex cacophony that is desperately trying to tell us something about the rapidly failing health of the planet and its inhabitants. As Pettman cautions, we would do well to listen.

With this latest book in the series, Stanford continues its English-language publication of the famed Colli-Montinari edition of Nietzsche's complete works, which include the philosopher's notebooks and early unpublished writings. Scrupulously edited so as to establish a new standard for the field, each volume includes an Afterword that presents and contextualizes the material therein.

  This volume provides the first English translation of Nietzsche's unpublished notebooks from 1882–1884, the period in which he was composing the book that he considered his best and most important work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Crucial transitional documents in Nietzsche's intellectual development, the notebooks mark a shift into what is widely regarded as the philosopher's mature period. They reveal his long-term design of a fictional tetralogy charting the philosophical, pedagogical, and psychological journeys of his alter-ego, Zarathustra. Here, in nuce, appear Zarathustra's teaching about the death of God; his discovery that the secret of life is the will to power; and his most profound and most frightening thought—that his own life, human history, and the entire cosmos will eternally return. During this same period, Nietzsche was also composing preparatory notes for his next book, Beyond Good and Evil, and the notebooks are especially significant for the insight they provide into his evolving theory of drives, his critical ideas about the nature and history of morality, and his initial thoughts on one of his best-known concepts, the superhuman (Übermensch).

This volume reflects Jacques Derrida's engagement in the late 1970s with French political debates on the teaching of philosophy and the reform of the French university system. He was a founding member of the Research Group on the Teaching of Philosophy (Greph), an activist group that mobilized opposition to the Giscard government's proposals to "rationalize" the French educational system in 1975, and a convener of the Estates General of Philosophy, a vast gathering in 1979 of educators from across France.

While addressing specific contemporary political issues on occasion, thus providing insight into the pragmatic deployment of deconstructive analysis, the essays deal mainly with much broader concerns. With his typical rigor and spark, Derrida investigates the genealogy of several central concepts which any debate about teaching and the university must confront.

Thus there are essays on the "teaching body," both the faculty corps and the strange interplay in the French (but not only the French) tradition between the mind and body of the professor; on the question of age in teaching, analyzed through a famous letter of Hegel; on the class, the classroom, and the socio-economic concept of class in education; on language, especially so-called "natural languages" like French; and on the legacy of the revolutionary tradition, the Estates General, in the university. The essays are linked by the extraordinary care and precision with which Derrida undertakes a political intervention into, and a philosophical analysis of, the institutionalization of philosophy in the university.

In this collection of essays Samuel Wheeler discusses Derrida and other “deconstructive” thinkers from the perspective of an analytic philosopher willing to treat deconstruction as philosophy, taking it seriously enough to look for and analyze its arguments. The essays focus on the theory of meaning, truth, interpretation, metaphor, and the relationship of language to the world. Wheeler links the thought of Derrida to that of Davidson and argues for close affinities among Derrida, Quine, de Man, and Wittgenstein. He also demonstrates the propinquity of Plato and Derrida and shows that New Criticism shares deconstruction’s conception of language. Of the twelve essays in the collection, four are published here for the first time.

The fundamental resemblance between Derrida and such analytic thinkers as Quine, Wittgenstein, and Davidson, the author argues, is that they deny the possibility of meanings as self-interpreting media constituting thoughts and intentions. Derrida argues that some form of magic language has determined the very project of philosophy, and his arguments work out the consequences of denying that there are such self-interpreting mental contents. In addition, Derrida and Davidson agree in denying any “given.” Without a given, questions about realism and idealism cease to have a point. Derrida and Davidson are both committed to the textuality of all significant marks, whether in neurons or on paper. They argue that there is no mode of representation more direct than language.

Sustaining Loss explores the uncanny, traumatic weaving together of the living and the dead in art, and the morbid fascination it holds for modern philosophical aesthetics. Beginning with Kant, the author traces how aesthetic theory has been drawn back repeatedly to the moving power of the undead body of the work of art. He locates the most potent expressions of this philosophical compulsion in Hegel's thesis that art is a thing of the past, and in Freud's view that the work of art is the haunting of the present by the endless suffering of what is dead but still has claims over the living.

The book asserts that modern aesthetics holds the key to unlocking the tortured relation of modernity to the past it is perpetually leaving behind. As the capacity to withstand the inescapable force of a past that is dead for us becomes the supreme test for a fully modern, fully secular philosophy, aesthetics moves to the center of philosophical reflection. But, the author argues, this secular philosophical orientation can be sustained only if aesthetic theory remains oriented by intimate contact with modernist works of art.

Sustaining Loss examines not only Kant, Hegel, and Freud, but also the contemporary artists Gerhard Richter and Ilya Kabakov, whose art turns fruitfully against art's own past. To live as a modern, the author asserts, is to live with the dead past that modernist art ceaselessly disgorges. Overall, the book aims to articulate an aesthetic theory suitable to the task of living in a time when, in Flannery O'Connor's words, "The blind don't see and the lame don't walk, and what's dead stays that way."

This book is both a concise and lucid introduction to Nietzsche and an original contribution to critical debates concerning Nietzsche interpretation and reception. This overview takes issue with the prevailing tendency to focus on Nietzsche's later work, which reaches its extreme with Heidegger's almost exclusive focus on the group of late notes posthumously collected as The Will to Power. Vattimo aims to mediate between two prominent hermeneutic readings of Nietzsche: Wilhelm Dilthey's view that Nietzsche's work fits into the nineteenth-century tradition of the philosophy of life and Heidegger's belief that Nietzsche is best understood as the author of a pair of ontological doctrines, the will to power and the eternal return of the same.

Vattimo aims to show that Nietzsche's early interest in cultural and historical criticism can be found throughout his corpus and that it informs, and helps to explain, Nietzsche's later doctrines and writings. This allows us to understand these later doctrines in a deeper way, to see their connections with his wider concerns, and thus to make greater sense of Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole.

This working hypothesis guides Vattimo through his elegant exposition of the basic views of the early and late Nietzsche, from the philological beginnings and the musings on Dionysus through the so-called positivist phase of the middle period up to the philosophy of Zarathustra and the fragmented insights that bespeak the will to power. Throughout, Vattimo's intellectual agenda is to present the philosophical relevance of a cultural criticism that does not let itself be reduced to a merely literary presentation of the psychology of decadence and nihilism, or to the grand ontological-metaphysical finale that Heidegger had in mind in his monumental Nietzsche studies.

As an appendix, Vattimo provides a history of Nietzsche reception in Europe that counters the narrow Anglo-American bias of much English-language Nietzsche scholarship.

Starting from the minimal principle of generative anthropology—that human culture originates as "the deferral of violence through representation"—the author proposes a new understanding of the fundamental concepts of metaphysics and an explanation of the historical problematic that underlies the postmodern "end of culture."

Part I begins with the paradoxical emergence of the "vertical" sign from the "horizontal" world of appetite. Two persons reaching for the same object are a minimal model of this emergence; their "pragmatic paradox" can be resolved only by substituting the representation of the object for its appropriation. The nature of paradox and the related notion of irony, as well as the fundamental concepts of being, thinking, and signification, are rethought on the basis of this triangular model, leading to an anthropological interpretation of the origin of philosophy and semiotics in Plato's Ideas. Part I concludes with an exploration of the psychoanalytic categories of the unconscious and the erotic.

