Epochal Discordance

Epochal Discordance
Author: Véronique M. Fóti
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0791481182

Friedrich Hölderlin must be considered not only a significant poet but also a philosophically important thinker within German Idealism. In both capacities, he was crucially preoccupied with the question of tragedy, yet, surprisingly, this book is the first in English to explore fully his philosophy of tragedy. Focusing on the thought of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Reiner Schürmann, Véronique M. Fóti discusses the tragic turning in German philosophy that began at the close of the eighteenth century to provide a historical and philosophical context for an engagement with Hölderlin. She goes on to examine the three fragmentary versions of Hölderlin's own tragedy, The Death of Empedocles, together with related essays, and his interpretation of Sophoclean tragedy. Fóti also addresses the relationship of his character Empedocles to the pre-Socratic philosopher and concludes by examining Heidegger's dialogue with Hölderlin concerning tragedy and the tragic.

Between Faith and Belief

Between Faith and Belief
Author: Joeri Schrijvers
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2016-05-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1438460236

What is to be done at the end of metaphysics? Joeri Schrijvers's contemporary philosophy of religion takes up this question, originally posed by Reiner Schürmann and central to continental philosophy. The book navigates the work of thinkers who have addressed such metaphysical concerns, including Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Luc Marion, Peter Sloterdijk, Ludwig Binswanger, Jacques Derrida, and more recently John D. Caputo, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, and Martin Hägglund. Notably, Schrijvers engages both those who would deconstruct Christianity and those who remain within this tradition, offering an option that is "between:" between Christianity and atheism, between progressive and conservative, between faith and belief. Ultimately, Schrijvers confronts the end of metaphysics with a phenomenology of love and community, arguing for the radical primacy of togetherness.

Early Greek Thought

Early Greek Thought
Author: James Luchte
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2011-06-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 144115616X

Early Greek Thought calls into question a longstanding mythology - operative in both the Analytic and Continental traditions - that the 'Pre-Socratics had the grandiose audacity to break with all traditional forms of knowledge' (Badiou). Each of the variants of this mythology is dismantled in an attempt to not only retrieve an 'indigenous' interpretation of early Greek thought, but also to expose the mythological character of our own contemporary meta-narratives regarding the 'origins' of 'Western', 'Occidental' philosophy. Using an original hermeneutical approach, James Luchte excavates the context of emergence of early Greek thought through an exploration of the mytho-poetic horizons of the archaic world, in relation to which, as Plato testifies, the Greeks were merely 'children'. Luchte discloses 'philosophy in the tragic age' as a creative response to a 'contestation' of mytho-poetic narratives and 'ways of being'. The tragic character of early Greek thought is unfolded through a cultivation of a conversation between its basic thinkers, one which would remain incomprehensible, with Bataille, in the 'absence of myth' and the exile of poetry.

Phenomenology and the Primacy of the Political

Phenomenology and the Primacy of the Political
Author: Véronique M. Fóti
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2017-05-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 331956160X

This volume is a Festschrift in honor of Jacques Taminiaux and examines the primacy of the political within phenomenology. These objectives support each other, in that Taminiaux's own intellectual itinerary brought him increasingly to an affirmation of the importance of the political. Divided into four sections, the essays contained in this volume engage with different aspects of the political dimension of phenomenology: its dialogue with classic texts of political philosophy, the political facets of phenomenological praxis, phenomenology’s contribution to actual political debates, and the impact of Taminiaux’s work in the shaping of phenomenology’s notion of politics. The phrase “the primacy of the political” echoes the “primacy of perception” as it was famously defined by Merleau-Ponty. This book emphasizes, however, the inescapability of the political rather than its “foundational” character, i.e. the fact that various itineraries of thought, explored in different fields of phenomenological research, give rise to politically relevant reflections. It points out and elucidates political connotations that haunt phenomenological concepts, such as ‘world’, ‘self’, ‘nature’, ‘intersubjectivity, or ‘language’, and traces them to a broad range of approaches, concepts, and methods. In its explorations, the book discusses a broad range of thinkers, including, but not limited to, Aristotle and Kant, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Arendt.

