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.

Borges cites innumerable authors in the pages making up his life’s work, and innumerable authors have cited and continue to cite him. More than a figure, then, the quotation is an integral part of the fabric of his writing, a fabric made anew by each reading and each re-citation it undergoes, in the never-ending throes of a work-in-progress. Block de Behar makes of this reading a plea for the very art of communication; a practice that takes community not in the totalized and totalizable soil of pre-established definitions or essences, but on the ineluctable repetitions that constitute language as such, and that guarantee the expansiveness—through etymological coincidences of meaning, through historical contagions, through translinguistic sharings of particular experiences—of a certain index of universality.

This volume consists of two lecture series given by Heidegger in the 1940s and 1950s. The lectures given in Bremen constitute the first public lectures Heidegger delivered after World War II, when he was officially banned from teaching. Here, Heidegger openly resumes thinking that deeply engaged him with Hölderlin's poetry and themes developed in his earlier works. In the Freiburg lectures Heidegger ponders thought itself and freely engages with the German idealists and Greek thinkers who had provoked him in the past. Andrew J. Mitchell's translation allows English-speaking readers to explore important connections with Heidegger's earlier works on language, logic, and reality.

Leading scholars explore the later thought of Merleau-Ponty and its central role in the modernism-postmodernism debate. Some of the best interpretations and evaluations of Merleau-Ponty’s innovative notions of chiasm and flesh are presented here by prominent scholars from the United States and Europe. Divided into three sections, the book first establishes the notion of the flesh as a consistent concept and unfolds the nuances of flesh that make it a compelling idea. The second section adds to the force of this idea by showing how flesh can be extended to phenomena that Merleau-Ponty was not able to treat, such as the internet and virtual reality, and the third offers criticisms of Merleau-Ponty from feminist and Levinasian points of view. All the essays attest to the fecundity of Merleau-Ponty’s later thought for such central philosophical issues as the bonds between self, others, and the world.

Companion to Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy

Edited by Charles E. Scott, Susan Schoenbohm, Daniela Vallega-Neu, and Alejandro Vallega

A key to unlocking one of Heidegger's most difficult and important works.

The publication of the first English translation of Martin Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) marked a significant event for Heidegger studies. Considered by scholars to be his most important work after Being and Time, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) elaborates what Heidegger calls "being-historical-thinking," a project in which he undertakes to reshape what it means both to think and to be. Contributions is an indispensable book for scholars and students of Heidegger, but it is also one of his most difficult because of its aphoristic style and unusual language. In this Companion 14 eminent Heidegger scholars share strategies for reading and understanding this challenging work. Overall approaches for becoming familiar with Heidegger's unique language and thinking are included, along with detailed readings of key sections of the work. Experienced readers and those coming to the text for the first time will find the Companion an invaluable guide to this pivotal text in Heidegger's philosophical corpus.

Contributors include Walter A. Brogan, David Crownfield, Parvis Emad, Günter Figal, Kenneth Maly, William McNeill, Richard Polt, John Sallis, Susan Schoenbohm, Charles E. Scott, Dennis J. Schmidt, Alejandro Vallega, Daniela Vallega-Neu, and Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann.

Charles E. Scott is Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He is author of The Question of Ethics, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Ethics and Politics (both Indiana University Press), and The Time of Memory.

Susan Schoenbohm has taught philosophy at Vanderbilt University, The University of the South, and Pennsylvania State University. She has published several articles on Heidegger, contemporary Continental thought, ancient Greek thought, and ancient Asian thought.

Daniela Vallega-Neu teaches philosophy at California State University, Stanislaus. She is author of Die Notwendigkeit der Grundung in Zeitalter der Deconstruction.

Alejandro Vallega teaches philosophy at California State University, Stanislaus.

Studies in Continental Thought -- John Sallis, general editor
July 2001
288 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
cloth 0-253-33946-4 $44.95 L /

What does it mean to have a distinctively religious orientation toward reality? Martin J. De Nys offers a philosophy of religion grounded within the phenomenological tradition as a way to understand religious life. Focusing on the key concepts of sacred transcendence, religious discourse, and radical self-transcendence, De Nys contends that a phenomenological view of religion allows considerable diversity in regard to the possibility of religious truth. Phenomenology also helps to account for the dizzying variety of religious expressions and religious lifeways. Ultimately, De Nys reaches a universal and complete method of describing a philosophical approach to religious life. This compelling book plays a valuable role in describing human engagement with religion.

Martin Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy reflects his famous philosophical "turning." In this work, Heidegger returns to the question of being from its inception in Being and Time to a new questioning of being as event. Heidegger opens up the essential dimensions of his thinking on the historicality of being that underlies all of his later writings. Contributions was composed as a series of private ponderings that were not originally intended for publication. They are nonlinear and radically at odds with the traditional understanding of thinking. This translation presents Heidegger in plain and straightforward terms, allowing surer access to this new turn in Heidegger's conception of being.

An ardent admirer and student of Emmanuel Levinas during the last decade of the philosopher's life, Michaël de Saint Cheron sat down with his mentor for these interviews, conducted in 1983, 1992, and 1994. Throughout, their conversations provide further insight into the key concepts of responsibility, transcendence, holiness, and the hostage for understanding Levinas’s notion of ethics as first philosophy.

As Levinas and Saint Cheron discuss a variety of topics — death and time in the philosophies of Heidegger and Bergson, eros and the feminine, the Judeo-Christian dialogue, Levinas’s differences of thought with Paul Ricœur, reflections on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the “end of history” with the fall of Western Communism — we can clearly see Levinas’s ceaseless engagement with the justification for living after such horrors as those of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Stalinism, Cambodia, or Rwanda.

Included here as well, following the interviews, are several essays in which Saint Cheron presents his own further considerations of their conversations and Levinas’s ideas. He writes of the relation of the epiphany of the face to the idea of holiness; of Sartre and, in particular, that existentialist thinker’s “revision” of Jews and Judaism in his final controversial dialogues with Benny Lévy; of the epiphanies of death in André Malraux’s writings; and of the radical breach effected in the Western philosophical tradition by Levinas’s “otherwise-than-thinking." Finally, Saint Cheron pays homage to Levinas’s talmudic readings in an analysis of forgiveness and the unforgivable in Jewish tradition and liturgy, culminating in an inevitable confrontation with the Shoah from the perspective of Simon Wiesenthal’s harrowing The Sunflower and some of the contemporary reactions to it.

First published in German in 1995, volume 77 of Heidegger's Complete Works consists of three imaginary conversations written as World War II was coming to an end. Composed at a crucial moment in history and in Heidegger's own thinking, these conversations present meditations on science and technology; the devastation of nature, the war, and evil; and the possibility of release from representational thinking into a more authentic relation with being and the world. The first conversation involves a scientist, a scholar, and a guide walking together on a country path; the second takes place between a teacher and a tower-warden, and the third features a younger man and an older man in a prisoner-of-war camp in Russia, where Heidegger's two sons were missing in action. Unique because of their conversational style, the lucid and precise translation of these texts offers insight into the issues that engaged Heidegger's wartime and postwar thinking.