Part II develops the idea that material exchange originates in the sparagmos or violent rendering of the sacrificial victim from which each participant obtains a roughly equal portion. The dependence of the process on the central victimary figure culminates in the Holocaust, the extermination of the Jews, whose crucial role in Western culture is their rejection of the central image in favor of peripheral exchange. As a result, postmodern dialogue becomes dominated by the rhetoric of victimage, and the culture of centrality gives way to an aesthetic of the marginal.

Now that pornography is on the Internet, its political and social functions have changed. So contends Margret Grebowicz in this imperative philosophical analysis of Internet porn. The production and consumption of Internet porn, in her account, are a symptom of the obsession with self-exposure in today's social networking media, which is, in turn, a symptom of the modern democratic construction of the governable subject as both transparent and communicative. In this first feminist critique to privilege the effects of pornography's Internet distribution rather than what it depicts, Grebowicz examines porn-sharing communities (such as the bestiality niche market) and the politics of putting women's sexual pleasure on display (the "squirting" market) as part of the larger democratic project. Arguing against this project, she shows that sexual pleasure is not a human right. Unlikely convergences between thinkers like Catherine MacKinnon, Jean Baudrillard, Judith Butler, and Jean-François Lyotard allow her to formulate a theory of the relationships between sex, speech, and power that stands as an alternative to such cyber-libertarian mottos as "freedom of speech" and "sexual freedom."

Drawing on Heidegger's corpus, the work of historians and biblical specialists, and contemporary philosophers like Levinas and Derrida, Zarader brings to light the evolution of an impensé—or unthought thought—that bespeaks a complex debt at the core of Heidegger's hermeneutic ontology.

Zarader argues forcefully that in his interpretation of Western thought and culture, Heidegger manages to recognize only two main lines of inheritance: the "Greek" line of philosophical thinking, and the Christian tradition of "faith." From this perspective, Heidegger systematically avoids any explicit or meaningful recognition of the contribution made by the Hebraic biblical and exegetical traditions to Western thought and culture. Zarader argues that this avoidance is significant, not simply because it involves an inexcusable historical oversight, but more importantly because Heidegger's own philosophical project draws on and develops themes that appear first, and fundamentally, within the very Hebraic traditions that he avoids, betraying an "unthought debt" to Hebraic tradition.

This is the third volume to appear in an edition that will be the first complete, critical, and annotated English translation of all of Nietzsche's work. Volume 2: Unfashionable Observations, translated by Richard T. Gray, was published in 1995; Volume 3: Human, All Too Human (I), translated by Gary Handwerk, was published in 1997. The edition is a new English translation, by various hands, of the celebrated Colli-Montinari edition, which has been acclaimed as one of the most important works of scholarship in the humanities in the last half century.

The present volume provides for the first time English translations of all of Nietzsche's unpublished notebooks from the summer of 1872 to the end of 1874. The major works published in this period were the first three Unfashionable Observations: "David Strauss the Confessor and the Writer," "On the Utility and Liability of History for Life," and "Schopenhauer as Educator." Translations of the preliminary notes for these pieces are coordinated with the translations of the published texts printed in Volume 2: Unfashionable Observations.

The content of these notebooks goes far beyond the notes and plans for published and unpublished Unfashionable Observations, encompassing numerous sketches related to Nietzsche's major philological project from this period, a book on the pre-Platonic Greek philosophers. The ideas that emerged from Nietzsche's deliberations on these early Greek thinkers are absolutely central to his thought from this period and contribute in significant ways to the development of several of his major themes: the role of the philosopher vis-à-vis his age and the surrounding culture; the relationships among philosophy, art, and culture; the metaphorical nature of language and its relationship to knowledge; the unmasking of the modern drive for absolute "truth" as a palliative against the horror of existence; and Nietzsche's "unfashionable" attack on modern science and modern culture, especially on the Germany of the Bismarck Reich. These notebooks represent important transitional documents in Nietzsche's intellectual development, marking, among other things, the shift away from philological studies toward unabashed cultural criticism.

Philosopher, literary critic, translator (of Nietzsche and Benjamin), Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe is one of the leading intellectual figures in France. This volume of six essays deals with the relation between philosophy and aesthetics, particularly the role of mimesis in a metaphysics of representation.

Comment [1997]

"Typography is a book whose importance has not diminished since its first publication in French in 1979. On the contrary, I would say, it is only now that one can truly begin to appreciate the groundbreaking status of these essays. The points it makes, the way it approaches the questions of mimesis, fictionality, and figurality, is unique. There are no comparable books, or books that could supersede it." —Rudolphe Gasché,

State University of New York, Buffalo

"Lacoue-Labarthe's essays still set the standards for thinking through the problem of subjectivity without simply retreating behind insights already gained. But this book is much more than a collection of essays: it constitutes a philosophical project in its own right. Anybody interested in the problem of mimesis—whether from a psychoanalytic, platonic, or any other philosophical angle—cannot avoid an encounter with this book. Lacoue-Labarthe is a philosopher and a comparatist in the highest sense of the word, and the breadth of his knowledge and the rigor of his thought are exemplary." —Eva Geulen,

New York University

Review

"In demonstrating how mimesis has determined philosophical thought, Lacoue-Labarthe provokes us into reconsidering our understanding of history and politics. . . . Together with the introduction, these essays are essential reading for anyone interested in Heidegger, postmodernism, and the history of mimesis in philosophy and literature." —The Review of Metaphysics

In exploring the nature of excess relative to a phenomenology of the limit, Testing the Limit claims that phenomenology itself is an exploration of excess. What does it mean that "the self" is "given"? Should we see it as originary; or rather, in what way is the self engendered from textual practices that transgress—or hover around and therefore within—the threshold of phenomenologial discourse? This is the first book to include Michel Henry in a triangulation with Derrida and Levinas and the first to critique Levinas on the basis of his interpolation of philosophy and religion. Sebbah claims that the textual origins of phenomenology determine, in their temporal rhythms, the nature of the subjectivation on which they focus. He situates these considerations within the broader picture of the state of contemporary French phenomenology (chiefly the legacy of Merleau-Ponty), in order to show that these three thinkers share a certain "family resemblance," the identification of which reveals something about the traces of other phenomenological families. It is by testing the limit within the context of traditional phenomenological concerns about the appearance of subjectivity and ipseity that Derrida, Henry, and Levinas radically reconsider phenomenology and that French phenomenology assumes its present form.

This volume collects a number of important and revealing interviews with Richard Rorty, spanning more than two decades of his public intellectual commentary, engagement, and criticism. In colloquial language, Rorty discusses the relevance and nonrelevance of philosophy to American political and public life. The collection also provides a candid set of insights into Rorty's political beliefs and his commitment to the labor and union traditions in this country. Finally, the interviews reveal Rorty to be a deeply engaged social thinker and observer.

This work, by one of the most innovative and challenging of contemporary thinkers, pivots on a Remark added by Hegel in 1831 to the second edition of his Science of Logic. As a model of close reading applied both to philosophical texts and the making of philosophical systems, The Speculative Remark played a significant role in transforming the practice of philosophy away from system building to analysis of specific linguistic detail, with meticulous attention to etymological, philological, and rhetorical nuance.

Nancy uses his extended examination of the Remark to delineate certain overall strategies in several Hegelian texts that militate for language-oriented readings of Hegel, as shown in Nancy's redefinition of such key terms as Aufhebung, mediation, and speculation. Nancy's reading progresses from speculative words and propositions to registering the speculative itself. While he avoids analyzing Hegel's system as such, Nancy reconstructs the Hegelian trajectory on a basis of tropes, building from propositions rather than structures, elements, and cycles.

