In this volume, Ilit Ferber offers the first comprehensive philosophical study of Jean Améry's oeuvre. A Holocaust survivor and lifelong exile, Améry is best known for At the Mind's Limits (1966), his searing reflection on Auschwitz. Yet the prominence of this work has often obscured the breadth of his thought. Read together with On Aging (1968) and On Suicide (1976), as well as his essays on literature and culture, a fuller picture emerges: Améry's writings form...

This book traces the concept of melancholy in Walter Benjamin's early writings. Rather than focusing on the overtly melancholic subject matter of Benjamin's work or the unhappy circumstances of his own fate, Ferber considers the concept's implications for his philosophy. Informed by Heidegger's discussion of moods and their importance for philosophical thought, she contends that a melancholic mood is the organizing principle or structure of Benjamin's early metaphysics and ontology. Her no...

This book traces the concept of melancholy in Walter Benjamin's early writings. Rather than focusing on the overtly melancholic subject matter of Benjamin's work or the unhappy circumstances of his own fate, Ferber considers the concept's implications for his philosophy. Informed by Heidegger's discussion of moods and their importance for philosophical thought, she contends that a melancholic mood is the organizing principle or structure of Benjamin's early metaphysics and ontology. Her no...

We usually think about language and pain as opposites, the one being about expression and connection, the other destructive, "beyond words" so to speak, and isolating. Language Pangs challenges these familiar conceptions and offers a radical reconsideration of the relationship between pain and language in terms of an essential interconnectedness. Ilit Ferber's premise is that we cannot probe the experience of pain without taking account its inherent relation to language; and vice ...

Philosophy's Moods is a collection of original essays interrogating the inseparable bond between mood and philosophical thinking. What is the relationship between mood and thinking in philosophy? In what sense are we always already philosophizing from within a mood? What kinds of mood are central for shaping the space of philosophy? What is the philosophical imprint of Aristotle’s wonder, Kant’s melancholy, Kierkegaard’s anxiety or Nietzsche's shamelessness? Philosophy's Moods invites its ...

**“[A] fascinating and accessible account . . . In his entertaining book, Mr. Eilenberger shows that his magicians’ thoughts are still worth collecting, even if, with hindsight, we can see that some performed too many intellectual conjuring tricks.” —Wall Street JournalA grand narrative of the intertwining lives of Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Ernst Cassirer, major philosophers whose ideas shaped the twentieth century**The year is 191...

It has been described as a "tame longing without any particular object" by Schopenhauer, "a bestial and indefinable affliction" by Dostoevsky, and "time's invasion of your world system" by Joseph Brodsky, but still very few of us today can explain precisely what boredom is. A Philosophy of Boredom investigates one of the central preoccupations of our age as it probes the nature of boredom, how it originated, how and why it afflicts us, and why we cannot seem to overcome it by any ...

A groundbreaking examination of word and image through the lenses of modern art and Continental philosophy: "Probing and lucid" (Stephen H. Watson, University of Notre Dame).Engagement with the image has played a decisive role in the formulation of the very idea of philosophy since Plato. Identifying pivotal moments in the history of philosophy, Dennis J. Schmidt develops the question of philosophy's regard of the image by considering painting―where the image most ...

Three renowned philosophers discuss the work of Martin Heidegger, and the moral quandary of engaging with a major philosopher who was also a Nazi.In February 1988, philosophers Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe came together in Heidelberg before a large audience to discuss the philosophical and political implications of Martin Heidegger's thought. Heidegger's involvement in Nazism has always been an unsettling stain on his legacy. Bu...

In 1915, C. G. Jung and his psychiatrist colleague, Hans Schmid-Guisan, began a correspondence through which they hoped to understand and codify fundamental individual differences of attention and consciousness. Their ambitious dialogue, focused on the opposition of extraversion and introversion, demonstrated the difficulty of reaching a shared awareness of differences even as it introduced concepts that would eventually enable Jung to create his landmark 1921 statement of the theory of ps...

"A philosophical critique of psychoanalysis that takes psychoanalysis seriously but not as unchallengeable dogma. . . . The most significant general treatment of psychoanalytic theory since Freud himself ceased publication."—Clyde Kluckhohn, The New York Times

While existentialism has long been associated with Parisian Left Bank philosophers sipping cocktails in smoke-filled cafés, or with a brooding, angst-filled outlook on life, Gosetti-Ferencei shows how vital and heterogeneous the movement really was. In this concise, accessible book, Gosetti-Ferencei offers a new vision of existentialism. As she lucidly demonstrates, existentialism is a rich and diverse philosophy that encourages meaningful engagement with the world around us, offering a ho...