This is a book about the ethics of authorship. Most directly, it explores different conceptualizations of the responsibilities of the author to the reader. But it also engages the question of what styles of authorship allow these responsibilities to be met. Style itself is an ethical issue, since the relation between the writing subject and the reader--and the dynamics of authority and influence, of gift giving and friendship in this relation--have as much to do with how one writes as what one says.The two writers who serve as the main subjects for this work, the German idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel and the Danish Christian existentialist Sren Kierkegaard, invite us to confront particularly challenging questions about the ethics of authorship. Each in his own way explores styles of authorship that employ a variety of strategies of seduction in order to entice the reader into his narratives, strategies that at least on the surface appear to be fundamentally manipulative and unethical. Further, both seek to enact their own deaths as authors, effectively disappearing as reliable guides for the reader. That might also seem to be ethically irresponsible, an abandonment of the reader, who has been seduced only to be deserted.This is the first work to undertake a sustained questioning of Kierkegaard's central distinction between his own indirectstyle of communication and the (purportedly) directstyle of Hegel's philosophy. Hegel was in fact a much more subtle practitioner of style than Kierkegaard represents him as being, indeed, a practitioner whose style is in the service of an ambitious reconceptualization of the ethics of authorship. As for Kierkegaard, his own indirect style raises a whole series of ethical questions about how the reader is imagined in relation to the author. There is finally an either/or between Hegel and Kierkegaard, just not the one Kierkegaard proposes as between an author devoid of ethics and one who makes possible a true ethics of authorship. Rather, the either/or is between two competing practices of authorship, one daunting with the cadences of a highly technical style, the other delightful for its elegance and playfulness--but both powerful experiments in the ethics of style.

Concerned with the meaning and function of principles in an era that appears to have given up on their possibility altogether, Christopher P. Long traces the paths of Aristotle’s thinking concerning finite being from the Categories, through the Physics, to the Metaphysics, and ultimately into the Nicomachean Ethics. Long argues that a dynamic and open conception of principles emerges in these works that challenges the traditional tendency to seek security in permanent and eternal absolutes. He rethinks the meaning of Aristotle’s notion of principle (arche) and spans the divide of analytic and continental methodological approaches to ancient Greek philosophy, while connecting Aristotle’s thinking to that of Levinas, Gadamer, and Heidegger.

How to interpret Derrida's work now after so much commentary has been devoted to his thought, and his own astonishing productivity has come to an end? In this groundbreaking collection, Joshua Kates argues that we must begin from a different frame than Derrida himself provides, by inserting his work into already existing fields, by "fielding Derrida." Is Derrida a skeptic? Does he subscribe to a death of meaning (and the "I") at the hands of a sign? Is his thought at all proximate to contemporary Marxian/post-Marxist thinking? Thanks to placing Derrida's texts in broader fields (such as Husserlian phenomenology and analytic philosophy of language) and subsequently nuancing what such comparisons yield, Kates's work capture Derrida's stances on these and other questions with a new concreteness and an unprecedented scope, forging links to vital debates across the humanities today.; "Offers creative and well-defended new interpretations of Derrida's familiar texts."

In Four Seminars, Heidegger reviews the entire trajectory of his thought and offers unique perspectives on fundamental aspects of his work. First published in French in 1976, these seminars were translated into German with Heidegger's approval and reissued in 1986 as part of his Gesamtausgabe, volume 15. Topics considered include the Greek understanding of presence, the ontological difference, the notion of system in German Idealism, the power of naming, the problem of technology, danger, and the event. Heidegger's engagements with his philosophical forebears—Parmenides, Heraclitus, Kant, and Hegel—continue in surprising dialogues with his contemporaries—Husserl, Marx, and Wittgenstein. While providing important insights into how Heidegger conducted his lectures, these seminars show him in his maturity reflecting back on his philosophical path. An important text for understanding contemporary philosophical debates, Four Seminars provides extraordinarily rich material for students and scholars of Heidegger.