The overview that emerges in the final chapter and epilogue constitutes a broad statement about Hegel's practice and significance, one nuanced by close attention to his deployment of rhetoric and linguistic play. The Speculative Remark thus furnishes a model for a theoretically aware approach to all systematic philosophy, while providing a significant historical contribution to the evolution of contemporary critical theory.

Sarah Kofman (1934-1994), Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and the author of over twenty books, was one of the most significant postwar thinkers in France. Kofman's scholarship was wide-ranging and included work on Freud and psychoanalysis, Nietzsche, feminism and the role of women in Western philosophy, visual art, and literature. The child of Polish Jewish immigrants who lost her father in the Holocaust, she also was interested in Judaism and anti-Semitism, especially as reflected in works of literature and philosophy. This book is an anthology of some of Kofman's most significant writings on these and other topics. Its purpose is to provide a general introduction to Kofman's thought, which has been highly influential in both Europe and America. Although some of the selections have been published previously, the majority of the books contents appear in English translation for the first time.

In times of intercultural tensions and conflicts, sincerity matters. Traditionally, sincerity concerns a performance of authenticity and truth, a performance that in intercultural situations is easily misunderstood. Sincerity plays a major role in law, the arts—literature, but especially the visual and performing arts—and religion. Sincerity enters the English language in the sixteenth century, when theatre emerged as the dominant idiom of secular representation, during a time of major religious changes. The present historical moment has much in common with that era; with its religious and cultural conflicts and major transformations in representational idioms and media. The Rhetoric of Sincerity is concerned with the ways in which the performance of sincerity is culturally specific and is enacted in different media and disciplines. The book focuses on the theatricality of sincerity, its bodily, linguistic, and social performances, and the success or failure of such performances.

Radical Atheism presents a profound new reading of the influential French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Against the prevalent notion that there was an ethical or religious "turn" in Derrida's thinking, Hägglund argues that a radical atheism informs Derrida's work from beginning to end. Proceeding from Derrida's insight into the constitution of time, Hägglund demonstrates how Derrida rethinks the condition of identity, ethics, religion, and political emancipation in accordance with the logic of radical atheism. Hägglund challenges other major interpreters of Derrida's work and offers a compelling account of Derrida's thinking on life and death, good and evil, self and other. Furthermore, Hägglund does not only explicate Derrida's position but also develops his arguments, fortifies his logic, and pursues its implications. The result is a groundbreaking deconstruction of the perennial philosophical themes of time and desire as well as pressing contemporary issues of sovereignty and democracy.

John Locke's theory of toleration is generally seen as advocating the privatization of religion. This interpretation has become conventional wisdom: secularization is widely understood as entailing the privatization of religion, and the separation of religion from power. This book turns that conventional wisdom on its head and argues that Locke secularizes religion, that is, makes it worldly, public, and political. In the name of diverse citizenship, Locke reconstructs religion as persuasion, speech, and fashion. He insists on a consensus that human rights are sacred insofar as humans are the creatures, and thus, the property of God. Drawing on a range of sources beyond Locke's own writings, Pritchard portrays the secular not as religion's separation from power, but rather as its affiliation with subtler, and sometimes insidious, forms of power. As a result, she captures the range of anxieties and conflicts attending religion's secularization: denunciations of promiscuous bodies freed from patriarchal religious and political formations, correlations between secular religion and colonialist education and conversion efforts, and more recently, condemnations of the coercive and injurious force of unrestricted religious speech.

Produced in honor of White's eightieth birthday, Re-Figuring Hayden White testifies to the lasting importance of White's innovative work, which firmly reintegrates historical studies with literature and the humanities. The book is a major reconsideration of the historian's contributions and influence by an international group of leading scholars from a variety of disciplines. Individual essays address the key concepts of White's intellectual career, including tropes, narrative, figuralism, and the historical sublime while exploring the place of White's work in the philosophy of history, postmodernism, and ethics. They also discuss his role as historian and teacher and apply his ideas to specific historical events.

This book offers a comprehensive evaluation of the two preeminent post-WWII political philosophers, John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. Both men question how we can be free and autonomous under coercive law and how we might collectively use our reason to justify exercises of political power. In pluralistic modern democracies, citizens cannot be expected to agree about social norms on the basis of common allegiance to comprehensive metaphysical or religious doctrines concerning persons or society, and both philosophers thus engage fundamental questions about how a normatively binding framework for the public use of reason might be possible and justifiable. Hedrick explores the notion of reasonableness underwriting Rawls's political liberalism and the theory of communicative rationality that sustains Habermas's procedural conception of the democratic constitutional state. His book challenges the Rawlsianism prevalent in the Anglo-American world today while defending Habermas's often poorly understood theory as a superior alternative.

A new and manageable edition of Locke has been badly needed. Professor Ramsey's judicious editing of these important texts fills the need and greatly enhances the value of the texts for the modern reader. Included are The Reasonablesness of Christianity, A Discourse on Miracles, A Further Note on Miracles, and some passages from A Third letter concerning Toleration. Each work is prefaced by an introduction,giving the background of its writing and indicating its contemporary significance.

We live in an age of distraction. Contemporary analyses of culture, politics, techno-science, and psychology insist on this. They often suggest remedies for it, or ways to capitalize on it. Yet they almost never investigate the meaning and history of distraction itself. This book corrects this lack of attention. It inquires into the effects of distraction, defined not as the opposite of attention, but as truly discontinuous intellect. Human being has to be reconceived, according to this argument, not as quintessentially thought-bearing, but as subject to repeated, causeless blackouts of mind.

The Problem of Distraction presents the first genealogy of the concept from Aristotle to the largely forgotten, early twentieth-century efforts by Kafka, Heidegger, and Benjamin to revolutionize the humanities by means of distraction. Further, the book makes the case that our present troubles cannot be solved by recovering or enhancing attention. Not-always-thinking beings are beset by radical breaks in their experience, but in this way they are also receptive to what has not and cannot yet be called experience.

This is a broad-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink aesthetic and literary studies in terms of an “anthropology” of symbolic media generally. Central to the author’s argument is the proposition that the idea of literature—at least as it has been understood in the West since the eighteenth century—as the paradigm for artistic experience is both limited and limiting. In its place, the author offers a more general theory of aesthetic experience appropriate to a wide range of media (in the term’s broadest sense) and geared toward performativity and bodily experience.

The author develops the idea of the “protoliterary” as a cultural-aesthetic discourse prior to and external to the “literary” as traditionally conceived in Western aesthetics. Manifestations of the protoliterary tend to occur within forms of multimedia theatricalization in which suggestive images of the body loom large. The appeal of the protoliterary lies in its ability to function on both cognitive and somatic levels, thereby neutralizing such distinctions as self/society and reality/fiction.

The author’s argument is indebted to John Dewey’s belief in a basic human need for aesthetic experience, a need that can be met in a variety of ways, from tattoos and scarification, through sports, parades, and cosmetics, to literature, opera, and film. From this basis the book theorizes a history of the development of separate, hierarchical arts in the West while suggesting that independent histories of single arts and artistic experience are no longer desirable or even possible. Although the genesis of particular forms of media are inextricably linked to specific historical, sociological, and technological conditions, their potential functions and effects are not tied to those conditions, nor should they be.

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), one of the leading social thinkers of the twentieth century, long concerned himself with the problems of moral philosophy, or "whether the good life is a genuine possibility in the present."

This book consists of a course of seventeen lectures given in May-July 1963. Captured by tape recorder (which Adorno called "the fingerprint of the living mind"), these lectures present a somewhat different, and more accessible, Adorno from the one who composed the faultlessly articulated and almost forbiddingly perfect prose of the works published in his lifetime. Here we can follow Adorno's thought in the process of formation (he spoke from brief notes), endowed with the spontaneity and energy of the spoken word.

