Inwardness and Existence

Inwardness and Existence PDF Author: Walter Albert Davis
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299120146
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 444

Get Book Here

Book Description
A profound, challenging, wide-ranging book, back in print for a new generation "Inwardness and Existence accomplishes what no book before or after has even approximated: it demonstrates with great lucidity and insight the shared philosophical project that animates psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism, and Hegelian dialectics. Davis roots the reader in the enterprise of questioning what is given and probing beyond what is safe in order to demonstrate that psychoanalytic inquiry, Marxist politics, existential reflection, and dialectical connection all move within the same orbit. No one who reads it will ever think about existence itself in the same way again. Davis's landmark work will profoundly transform anyone who reads it."--Todd McGowan, author of The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan

Inwardness and Existence

Inwardness and Existence PDF Author: Walter Albert Davis
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299120146
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 444

Get Book Here

Book Description
A profound, challenging, wide-ranging book, back in print for a new generation "Inwardness and Existence accomplishes what no book before or after has even approximated: it demonstrates with great lucidity and insight the shared philosophical project that animates psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism, and Hegelian dialectics. Davis roots the reader in the enterprise of questioning what is given and probing beyond what is safe in order to demonstrate that psychoanalytic inquiry, Marxist politics, existential reflection, and dialectical connection all move within the same orbit. No one who reads it will ever think about existence itself in the same way again. Davis's landmark work will profoundly transform anyone who reads it."--Todd McGowan, author of The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan

Inwardness

Inwardness PDF Author: Jonardon Ganeri
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023154975X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 90

Get Book Here

Book Description
Where do we look when we look inward? In what sort of space does our inner life take place? Augustine said that to turn inward is to find oneself in a library of memories, while the Indian Buddhist tradition holds that we are self-illuminating beings casting light onto a world of shadows. And a disquieting set of dissenters has claimed that inwardness is merely an illusion—or, worse, a deceit. Jonardon Ganeri explores philosophical reflections from many of the world’s intellectual cultures, ancient and modern, on how each of us inhabits an inner world. In brief and lively chapters, he ranges across an unexpected assortment of diverse thinkers: Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Chinese, and Western philosophy and literature from the Upaniṣads, Socrates, and Avicenna to Borges, Simone Weil, and Rashōmon. Ganeri examines the various metaphors that have been employed to explain interiority—shadows and mirrors, masks and disguises, rooms and enclosed spaces—as well as the interfaces and boundaries between inner and outer worlds. Written in a cosmopolitan spirit, this book is a thought-provoking consideration of the value—or peril—of turning one’s gaze inward for all readers who have sought to map the geography of the mind.

Absence of Mind

Absence of Mind PDF Author: Marilynne Robinson
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300166478
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 131

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this ambitious book, acclaimed writer Marilynne Robinson applies her astute intellect to some of the most vexing topics in the history of human thought—science, religion, and consciousness. Crafted with the same care and insight as her award-winning novels, Absence of Mind challenges postmodern atheists who crusade against religion under the banner of science. In Robinson’s view, scientific reasoning does not denote a sense of logical infallibility, as thinkers like Richard Dawkins might suggest. Instead, in its purest form, science represents a search for answers. It engages the problem of knowledge, an aspect of the mystery of consciousness, rather than providing a simple and final model of reality.By defending the importance of individual reflection, Robinson celebrates the power and variety of human consciousness in the tradition of William James. She explores the nature of subjectivity and considers the culture in which Sigmund Freud was situated and its influence on his model of self and civilization. Through keen interpretations of language, emotion, science, and poetry, Absence of Mind restores human consciousness to its central place in the religion-science debate.

Essays on the Condition of Inwardness

Essays on the Condition of Inwardness PDF Author: Frederic Will
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781443897792
Category : Other (Philosophy)
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Inwardness is the condition of being inside. However, this can mean many things: one can be inside himself - dealing with his emotions, his projections, his fantasies - or with other people who become part of him as he deals with himself. One can be inside his social environment, letting himself be part of the tissue of values, reciprocations, and personal interventions that compose one's social existence. These are two quite different kinds of being inside, both of them different from being in a box or being in a prison cell, and yet each of them, in a recognizable sense, inside something. This book is concerned with inwardness in two different senses, the first as being in the center of existence, and the second as being a quest for the meaning of the center of one's existence, that is two different kinds of profoundly 'within' states. The book culminates with tales of searching for the meaning of interiority, as it self-characterizes in the inner brain of a lizard, or in the mineral constitution of the earth from which we take our lives."

