Browse

This book is about long-term romantic love and how we go about developing it—or fail to do so. It is about building the foundations for such love and dealing with the difficulties that inevitably emerge in such a challenging and critical construction project. The reader will discover the good news that there is no reason to despair: enduring love can be achieved. And time plays a leading role in this process. The book takes an optimistic perspective. Not only is enduring, profound love possible; it is also more common than most of us think. Yet the romantic road is often bumpy and long. Enticing romances encounter many blind alleys. How is the would-be lover to know when such romances are promenades for flourishing love and when they are dead-end streets? The book provides some helpful signposts along the “freeway of love.” Love is not all you need; but if you have enough of what you need, and love infuses life with joy, your life is more likely to be, as the classic song has it, a many-splendored thing. The book casts doubt on prevailing popular attempts to make love as fresh as it was at its very beginning. When freshness is foremost, we are setting ourselves up to lose the battle for long-lasting profound love before the war has begun, as there will always be fresher and tastier occasional romantic affairs than the present one.

Despite its foundational role in the history of philosophy, Plato's famous argument that art does not have access to truth or knowledge is now rarely examined, in part because recent philosophers have assumed that Plato’s challenge was resolved long ago. This book argues that Plato has in fact never been satisfactorily answered—and to demonstrate that, it offers a comprehensive account of Plato’s influence through nearly the whole history of Western aesthetics. The book offers a reading of the post-Platonic aesthetic tradition as a series of responses to Plato’s position, examining a diversity of thinkers and ideas. It visits Aristotle’s Poetics, the medieval Christians, Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Hegel’s phenomenology, Marxism, social realism, Heidegger, and many other works and thinkers, ending with a powerful synthesis that lands on four central aesthetic arguments that philosophers have debated.

Many people today hold up empathy as crucial to caring about all humanity and bridging divides between hostile groups. Others accuse it of reinforcing xenophobic tribalism, and of directing people to help only individuals they see or whose stories they know. Who is right? Is empathy essential to cosmopolitanism, and a valuable moral instrument, or does it blur the differences among people, reinforce ethnocentrism, and distract us from fair and effective moral action? Being Me Being You argues that the answer to that question depends on the conception of empathy one is working with. It recommends the “projective” conception of empathy, introduced by the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith, as against the “contagious” conception of empathy to be found in the writings of his contemporary and friend David Hume. (Both men are among the first theorists of empathy, but they called it “sympathy.”) Smith developed a conception of empathy by which it is not merely an instrument for moral action, but a key component of what it is to be human. For Smith, however, empathy is also crucial to our having distinctive perspectives—to what we call “difference” today; empathy enables our common humanity and our distinctiveness to come together. Relatedly, Smith showed how it could help us combine our cosmopolitan aspirations with our local loyalties, and how it could make for public policies that are sensitive to each person’s different needs and aspirations. In all these ways, Smith’s empathy-centered humanism remains invaluable today.

If collective remembrance is as old as human communal existence and the age-old practices that forge its cohesion, theoretical preoccupation with the phenomenon of collective memory is relatively recent. The present book accounts for this paradox through interpretation of the novel function accorded to collective memory which, in a modern context of discontinuity and dislocation, reoccupies the space that has been left vacant by the decline of traditional assumptions concerning human socio-political identity. In this situation, where memory is widely called upon as a source of collective cohesion, this book aims to elaborate a philosophical basis for the concept of collective memory and to delimit its scope in relation to the historical past. Extensive analysis is devoted to the complex modes of symbolic configuration of collective memory in the public sphere. These modes of symbolic configuration have undergone radical transformation over the past century that is both reflected and engendered by the new technologies of mass communication by virtue of their capacity to simulate direct experience and remembrance through the image. Such transformations make increasingly palpable the limited scope of collective memory, rooted in a rapidly changing context, in the face of an historical past beyond its pale. The growing awareness of these limits, however, and of the opacity of the historical past, need not fuel historical skepticism: as the novels of Walter Scott, Marcel Proust and W. J. Sebald serve to illustrate, it may place in evidence subtle nuances of temporal context that are emblematic of historical reality.