The lectures focus largely on Kant, "a thinker in whose work the question of morality is most sharply contrasted with other spheres of existence." After discussing a number of the Kantian categories of moral philosophy, Adorno considers other, seemingly more immediate general problems, such as the nature of moral norms, the good life, and the relation of relativism and nihilism.

In the course of the lectures, Adorno addresses a wide range of topics, including: theory and practice, ethics as bad conscience, the repressive character, the problem of freedom, dialectics in Kant and Hegel, the nature of reason, the moral law as a given, psychoanalysis, the element of the Absurd, freedom and law, the Protestant tradition of morality, Hamlet, self-determination, phenomenology, the concept of the will, the idea of humanity, The Wild Duck, and Nietzsche's critique of morality.

This book collects fifteen major philosophical essays written over a period of more than twenty years by acclaimed Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. The volume opens with an introduction in which the editor situates Agamben's work with respect to both the history of philosophy and contemporary European thought. The essays that follow articulate a series of theoretical confrontations with privileged figures in the history of philosophy, politics, and criticism, from Plato to Spinoza, Aristotle to Deleuze, Carl Schmitt to Benjamin, Hegel to Aby Warburg, and Heidegger to Derrida. Three fundamental concepts organize the collection as a whole: language, in the sense not of particular statements but rather the very taking place of speech, the pure fact of language's existence; history, as it appears from a perspective in which tradition, transmission, and memory reach their messianic fulfillment; and potentiality, understood as a fundamental problem of metaphysics, ethics, and the philosophy of language. All these topics converge in the final part of the book, in which Agamben offers an extensive reading of Melville's short story "Bartleby the Scrivener" as a work that puts potentiality and actuality, possibility and reality, in an altogether new light.

In this book of brilliantly erudite and precise discussions, Pierre Hadot explains that for the Ancients philosophy was not reducible to the building of a theoretical system: it was above all a choice about how to live one's life.

One of the most influential historians of ancient philosophy in the world today, Hadot is adept at using ancient philosophers to illuminate the relevance of their ideas to contemporary life. In this book, which is an ideal introduction to Hadot's more scholarly What is Ancient Philosophy?, we learn that to be an Epicurean is not merely to think like one; it is to adopt a way of living where limiting desires is the condition for happiness. Being an Aristotelian, similarly, is to choose a life that involves contemplation, and being a Cynic is to follow Diogenes in his refusal of quotidian convention and the mentality of ordinary people. If so many Ancient philosophers founded schools, Hadot explains, it was precisely because they were proposing how to live life on a daily basis. We learn here that the history of philosophy has been something more than just that of a discourse. The founding texts of Greek philosophy, after all, were notes taken from oral exercises undertaken in concrete circumstances and contexts, most often a dialogue between students and specific interlocutors who meant to shed light on their students' real existence. The immense contribution of this book, which also traces Hadot's own personal itinerary in a touching manner, is to remind us, through direct language and numerous examples, what the theoretical aspect of philosophy often masks: its vital and existential dimensions.

The book offers a new introduction to Jacques Derrida and to Deconstruction as an important strand of Continental Philosophy. From his early writings on phenomenology and linguistics to his later meditations on war, terrorism, and justice, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) achieved prominence on an international scale by addressing as many different audiences as he did topics. Yet despite widespread acclamation, his work has never been considered easy. Rendering accessible debates that marked more than four decades of engagement and inquiry, Susanne Lüdemann traces connections between the philosopher's own texts and those of his many interlocutors, past and present.

Unlike conventional introductions, Politics of Deconstruction offers a number of personal approaches to reading Derrida and invites readers to find their own. Emphasizing the relationship between philosophy and politics, it shows that, with Deconstruction, there is much more at stake than an "academic" discussion, for Derrida's work deals with all the burning political and intellectual challenges of our time. The author's own professional experience in both the United States and in Europe, which particularly inform her chapter on Derrida's reception in the United States, opens a unique perspective on a unique thinker, one that rewards specialists and newcomers alike.

This book questions the book itself, archivization, machines for writing, and the mechanicity inherent in language, the media, and intellectuals. Derrida questions what takes place between the paper and the machine inscribing it. He examines what becomes of the archive when the world of paper is subsumed in new machines for virtualization, and whether there can be a virtual event or a virtual archive.

Derrida continues his long-standing investigation of these issues, and ties them into the new themes that governed his teaching and thinking in the past few years: the secret, pardon, perjury, state sovereignty, hospitality, the university, animal rights, capital punishment, the question of what sort of mediatized world is replacing the print epoch, and the question of the “wholly other.” Derrida is remarkable at making seemingly occasional pieces into part of a complexly interconnected trajectory of thought.

In Poetry and Apocalypse, Franke seeks to find the premises for dialogue between cultures, especially religious fundamentalisms—including Islamic fundamentalism—and modern Western secularism. He argues that in order to be genuinely open, dialogue needs to accept possibilities such as religious apocalypse in ways that can be best understood through the experience of poetry. Franke reads Christian epic and prophetic tradition as a secularization of religious revelation that preserves an understanding of the essentially apocalyptic character of truth and its disclosure in history. The usually neglected negative theology that undergirds this apocalyptic tradition provides the key to a radically new view of apocalypse as at once religious and poetic.

Since Hegel, philosophy cannot stop thinking its end.

The violent transformations which Hegel's philosophy has uncovered and caused in the structure of philosophical terms and in the terms under which philosophy is possible is Hamacher's topic. Starting from Hegel's commentaries on biblical scripture, Hamacher traces the genealogy and unfolding of Hegel's thought into his mature works—the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Encyclopedia, the Philosophy of History—focusing throughout on the limits and borders, the limitations and extremities of its conceptual and textual movements.

Because the concept for Hegel is the end of the thing—the point where it peaks—because it occurs by severance from its representational content, the trace of this splitting appears imprinted into its discursive articulation. The Hegelian text is punctuated by a series of terms and topics that operate according to the logic of the turning point: one function activating its opposite, they serve as pores between mutually exclusive experiences and establish their unity. This dialectical procedure falters, its unity dissolves, the pores turn into aporias, wherever conceptual exigencies surpass the reality they have instilled. Hamacher shows that dialectics, proceeding by way of aporias, remains unable to account for its own movement. Hegel's system must be read from the point where its rupture fails to converge with its end.

Analyzing both the historical and the systematic aspects of Hegel's philosophy, addressing Kant and religious fetishism, Nietzsche and the impossible repetition of the same, Marx and the aroma of religion, Freud and the hysterical body, Hamacher's argument is directed toward what in Hegel's philosophy of spirit resists spiritualization and defeats philosophy. Aspiring to be the last philosophy, speculative idealism has to incorporate all previous systems and spiritualize its incorporation. Its logic of ingestion must, however, reject with repulsion and nausea (Ekel) everything that resists appropriation.

Emphasizing Hegel's claim to present the political theology of modern society, Hamacher shows that the mechanism of nausea meant to keep the system intact is in fact itself a mechanism foreign to its body; it averts the promised incorporation, defeats idealization, leaves the body politic disintegrated, and voids the claim of the most powerful ontology of modern society to mark the end, the completion and plenitude—the pleroma—of philosophy and history. What remains—the indigestible, the unreadable, the nondiscursive—demands yet another kind of discourse and another practical gesture: toward a pleroma other than Hegel's.

