Derrida and the Future of the Liberal Arts

Derrida and the Future of the Liberal Arts PDF Author: Mary Caputi
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 144115762X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Derrida and the Future of the Liberal Arts highlights the Derridean assertion that the university must exist 'without condition' - as a bastion of intellectual freedom and oppositional activity whose job it is to question mainstream society. Derrida argued that only if the life of the mind is kept free from excessive corporate influence and political control can we be certain that the basic tenets of democracy are being respected within the very societies that claim to defend democratic principles. This collection contains eleven essays drawn from international scholars working in both the humanities and social sciences, and makes a well-grounded and comprehensive case for the importance of Derridean thought within the liberal arts today. Written by specialists in the fields of philosophy, literature, history, sociology, geography, political science, animal studies, and gender studies, each essay traces deconstruction's contribution to their discipline, explaining how it helps keep alive the 'unconditional', contrapuntal mission of the university. The book offers a forceful and persuasive corrective to the current assault on the liberal arts.

Derrida and the Future of the Liberal Arts

Derrida and the Future of the Liberal Arts PDF Author: Mary Caputi
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 144115762X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Get Book Here

Book Description
Derrida and the Future of the Liberal Arts highlights the Derridean assertion that the university must exist 'without condition' - as a bastion of intellectual freedom and oppositional activity whose job it is to question mainstream society. Derrida argued that only if the life of the mind is kept free from excessive corporate influence and political control can we be certain that the basic tenets of democracy are being respected within the very societies that claim to defend democratic principles. This collection contains eleven essays drawn from international scholars working in both the humanities and social sciences, and makes a well-grounded and comprehensive case for the importance of Derridean thought within the liberal arts today. Written by specialists in the fields of philosophy, literature, history, sociology, geography, political science, animal studies, and gender studies, each essay traces deconstruction's contribution to their discipline, explaining how it helps keep alive the 'unconditional', contrapuntal mission of the university. The book offers a forceful and persuasive corrective to the current assault on the liberal arts.

Jean-Luc Nancy and the Thinking of Otherness

Jean-Luc Nancy and the Thinking of Otherness PDF Author: Daniele Rugo
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1780937032
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Jean-Luc Nancy and the Thinking of Otherness is the first book in English to provide a sustained account of the relationship between Nancy, Levinas and Heidegger. It investigates Jean-Luc Nancy's reading of Heidegger, focusing on the question of Being-with, and starting with the problem of otherness in Heidegger, the book goes on to establish a dialogue between Nancy and the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. With intellectual agility and command of cinema, literature and visual art, Daniele Rugo insists on the critical significance of Nancy's project for any future philosophy attempting to define itself beyond foundational acts, and according to the continuous crossings at the heart of existence. By discussing Nancy alongside Heidegger and Levinas, Rugo underlines the essential indecision between philosophy-as-literature and philosophy as the re-appropriation of the question of Being. Rugo offers unexpected associations which return thinking to the play of specificity, rather than restricting it to the passage of abstract formulations.

Deleuze and Art

Deleuze and Art PDF Author: Anne Sauvagnargues
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441149155
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
In Deleuze and Art Anne Sauvagnargues, one of the world's most renowned Deleuze scholars, offers a unique insight into the constitutive role played by art in the formation of Deleuze's thought. By reproducing Deleuze's social and intellectual references, Sauvagnargues is able to construct a precise map of the totality of Deleuze's work, pinpointing where key Deleuzian concepts first emerge and eventually disappear. This innovative methodology, which Sauvagnargues calls "periodization", provides a systematic historiography of Deleuze's philosophy that remains faithful to his affirmation of the principle of exteriority. By analyzing the external relations between Deleuze's self-proclaimed three philosophical periods, Sauvagnargues gives the reader an inside look into the conceptual and artistic landscape that surrounded Deleuze and the creation of his philosophy. With extreme clarity and precision, Sauvagnargues provides an important glimpse into Deleuze's philosophy by reconstructing the social and intellectual contexts that contributed to the trajectory of his thought. This book is the product of insightful and careful research, which has not been made available to English readers of Deleuze before now.

Interdiscipline

Interdiscipline PDF Author: Petar Ramadanovic
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000471985
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This book brings together two different discussions on the value of the humanities and a broader debate on interdisciplinary scholarship in order to propose a new way beyond current threats to the humanities. Petar Ramadanovic offers nothing short of a drastic rehaul of our approaches to literary scholarship, the humanities, and university systems. Beginning with an analysis of what is often referred to as the "crises" in the humanities, the author looks at the specifics of literary studies, but also issues around working conditions for academics. From precarity and pay conditions to peer review, the book has practical as well as theoretical implications that will resonate throughout the humanities. While most books defending the humanities emphasize the uniqueness of the subject or area, Ramadanovic does the opposite, emphasizing the need for interdisciplinarity and combined knowledge. This proposal is then fully explored through literary studies, and its potential throughout the humanities and beyond, into the sciences. Interdiscipline is not just a defense of literature and the humanities; it offers a clear and inspiring pathway forwards, drawing on all disciplines to show their cultural and social significance. The book is important reading for all scholars of literary studies, and also throughout the humanities.

