This book is the first English-language collection of essays by leading Camus scholars from around the world to focus on Albert Camus’ place and status as a philosopher amongst philosophers. After a thematic introduction, the dedicated chapters of Part 1 address Camus’ relations with leading philosophers, from the ancient Greeks to Jean-Paul Sartre (Augustine, Hume, Kant, Diderot, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Hegel, Marx, Sartre). Part 2 contains pieces considering philosophical themes in Camus’ works, from the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus to love in The First Man (the absurd, psychoanalysis, justice, Algeria, solidarity and solitude, revolution and revolt, art, asceticism, love).
Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Classics in International Modernism and the Avant-Garde examines how the writers and artists who lived from roughly the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth sought to build a new world from the ashes of one marked by two world wars, global economic depression, the rise of nationalism, and the collapse of empires. By surveying the modernist appropriation of Ancient Greece and Rome, the fourteen chapters in this volume demonstrate how the Classics, as foundational texts of the old order, were nevertheless adapted to suit the stylistic innovation and formal experimentation that characterized modernist and avant-garde literature and art.
This book offers an archeology of the undeveloped potential of mathematics for critical theory. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno first conceived of the critical project in the 1930s, critical theory steadfastly opposed the mathematization of thought. Mathematics flattened thought into a dangerous positivism that led reason to the barbarism of World War II. The Mathematical Imagination challenges this narrative, showing how for other German-Jewish thinkers, such as Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer, mathematics offered metaphors to negotiate the crises of modernity during the Weimar Republic. Influential theories of poetry, messianism, and cultural critique, Handelman shows, borrowed from the philosophy of mathematics, infinitesimal calculus, and geometry in order to refashion cultural and aesthetic discourse. Drawn to the austerity and muteness of mathematics, these friends and forerunners of the Frankfurt School found in mathematical approaches to negativity strategies to capture the marginalized experiences and perspectives of Jews in Germany. Their vocabulary, in which theory could be both mathematical and critical, is missing from the intellectual history of critical theory, whether in the work of second generation critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas or in contemporary critiques of technology. The Mathematical Imagination shows how Scholem, Rosenzweig, and Kracauer’s engagement with mathematics uncovers a more capacious vision of the critical project, one with tools that can help us intervene in our digital and increasingly mathematical present. The Mathematical Imagination is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.
For six centuries, Plato has held German philosophy in his grip. Brill’s Companion to German Platonism examines how German thinkers have interpreted Plato and how in turn he has decisively influenced their thought. Under the editorship of Alan Kim, this companion gathers the work of scholars from four continents, writing on figures from Cusanus and Leibniz to Husserl and Heidegger. Taken together, their contributions reveal a characteristic pattern of “transcendental” interpretations of the mind’s relation to the Platonic Forms. In addition, the volume examines the importance that the dialogue form itself has assumed since the nineteenth century, with essays on Schleiermacher, the Tübingen School, and Gadamer. Brill’s Companion to German Platonism presents both Plato and his German interpreters in a fascinating new light.
This book seeks to establish the relevance of Albert Camus’ philosophy and literature to contemporary ethics. By examining Camus’ innovative methods of approaching moral problems, Whistler demonstrates that Camus’ work has much to offer the world of ethics— Camus does philosophy differently, and the insights his methodologies offer could prove invaluable in both ethical theory and practice. Camus sees lived experience and emotion as ineliminable in ethics, and thus he chooses literary methods of communicating moral problems in an attempt to draw positively on these aspects of human morality. Using case studies of Camus’ specific literary methods, including dialogue, myth, mime and syntax, Whistler pinpoints the efficacy of each of Camus’ attempts to flesh-out moral problems, and thus shows just how much contemporary ethics could benefit from such a diversification in method.
Jean-Paul Sartre's technical and multifaceted concept of magic is central for understanding crucial elements of his early philosophy (1936-1943), not least his conception of the ego, emotion, the imaginary and value. Daniel O'Shiel follows the thread of magic throughout Sartre's early philosophical work. Firstly, Sartre's work on the ego (1936) shows a personal, reflective form of consciousness that is magically hypostasized onto the pre-reflective level. Secondly, emotion (1938) is inherently magical for Sartre because emotive qualities come to inhere in objects and thereby transform a world of pragmatism into one of captivation. Thirdly, analyses of The Imaginary (1940) reveal that anything we imagine is a spontaneous creation of consciousness that has the power to enchant and immerse us, even to the point of images holding sway over us. Culminating with Sartre's ontological system of Being and Nothingness (1943), O'Shiel argues that Sartre does not do away with the concept, but in fact provides ontological roots for it. This is most evident in Sartre's analyses of value, possession and language. A second part shows how such Sartrean magic is highly relevant for a number of concrete case studies: the arts, advertising, racism and stupidity, and certain instances of psychopathology. O'Shiel shows that Sartre's magical being is important for any contemporary philosophical anthropology because it is essentially at work at the heart of many of our most significant experiences, both creative and damaging.
A celebration of the importance and significance of The Myth of Sisyphus, this collection of essays, from some of the world’s leading Camus scholars, examines the impact on philosophy that Camus’s The Myth has had in the past 80 years.
What do our pets do when they're not with us? Caroline Paul and Wendy MacNaughton used GPS, cat cameras, psychics, and the web to track the adventures of their beloved cat Tibia.
"What corporations fear most are consumers who ask questions. Naomi Klein offers us the arguments with which to take on the superbrands." Billy Bragg from the bookjacket.