Of Minimal Things is an exploration and reassessment of the philosophical notion of relation. In contrast to the scholastic, ontological conception of relation as a thing of diminished being, this book views relation as the minimal and elemental theme and structure of philosophy. Drawing radical conclusions from the classical understanding of relation as a being-toward-another, it argues that rethinking relation engages the very possibility and limits of philosophical discourse.

In the author's studies of Nietzsche and Benjamin, Husserl and Heidegger, Derrida and Blanchot, relation is shown to be central to their thought and to undergo elaborations that escape the ontological, categorial, and formalist ways in which the concept has traditionally been interpreted. Comprehending relation in terms of determination, foundation, mediatization, translation, or communication, these authors are shown to draw out and refine a host of structural implications of the notion that unseat its formalist and categorial conception.

Studying the writings of Mallarmé and Kafka, the author argues that rethought from, and in light of the other to which a relation tends, philosophy necessarily opens up to and is implicated in its others, one such possible other being literature.

Deepening divisions separate today's philosophers, first, from the culture at large; then, from each other; and finally, from philosophy itself. Though these divisions tend to coalesce publicly as debates over the Enlightenment, their roots lie much deeper. Overcoming them thus requires a confrontation with the whole of Western philosophy. Only when we uncover the strange heritage of Aristotle's metaphysics, as reworked, for example, by Descartes and Kant, can we understand contemporary philosophy's inability to dialogue with women, people of color, LGBTs, and other minority groups. Only when we have understood that inability can we see how the thought of Hegel and Heidegger contains the seeds of a remedy. And only when armed with such a remedy can philosophy rise to the challenges posed by thinkers such as David Foster Wallace and Abraham Lincoln. The book's interpretations of these figures and others past and present are as scrupulous as its conclusions will be controversial. The result contributes to the most important question confronting us today: does reason itself have a future?

Drawing on Nietzsche's prolific early notebooks and correspondence, this book challenges the polarized picture of Nietzsche as a philosopher who abandoned classical philology. It traces the contours of his earliest philological thinking and opens the way to a fresh view of his later thinking. The book's primary aim is to displace the developmental logic that has been a controlling factor in Nietzsche's reception, namely the assumption that Nietzsche passed from a precritical phase to an enlightened phase in which he liberated himself from metaphysics. A subsidiary aim is to decenter the view that fastens onto The Birth of Tragedy as a dramatic turning point in Nietzsche's thought.

For Nietzsche, questions about the religion, art, and history of the classical world are bound up with fundamental questions about knowledge, culture, history, and the status of the subject. From his early writings, Nietzsche finds it difficult to separate questions about modernity from those about antiquity. Nor are the problems of classical philology ever far from his mind, even toward the end of his career. By showing how frequently the "later" Nietzsche appears in the early writings, the author hopes to provoke reflection on the adequacy of current characterizations of Nietzsche, and not just to raise questions about the periodization of his life and thought.

The book traces Nietzsche's efforts, throughout his career, to determine the ways in which philosophy and philology are symptomatic of modern cultural habits, ideologies, and imaginings. In the form of a cultural anthropology, he may even have outlined the most trenchant model still available for confronting the ghostly specters that haunt Western society. Nietzsche's incessant preoccupation with the symptomatology of the modern subject—its ailments, its allusions, and the signs of its irrepressible presence—unifies his oeuvre more than any other single question.

The author argues that Nietzsche arrived at this inquiry from a philological perspective, according to which subjective identity is viewed as part of a historical process. Embodied in practices, habits, and institutions, these inheritances of culture—of which classical antiquity is a crucial part—undergo the vicissitudes of transmission, decipherment, reconstruction, reception, and especially falsification (whether through unwilled or deliberate misunderstanding). All of these factors are intimately bound up with the ways in which subjects form themselves.

This long-overdue translation brings to the English-speaking world the work that set the tone for the post-structuralist reading of Nietzsche.

The issue of style, of why Nietzsche wrote as he did, is fundamental, on any level, to reading his texts. Some Nietzsche critics (in particular, those, such as Jean Granier, indebted to Heidegger's reading), in effect translated Nietzsche's terms back into those of a philosophy of ontology. This book (which includes an appendix specifically directed against the "Heideggerian" reading) shows how such an approach fails to interrogate the precise terms, such as "Nature" or "life", that Nietzsche used in place of "being," and to ask the meaning of this substitution.

The author gives not only a reading of Nietzsche's ideas, but a method for investigating his style. She shows in great detail how it influences both Nietzsche's ideas and the way in which they are to be understood. In so doing, she exemplifies how post-structuralist methods can be used to open up classical philosophical texts to new readings. She write conceptually in the knowledge that the concept has no greater value than metaphor and is itself a condensation of metaphors, rather than writing metaphorically as a way of denigrating the concept and proposing metaphor as the norm, and thus acknowledges the specificity of philosophy, its irreducibility to any other form of expression—even when this philosophy has nothing traditional about it any longer, even when it is, like Nietzsche's an unheard-of and insolent philosophy.

As long as we care about suffering in the world, says political philosopher Simona Forti, we are compelled to inquire into the question of evil. But is the concept of evil still useful in a postmodern landscape where absolute values have been leveled and relativized by a historicist perspective? Given our current unwillingness to judge others, what signposts remain to guide our ethical behavior?

Surveying the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western philosophical debates on evil, Forti concludes that it is time to leave behind what she calls "the Dostoevsky paradigm": the dualistic vision of an omnipotent monster pitted against absolute, helpless victims. No longer capable of grasping the normalization of evil in today's world—whose structures of power have been transformed—this paradigm has exhausted its explanatory force.

In its place, Forti offers a different genealogy of the relationship between evil and power, one that finally calls into question power's recurrent link to transgression. At the center of contemporary evil she posits the passive attitude towards rule-following, the need for normalcy, and the desire for obedience nurtured by our contemporary mass democracies. In our times, she contends, evil must be explored in tandem with our stubborn desire to stay alive at all costs as much as with our deep need for recognition: the new modern absolutes. A courageous book, New Demons extends an original, inspiring call to ethical living in a biopolitical age.

Throughout much of Chinese history, Mencius (372-289 b.c.) was considered the greatest Confucian thinker after Confucius himself. Following the enshrinement of the Mencius (an edited compilation of his thought by disciples or disciples of disciples) as one of the Four Books by Sung neo-Confucianists, he was studied by all educated Chinese.

This study begins a reassessment of Mencius by studying his ethical thinking (how one should live) in relation to that of other early Chinese thinkers, including Confucius, Mo Tzu, the Yangists, and Hsün Tzu. It is the first of three planned studies on Mencius: the second volume will examine the reception and development of Mencian ideas by later thinkers, and the third will be a general philosophical discussion of Confucian ethics.

In this book, one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers considers the status of art in the modern era. He takes seriously Hegel's claim that art has exhausted its spiritual vocation, that it is no longer through art that Spirit principally comes to knowledge of itself. He argues, however, that Hegel by no means proclaimed the "death of art" (as many still imagine) but proclaimed rather the indefinite continuation of art in what Hegel called a "self-annulling" mode.

With astonishing breadth and originality, the author probes the meaning, aesthetics, and historical consequences of that self-annulment. In essence, he argues that the birth of modern aesthetics is the result of a series of schisms—between artist and spectator, genius and taste, and form and matter, for example—that are manifestations of the deeper, self-negating yet self-perpetuating movement of irony.