“Rhetoric is the counterpart of logic,” claimed Aristotle. “Rhetoric is the first part of logic rightly understood,” Martin Heidegger concurred. “Rhetoric is the universal form of human communication,” opined Hans-Georg Gadamer. However, this book offers a new conception of rhetoric, one that builds a definitive case for an understanding of the discipline as a philosophical enterprise beyond basic argumentation and which is fully conversant with the advances of the New Rhetoric of Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. Chapter by chapter, it develops an understanding of rhetoric not only in its philosophical dimension but also as a means of guiding and conducting conflicts, achieving justice, and understanding the human condition. Along the way, the book restores the traditional dignity and importance of the discipline and illuminates the twentieth-century resurgence of rhetoric among philosophers, as well as the role that rhetoric can play in future discussions of ontology, epistemology, and ethics. At a time when the fields of philosophy and rhetoric have diverged, it returns them to their common moorings and shows us a new way forward.

This volume uses phenomenological and hermeneutical tools to look at “distressed bodies” – including the experiences and treatment of sick patients, prisoners, and animals. These groups are challenged both by processes from within (the sick body) and outside (social exclusion and objectification). The book draws on literary examples such as Sophocles’ Philoctetes, the author’s own struggles with chronic pain, and clinical and philosophical sources, to understand the many ways illness can shatter one’s life world. This leads to a critical and visionary re-examination of treatment modalities, such as our fetishized fascination with pills, and potential uses of touch and healing objects/environments in medicine. Along the way, clinical diagnosis and bioethical reflection are also rethought. Real-world predicaments generate “texts” embedded in complex “contexts” which often remain unexamined. For example, organ transplantation as practiced reflects Cartesian and capitalist modes of objectifying the body. Yet lived bodies intertwine from birth to death, and beyond—this can lead to a new ways of understanding and performing organ transplants. Similarly, capitalist and Cartesian models shape our harsh treatment of animal-bodies and prisoners in a way that demands re-vision. The book challenges our contemporary factory farms and penitentiaries. Yet in chapters co-written with prisoners we also see how imprisonment can evoke strategies of resistance and redemption, and even close relations with animals as the two shunned groups assist each other. The book ends with a focus on such human-animal “shape-shifting.” Attending to distressed bodies thus leads to a radical re-envisioning of medical, criminal justice, and environmental practices.

Twitter is used as an example of a distinctively digital institution. Twitter’s constitution and development is a test case for Searle’s theory of Status Function Declarations. The analysis distinguishes between acts of the individual members of Twitter, joining, following and tweeting; and the acts, or Status Function Declarations of the Twitter system as a whole, manifested in the way that the software system can change, and the way in which Twitter can interact with other institutions through its Application Programming Interface. It is argued that Twitter is an exemplar or paradigm and not an exception. All our very new digital institutions use language in ways quite different from traditional institutions and in understanding digital institutions we need to probe the basic actions, the Status Function Declarations through which we build and shape their performance and evolution. It is further suggested that the normative structures we find in digital institutions arise directly from the Status Function Declarations of their members and this insight helps us understand how they attract and may magnify problematic behaviour — in the case of Twitter, trolling and bullying. The theory of digital institutions developed is naturalistic and evolutionary and the work of Michael Tomasello on primate behavior and child development has suggestive parallels for understanding the development of social media.

German Idealism as Constructivism is Tom Rockmore’s statement on the debate about German idealism between proponents of representationalism and those of constructivism that still plagues our grasp of the history of German idealism and the whole epistemological project today. Rockmore argues that German idealism—which includes iconic thinkers such as Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—can best be understood as a constructivist project, one that asserts that we cannot know the mind-independent world as it is but only our own mental construction of it. Since ancient Greece philosophers have tried to know the world in itself, an effort that Kant believed had failed. His alternative strategy—which came to be known as the Copernican revolution—was that the world as we experience and know it depends on the mind. Rockmore shows that this project was central to Kant’s critical philosophy and the later German idealists who would follow him. He traces the different ways philosophers like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel formulated their own versions of constructivism. Rockmore offers an analysis of a crucial part of the legacy of German idealism.

