This critical survey of issues in European philosophy offers detailed accounts of crucial texts by important thinkers. Sedgwick draws key ideas from these sources, analyzing the various relationships between them and linking them to central themes in philosophical enquiry, such as the nature of subjectivity, reason and experience, anti-humanism, and the nature of language.Areas explored include epistemology, metaphysics and ontology, ethics and politics. Aspects of the work of a broad range of thinkers is considered in detail, including Descartes, Locke, Hume, (...) Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Adorno and Horkheimer, Heidegger, Deleuze and Guatarri, Levinas, Derrida, Althusser, Foucault and Lyotard. This intriguing new work presents the complex ideas of European philosophy in a straightforward manner, and will be of interest to both introductory and advanced-level readers. (shrink)

A masterful series of interviews with Levinas, conducted by French philosopher Philippe Nemo, which provides a succinct presentation of Levinas's philosophy.

These essays provoke new responses to the work of the eminent French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas through an analysis of how the problematics of reading, deconstruction, feminism, and psychotherapy complicate and deepen Levinas's account of ...

In this rich and resonant work, Soren Kierkegaard reflects poetically and philosophically on the biblical story of God's command to Abraham, that he sacrifice his son Isaac as a test of faith. Was Abraham's proposed action morally and religiously justified or murder? Is there an absolute duty to God? Was Abraham justified in remaining silent? In pondering these questions, Kierkegaard presents faith as a paradox that cannot be understood by reason and conventional morality, and he challenges the universalist ethics and (...) immanental philosophy of modern German idealism, especially as represented by Kant and Hegel. This volume presents the first new English translation for twenty years, by Sylvia Walsh, together with an introduction by C. Stephen Evans which examines the ethical and religious issues raised by the text. (shrink)

"One of the major works in the development of contemporary criticism and philosophy." -- J. Hillis Miller, Yale University Jacques Derrida's revolutionary theories about deconstruction, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, first voiced in the 1960s, forever changed the face of European and American criticism. The ideas in De la grammatologie sparked lively debates in intellectual circles that included students of literature, philosophy, and the humanities, inspiring these students to ask questions of their disciplines that had previously been considered improper. Thirty years (...) later, the immense influence of Derrida's work is still igniting controversy, thanks in part to Gayatri Spivak's translation, which captures the richness and complexity of the original. This corrected edition adds a new index of the critics and philosophers cited in the text and makes one of contemporary criticism's most indispensable works even more accessible and usable. (shrink)

Recorded in Ithaca, NY by Cornell University., Sponsored by: Andrew D. White Professors-At-Large Program., Speaker: Professor of the History of Philosophy, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large., Lecture, October 3, 1988.

" "Positions brings together three interviews with Derrida, outlining his central concerns and ideas.

Introduction: Morality in Modern and Postmodern Perspective Shattered beings are best represented by bits and pieces. Rainer Maria Rilke As signalled in its ...

Through a detailed examination of the basis of the idea of communication - with its semantic core of "commonality" or the transcendence of difference - Chang argues against the tendency of theorists to value understanding over misunderstanding, clarity over ambiguity, order over disorder. To this end the author revisits the thought of Derrida and considers deconstruction in general. Specifically, he uses the critique of the phenomenological tradition emerging from poststructuralism to clarify the commitments and assumptions inherent in models of communication. (...) A seminal work, Deconstructing Communication will serve as the guiding framework for a constructive debate about the future direction of communication theory. Situated at the intersection of current debates regarding meaning and representation, Deconstructing Communication casts doubt on the seeming innocence of the activity of communication. Using poststructuralist literary theory and philosophy, Briankle G. Chang argues that modern theories fail to provide an adequate explanation for how communication is possible. (shrink)

The ‘inherent transgression’ refers to the notion that the very emergence of a certain ‘value’ which serves as a point of ideological identification relies on its transgression, on some mode of taking a distance from it. Ideology depends upon the ‘gap’ that the symbolic order produces between itself and the subject as an effect of bringing the latter into being as a subject of language. Since there is no direct, unmediated relationship between the subject and the authentic, true value, the (...) problem of ‘belief takes on vital importance. But the very separation between belief and knowledge requires that the’ true believer’ must always be someone else. The ‘Lacanian’ decentred subject has to live out the authenticity of his being or her jouissance through the Other. The problem, then, is how to sustain the fiction of the Other, the Other who believes and is worthy of belief. Belief in the Other never goes away but returns in the more excessive, threatening form of nameless powers ‘pulling the strings’, leaving the subject vulnerable to another paranoiac impostor looking to confirm the truth of the conspiracy in his or her own ‘transgressive’ image. (shrink)

Identity and Difference consists of English translations and the original German versions of two little-known lectures given in 1957 by Martin Heidegger, "The Principle of Identity" and "The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics.

Heidegger's Destruktion of the metaphysical tradition leads him to the view that all Western metaphysical systems make foundational claims best understood as 'ontotheological'. Metaphysics establishes the conceptual parameters of intelligibility by ontologically grounding and theologically legitimating our changing historical sense of what is. By first elucidating and then problematizing Heidegger's claim that all Western metaphysics shares this ontotheological structure, I reconstruct the most important components of the original and provocative account of the history of metaphysics that Heidegger gives in support (...) of his idiosyncratic understanding of metaphysics. Arguing that this historical narrative generates the critical force of Heidegger's larger philosophical project (namely, his attempt to find a path beyond our own nihilistic Nietzschean age), I conclude by briefly showing how Heidegger's return to the inception of Western metaphysics allows him to uncover two important aspects of Being's pre-metaphysical phenomenological self-manifestation, aspects which have long been buried beneath the metaphysical tradition but which are crucial to Heidegger's attempt to move beyond our late-modern, Nietzschean impasse. (shrink)

In this article I discuss Kant's idea of cosmopolitanism both in its prescriptive dimension (its normative content and regulative aspirations) and also its descriptive basis (its crucial philosophical-anthropological assumptions constituting its theoretical justification). My aim is to show that the prescriptive dimension cannot be treated separately from the descriptive one for some difficulties that the latter confronts pervade the former and misinform it. I then proceed to an examination of those difficulties which I locate mainly in Kant's onto-theological commitment to (...) some anthropological tenets of his era. I explore the implications of these tenets and show that they contribute negatively to the task of the promotion of a cosmopolitanism that respects difference and heterogeneity. I conclude with some critical suggestions pro-pounding a renegotiation of the paradigmatic certainties of Kant's cosmopolitanism in order to salvage its normative import and couch it in less onto-theological terms. (shrink)

When the tried oldster drew near to his last hour, having fought the good fight and kept the faith, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten that ...