Through this concept of self-annulment, the author offers an imaginative reinterpretation of the history of aesthetic theory from Kant to Heidegger, and he opens up original perspectives on such phenomena as the rise of the modern museum, the link between art and terror, the natural affinity between "good taste" and its perversion, and kitsch as the inevitable destiny of art in the modern era. The final chapter offers a dazzling interpretation of Dürer's Melancholia in the terms that the book has articulated as its own.

The Man Without Content will naturally interest those who already prize Agamben's work, but it will also make his name relevant to a whole new audience—those involved with art, art history, the history of aesthetics, and popular culture.

Jean-Pierre Dupuy, prophet of what he calls "enlightened doomsaying," has long warned that modern society is on a path to self-destruction. In this book, he pleads for a subversion of this crisis from within, arguing that it is our lopsided view of religion and reason that has set us on this course. In denial of our sacred origins and hubristically convinced of the powers of human reason, we cease to know our own limits: our disenchanted world leaves us defenseless against a headlong rush into the abyss of global warming, nuclear holocaust, and the other catastrophes that loom on our horizon. Reviving the religious anthropology of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Marcel Mauss and in dialogue with the work of René Girard, Dupuy shows that we must remember the world's sacredness in order to keep human violence in check. A metaphysical and theological detective, he tracks the sacred in the very fields where human reason considers itself most free from everything it judges irrational: science, technology, economics, political and strategic thought. In making such claims, The Mark of the Sacred takes on religion bashers, secularists, and fundamentalists at once. Written by one of the deepest and most versatile thinkers of our time, it militates for a world where reason is no longer an enemy of faith.

In this highly original and provocative book, Michel Serres reflects on the relation between nature and culture and analyzes the origins of the world's contemporary environmental problems. He does so through the surprising proposition that our cleanliness is our dirt. While all living beings pollute to lay claim to their habitat, humans have multiplied pollution's effects catastrophically since the Industrial Revolution through the economic system's mode of appropriation and its emphasis on mindless growth. He warns that while we can measure what he calls "hard pollution"—the poisoning of the Earth—we ignore at our peril the disastrous impact of the "soft pollution" created by sound and images on our psyches. Sounding the alarm that the planet is heading for disaster, Serres proposes that humanity should stop trying to "own" the world and become "renters." Building on his earlier work, especially that on hominization, he urges us to establish a "natural contract" with nature.

Published with the assistance of the Edgar M. Kahn Memorial Fund.

The work of contemporary Italian thinkers, what Roberto Esposito refers to as Italian Theory, is attracting increasing attention around the world. This book explores the reasons for its growing popularity, its distinguishing traits, and why people are turning to these authors for answers to real-world issues and problems. The approach he takes, in line with the keen historical consciousness of Italian thinkers themselves, is a historical one. He offers insights into the great "unphilosophical" philosophers of life—poets, painters, politicians and revolutionaries, film-makers and literary critics—who have made Italian thought, from its beginnings, an "impure" thought. People like Machiavelli, Croce, Gentile, and Gramsci were all compelled to fulfill important political roles in the societies of their times. No wonder they felt that the abstract vocabulary and concepts of pure philosophy were inadequate to express themselves. Similarly, artists such as Dante, Leonardo Da Vinci, Leopardi, or Pasolini all had to turn to other disciplines outside philosophy in order to discuss and grapple with the messy, constantly changing realities of their lives.

For this very reason, says Esposito, because Italian thinkers have always been deeply engaged with the concrete reality of life (rather than closed up in the introspective pursuits of traditional continental philosophy) and because they have looked for the answers of today in the origins of their own historical roots, Italian theory is a "living thought." Hence the relevance or actuality that it holds for us today.

Continuing in this tradition, the work of Roberto Esposito is distinguished by its interdisciplinary breadth. In this book, he passes effortlessly from literary criticism to art history, through political history and philosophy, in an expository style that welcomes non-philosophers to engage in the most pressing problems of our times. As in all his works, Esposito is inclusive rather than exclusive; in being so, he celebrates the affirmative potency of life.

Thomas Hobbes is an iconic figure who serves as an easy reference for pundits commenting on the brutality of war as well as for critics of a distinctly modern individualism in which calculating and rapacious self-interest is the cause of the violence, destruction, and exploitation endemic to the contemporary world. Frost's reading of Hobbes's philosophy shows us that underlying such visions of self and politics is another iconic figure: that of the Cartesian subject. What gives the iconic Hobbes his hardcore individualism and its corollary accounts of instrumentalism, conflict, and absolutism is a Cartesian rendering of the self as split into mind and body. Carefully elaborating Hobbes's materialist ontology, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker challenges both our implicit Cartesian assumptions about the self and the commonplace Hobbes that so readily figures violence in our political imagination. Through his materialism, Hobbes presents an alternative modern account of self-consciousness, reason, agency, power, freedom, and responsibility. In doing so, he shows that our fundamental intersubjectivity and interdependence require that we pursue peace above all else.

This book is the companion to Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros (Stanford University Press, 2000), which dealt with the psychoanalytic clinical problem of resistance to interpretation. The key to this resistance is the unconscious registration and repudiation (disavowal) of the reality of difference. The surprising generality of this resistance intersects with Nietzsche's, Heidegger's, and Derrida's understanding of how and why difference is in general the "unthought of metaphysics." All three see metaphysics engaged with a "registration and repudiation of difference," and all three rethink interpretation in relation to this question. The synthesis of these theories of interpretation and difference provides the philosophical foundations for a new thinking of how interpretation functions, and is a critical intersection of deconstruction and psychoanalysis.

Recent debates within Continental philosophy have decisively renewed the question of the ethical, with the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995) as its center. Coming from yet in contestation with the phenomenological traditions of Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas defines ethics as an originary response to the face of the other. For him, language is an exception to a habitual economy that represses alterity and maintains the asymmetry and distance constitutive of the nontotalizing relation to the other. Ethics occurs in the interlocutionary relation to the other, and interpellation—a kind of interruption by speaking—is the essential feature of ethical language.

Between 1982 and 1992, Levinas gave numerous interviews, closing a distinguished sixty-year career. Of the twenty interviews collected in this volume, seventeen appear in English for the first time. In the interviews Levinas sets forth the central features of his ethical philosophy, previously enunciated in Totality and Infinity (1961), in a language that bridges to the idiom of his later work. He underlines his dedication to the phenomenological search for the concrete and the nonformal signification of alterity. He also elaborates issues that do not receive extensive treatment in his formal philosophical works, including the question of prephilosophical experiences and the ethical signification of money, justice, and the State.

The informality of the interviews prompts Levinas to address matters about which he is reticent in his published works, notably the relation of his ethical philosophy to theological questions, the intrication of the Hebrew Bible in Greek philosophy, his substantial corpus of "nonphilosophical" or "confessional" writings on the Talmud, and recollections of his extraordinary talmudic teacher, Shoshani.

The centerpiece of the volume is a previously untranslated 1986 interview with François Poirié. Containing Levinas's sole extended discussion of biographical matters with an interviewer, this text helps to situate Levinas in his contemporary intellectual world and to clarify his place in French thought.

The Impertinent Self provides a philosophical and cultural theory of modernity by constructing a parallel between the philosophical self and the hero figure found in certain cinematic genres. Früchtl argues that modernity is not unified and should be conceived as a phenomenon consisting of three strata: the classical, the agonist, and the hybrid. He demonstrates this by following a dual trajectory: the shift in the concept of the self from German idealism to Romanticism and so-called postmodernism, and the evolution of the hero figure in the Western and in crime and science fiction movies. Früchtl takes a clear position within the ongoing discussion in the humanities and social sciences about modernity, a discussion that, in light of the work of Foucault, Lyotard, and Habermas, has too often neglected the importance of Romanticism. Similarly, he embraces the role of film and popular culture in modern society.

