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Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928-1938

Ronald Bruzina

Eugen Fink was Edmund Husserl's research assistant during the last decade of the renowned phenomenologist's life, a period in which Husserl's philosophical ideas were radically recast. This book ... More

Eugen Fink was Edmund Husserl's research assistant during the last decade of the renowned phenomenologist's life, a period in which Husserl's philosophical ideas were radically recast. This book shows that Fink was actually a collaborator with Husserl, contributing indispensable elements to their common enterprise. Drawing on hundreds of notes and drafts by Fink, it highlights the scope and depth of his theories and critiques. The book places these philosophical formulations in their historical setting, organizes them around such key themes as the world, time, life, and the concept and methodological place of the “meontic,” and demonstrates that they were a pivotal impetus for the renewing of “regress to the origins” in transcendental-constitutive phenomenology.Less

The Elusiveness of the Ordinary: Studies in the Possibility of Philosophy

Stanley Rosen

The concept of the ordinary, along with such cognates as everyday life, ordinary language, and ordinary experience, has come into special prominence in late modern philosophy. Thinkers have employed ... More

The concept of the ordinary, along with such cognates as everyday life, ordinary language, and ordinary experience, has come into special prominence in late modern philosophy. Thinkers have employed two opposing yet related responses to the notion of the ordinary: scientific and phenomenological approaches on the one hand, and on the other, more informal or even anti-scientific procedures. This book presents a comprehensive study of the main approaches to theoretical mastery of ordinary experience. It evaluates the responses of a wide range of modern and contemporary thinkers, and grapples with the peculiar problem of the ordinary—how to define it in its own terms without transforming it into a technical (and so, extraordinary) artifact. The book's approach is both historical and philosophical. It offers Montesquieu and Husserl as examples of the scientific approach to ordinary experience; contrasts Kant and Heidegger with Aristotle to illustrate the transcendental approach and its main alternatives; discusses attempts by Wittgenstein and Strauss to return to the pre-theoretical domain; and analyzes the differences among such thinkers as Moore, Austin, Grice, and Russell with respect to the analytical response to ordinary language. The book concludes with a theoretical exploration of the central problem of how to capture the elusive ordinary intact.Less

European Intellectual History from Rousseau to Nietzsche

Frank M Turner

Richard A. Lofthouse (ed.)

One of the most distinguished cultural and intellectual historians of our time, Frank Turner taught a landmark Yale University lecture course on European intellectual history that drew scores of ... More

One of the most distinguished cultural and intellectual historians of our time, Frank Turner taught a landmark Yale University lecture course on European intellectual history that drew scores of students over many years. His lectures—lucid, accessible, beautifully written, and delivered with a notable lack of jargon—distilled modern European history from the Enlightenment to the dawn of the twentieth century and conveyed the turbulence of a rapidly changing era in European history through its ideas and leading figures. The author, one of Turner's former students, has now edited the lectures into a single volume that outlines the thoughts of a great historian on the forging of modern European ideas. Moreover, it offers a fine example of how intellectual history should be taught: rooted firmly in historical and biographical evidence.Less

Hegel, Idealism, and Analytic Philosophy

Tom Rockmore

This book—a large-scale survey of the complex relationship between Hegel's idealism and Anglo-American analytic philosophy—argues that analytic philosophy has consistently misread and misappropriated ... More

This book—a large-scale survey of the complex relationship between Hegel's idealism and Anglo-American analytic philosophy—argues that analytic philosophy has consistently misread and misappropriated Hegel. According to the book, the first generation of British analytic philosophers to engage Hegel possessed a limited understanding of his philosophy and of idealism. Succeeding generations continued to misinterpret him, and recent analytic thinkers have turned Hegel into a pragmatist by ignoring his idealism. The book explains why this has happened, defends Hegel's idealism, and points out the ways that Hegel is a key figure for analytic concerns, focusing in particular on the fact that he and analytic philosophers both share an interest in the problem of knowledge.Less

Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico's New Science and "Finnegans Wake"

Donald Phillip Verene

This book examines in full the interconnections between Giambattista Vico's new science and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Maintaining that Joyce is the greatest modern “interpreter” of Vico, it ... More

This book examines in full the interconnections between Giambattista Vico's new science and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Maintaining that Joyce is the greatest modern “interpreter” of Vico, it demonstrates how images from Joyce's work offer keys to Vico's philosophy. The book presents the entire course of Vico's philosophical thought as it develops in his major works, with Joyce's words and insights serving as a guide. The book devotes a chapter to each period of Vico's thought, from his early orations on education to his anti-Cartesian metaphysics and his conception of universal law, culminating in his new science of the history of nations. The book analyzes Vico's major works, including all three editions of the New Science. The book also features a detailed chronology of the philosopher's career, historical illustrations related to his works, and an extensive bibliography of Vico scholarship and all English translations of his writings.Less

Modernity and Its Discontents: Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow

Steven B. Smith

In this book, Steven Smith examines modernity as the site of a unique type of human being entirely unknown to the ancient and medieval worlds that is called the bourgeois. The characteristics and ... More

In this book, Steven Smith examines modernity as the site of a unique type of human being entirely unknown to the ancient and medieval worlds that is called the bourgeois. The characteristics and qualities attributed to this new kind of individual by writers like Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Franklin, and Kant included the desire for autonomy, to live independently of custom, habit, and tradition, and to be the ultimate locus of moral responsibility. This kind of bourgeois culture that has become most fully associated with America and the American way of life was accompanied by doubts and fears. Bourgeois society was rejected by some of its leading critics as domineering and tyrannical (Marx), as tepid and cowardly (Nietzsche), and as lacking in taste and culture (Flaubert). The concept of the bourgeois slowly became the locus of scorn and as the cause of our manifold discontents. How did modernity that was once considered the locus of the free and responsible individual become associated with low-minded materialism, moral cowardice, and philistinism? This provocative book explores some of reasons for these anxieties in the works of Rousseau, Tocqueville, Flaubert, Leo Strauss, Isaiah Berlin, and Saul Bellow. The work offers a novel perspective of what it means to be modern by showing what is most characteristic of modernity are the self-criticisms and doubts that have accompanied political progress and why some of these discontents have produced movements of radical rejection.Less