Postmodern thinkers have demonstrated the fragmentation of the Enlightenment understanding of the self, society, and nature; for many, however, the postmodern alternatives—the pursuit of individual self-definition, utter skepticism regarding the relation between language and reality, or the embrace of ideological power—are unconvincing. In The Fullness of Knowing, by placing the most promising postmodern insights in dialogue with eighteenth-century critics of the Enlightenment, Daniel Ritchie argues that we can begin to overcome post-Enlightenment fragmentation without abandoning either coherence (as many postmoderns have done) or the valid insights of modern and postmodern thought (as many traditionalists have done).

Tamsin Jones believes that locating Jean-Luc Marion solely within theological or phenomenological discourse undermines the coherence of his intellectual and philosophical enterprise. Through a comparative examination of Marion's interpretation and use of Dionysius the Areopagite and Gregory of Nyssa, Jones evaluates the interplay of the manifestation and hiddenness of phenomena. By placing Marion against the backdrop of these Greek fathers, Jones sharpens the tension between Marion's rigorous method and its intended purpose: a safeguard against idolatry. At once situated at the crossroads of the debate over the turn to religion in French phenomenology and an inquiry into the retrieval of early Christian writings within this discourse, A Genealogy of Marion's Philosophy of Religion opens up a new view of the phenomenology of religious experience.

Reputed to be one of the most difficult yet rewarding works of philosophical literature, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit has long been in need of an introduction for English readers. Without using jargon or technical terms, Donald Phillip Verene provides that introduction, guiding the reader through Hegel’s text as a whole and offering a way to grasp the major insights and sections of Hegel’s text without oversimplifying its narrative. A glossary of sixty of Hegel’s terms, discussed in both their original German and English equivalents, is included.

Walter A. Brogan’s long-awaited book exploring Heidegger’s phenomenological reading of Aristotle’s philosophy places particular emphasis on the Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, and Rhetoric. Controversial and challenging, Heidegger and Aristotle claims that it is Heidegger’s sustained thematic focus and insight that governs his overall reading of Aristotle, namely, that Aristotle, while attempting to remain faithful to the Parmenidean dictum regarding the oneness and unity of being, nevertheless thinks of being as twofold. Brogan offers a careful and detailed analysis of several of the most important of Heidegger’s treatises on Aristotle, including his assertion that Aristotle’s twofoldness of being has been ignored or misread in the traditional substance-oriented readings of Aristotle. This groundbreaking study contributes immensely to the scholarship of a growing community of ancient Greek scholars engaged in phenomenological approaches to the reading and understanding of Aristotle.

Featuring essays by renowned scholars Michael J. Hyde, Theodore Kisiel, Mark Michalski, Otto Pöggeler, and Nancy S. Struever, this book provides the definitive treatment of Martin Heidegger’s 1924 lecture course, “Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy.” A deep and original interview with philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, who attended the lecture course, is also included. Conducted over the course of three years, just prior to his death in 2002, the interview is Gadamer’s last major philosophical statement. By carefully considering this lecture course in the context of Heidegger’s life and work, the contributors compel us to reconsider the history and theory of rhetoric, as well as the history of twentieth-century continental philosophy.

Elaborates the author’s conception of plasticity by proposing a new way of thinking through Heidegger’s writings on change. After the readings of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas and the broad disengagement from him in critical theory and humanities, the work of Martin Heidegger has generally not been the subject of inventive interpretations, especially not by thinkers developing their own body of concepts. In this work, one of France’s most inventive contemporary philosophers, Catherine Malabou, undertakes such a reading, arguing that behind Heidegger’s question of being lies another, one not yet addressed in continental philosophy: change. Treating under this deceptively simple heading the themes of exchange, substitution, migration, and metamorphosis, Malabou argues that Heidegger’s thought offers a radical theory of “ontico-ontological” transformability not found in any other thinker, and sketches its implications for a whole range of issues—capitalism, the gift, ethics, suffering, the biological, technology, imagination, and time—of central concern to the humanities. A major step in the series of texts in which Malabou elaborates a body of theory that starts from certain consequences of the philosophies of difference in order to go beyond them, The Heidegger Change is also an audacious work of theory for an age at risk of forgetting what it might take to do theory. A piece of writing in its own right, the text invents its own terminological and metaphoric lexicon while addressing its reader directly and urgently, and thus recalls the inventiveness and style of the classic theoretical texts of previous decades even as it stakes a route toward novel conceptual possibilities.