Engages the work and career of a central figure in contemporary philosophy. Hugh J. Silverman was an inspiring scholar and teacher, known for his work engaging and shaping phenomenology, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction. As Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at Stony Brook University, State University of New York, Silvermans work was marked by the between, a concept he developed to think the postmodern in the space between philosophy and non-philosophy. In this volume, leading scholars explore and extend Silvermans philosophical contributions, from reflections on the notions of care, time, and responsibility, to presentations of the practices and possibilities of deconstruction itself. They provide an assessment of Silvermans life and work at the intersection of philosophy, ethics, and politics.
The concept of chiasm has played major role in continental philosophy, where it has referred to various phenomenological and hermeneutic structures of reversibility, intertwining, and encounter. In Chiasmatic Encounters: Art, Ethics, Politics, fourteen international contributors representing various fields of expertise analyze this central concept and its significance for contemporary cultural theory. The authors discuss the work of major philosophers like Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Habermas, Levinas, Derrida, and Deleuze, adapting their ideas of chiasmatic relations to cultural analysis. As the internal and external horizons of perception and experience are intertwined and reversed, various cultural texts, like a Vermeer painting, a symphony of Sibelius, a David Lynch movie, or a young girl walking in her summer dress, are seen from new and unexpected angles. The book also addresses the chiasmatic crossing between ethics and politics-- between unconditional ethical responsibility and always conditional political choices. Representing the cutting edge of contemporary cultural theory and interdisciplinary thinking, Chiasmatic Encounters is essential reading for anyone working in continental philosophy, aesthetics, or political theory.
In this first English publication of a well-known and widely respected Italian scholar, readers will encounter the preeminent interpreter of the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty engaged in a dialogue of critical concern to contemporary philosophy. In subtle and sensitive language eminently suited to the style and substance of Merleau-Ponty's own writings, Mauro Carbone fashions four essays around a central theme-the relations of the sensible and the intelligible, and of philosophy and non-philosophy-that occupied Merleau-Ponty in his later work. An original and innovative interpretation of the ontology of Merleau-Ponty--and themselves a significant contribution to the field of Continental thought--these essays constitute a sustained exploration of what Merleau-Ponty detected, and greeted, as a "mutation within the relations of man and Being," which would provide him with the basis for a new idea of philosophy or "a-philosophy." In lucid, often elegant terms, Carbone analyzes key elements of Merleau-Ponty's thought in relation to Proust's Recherche, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, the new biology of Von Uexküll, Rimbaud's Lettre du voyant, and Heidegger's conception of "letting-be." His work clearly demonstrates the vitality of Merleau-Ponty's late revolutionary philosophy by following its most salient, previously unexplored paths. This is essential reading for any scholar with an interest in Merleau-Ponty, in the questions of embodiment, temporality and Nature, or in the possibility of philosophy today.
A philosophical challenge to the ableist conflation of disability and pain More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle said: “let there be a law that no deformed child shall live.” This idea is alive and well today. During the past century, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. argued that the United States can forcibly sterilize intellectually disabled women and philosopher Peter Singer argued for the right of parents to euthanize certain cognitively disabled infants. The Life Worth Living explores how and why such arguments persist by investigating the exclusion of and discrimination against disabled people across the history of Western moral philosophy. Joel Michael Reynolds argues that this history demonstrates a fundamental mischaracterization of the meaning of disability, thanks to the conflation of lived experiences of disability with those of pain and suffering. Building on decades of activism and scholarship in the field, Reynolds shows how longstanding views of disability are misguided and unjust, and he lays out a vision of what an anti-ableist moral future requires. The Life Worth Living is the first sustained examination of disability through the lens of the history of moral philosophy and phenomenology, and it demonstrates how lived experiences of disability demand a far richer account of human flourishing, embodiment, community, and politics in philosophical inquiry and beyond.
Merleau-PontyENTRE HIER ET DEMAINBETWEEN YESTERDAY AND TOMORROWTRA IERI E DOMANI****dossiers – special sections – dossiersMerleau -Ponty demainMerleau -Ponty TomorrowMerleau -Ponty domaniMerleau -Ponty et la philosophie classique allemandeMerleau -Ponty and Classical German PhilosophyMerleau -Ponty e la filosofia classica tedesca****varia – diverse – varia****COMPTES RENDUS – REVIEWS – RECENSIONItextes de – texts by – testi diJacopo Bodini, Guillaume Carron, Frank Chouraqui, Anna Caterina Dalmasso, Guy-Félix Duportail, Faustino Fabbianelli, Véronique M. Fóti, Anne Gléonec, Koji Hirose, Kathleen Hulley, Takashi Kakuni, Stefan Kristensen, Donald A. Landes, Len Lawlor, Laura McMahon, Stefano Micali, David Morris, Angelica Nuzzo, Claudio Rozzoni, Ted Toadvine, Dylan Trigg, Luca Vanzago
Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty: The Logic and Pragmatics of Creation, Affective Life, and Perception offers the only full-length examination of the relationships between Deleuze, Bergson and Merleau-Ponty. Henri Bergson (1859–1941), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), and Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) succeeded one another as leading voices in French philosophy over a span of 136 years. Their relationship to one another's work involved far more than their overlapping lifetimes. Bergson became both the source of philosophical insight and a focus of criticism for Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. Deleuze criticized Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology as well as his interest in cognitive and natural science. Author Dorothea Olkowski points out that each of these philosophers situated their thought in relation to their understandings of crucial developments and theories taken up in the history and philosophy of science, and this has been difficult for Continental philosophy to grasp. She articulates the differences between these philosophers with respect to their disparate approaches to the physical sciences and with how their views of science function in relation to their larger philosophical projects. In Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Olkowski examines the critical areas of the structure of time and memory, the structure of consciousness, and the question of humans' relation to nature. She reveals that these philosophers are working from inside one another's ideas and are making strong claims about time, consciousness, reality, and their effects on humanity that converge and diverge. The result is a clearer picture of the intertwined workings of Continental philosophy and its fundamental engagement with the sciences.