Against the assumption that aesthetic form relates to a harmonious arrangement of parts into a beautiful whole, this book argues that reason is the real theme of the Critique of Judgment as of the two earlier Critiques. Since aesthetic judgment of the beautiful becomes possible only when the mind is confronted with things of nature, for which no determined concepts of understanding are available, aesthetic judgment is involved in an epistemological or, rather, para-epistemological task.

The predicate "beautiful" indicates that something has minimal form and is cognizable. This book explores this concept of form, in particular the role of presentation (Darstellung) in what Kant refers to as "mere form," which involves not only the understanding, but also reason as the faculty of ideas. Such a notion of form reveals why the beautiful can be related to the morally good. On the basis of this reinterpreted concept of form, most major concepts and themes of the Critique of Judgment—such as disinterestedness, free play, the sublime, genius, and beautiful arts—are examined by the author and shown in a new light.

It is commonly believed that Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), well known as the founder of phenomenology and as the teacher of Heidegger, was unable to free himself from the framework of a classical metaphysics of subjectivity. Supposedly, he never abandoned the view that the world and the Other are constituted by a pure transcendental subject, and his thinking in consequence remains Cartesian, idealistic, and solipsistic.

The continuing publication of Husserl's manuscripts has made it necessary to revise such an interpretation. Drawing upon both Husserl's published works and posthumous material, Husserl's Phenomenology incorporates the results of the most recent Husserl research. It is divided into three parts, roughly following the chronological development of Husserl's thought, from his early analyses of logic and intentionality, through his mature transcendental-philosophical analyses of reduction and constitution, to his late analyses of intersubjectivity and lifeworld. It can consequently serve as a concise and updated introduction to his thinking.

The Honor of Thinking investigates the limits of criticism, theory, and philosophy in light of what Martin Heidegger and French post-Heideggerian philosophers have established about the nature and tasks of thinking. In addition to in-depth analyses of Walter Benjamin's conception of critique—and in particular the relation of critique to ethics, as well as alternative models of criticism (such as Heidegger's notion of "Auseinandersetzung," and Derridean deconstruction)—this book contains essays on the notion of theory from the Greeks and the early German Romantics to the contemporary use of this notion in literary studies. The last part of the book investigates the different ways of understanding philosophical thinking that are found in contemporary French thought, examining works of Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Derrida.

Didacticism, romanticism, and classicism are the possible schemata for the knotting of art and philosophy, the third term in this knot being the education of subjects, youth in particular. What characterizes the century that has just come to a close is that, while it underwent the saturation of these three schemata, it failed to introduce a new one. Today, this predicament tends to produce a kind of unknotting of terms, a desperate dis-relation between art and philosophy, together with the pure and simple collapse of what circulated between them: the theme of education.

Whence the thesis of which this book is nothing but a series of variations: faced with such a situation of saturation and closure, we must attempt to propose a new schema, a fourth type of knot between philosophy and art.

Among these “inaesthetic” variations, the reader will encounter a sustained debate with contemporary philosophical uses of the poem, bold articulations of the specificity and prospects of theater, cinema, and dance, along with subtle and provocative readings of Fernando Pessoa, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Samuel Beckett.

For Greek antiquity, the question of right or fitting measure constituted the very heart of both ethics and politics. But can the Good of the ethical life and the Justice of the political be reduced to measurement and calculation? If they are matters of measure, are they not also absolutely immeasurable? In critical dialogue with texts by Plato, Hölderlin, Rilke, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Levi, the author argues that the question of measure has become ever more urgent in the context of a modernity pressured by the conditions of a technological economy and a relativism that threatens to destroy a vital sense of moral responsibility and the commitment to justice that underlies the possibility of freedom. Conceived as a task for the “metaphysics” of memory, this book explores the normative problematic of measure, bringing its deeply buried redemptive promise to appearance in our gestures, uses and abuses of the hands, the dialectic of tact, and the manners of social existence.

Giorgio Agamben has come to be recognized in recent years as one of the most provocative and imaginative thinkers in contemporary philosophy and political theory. The essays gathered together in this volume shed light on his extensive body of writings and assess the significance of his work for debates across a wide range of fields, including philosophy, political theory, Jewish studies, and animal studies. The authors discuss material extending across the entire range of Agamben's writings, including such early works as Language and Death and more recent and widely acknowledged works such as Homo Sacer. Readers will find useful discussions of key concepts and theories in Agamben's work, such as sovereignty and bare life, along with more critical analyses of the political stakes and consequences of his theoretical and political interventions.

In this study, Paola Marrati approaches—in an extremely insightful, rigorous, and well-argued way—the question of the philosophical sources of Derrida's thought through a consideration of his reading of both Husserl and Heidegger. A central focus of the book is the analysis of the concepts of genesis and trace as they define Derrida's thinking of historicity, time, and subjectivity. Notions such as the contamination of the empirical and the transcendental, dissemination and writing, are explained as key categories establishing a guiding thread that runs through Derrida's early and later works. Whereas in his discussion of Husserl Derrida problematizes the relationship between the ideality of meaning and the singularity of its historical production, in his interpretation of Heidegger he challenges the very idea of the originary finitude of temporality.

This book is essential reading not only for those interested in the philosophical roots of deconstruction, but for all those interested in the central questions of history and temporality, subjectivity and language, that pervade contemporary debates in cultural, literary, and visual theory alike.

Seven eminent authors, all known for their work in deconstruction, address the millennial issue of our “futures,” “promises,” “prophecies,” “projects,” and “possibilities”—including the possibility that there may be no “future” at all. Speculative in every sense, these essays are marked by a common concern for the act of reading as it is practiced in the work of Jacques Derrida. The contributors—Geoffrey Bennington, Paul Davies, Peter Fenves, Werner Hamacher, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Elisabeth Weber, and Jacques Derrida himself—study a range of authors, including Pascal, Kant, Hegel, Leibniz, Marx, Benjamin, Koyré, Arendt, and Lacan.

These readings are neither prescriptive, definitive, nor definitional. Each essay seeks out, in the work it studies, those moments that pronounce or propose futures that enable speculation, moments in which the speculator has to make promises. As Derrida says in his essay, “Between lying and acting, acting in politics, manifesting one’s own freedom through action, transforming facts, anticipating the future, there is something like an essential affinity. . . . The lie is the future.” Or, in the words of Werner Hamacher, “The futurity of language, its inherent promising capacity, is the ground—but a ground with no solidity whatever—for all present and past experiences, meanings, and figures which could communicate themselves in it.”

These essays, though arising from deconstruction, point out the ways in which deconstruction has yet to occur, and they do so by scanning the unattainable horizons marked off by thinkers at the forefront of our modern era.

Humans may be the only creatures conscious of having a future, but all too often we would rather not think about it. Likewise, our societies, unable to deal with radical uncertainty, do not make policies with a view to the long term. Instead, we suffer from a sense of powerlessness, collective irrationality, and perennial political discontent.

In The Future and Its Enemies, Spanish philosopher Daniel Innerarity makes a plea for a new social contract that would commit us to moral and political responsibility with respect to future generations. He urges us to become advocates for the future in the face of enemies who, oblivious to the costs of modernization, press for endless and unproductive acceleration. His accessible book proposes a new way of confronting the unknown—one grounded in the calculation of risk. Declaring the classical right-left divide to be redundant, Innerarity presents his hopes for a renewed democracy and a politics that would find convincing ways to mediate between the priorities of the present, the heritage of the past, and the challenges that lie ahead.