We are now acutely aware, as if all of the sudden, that data matters enormously to how we live. How did information come to be so integral to what we can do? How did we become people who effortlessly present our lives in social media profiles and who are meticulously recorded in state surveillance dossiers and online marketing databases? What is the story behind data coming to matter so much to who we are? How We Became Our Data excavates early moments of our rapidly accelerating data-tracking technologies and their consequences for how we think of and express our selfhood today. The book explores the emergence of mass-scale record keeping systems like birth certificates and social security numbers, as well as new data techniques for categorizing personality traits, measuring intelligence, and how redlining led to the datafication of racialized subjectivity. This all culminates in an exploration of the concept of “informational persons” and the “informational power” these persons are now subject to. The recent explosion of digital technologies that are turning us into a series of algorithmic data points is shown to have a deeper and more turbulent past than we commonly think. Blending philosophy, history, political theory, and media theory in conversation with thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, and Friedrich Kittler, this book illuminates how we have come to think of our personhood in the age of information.

This book is about understanding and coping with exceptionally difficult problems that stand in the way of living as we think we should. Living that way depends on pursuing possibilities that unavoidably conflict in our evaluative framework. We must evaluate them and that requires deciding what our priorities should be. Such decisions are very difficult because we value the conflicting possibilities and have strong reasons both for and against them. By opting for one, we must opt against the conflicting one we also value. The problems of life are difficult because by saying yes to a possibility we reasonably value, we must say no to a conflicting possibility we also reasonably value. A deeper understanding shows that life without loss is impossible and conflicts between possibilities are unavoidable parts of life so long as we are committed to the economic, legal, moral, personal, political, and religious modes of evaluation of our evaluative framework. Essential to coping with such problems is a comparative approach to understanding and evaluating the available possibilities. Each chapter considers an anthropological, historical, or literary case in order to illuminate a particular problem in our evaluative framework by comparing it with another that is very different indeed. The point is not to criticize or justify either, but to understand better our possibilities and problems, and to come to see that the available possibilities are much richer than we commonly suppose. We enrich our understanding of the possibilities of life by learning from how others live.

Why does sports fandom matter so much to fans, who often don’t play the games they watch at all? This book philosophically investigates sports fandom, spanning the fields of feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, and philosophy of sport, and in dialogue with the work of sociologists, anthropologists, and historians of sport and popular culture. Sports fandom, this book concludes, is a primary means of creating and reinforcing individual and community identities for Americans today, contributing both to communities’ persistence over time, and to the racial and gender hierarchies that characterize those communities. Sports fandom is a practice of subjectivization: a means by which individuals are both regulated and, at the same time, achieve a sense of their own identities. By analyzing fan practice, history, and discourse (especially in the American south), and by responding to contemporary philosophical and social scientific work on sports fans, this book argues that racial whiteness is reproduced in and through many white fans’ imaginative relation to and ritualized display of men of color, and that normative heterosexual masculinity is reproduced through the practices of sports fandom that more or less explicitly disparage femininity and homosexual desire. Yet, it also concludes that sports fandom is not uniformly oppressive; sports fans are not univocal, and there are marginal forms of sports fandom that constitute genuine glimmers of social resistance.

Although Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel considered Science of Logic essential to his philosophy, it has received scant commentary compared with the other three books he published in his lifetime. This book rescues Science of Logic from obscurity, arguing that its neglect is responsible for contemporary philosophy’s fracture into many different and opposed schools of thought. Through careful analysis, the book sheds new light on the precise problems that animate Hegel’s overlooked book and their tremendous significance to philosophical conceptions of logic and reason. The book’s overarching question is how, if at all, rationalism can overcome the split between monism and dualism. Monism—which claims a singular essence for all things—ultimately leads to nihilism, while dualism, which claims multiple, irreducible essences, leads to what the book calls “the endless chatter of the history of philosophy.” Science of Logic, the book argues, is the fundamental text to offer a new conception of rationalism that might overcome this philosophical split. Leading readers through Hegel’s book from beginning to end, the book’s argument culminates in a masterful chapter on the Idea in Hegel.

