At the heart of the current surge of interest in religion among contemporary Continental philosophers stands Augustine's Confessions. With Derrida's Circumfession constantly in the background, this volume takes up the provocative readings of Augustine by Heidegger, Lyotard, Arendt, and Ricoeur. Derrida himself presides over and comments on essays by major Continental philosophers and internationally recognized Augustine scholars. While studies on and about Augustine as a philosopher abound, none approach his work from such a uniquely postmodern point of view, showing both the continuing relevance of Augustine and the religious resonances within postmodernism. Posed at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and religious studies, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Augustine as well as those interested in the invigorating discussion between philosophy, religion, and postmodernism.

Contributors include Geoffrey Bennington, Philippe Capelle, John D. Caputo, Elizabeth A. Clark, Hent de Vries, Jacques Derrida, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Richard Kearney, Catherine Malabou, James O'Donnell, Michael J. Scanlon, and Mark Vessey.

Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion -- Merold Westphal, general editor

Volume 18 of Martin Heidegger's collected works presents his important 1924 Marburg lectures which anticipate much of the revolutionary thinking that he subsequently articulated in Being and Time. Here are the seeds of the ideas that would become Heidegger's unique phenomenology. Heidegger interprets Aristotle's Rhetoric and looks closely at the Greek notion of pathos. These lectures offer special insight into the development of his concepts of care and concern, being-at-hand, being-in-the-world, and attunement, which were later elaborated in Being and Time. Available in English for the first time, they make a significant contribution to ancient philosophy, Aristotle studies, Continental philosophy, and phenomenology.

While many scholars consider Simone de Beauvoir an important philosopher in her own right, thorny issues of mutual influence between her thought and that of Jean-Paul Sartre still have not been settled definitively. Some continue to believe Beauvoir's own claim that Sartre was the philosopher and she was the follower even though their relationship was far more complex than this proposition suggests. Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb, and an international group of scholars explore the philosophical and literary relationship between Beauvoir and Sartre in this penetrating volume. Did each elaborate a philosophy of his or her own? Did they share a single philosophy? Did the ideas of each have an impact on the other? How did influences develop and what was their nature? Who influenced whom most of all? A crisscrossed picture of mutual intricacies and significant differences emerges from the skillful and sophisticated exchange that takes place here.

Becoming a Self provides a reader's guide to the book often taken to be Kierkegaard's most important contribution to philosophy and theology.

In these lectures, delivered in 1933-1934 while he was Rector of the University of Freiburg and an active supporter of the National Socialist regime, Martin Heidegger addresses the history of metaphysics and the notion of truth from Heraclitus to Hegel. First published in German in 2001, these two lecture courses offer a sustained encounter with Heidegger's thinking during a period when he attempted to give expression to his highest ambitions for a philosophy engaged with politics and the world. While the lectures are strongly nationalistic and celebrate the revolutionary spirit of the time, they also attack theories of racial supremacy in an attempt to stake out a distinctively Heideggerian understanding of what it means to be a people. This careful translation offers valuable insight into Heidegger's views on language, truth, animality, and life, as well as his political thought and activity.

Presenting the first step-by-step commentary on Husserl’s Ideas I, Marcus Brainard’s Belief and Its Neutralization provides an introduction not only to this central work, but also to the whole of transcendental phenomenology. Brainard offers a clear and lively account of each key element in Ideas I, along with a novel reading of Husserl, one which may well cause scholars to reconsider many long-standing views on his thought, especially on the role of belief, the effect and scope of the epoché, and the significance of the universal neutrality modification.

Plato's chora as developed in the Timaeus is a creative matrix in which things arise and stand out in response to the lure of the Good. Chora is paired with the Good, its polar opposite; both are beyond beingand the metaphors hitherto thought to disclose the transcendent. They underlie Plato's distinction of a procreative gap between being and becoming. The chiasmus between the Good and chora makes possible their mutual participation in one another. This gap makes possible both phenomenological and cosmological interpretations of Plato. Metaphor is restricted to beings as they appear in this gap through the crossing of metaphor's terms, terms that dwell with, rather than subulate, one another. Hermeneutically, through its iswe can see something being engendered or determined by that crossing.Bigger's larger goal is to align the primacy of the Good in Plato and Christian Neoplatonism with the creator God of Genesis and the God of love in the New Testament.

Essays describe Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo’s unique and radical hermeneutic philosophy. This is the first collection of essays in English that deals directly with the philosophy of Gianni Vattimo from a purely critical perspective, further establishing his rightful place in contemporary European philosophy. Vattimo, who first came to prominence as the translator of Gadamer’s Truth and Method into Italian, is now considered to be more than a philosopher and prolific author. As a former member of the European Parliament (1999–2004), he is also a public intellectual. This book takes up his call to advance the crucial active and affirmative engagement with thinking and society. More than just interpretations of Vattimo’s thinking, these essays are expressions of the new impetus given to hermeneutic philosophy by “weak thought,” the term he coined for how we think now in the wake of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer. The development of Vattimo’s thinking is reflected in the organization of the volume, divided into three main parts: Hermeneutics and Nihilism, Metaphysics and Religion, and Politics and Technology.

Daniela Vallega-Neu questions the ontological meaning of body and thinking by carefully taking into account how we come to experience thought bodily. She engages six prominent figures of the Western philosophical tradition—Plato, Nietzsche, Scheler, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Foucault—and considers how they understand thinking to occur in relation to the body as well as how their thinking is itself bodily. Through a deconstructive and performative reading, she explores how their thinking reveals a bodily dimension that is prior to what classical metaphysics comes to conceive as mind-body duality. Thus, Vallega-Neu uncovers the bodily dimension that sustains their thought and their work. As she contends, the trace of the body in our thought not only exposes the strangers we are to ourselves, but may also lead to a new understanding of how we come to be who we are in relation to the world we live in.