We can calculate financial fraud, but how do we measure bad faith? How can we evaluate the words of the pharmaceutical industry or of eco-scientific ideologies, or the subtle deception found in political scheming? Henri Atlan sheds light on these questions through the concept of ona'ah, which in Hebrew refers to both fraud in financial transactions and the verbal injury inflicted by speech. The world of ona'ah is a world of an "in-between," where the impossible purity of absolute Platonic truth gives way to a more relative notion—the near-theft, the quasi-lie. Today it seems that no discourse is safe from fraudulent excesses, be they intentional or no. As both philosopher and biologist, Atlan works on several registers. He forges links between the Talmud, the Kabbalah, and the big questions of our time, multiplying the bridges between science, philosophy, and current ethical dilemmas. In a context of financial and moral crises that appear to be weakening our democracies, Henri Atlan's work allows us to rethink the status of fraud in the contemporary world.

This book offers an original approach to avant-garde art and its transformative force. Presenting an alternative to the approaches to art developed in postmodern theory or cultural studies, Ziarek sees art's significance in its critique of power and the increasing technologization of social relations. Re-examining avant-garde art and literature, from Italian and Russian Futurism and Dadaism, to Language poetry, video and projection art, as well as transgenic and Internet art, this book argues that art's importance today cannot be explained simply in aesthetic or cultural terms but has to take into consideration how artworks question the technological character of modern power. To emphasize the transformative character of art, the book redefines art as a force field, in which forces drawn from historical and social reality come be to formed into an alternative relationality. Through discussions of such key avant-garde figures as Marinetti, Duchamp, Khlebnikov, and Vertov, and innovative contemporary artists like Viola, Wodiczko and Kac, The Force of Art counters the pessimism about art's social function by recovering and redefining art's transformative role in modernity.

When future historians chronicle the twentieth century, they will see phenomenology as one of the preeminent social and ethical philosophies of its age. The phenomenological movement not only produced systematic reflection on common moral concerns such as distinguishing right from wrong and explaining the status of values; it also called on philosophy to renew European societies facing crisis, an aim that inspired thinkers in interwar Europe as well as later communist bloc dissidents.

Despite this legacy, phenomenology continues to be largely discounted as esoteric and solipsistic, the last gasp of a Cartesian dream to base knowledge on the isolated rational mind. Intellectual histories tend to cite Husserl's epistemological influence on philosophies like existentialism and deconstruction without considering his social or ethical imprint. And while a few recent scholars have begun to note phenomenology's wider ethical resonance, especially in French social thought, its image as stubbornly academic continues to hold sway. The Far Reaches challenges that image by tracing the first history of phenomenological ethics and social thought in Central Europe, from its founders Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl through its reception in East Central Europe by dissident thinkers such as Jan Patočka, Karol Wojtyła (Pope John Paul II), and Václav Havel.

This is the most systematic, the most radical, and the most lucid treatise on freedom that has been written in contemporary Continental philosophy. Finding its guiding motives in Kant's second Critique and working its way up to and beyond Heidegger and Adorno, this book marks the most advanced position in the thinking of freedom that has been proposed after Sartre and Levinas. One could call it a fundamental ontology of freedom if freedom, according to the author, did not entail liberation from foundational acts and the overcoming of any logic that determines the way ontology does, by positing being either as self-sufficient position or as subjected to strictly immanent laws.

Once existence no longer offers itself as an empiricity that must be related to its conditions of possibility or sublated in a transcendence beyond itself, but instead as sheer factuality, we must think this fact, the fact of existence as the essence of itself, as freedom. The question is no longer "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Instead, it becomes "Why these very questions by which existence affirms itself and abandons itself in a single gesture?" If we do not think being itself as a freedom, we are condemned to think of freedom as pure "Idea" or "right," and being-in-the-world, in turn, as a blind and obtuse necessity. Since Kant, philosophy and our world have relentlessly confronted this scission.

Enthusiasm studies what Kant calls a "strong" sense of the sublime, not as an aesthetic feeling but as a form of political judgment rendered not by the active participants in historical events but those who witness them from afar. Lyotard's analysis, preparatory to his work in The Differend and subsequent publications, is a radical rereading of the Kantian "faculties," traditionally understood as functions of the mind, in terms of a philosophy of phrases derived from Lyotard's prior encounters with Wittgenstein's theory of language games. The result is a kind of "fourth" critique based in Kant's later political and historical writings, with an emphasis on understanding the place of those sudden and unscripted events that have the power to reshape the political/historical landscape (such as the French Revolution, May 1968, and others).

This book is Stanley Cavell’s definitive expression on Emerson. Over the past thirty years, Cavell has demonstrated that he is the most emphatic and provocative philosophical critic of Emerson that America has yet known. The sustained effort of that labor is drawn together here for the first time into a single volume, which also contains two previously unpublished essays and an introduction by Cavell that reflects on this book and the history of its emergence.

Students and scholars working in philosophy, literature, American studies, history, film studies, and political theory can now more easily access Cavell’s luminous and enduring work on Emerson. Such engagement should be further complemented by extensive indices and annotations. If we are still in doubt whether America has expressed itself philosophically, there is perhaps no better space for inquiry than reading Cavell reading Emerson.

Desire and Distance constitutes an important new departure in contemporary phenomenological thought, a rethinking and critique of basic philosophical positions concerning the concept of perception presented by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, though it departs in significant and original ways from their work. Barbaras's overall goal is to develop a philosophy of what "life" is—one that would do justice to the question of embodiment and its role in perception and the formation of the human subject. Barbaras posits that desire and distance inform the concept of "life." Levinas identified a similar structure in Descartes's notion of the infinite. For Barbaras, desire and distance are anchored not in meaning, but in a rethinking of the philosophy of biology and, in consequence, cosmology.

Barbaras elaborates and extends the formal structure of desire and distance by drawing on motifs as yet unexplored in the French phenomenological tradition, especially the notions of "life" and the "life-world," which are prominent in the later Husserl but also appear in non-phenomenological thinkers such as Bergson. Barbaras then filters these notions (especially "life") through Merleau-Ponty.

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) has long been recognized as one of the greatest poets of the German language, but his importance to philosophy has surfaced only comparatively recently. Although Schelling and Hegel acknowledged Hölderlin early on as their equal, for a long time his philosophical thought remained unknown outside the small circle of his friends.

Among the most prominent figures in the rediscovery of Hölderlin's thought is Dieter Henrich, who, in a series of highly influential studies over the last thirty years, has shown that Hölderlin played a decisive role in the development of philosophy from Kant to Hegel, and hence in the formation of German Idealism. Among other things, Henrich demonstrated that Hölderlin, while still a student, launched a powerful critique of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre and outlined an alternative to the dominant view of the foundation of philosophy. This alternative proved pathbreaking for his philosophical friends, forcing Hegel, for example, to abandon his own Kantianism and, eventually, to give systematic articulation to a position that went even beyond Hölderlin's.

This volume includes six of Henrich's most important essays on Hölderlin's philosophical significance. Among the topics discussed are Hölderlin's motivation and methodological orientation in his work on German Idealism, the intellectual atmosphere of Hölderlin's student years and the philosophical problems that occupied him, Hölderlin's attitude toward any first-principle philosophy, and the complex personal and philosophical relationships between Hegel and Hölderlin. The last essay is a long, detailed interpretation of one of Hölderlin's greatest poems, "Remembrance." In elucidating its lyric composition and structure, Henrich also seeks to show how it incorporates and develops Hölderlin's philosophical thought.