I distinguish here between work on historical figures in philosophy as a form of history and as philosophy, and I defend a conception of the latter. The second and related point takes up the implications of the unusual “success conditions” there might be for philosophy. That is, there can be no general, methodologically secure way to know when a defense of a philosophical position has been successful. The implication drawn is that the engagement with interlocutors and critics is a necessary and unavoidable condition of some satisfaction that one might have made more sense then before one’s attempt. Philosophy is thus essentially and not incidentally dialogic. Every philosophical position must start out as a proffer; it “lives” (remains a live possibility, attracts attention, criticism, defense) or is animated, only in such inter-animated exchanges. The book that follows explores instances of such interanimation.

In his latest book, the prolific writer and thinker Alphonso Lingis brings interdisciplinarity and lyrical philosophizing to the weight of reality, the weight of things, and the weight of life itself. Drawing from philosophy, anthropology, psychology, religion, and science, Lingis seeks to uncover what in our reality escapes our attempts at measuring and categorizing. Writing as much from his own experiences and those of others as from his longstanding engagement with phenomenology and existentialism, Irrevocable studies the world in which shadows, reflections, halos, and reverberations count as much as the carpentry of things. Whether describing religious art and ritual, suffering, war and disease, the pleasures of love, the wonders of nature, archaeological findings, surfing, volcanoes, or jellyfish, Lingis writes with equal measures of rigor and abandon about the vicissitudes of our practices and beliefs. Knowing that birth, the essential encounters in our lives, crippling diseases and accidents, and even death are all determined by chance, how do we recognize and understand such chance? After facing tragedies, what makes it possible to live on while recognizing our irrevocable losses? Lingis’s investigations are accompanied by his own vivid photographs from around the world. Balancing the local and the global, and ranging across vast expanses of culture and time, Irrevocable sounds the depths of both our passions and our impassioned bodies and minds.

For decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous categories—such as religion, science, and art—has collapsed under the weight of postmodern critiques, calling into question the possibility of progress and even the value of knowledge. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm aims to radicalize and move beyond these deconstructive projects to offer a path forward for the humanities and social sciences using a new model for theory he calls metamodernism. Metamodernism works through the postmodern critiques and uncovers the mechanisms that produce and maintain concepts and social categories. In so doing, Storm provides a new, radical account of society’s ever-changing nature—what he calls a “Process Social Ontology”—and its materialization in temporary zones of stability or “social kinds.” Storm then formulates a fresh approach to philosophy of language by looking beyond the typical theorizing that focuses solely on human language production, showing us instead how our own sign-making is actually on a continuum with animal and plant communication. Storm also considers fundamental issues of the relationship between knowledge and value, promoting a turn toward humble, emancipatory knowledge that recognizes the existence of multiple modes of the real. Metamodernism is a revolutionary manifesto for research in the human sciences that offers a new way through postmodern skepticism to envision a more inclusive future of theory in which new forms of both progress and knowledge can be realized.

Nietzsche’s Earth articulates the sense of his call to be “true to the earth,” exploring its political dimensions. Triangulating Nietzsche between the nineteenth century European world of competing nation states and the changed landscape of more recent times, it argues that this thinker speaks to contemporary themes and questions such as globalization, the so-called end of history, sovereign assumption of emergency powers through states of exception, and the composition of the decisive political body of a diverse, nomadic, and hybrid multitude. The book explores the contrast between two modes of political time: that of the “last humans,” measured out and securitized by debt and insurance, another involving openness to futurity where “philosophers of the future” may vigilantly seize unique opportunities. These discussions put Nietzsche in dialogue with more recent philosophers of the event, including Deleuze, Derrida, Agamben, and Badiou. The study examines Nietzsche’s sketch of a political geoaesthetics of the anthropocene, elucidating Thus Spoke Zarathustra’s celebration of a garden earth. Nietzsche’s Earth concludes by demonstrating that his “philosophy of the Antichrist” should be understood not merely as a challenge to Christian belief but as an immanent critique of traditional political theology, linking the death of God to the fragility of the state. The book constructs a running dialogue between Nietzsche and those thinkers of his time and ours who see the earth through the lenses of a totalizing world-history, on a more or less Hegelian model, involving a hierarchical system of nation-states and an inescapable teleological narrative.

