Product Description: Mortal Thought seeks to illustrate the artistic and philosophical contexts for Hölderlin's poetic thought and to trace his profound impact upon subsequent philosophy, most notably Nietzsche, the Frankfurt School, Heidegger and Post-structuralism...read more

Product Description: The growth of transnational corporations, the dominance of worldwide financial and political institutions, and the extensive influence of media that are nearly monopolized by corporate interests are key factors shaping our global society today...read more

Product Description: Complemented by phenomenology on the one hand and by materialism on the other, this book provides a worldview that reconciles old conflicts between nature and society, objective and subjective, individual and group. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Jean-Luc Nancy stands as one of the great French theorists of "deconstruction." His writings on philosophy, politics, aesthetics, and religion have significantly contributed to the development of contemporary French thought and helped shape and transform the field of continental philosophy. Through Nancy's immense oeuvre, which covers a wide range of topics such as community, freedom, existence, sense/ touch, democracy, Christianity, the visual arts and music, and writing itself, we have learned to take stock of the world in a more nuanced fashion. In this collection, contemporaries of Nancy and eminent scholars of continental philosophy, including Giorgio Agamben, Étienne Balibar, Ginette Michaud, Georges Van Den Abbeele, Gregg Lambert and Ian James, have been invited to reflect on the force of Nancy's "deconstruction" and how it has affected, or will affect, the ways we approach many of the most pertinent topics in contemporary philosophy. The collection also includes Jean-Luc Nancy's previously unpublished 'Dialogue Beneath the Ribs', where he reflects, twenty years after, on his heart transplant. Nancy Now will be of critical interest not only to scholars working on or with Nancy's philosophy, but also to those interested in the development and future of French thought.

Plural Temporality traces out a dynamic historical relationship between the texts of Spinoza and Althusser. It interrogates Spinoza s thought through Althusser's and vice versa, with the intention of opening new horizons for the question of materialism. From the fragmentary intuitions Althusser produced about Spinoza throughout his life, Morfino builds a new and comprehensive interpretation of Spinoza s philosophy. In the later sections of the book, this interpretation is put to work to help to clarify some of the more problematic aspects of the late Althusser s philosophy, thereby offering new concepts for a materialist position in philosophy and the development of Marxist theory."

Moral values are real―we don't just make them up. Beauty is in the world―it's not just in the eye of the beholder. You are free―what you do is not always determined by electrochemical processes in your brain. And the universe we live in is God's creation.These are radical claims. But they are widely rejected in contemporary philosophy because they are almost always considered in relative isolation from one another. This book shows that when they are considered in conjunction, they gain mutual support. And it shows this both clearly and concisely.But its systematic approach to philosophy also reveals that various philosophical positions currently widely accepted and defended can appear plausible and perhaps even compelling only when they are considered in relative isolation―as they, too, almost always are. When the issues on which these positions are taken are considered in conjunction, problems come into view and the alternative positions defended in this book emerge as superior.Toward a Philosophical Theory of Everything is a ground-breaking work that shows the importance of systematic thinking, while also defending positions, on central philosophical issues, that are widely rejected in contemporary philosophy.

Product Description: Althusser and His Contemporaries alters and expands understanding of Louis Althusser and French philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s. Thousands of pages of previously unpublished work from different periods of Althusser's career have been made available in French since his death in 1990...read more

Product Description: Gilles Deleuze is considered one of the most important French philosophers of the twentieth century. Eleanor Kaufman situates Deleuze in relation to others of his generation, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Klossowski, Maurice Blanchot, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and she engages the provocative readings of Deleuze by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek...read more

Between 1907 and 1911, Ferdinand de Saussure gave three series of lectures on the topic of general linguistics. After his death, these lecture notes were gathered together by his students and published as the Course in General Linguistics. And in the past one hundred years, there has been no more influential and divisive reading of Saussure than that of Jacques Derrida.This book is an examination of Derrida's philosophical reconstruction of Saussurean linguistics, of the paradigm shift from structuralism to post-structuralism, and of the consequences that continue to resonate in every field of the humanities today.Despite the importance of Derrida's critique of Saussure for cultural studies, philosophy, linguistics and literary theory, no comprehensive analysis has before been written. The magnitude of the task undertaken here makes this book an invaluable resource for those wishing to interrogate the encounter beyond appearances or received wisdom.In this process of a close reading, the following t

In a wide-ranging 2007 study of Claude Lévi-Strauss's aesthetic thought, Boris Wiseman demonstrates not only its centrality within his oeuvre but also the importance of Levi-Strauss for contemporary aesthetic enquiry. Reconstructing the internal logic of Lévi-Strauss's thinking on aesthetics, and showing how anthropological and aesthetic ideas intertwine at the most elemental levels in the elaboration of his system of thought, Wiseman demonstrates that Lévi-Strauss's aesthetic theory forms an integral part of his approach to Amerindian masks, body decoration and mythology. He reveals the significance of Lévi-Strauss's anthropological analysis of an 'untamed' mode of thinking (pensée sauvage) at work in totemism, classification and myth-making for his conception of art and aesthetic experience. In this way, structural anthropology is shown to lead to ethnoaesthetics. Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics adopts a broad-ranging approach that combines the different perspectives of anthropology, philosophy, aesthetic theory and literary criticism into an unusual and imaginative whole.

Product Description: Kathrin Koslicki offers an analysis of ordinary material objects, those material objects to which we take ourselves to be committed in ordinary, scientifically informed discourse. She focuses particularly on the question of how the parts of such objects are related to the wholes which they compose...read more

Product Description: Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), père de l''anthropologie structurale, est le plus célèbre des inconnus. Célèbre pour avoir, par sa longévité et l''ampleur de son oeuvre, marqué l''ensemble de la vie intellectuelle du XXe siècle, il nous est devenu inconnu, par l''oubli dans lequel nous sommes tombés des grands axes qui l''ont organisée...read more

Product Description: This book brings together two of the most influential thinkers in critical theory. By unmasking reality as contingent symbolic fiction, the authors argue, Foucauldian criticism has only deconstructed the world in different ways; the point, however, is 'to recognize the Real in what appears to be mere symbolic fiction' (Žižek) and to change it...read more