Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Transition to Postmodernity

Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Transition to Postmodernity

Author: Gregory Bruce Smith

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1996-02-15

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 9780226763392

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Among the most influential and enigmatic thinkers of the modern age, Nietzsche and Heidegger have become pivotal in the struggle to define postmodernism. In this work, Gregory Smith offers the most comprehensive examination to date of the turn to postmodernity in the writings of these philosophers. Smith argues that, while much of postmodern thought is rooted in Nietzsche and Heidegger, it has ironically attempted, whether unwittingly or by design, to deflect their philosophy back onto a modern path. Other alternative paths emanating from both Nietzschean and Heideggerian thought that might more powerfully speak to postmodern culture have been ignored. Nietzsche and Heidegger, Smith suggests, have made possible a far more revolutionary critique of modernity then even their most ardent postmodern admirers have realized. Smith contends that the influences on the postmodern in the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger are founded in a new vision of praxis liberated from theory. Ultimately, these philosophers do transcend the nihilism often found in the guise of postmodernism. Their thought is, moreover, consistent with the possibility of limited constitutional government and the rule of law. Smith's book takes the first step toward recovering these possibilities and posing the fundamental questions of politics and ethics in ways that have heretofore been closed off by late-modern thought.


Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Transition to Postmodernity

Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Transition to Postmodernity

Author: Gregory B. Smith

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1996-02-15

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 9780226763408

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Nietzsche and Heidegger, Smith argues, have made possible a far more revolutionary critique of modernity than even their most ardent postmodern admirers have realized.


Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity

Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity

Author: Iain D. Thomson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-04-29

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1139498975

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Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity offers a radical new interpretation of Heidegger's later philosophy, developing his argument that art can help lead humanity beyond the nihilistic ontotheology of the modern age. Providing pathbreaking readings of Heidegger's 'The Origin of the Work of Art' and his notoriously difficult Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), this book explains precisely what postmodernity meant for Heidegger, the greatest philosophical critic of modernity, and what it could still mean for us today. Exploring these issues, Iain D. Thomson examines several postmodern works of art, including music, literature, painting and even comic books, from a post-Heideggerian perspective. Clearly written and accessible, this book will help readers gain a deeper understanding of Heidegger and his relation to postmodern theory, popular culture and art.


Postmodern Platos

Postmodern Platos

Author: Catherine H. Zuckert

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1996-06

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 9780226993317

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Catherine Zuckert examines the work of five key philosophical figures from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the lens of their own decidedly postmodern readings of Plato. She argues that Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, and Derrida, convinced that modern rationalism had exhausted its possibilities, all turned to Plato in order to rediscover the original character of philosophy and to reconceive the Western tradition as a whole. Zuckert's artful juxtaposition of these seemingly disparate bodies of thought furnishes a synoptic view, not merely of these individual thinkers, but of the broad postmodern landscape as well. The result is a brilliantly conceived work that offers an innovative perspective on the relation between the Western philosophical tradition and the evolving postmodern enterprise.


Political Philosophy and the Republican Future

Political Philosophy and the Republican Future

Author: Gregory Bruce Smith

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2018-07-25

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 0268103925

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Are we moving inevitably into an irreversible era of postnationalism and globalism? In Political Philosophy and the Republican Future, Gregory Bruce Smith asks, if participation in self-government is not central to citizens’ vision of the political good, is despotism inevitable? Smith's study evolves around reconciling the early republican tradition in Greece and Rome as set out by authors such as Aristotle and Cicero, and a more recent tradition shaped by thinkers such as Machiavelli, Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Madison, and Rousseau. Gregory Smith adds a further layer of complexity by analyzing how the republican and the larger philosophical tradition have been called into question by the critiques of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and their various followers. For Smith, the republican future rests on the future of the tradition of political philosophy. In this book he explores the nature of political philosophy and the assumptions under which that tradition can be an ongoing tradition rather than one that is finished. He concludes that political philosophy must recover its phenomenological roots and attempt to transcend the self-legislating constructivism of modern philosophy. Forgetting our past traditions, he asserts, will only lead to despotism, the true enemy of all permutations of republicanism. Cicero's thought is presented as a classic example of the phenomenological approach to political philosophy. A return to the architectonic understanding of political philosophy exemplified by Cicero is, Smith argues, the key to the republican future.


Historical Dictionary of Heidegger's Philosophy

Historical Dictionary of Heidegger's Philosophy

Author: Frank Schalow

Publisher: Scarecrow Press

Published: 2010-08-20

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 0810874938

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By the time Martin Heidegger passed away on May 26th, 1976, he had become the most important and controversial philosopher of his age. While many of his former students had become important philosophers and thinkers in their own right, Heidegger also inspired countless others, like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The second edition of the Historical Dictionary of Heidegger's Philosophy is an historical perspective on the development of Heidegger's thought in all its nuances and facets. Schalow and Denker cast light on the historical influences that shaped the thinker and his time through a chronology; an introductory essay; a bibliography; appendixes that include German and Greek to English glossaries of terms and a complete listing of Heidegger's writings, lectures, courses, and seminars; and a cross-referenced dictionary section offering over 600 entries on concepts, people, works, and technical terms. This volume is an invaluable resource for student and scholar alike.


