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Philosophy
Essays on Beauvoir’s influences, contemporary engagements, and legacy in the philosophical tradition. Despite a deep familiarity with the philosophical tradition and despite the groundbreaking influence of her own work, Simone de Beauvoir never embraced the idea of herself as a philosopher. Her legacy is similarly complicated. She is acclaimed as a revolutionary thinker on issues of gender, age, and oppression, but although much has been written weighing the influence she and Jean-Paul Sartre had on one another, the extent and sophistication of her engagement with the Western tradition broadly goes mostly unnoticed. This volume turns the spotlight on exactly that, examining Beauvoir’s dialogue with her influences and contemporaries, as well as her impact on later thinkers—concluding with an autobiographical essay by bell hooks discussing the influence of Beauvoir’s philosophy and life on her own work and career. These innovative essays both broaden our understanding of Beauvoir and suggest new ways of understanding canonical figures through the lens of her work.
by Merold Westphal
Becoming a Self provides a reader's guide to the book often taken to be Kierkegaard's most important contribution to philosophy and theology.
Dilemmas of a Philosopher and Naturalist
Thomas C. Dalton
As one of America's "public intellectuals," John Dewey was
engaged in a lifelong struggle to understand the human mind and the nature of human
inquiry. According to Thomas C. Dalton, the successful pursuit of this mission
demanded that Dewey become more than just a philosopher; it compelled him to become
thoroughly familiar with the theories and methods of physics, psychology, and
neurosciences, as well as become engaged in educational and social reform. Tapping
archival sources and Dewey's extensive correspondence, Dalton reveals that Dewey had
close personal and intellectual ties to scientists and scholars who helped form the
mature expression of his thought. Dewey's relationships with F. M. Alexander, Henri
Matisse, Niels Bohr, Myrtle McGraw, and Lawrence K. Frank, among others, show how
Dewey dispersed pragmatism throughout American thought and culture.
A Systematic Approach in Confrontation with Martin Heidegger, Émmanuel Lévinas, and Jean-Luc Marion
Lorenz
Being and God argues that defensible philosophical theorization concerning the topic “God” is both possible and necessary within the framework of an adequate systematic philosophy—which must include a theory of Being—but is not possible in the absence of such a framework.
Martin Heidegger. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt
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.
Rhetoric beyond Representation
By elaborating upon pivotal twentieth-century studies in language, representation, and subjectivity, Being Made Strange reorients the study of rhetoric according to the discursive formation of subjectivity. The author develops a theory of how rhetorical practices establish social, political, and ethical relations between self and other, individual and collectivity, good and evil, and past and present. He produces a novel methodology that analyzes not only what an individual says, but also the social, political, and ethical conditions that enable him or her to do so. This book also offers valuable ethical and political insights for the study of subjectivity in philosophy, cultural studies, and critical theory.
Husserl's System of Phenomenology in Ideas I
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.
Reading Scandalous Texts
Jeremiah L. Alberg
Jeremiah Alberg’s fascinating book explores a phenomenon almost every news reader has experienced: the curious tendency to skim over dispatches from war zones, political battlefields, and economic centers, only to be drawn in by headlines announcing a late-breaking scandal. Rationally we would agree that the former are of more significance and importance, but they do not pique our curiosity in quite the same way. The affective reaction to scandal is one both of interest and of embarrassment or anger at the interest. The reader is at the same time attracted to and repulsed by it. Beneath the Veil of the Strange Verses describes the roots out of which this conflicted desire grows, and it explores how this desire mirrors the violence that undergirds the scandal itself. The book shows how readers seem to be confronted with a stark choice: either turn away from scandal completely or become enthralled and thus trapped by it. Using examples from philosophy, literature, and the Bible, Alberg leads the reader on a road out of this false dichotomy. By its nature, the author argues, scandal is the basis of our reading; it is the source of the obstacles that prevent us from understanding what we read, and of the bridges that lead to a deeper grasp of the truth.
Race, Sexuality, Animality
Christopher Peterson
In contemporary race and sexuality studies, the topic of animality emerges almost exclusively in order to index the dehumanization that makes discrimination possible. Bestial Traces argues that a more fundamental disavowal of human animality conditions the bestialization of racial and sexual minorities. Hence, when conservative politicians equate homosexuality with bestiality, they betray an anxious effort to deny the animality inherent in all sexuality. Focusing on literary texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Joel Chandler Harris, Richard Wright, Philip Roth, and J. M. Coetzee, together with philosophical texts by Derrida, Heidegger, Agamben, Freud, and Nietzsche, Peterson maintains that the representation of social and political others as animals can be mitigated but never finally abolished. All forms of belonging inevitably exclude some others as "beasts." Though one might argue that absolute political equality and inclusion remain desirable, even if ultimately unattainable, ideals, Bestial Traces shows that, by maintaining such principles, we exacerbate rather than ameliorate violence because we fail to confront how discrimination and exclusion condition all social relations.
Philosophy, Prophecy, and Politics in Leo Strauss's Early Thought
Examines the early works of German-Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973). Praised as a major political thinker of the twentieth century and vilified as the putative godfather of contemporary neoconservatism, Leo Strauss (1899–1973) has been the object of heated controversy both in the United States and abroad. This book offers a more balanced appraisal by focusing on Strauss’s early writings. By means of a close and comprehensive study of these texts, David Janssens reconstructs the genesis of Strauss’s thought from its earliest beginnings until his emigration to the United States in 1937. He discusses the first stages in Strauss’s grappling with the “theological-political problem,” from his doctoral dissertation on Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi to his contributions to Zionist periodicals, from his groundbreaking study of Spinoza’s critique of religion to his research on Moses Mendelssohn, and from his rediscovery of medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy to his research on Hobbes. Throughout, Janssens traces Strauss’s rediscovery of the Socratic way of life as a viable alternative to both modern philosophy and revealed religion.