Ars Vitae

Ars Vitae PDF Author: Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268108919
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 567

Get Book Here

Book Description
Despite the flood of self-help guides and our current therapeutic culture, feelings of alienation and spiritual longing continue to grip modern society. In this book, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn offers a fresh solution: a return to classic philosophy and the cultivation of an inner life. The ancient Roman philosopher Cicero wrote that philosophy is ars vitae, the art of living. Today, signs of stress and duress point to a full-fledged crisis for individuals and communities while current modes of making sense of our lives prove inadequate. Yet, in this time of alienation and spiritual longing, we can glimpse signs of a renewed interest in ancient approaches to the art of living. In this ambitious and timely book, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn engages both general readers and scholars on the topic of well-being. She examines the reappearance of ancient philosophical thought in contemporary American culture, probing whether new stirrings of Gnosticism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Cynicism, and Platonism present a true alternative to our current therapeutic culture of self-help and consumerism, which elevates the self’s needs and desires yet fails to deliver on its promises of happiness and healing. Do the ancient philosophies represent a counter-tradition to today’s culture, auguring a new cultural vibrancy, or do they merely solidify a modern way of life that has little use for inwardness—the cultivation of an inner life—stemming from those older traditions? Tracing the contours of this cultural resurgence and exploring a range of sources, from scholarship to self-help manuals, films, and other artifacts of popular culture, this book sees the different schools as organically interrelated and asks whether, taken together, they can point us in important new directions. Ars Vitae sounds a clarion call to take back philosophy as part of our everyday lives. It proposes a way to do so, sifting through the ruins of long-forgotten and recent history alike for any shards helpful in piecing together the coherence of a moral framework that allows us ways to move forward toward the life we want and need.

Deracination

Deracination PDF Author: Walter A. Davis
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791491293
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
Through a critique of history—as a reality, a discipline, and a way of writing—Deracination challenges the basic theoretical tenets of both humanism and postmodernism. As a discipline, history is currently undergoing what Heidegger would call a productive "crisis," and a number of thinkers, including Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Paul Ricoeur, and Stephen Greenblatt, have begun to reexamine the cognitive assumptions and narrative paradigms that inform the discipline. This book radicalizes such developments in order to construct both a new theory of history as well as a new concept of how histories should be written. To make the interrogation concrete, the book focuses on Hiroshima and the ways in which the trauma of that event has been repressed by the discourses that historians have fashioned in order to "explain" what happened on August 6, 1945.

Biopoetics

Biopoetics PDF Author: Andreas Weber
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9402408320
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 157

Get Book Here

Book Description
Meaning, feeling and expression – the experience of inwardness – matter most in human existence. The perspective of biopoetics shows that this experience is shared by all organisms. Being alive means to exist through relations that have existential concern, and to express these dimensions through the body and its gestures. All life takes place within one poetic space which is shared between all beings and which is accessible through subjective sensual experience. We take part in this through our empirical subjectivity, which arises from the experiences and needs of living beings, and which makes them open to access and sharing in a poetic objectivity. Biopoetics breaks free from the causal-mechanic paradigm which made biology unable to account for mind and meaning. Biology becomes a science of expression, connection and subjectivity which can understand all organisms including humans as feeling agents in a shared ecology of meaningful relations, embedded in a symbolical and material metabolism of the biosphere.

Schopenhauer's 'The World as Will and Representation'

Schopenhauer's 'The World as Will and Representation' PDF Author: Robert L. Wicks
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441160337
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Get Book Here

Book Description
Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation is widely considered to be one of the most important and influential texts in nineteenth-century German philosophy. The text provides an avenue through which to introduce and explore a rich assortment of philosophical themes and questions, and represents Schopenhauer's widely discussed attempt to find personal meaning amidst a violent, frustrating and seemingly godless world. Since it was published in 1818, the text has influenced generations of musicians, artists, writers and historians, as well as philosophers. This Reader's Guide presents a concise and accessible introduction to the text, offering invaluable guidance on: - Philosophical context - Key themes - Reading the text - Reception and influence - Further reading

Phenomenology of Spirit

Phenomenology of Spirit PDF Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publ.
ISBN: 9788120814738
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 648

Get Book Here

Book Description
wide criticism both from Western and Eastern scholars.

Living Christianly

Living Christianly PDF Author: Sylvia Walsh
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271045523
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Get Book Here

Book Description
The pseudonymous works Kierkegaard wrote during the period 1843&–46 have been responsible for establishing his reputation as an important philosophical thinker, but for Kierkegaard himself, they were merely preparatory for what he saw as the primary task of his authorship: to elucidate the meaning of what it is to live as a Christian and thus to show his readers how they could become truly Christian. The more overtly religious and specifically Christian works Kierkegaard produced in the period 1847&–51 were devoted to this task. In this book Sylvia Walsh focuses on the writings of this later period and locates the key to Kierkegaard&’s understanding of Christianity in the &“inverse dialectic&” that is involved in &“living Christianly.&” In the book&’s four main chapters, Walsh examines in detail how this inverse dialectic operates in the complementary relationship of the negative qualifications of Christian existence&—sin, the possibility of offense, self-denial, and suffering&—to the positive qualifications&—faith, forgiveness, new life/love/hope, and joy and consolation. It was Kierkegaard&’s aim, she argues, &“to bring the negative qualifications, which he believed had been virtually eliminated in Christendom, once again into view, to provide them with conceptual clarity, and to show their essential relation to, and necessity in, securing a correct understanding and expression of the positive qualifications of Christian existence.&”