Heidegger's Polemos

Heidegger's Polemos

Author: Gregory Fried

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0300133278

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Gregory Fried offers in this book a careful investigation of Martin Heidegger’s understanding of politics. Disturbing issues surround Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism, his disdain for liberal democracy, and his rejection of the Enlightenment. Fried confronts these issues, focusing not on the historical debate over Heidegger’s personal involvement with Nazism, but on whether and how the formulation of Heidegger’s ontology relates to his political thinking as expressed in his philosophical works. The inquiry begins with Heidegger’s interpretation of Heraclitus, particularly the term polemos (“war,” or, in Heidegger’s usage, “confrontation”). Fried contends that Heidegger invests polemos with broad ontological significance and that his appropriation of the word provides important insights into major strands of his thinking—his conception of the human being, understanding of truth, and interpretation of history—as well as the meaning of the so-called turn in his thought. Although Fried finds that Heidegger’s politics are continuous with his thought, he also argues that Heidegger’s work raises important questions about contemporary identity politics. Fried also shows that many postmodernists, despite attempts to distance themselves from Heidegger, fail to avoid some of the same political pitfalls his thinking entailed.


European Thought and Culture, 1350-1992

European Thought and Culture, 1350-1992

Author: Michael J. Sauter

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-06-06

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 1000395499

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This book explores the main currents of European thought between 1350 and 1992, which it approaches in two principal ways: culture as produced by place and the progressive unmooring of thought from previously set religious and philosophical boundaries. The book reads the period against spatial thought’s history (spatial sciences such as geography or Euclidean geometry) to argue that Europe cannot be understood as a continent in intellectual terms or its history organized with respect to traditional spatial-geographic categories. Instead we need to understand European intellectual history in terms of a culture that defined its own place, as opposed to a place that produced a given culture. It then builds on this idea to argue that Europe’s overweening drive to know more about humanity and the cosmos continually breached the boundaries set by venerable religious and philosophical traditions. In this respect, spatial thought foregrounded the human at the unchanging’s expense, with European thought slowly becoming unmoored, as it doggedly produced knowledge at wisdom’s expense. Michael J. Sauter illustrates this by pursuing historical themes across different chapters, including European thought’s exit from the medieval period, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the Industrial Revolution, and war and culture, offering a thorough overview of European thought during this period. The book concludes by explaining how contemporary culture has forgotten what early modern thinkers such as Michel de Montaigne still knew, namely, that too little skepticism toward one’s own certainties makes one a danger to others. Offering a comprehensive introduction to European thought that stretches from the late fourteenth to the late twentieth century, this is the perfect one-volume study for students of European intellectual history.


Existentialist Background

Existentialist Background

Author: William Leon McBride

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 9780815324928

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This collection of essays and reviews represents the most significant and comprehensive writing on Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors. Miola's edited work also features a comprehensive critical history, coupled with a full bibliography and photographs of major productions of the play from around the world. In the collection, there are five previously unpublished essays. The topics covered in these new essays are women in the play, the play's debt to contemporary theater, its critical and performance histories in Germany and Japan, the metrical variety of the play, and the distinctly modern perspective on the play as containing dark and disturbing elements. To compliment these new essays, the collection features significant scholarship and commentary on The Comedy of Errors that is published in obscure and difficulty accessible journals, newspapers, and other sources. This collection brings together these essays for the first time.


Aesthetic Transformations

Aesthetic Transformations

Author: Thomas Jovanovski

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 9780820420028

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In this provocative work, Thomas Jovanovski presents a contrasting interpretation to the postmodernist and feminist reading of Nietzsche. As Jovanovski maintains, Nietzsche's written thought is above all a sustained endeavor aimed at negating and superseding the (primarily) Socratic principles of Western ontology with a new table of aesthetic ethics - ethics that originate from the Dionysian insight of Aeschylean tragedy. Just as the Platonic Socrates perceived a pressing need for, and succeeded in establishing, a new world-historical ethic and aesthetic direction grounded in reason, science, and optimism, so does Nietzsche regard the rebirth of an old tragic mythos as the vehicle toward a cultural, political, and religious metamorphosis of the West. However, Jovanovski contends that Nietzsche does not advocate such a radical social turning as an end in itself, but as only the most consequential prerequisite to realizing the culminating object of his «historical philosophizing» - the phenomenal appearance of the Übermensch.