Product Description: If philosophy has limits, what lies beyond them? One answer is literature. In this study, rather than seeing literature as a source of illustrations of philosophical themes, the author considers both philosophy and literature as sometimes competing but often complementary ways of making sense of and conveying the character of ethical experience...read more

Product Description: Though Heidegger’s Being and Time is often cited as one of the most important philosophical works of the last hundred years, its Division Two has received relatively little attention. This outstanding collection corrects that, examining some of the central themes of Division Two and their wide-ranging and challenging implications...read more

Product Description: In Essential Vulnerabilities, Deborah Achtenberg contests Emmanuel Levinas’s idea that Plato is a philosopher of freedom for whom thought is a return to the self. Instead, Plato, like Levinas, is a philosopher of the other. Nonetheless, Achtenberg argues, Plato and Levinas are different...read more

Product Description: Immunity to error through misidentification is recognised as an important feature of certain kinds of first-person judgments, as well as arguably being a feature of other indexical or demonstrative judgments. In this collection of newly commissioned essays, the contributors present a variety of approaches to it, engaging with historical and empirical aspects of the subject as well as contemporary philosophical work...read more

Product Description: It has been a constant intention of the series of AMERICAN UNIVERSITY PUBLICATIONS IN PHILOSOPHY to present to the philosophical reader books which probed the frontiers of contemporary philosophy. That intention remains true of the following volume, which offers an international dialogue regarding the phenomenological program and succeeding movements...read more

Product Description: In discussion with M. Buber, F. Rosenzweig, A.J. Heschel, F. Fischer and E. Levinas, Ephraim Meir outlines a novel conception of a selfhood that is grounded in dialogical thought. He focuses on the shaping of identity in present day societies and offers a new view on identity around the concepts of self-transcendence, self-difference, and trans-difference...read more

John Locke’s foundational place in the history of British empiricism and liberal political thought is well established. So, in what sense can Locke be considered a modern European philosopher? Identity and Difference argues for reassessing this canonical figure. Closely examining the "treatise on identity" added to the second edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Étienne Balibar demonstrates Locke’s role in the formation of two concepts central to the metaphysics of the subject—consciousness and the self—and the complex philosophical, legal, moral and political nature of his terms.With an accompanying essay by Stella Sandford, situating Balibar’s reading of Locke in the history of the reception of the Essay and within Balibar’s other writings on "the subject," Identity and Difference rethinks a crucial moment in the history of Western philosophy.

Product Description: The Evident Connexion presents a new reading of Hume's "bundle theory" of the self or mind, and his later rejection of it. Galen Strawson argues that the bundle theory does not claim that there are no subjects of experience, as many have supposed, or that the mind is just a series of experiences...read more

Product Description: A humanistic account of self-consciousness and personal identity, and offering a structural parallel between the epistemology of memory and bodily awareness. It provides a much-needed rapprochement between Analytic and Phenomenological approaches, developing Wittgenstein's insights into "I"-as-subject and self-identification...read more

Some critical theorists understand the self as constituted by power relations, while others insist upon the self's autonomous capacities for critical reflection and deliberate self-transformation. Up to now, it has all too often been assumed that these two understandings of the self are incompatible. In her bold new book, Amy Allen argues that the capacity for autonomy is rooted in the very power relations that constitute the self. Allen's theoretical framework illuminates both aspects of what she calls, following Foucault, the "politics of our selves." It analyzes power in all its depth and complexity, including the complicated phenomenon of subjection, without giving up on the ideal of autonomy. Drawing on original and critical readings of a diverse group of theorists, including Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Judith Butler, and Seyla Benhabib, Allen shows how the self can be both constituted by power and capable of an autonomous self-constitution. Her argument is a significant and vital contribution to feminist theory and to critical social theory, both of which have long grappled with the relationship between power and agency.If critical theory is to be truly critical, Allen argues, it will have to pay greater attention to the phenomenon of subjection, and will have to think through the challenges that the notion of subjection poses for the critical-theoretical conception of autonomy. In particular, Allen discusses in detail how the normative aspirations of Habermasian critical theory need to be recast in light of Foucault's and Butler's account of subjection. This book is original both in its attempt to think of power and autonomy simultaneously and in its effort to bring the work of Foucault and Habermas into a productive dialogue.

Product Description: The clinician needs to make sense of many client experiences in the course of daily practice: do these experiences reflect the simple product of complex neurochemical activity, or do they represent another dynamic involving the subjective self? When research findings from the neurosciences are applied to clinical psychology, reductionist thinking is typically followed, but this creates problems for the clinical practitioner...read more

Product Description: Striking cultural developments took place in the twelfth century which led to what historians have termed 'the emergence of the individual.' The Medieval Fold demonstrates how cultural developments typically associated with this twelfth-century renaissance-autobiography, lyric, courtly love, romance-can be traced to the Church's cultivation of individualism...read more

Product Description: Although Wittgenstein is often held co-responsible for the so-called death of man as it was pronounced in the course of the previous century, no detailed description of his alternative to the traditional or Cartesian account of human being has so far been available...read more

Product Description: From very early times, Buddhist intellectuals have made the notion of a self-existing over and above the bodily and mentalconstituent’s one of their main targets. Their critique first culminates in Vasubandhu’s treatise against the Buddhist personalists(5th century CE)...read more

Product Description: Compassion is a word we use frequently but rarely precisely. One reason we lack a philosophically precise understanding of compassion is that moral philosophers today give it virtually no attention. Indeed, in the predominant ethical traditions of the West (deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics), compassion tends to be either passed over without remark or explicitly dismissed as irrelevant...read more

In the Self's Place is an original phenomenological reading of Augustine that considers his engagement with notions of identity in Confessions. Using the Augustinian experience of confessio, Jean-Luc Marion develops a model of selfhood that examines this experience in light of the whole of the Augustinian corpus. Towards this end, Marion engages with noteworthy modern and postmodern analyses of Augustine's most "experiential" work, including the critical commentaries of Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Marion ultimately concludes that Augustine has preceded postmodernity in exploring an excess of the self over and beyond itself, and in using this alterity of the self to itself, as a driving force for creative relations with God, the world, and others. This reading establishes striking connections between accounts of selfhood across the fields of contemporary philosophy, literary studies, and Augustine's early Christianity.