Life is short. This indisputable fact of existence has driven human ingenuity since antiquity, whether through efforts to lengthen our lives with medicine or shorten the amount of time we spend on work using technology. Alongside this struggle to manage the pressure of life's ultimate deadline, human perception of the passage and effects of time has also changed. This book examines a range of material—from Hippocrates to Run Lola Run—to put forth a new conception of time and its limits that, unlike older models, is firmly grounded in human experience. The author's analysis of the roots of the word time connects it to the temples of the skull, demonstrating that humans first experienced time in the beating of their pulses. Tracing this corporeal perception of time across literary, religious, and philosophical works, the author concludes that time functions as a kind of sixth sense—the crucial sense that enables the other five. The book is a meditation on life's inexorable brevity.

This work is about how philosophy can contribute to the challenges that hermeneutics faces in interpreting an ever-changing world. It proposes an orientational and reflective approach to interpretation in which judgment must play a central role. The canonical contributions to hermeneutics of thinkers such as Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur are considered and partly reassessed. But the main focus of the book is to develop certain overlooked resources of Kant’s transcendental thought in order to reconceive hermeneutics as a critical inquiry into the appropriate contextual conditions of understanding. For this, reflective and diagnostic judgment are essential, not only to discern the differentiating features of whatever phenomena are to be understood, but also to orient us to the various meaning contexts that can frame their interpretation. These contexts may be shaped by systematic theoretical interests as well as normative and practical concerns. Some of these orientational contexts will be influenced by regional circumstances and others defined by more universal worldly ideals. Here the human sciences can play an important role in searching for clarifying discourses. The ultimate task of a hermeneutical critique is to establish priorities among the disciplinary contexts that may be brought to bear on interpretation. The final chapter considers how orientational contexts can be reconfigured to respond to the way the media of communication are being transformed by digital technology and other contemporary cultural and artistic developments.

This book explores a new area, the philosophy of autobiography. There are many long-standing philosophical discussions surrounding concepts relating to autobiography: the self, personal identity, narrative, understanding others, self-understanding, the reliability of memory, self-deception, the meaning of life. There has also been sustained interest among literary critics in the genre of autobiography. However, there is relatively little that brings these philosophical debates together to ask: what is it we are doing, exactly, when we write an autobiography? And the related question of: what do we understand when we read someone else's autobiography? Finally, the volume also asks: what is special about a published autobiography, as opposed to a single individual thinking about her life, or a self-description spoken to a friend, or the writing of a personal diary? This volume brings together ten diverse contributions from different perspectives and disciplines, exploring some answers to these questions: Marya Schechtman, Garry L. Hagberg, Christopher Hamilton, Marina Oshana, John Christman, Somogy Varga, D.K. Levy, Merete Mazzarella, J. Lenore Wright, and Áine Mahon.

The Victorian period in Britain was an “age of reform.” It is therefore not surprising that two of the era's most eminent intellects described themselves as reformers. Both William Whewell and John Stuart Mill believed that by reforming philosophy—including the philosophy of science—they could affect social and political change. But their divergent visions of this societal transformation led to a sustained and spirited controversy that covered morality, politics, science, and economics. Situating their debate within the larger context of Victorian society and its concerns, this book shows how two very different men captured the intellectual spirit of the day and engaged the attention of other scientists and philosophers, including the young Charles Darwin. Mill—philosopher, political economist, and Parliamentarian—remains a canonical author of Anglo-American philosophy, while Whewell—Anglican cleric, scientist, and educator—is now often overlooked, though in his day he was renowned as an authority on science. Placing their teachings in their proper intellectual, cultural, and argumentative spheres, the book revises the standard views of these two important Victorian figures, showing that both men's concerns remain relevant today. A philosophically and historically sensitive account of the engagement of the major protagonists of Victorian British philosophy, this is the first book-length examination of the dispute between Mill and Whewell in its entirety.