Heidegger and Literary Studies

Heidegger and Literary Studies
Author: Andrew Benjamin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2023-11-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009081748

Martin Heidegger is one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th Century, and a key philosophical resource for literary critics. Not only has he written about poetry, generations of poets have engaged his writings. And yet, for Heidegger poetry and literature are separate. An essential part of the project of this book therefore is to show how both the distinction and connection between literature and poetry is staged within Heidegger's thought. It offers Heidegger's perspective on a range of key themes, topics, poets, and writers, including Poetry and Poetics, Ancient Greek theatre and tragedies and then specifically Friedrich Hölderlin, Thomas Mann, Paul Celan, Euripides and Sophocles. As the Chapters comprising this book make clear, Heidegger's work remains indispensable for any serious engagement with either literature or poetry today.

Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy

Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy
Author: Emmanuel Alloa
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2019-12-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1438476914

Assesses the importance of Merleau-Ponty to current and ongoing concerns in contemporary philosophy. Maurice Merleau-Ponty is widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century philosophy. The recent publication of his lecture courses and posthumous working notes has opened new avenues for both the interpretation of his thought and philosophy in general. These works confirm that, with a surprising premonition, Merleau-Ponty addressed many of the issues that concern philosophy today. With the benefit of this fuller picture of his thought, Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy undertakes an assessment of the philosopher’s relevance for contemporary thinking. Covering a diverse range of topics, including ontology, epistemology, anthropology, embodiment, animality, politics, language, aesthetics, and art, the editors gather representative voices from North America and Europe, including both Merleau-Ponty specialists and thinkers who have come to the philosopher’s work through their own thematic interest. “Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy offers a rich set of writings by central and rising scholars, spanning various languages and traditions, who together show Merleau-Ponty’s continuing relevance for contemporary thinking on phenomenology, mind and nature, politics and power, and art and creation. This book will advance scholarship and also open new doors for those seeking to find their way into Merleau-Ponty’s ways of thinking.” — David Morris, author of The Sense of Space

Sophocles' 'Oedipus the King'

Sophocles' 'Oedipus the King'
Author: Sean Sheehan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2012-03-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1441152857

Described as the Mona Lisa of literature and the world's first detective story, Sophocles' Oedipus the King is a major text from the ancient Greek world and an iconic work of world literature. Aristotle's favourite play, lauded by him as the exemplary Athenian tragedy, Oedipus the King has retained its power both on and off the stage. Before Freud's famous interpretation of the play - an appropriation, some might say - Hölderlin and Nietzsche recognised its unique qualities. Its literary worth is undiminished, philosophers revel in its probing into issues of freedom and necessity and Lacan has ensured its vital significance for post-Freudian psychoanalysis. This Reader's Guide begins with Oedipus as a figure from Greek mythology before focusing on fifth-century Athenian tragedy and the meaning of the drama as it develops scene by scene on the stage. The book covers the afterlife of the play in depth and provides a comprehensive guide to further reading for students.

Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ

Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ
Author: Leif Weatherby
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 634
Release: 2016-03-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0823269426

Around 1800, German romanticism developed a philosophy this study calls “Romantic organology.” Scientific and philosophical notions of biological function and speculative thought converged to form the discourse that Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ reconstructs—a metaphysics meant to theorize, and ultimately alter, the structure of a politically and scientifically destabilized world.

Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty

Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty
Author: Véronique M. Fóti
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2013-05-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0810166550

The French philosopher Renaud Barbaras remarked that late in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s career, “The phenomenology of perception fulfills itself as a philosophy of expression.” In Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty: Aesthetics, Philosophy of Biology, and Ontology, Véronique M. Fótiaddresses the guiding yet neglected theme of expression in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. She traces Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about how individuals express creative or artistic impulses through his three essays on aesthetics, his engagement with animality and the “new biology” in the second of his lecture courses on nature of 1957–58, and in his late ontology, articulated in 1964 in the fragmentary text of Le visible et l’invisible (The Visible and the Invisible). With the exception of a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 essay “Cezanne’s Doubt,” Fóti engages with Merleau-Ponty’s late and final thought, with close attention to both his scientific and philosophical interlocutors, especially the continental rationalists. Expression shows itself, in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, to be primordial, and this innate and fundamental nature of expression has implications for his understanding of artistic creation, science, and philosophy.