Merleau-Ponty's Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

Merleau-Ponty's Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy PDF Author: Bryan A. Smyth
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1780937865
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Bringing to light the essential philosophical role of Marxism within Merleau-Ponty's reinterpretation of transcendental phenomenology, this book shows that the realization of this project hinges methodologically upon a renewed conception of the proletariat qua universal class-specifically, that it rests upon a humanist myth of incarnation which, substantiated by Merleau-Ponty's notion of 'heroism', locates an objective historical purposiveness in the habituated organism of the modern subject. Foregrounding the phenomenological priority of history over corporeality in this way, Smyth's analysis recovers the 'militant' character of Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology. It thus sheds critical new light on his early thought, and challenges some of the main parameters of existing scholarship by disclosing the intrinsic normativity of his basic methodological commitments.

Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries

Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries PDF Author: Ivan Boldyrev
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472505344
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries is a much needed concise yet comprehensive overview of Ernst Bloch's early and later thought. It fills an important gap in research on the history of German thought in the 20th century by reconstructing the contexts of Bloch's philosophy, while focusing on his contemporaries - Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno. Ernst Bloch's influential ideas include his theory of utopian consciousness, his resolute inclination to merge aesthetics and politics, rehabilitation of hope, and atheistic conception of Christianity. Although Bloch's major early texts, Spirit of Utopia and Traces, have recently been translated into English, and there has been renewed interest in Bloch over the last 15 years, he is still relatively unknown compared to other left German-Jewish intellectuals. Ivan Boldyrev places Bloch's often enigmatic prose within contexts more familiar to English-speaking readers, and outlines the most important messages in Bloch's legacy still relevant today to European intellectual discourse, in particular aesthetics and philosophy of history.

Gadamer's Poetics: A Critique of Modern Aesthetics

Gadamer's Poetics: A Critique of Modern Aesthetics PDF Author: John Arthos
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441181075
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Gadamer's writing on art is typically seen as supporting his philosophical theory of truth. Drawing together a coherent theory of the work of art from the corpus of Gadamer's writings, this is the first full-length examination of Gadamer's theory of the work of art in its own right. Close readings of Gadamer's treatment of aesthetics in Truth and Method, as well as his many essays and lectures on art, highlight an approach to art that is not ancillary to historical, philosophical, and linguistic themes. The book establishes Gadamer's position on the criteria for the judgment of art, and the balance between production and reception from a hermeneutic perspective. Offering useful insights to some of the most tantalizing and obscure Gadamerian themes, this not only makes a significant addition to Gadamer scholarship, but provides aesthetics scholars, critics, and interpreters with new ways of thinking about art.

The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling

The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling PDF Author: Christopher Yates
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472508882
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
The first comparative study of Heidegger and Schelling, recognizing Schelling's place in post-Kantian GermanIdealism and his contribution to Heidegger's later thought.

The Elective Mind

The Elective Mind PDF Author: Réal Fillion
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
ISBN: 0776629573
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
This book discusses the relevance of philosophy courses within the undergraduate curriculum as integral to the self-formation that is at the heart of a liberal education. The objective is to provide a historically layered view of what it can still mean to study for its own sake. The elective university classroom is important because the course of study is chosen out of personal interest and enthusiasm, as opposed to being primarily governed by predetermined disciplinary objectives. It engages the student’s mind directly and freely, and counters the overly specialized minds favoured by the contemporary university as well as the commodification of its degrees. The discussion builds on the distinction put forward by Raymond Williams between a dominant culture (in this case, university study as contributing to research and/or marketable degrees) and alternative and/or oppositional cultures that have both residual and emergent dimensions. The elective stream of university study is treated as alternative and oppositional to the dominant culture. The elective university classroom is examined as a combination of a classroom, students, texts, and professors. Each element is explored in terms of its alternative/residual significance as illustrated through the history of philosophy: the classroom and students through the life and death of Socrates; texts through the origins of the university in medieval scholasticism; the professor in the Humboldtian reform of the university at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Berlin. Published in English.

Speculation, Heresy, and Gnosis in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion

Speculation, Heresy, and Gnosis in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion PDF Author: Joshua Ramey
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786601427
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Many in continental philosophy of religion aver that we are in a new moment, one where the intellectually marginalized and religiously bastardized traditions of mystical, intuitive, and esoteric apprehensions must be re-articulated and appreciated anew. In an era marked by catastrophic events and atrophied cultural institutions, what seems to be needed is an affirmation of the human potential to truck with non-human or even inhuman forces and intentions, at scales of speed, slowness, or intensity that break with consensual conceptions of human limitations. The essays in this volume outline patterns of mind and mortality, existence and ecstasy, creativity and expression, political possibility and religious matrix from a position that takes quite seriously possible relations with the absolute, however enigmatic, that modernity has denied and postmodernity has obscured in the name of academic skepticism and humanist reservations. Beyond post-modernist pastiche and post-secular nostalgia, these essays explore the potencies of archaic spiritual disciplines as well as the passions driving the mystical, heretical, and Gnostic intimations riddling contemporary relations with the absolute.