In a series of conversations, Jean-Luc Marion reconstructs a career’s path in the history of philosophy, theology, and phenomenology. Discussing such concepts as the event, the gift, and the saturated phenomenon, Marion elaborates the rigor displayed by the things themselves. He discusses the major stages of his work and offers his views on the forces that have driven his thought.The conversation ranges from Marion’s engagement with Descartes, to phenomenology and theology, to Mari...

Walter Lowrie's classic, bestselling translation of Søren Kierkegaard's most important and popular books remains unmatched for its readability and literary quality. Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death established Kierkegaard as the father of existentialism and have come to define his contribution to philosophy. Lowrie's translation, first published in 1941 and later revised, was the first in English, and it has introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to Kie...

This study, originally published in 1977, focuses on a critical examination of the life-work of Alfred Schutz, the most important and influential ‘father’ of several recent schools of empirical social research.The author shows why Shutz and his followers fail in their attempts to ‘humanize’ empirical social science. The problems they encounter, he argues, are due to their attempt to achieve a methodological synthesis of self-determining subjectivity and empirical criteria of valida...

Jacques Rancière's work has challenged many of the assumptions of contemporary continental philosophy by placing equality at the forefront of emancipatory political thought and aesthetics. Drawing on the claim that egalitarian politics persistently appropriates elements from political philosophy to engage new forms of dissensus, Devin Zane Shaw argues that Rancière's work also provides an opportunity to reconsider modern philosophy and aesthetics in light of the question of equality. In Pa...

Beginning is the hardest ITPment, not because openers are all that scarce but because you're blowing into, cracking a universe. l Maurice Natanson q;>enings are already directed toward closings. The first question in presenting a body of work is where to cut in. This is an especially difficult question since the cut-in provides a perspecti ve on what follows. A cut is an angle of entry. Wherever I enter, from there, a realm unfolds itself. In that sense, my angle of entry is my point of vi...

Many philosophers adopt methods that emulate those of the natural sciences. They call such an overall approach naturalism, and consider it indispensable for fruitful philosophical debate in various areas. In spite of this consensus however, little is ever said about how naturalism depends on the underlying idea of nature, which we often endorse unconsciously. If we can determine how naturalism reflects an underlying account of nature, we would be in a better position to distinguish between...

At stake in this book is a struggle with language in a time when our old faith in the redeeming of the word-and the word's power to redeem-has almost been destroyed. Drawing on Benjamin's political theology, his interpretation of the German Baroque mourning play, and Adorno's critical aesthetic theory, but also on the thought of poets and many other philosophers, especially Hegel's phenomenology of spirit, Nietzsche's analysis of nihilism, and Derrida's writings on language, Kleinberg-Levi...

The essays which are collected in this book were written at various intervals during the last seven years. The essay "Heidegger and Dewey," which is the last one to be printed in the book, was actually the first one I wrote. It was written as a seminar paper for John D. Goheen's course on Dewey in the Spring of 1968 at Stanford University where I was a second-year graduate student. The paper went unchanged into my thesis "Four Studies in Phenomenology and Pragmatism," which I eventually su...

History, the Human, and the World Between is a philosophical investigation of the human subject and its simultaneous implication in multiple and often contradictory ways of knowing. The eminent postcolonial theorist R. Radhakrishnan argues that human subjectivity is always constituted “between”: between subjective and objective, temporality and historicity, being and knowing, the ethical and the political, nature and culture, the one and the many, identity and difference, experien...

The Risk of Freedom presents an in-depth analysis of the philosophy of Jan Patocka, one of the most influential Central European thinkers of the twentieth century, examining both the phenomenological and ethical-political aspects of his work. In particular, Francesco Tava takes an original approach to the problem of freedom, which represents a recurring theme in Patocka’s work, both in his early and later writings.Freedom is conceived of as a difficult and dangerous experience. In ...

This book challenges the view of the relationship between Kant's and Sartre's practical philosophies arguing that Kant was one of Sartre's most significant predecessors. The book identifies several fundamental theses of Sartre's practical philosophy, and shows Sartre to be closer to Kant in this respect than many contemporary Kantian theories are.

Taking the Heideggerian critical ontology of technology as its base, this volume looks at postcolonial modernization and development in the global south as the worldwide expansion of the western metaphysical understanding of reality. We live today in an increasingly globalizing technological society that Martin Heidegger described in the middle of the last century as ‘the planetary imperialism of technologically organized man.’ Consequent upon this cultural-intellectual globalization, the ...