Carnal Hermeneutics


Book Description

Building on a hermeneutic tradition in which accounts of carnal embodiment are overlooked, misunderstood, or underdeveloped, this work initiates a new field of study and concern. Carnal Hermeneutics provides a philosophical approach to the body as interpretation. Transcending the traditional dualism of rational understanding and embodied sensibility, the volume argues that our most carnal sensations are already interpretations. Because interpretation truly goes “all the way down,” carnal hermeneutics rejects the opposition of language to sensibility, word to flesh, text to body. In this volume, an impressive array of today’s preeminent philosophers seek to interpret the surplus of meaning that arises from our carnal embodiment, its role in our experience and understanding, and its engagement with the wider world.




Prolegomena to a Carnal Hermeneutics


Book Description

Prolegomena to a Carnal Hermeneutics introduces the importance of body politics from both Eastern and Western perspectives. Hwa Yol Jung begins with Giambattista Vico’s anti-Cartesianism as the birth of the discipline. He then explores the homecoming of Greek mousike (performing arts), which included oral poetry, dance, drama, and music; Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical body politics; the making of body politics in Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Luce Irigaray; Marshall McLuhan’s transversal and embodied philosophy of communication; and transversal geophilosophy. This tour de force will be an engaging read for anyone interested in the above thinkers, as well as for students and scholars of comparative philosophy, communication theory, environmental philosophy, political philosophy, or continental philosophy




Hermeneutic Rationality


Book Description

The problem of the limits of reason is by no means a privileged subject of an academic discourse. By reducing reality to what can be conceived of within the paradigms of the scientific laboratory, manipulative despotism, which positivistic notion of objectivism has established, creates in a human being a unilateral conscience of the world and of oneself; a conscience that dominates today our understanding of existence in its manifold senses of Being and the world we live in. This way of thinking, based on a powerful and skillful technique aimed at controlling human life in all its dimensions, intends to impose this limiting positivistic horizon on human beings in the name of Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite. Hermeneutic rationality resists the claims of modern science and promotes the culture of hospitality toward the world as it shows itself in its complexity. Maria Luisa Portocarrero, Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal, Professor of Philosophy, specializing in the phenomenological hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. Luis Antonio Umbelino, Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal, Professor of Philosophy and Artistic Studies. Andrzej Wiercinski, Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat Freiburg, Germany, Professor of Philosophy of Religion, specializing in Practical Philosophy/Philosophical Hermeneutics.




Political Phenomenology


Book Description

This volume presents political phenomenology as a new specialty in western philosophical and political thought that is post-classical, post-Machiavellian, and post-behavioral. It draws on history and sets the agenda for future explorations of political issues. It discloses crossroads between ethics and politics and explores border-crossing issues. All the essays in this volume challenge existing ideas of politics significantly. As such they open new ways for further explorations BY future generations of phenomenologists and non-phenomenologists alike. Moreover, the comprehensive chronological bibliography is unprecedented and provides not only an excellent picture of what phenomenologists have already done but also a guide for the future.




Somatic Desire


Book Description

The essays in this volume all ask what it means for human beings to be embodied as desiring creatures—and perhaps still more piercingly, what it means for a philosopher to be embodied. In taking up this challenge via phenomenology, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of literature, the volume questions the orthodoxies not only of Western metaphysics but even of the phenomenological tradition itself. We miss much that has philosophical import when we exclude the somatic aspects of human life, and it is therefore the philosopher’s duty now to rediscover the meaning inherent in desire, emotion, and passion—without letting the biases of any tradition determine in advance the meaning that reveals itself in embodied desire. Continental philosophers have already done much to challenge binary oppositions, and this volume sets out a new challenge: we must now also question the dichotomy between being at home and being alienated. Alterity is not simply something out there, separate from myself; rather, it penetrates me through and through, even in my corporeal experience. My body is both my own and other; I am other than myself and therefore other than my body. Additionally, this book is a conversation, not a presentation of a new orthodoxy. Thus, the hope is that these essays will open the way for further dialogue that will continue to radically rethink our understanding of embodied desire. Gathered together here are twelve essays that address these issues from deeply interrelated albeit unique perspectives from within the field.




Paul Ricoeur and Environmental Philosophy


Book Description

Paul Ricoeur and Environmental Philosophy expands the scope of Ricoeur's philosophy, especially his hermeneutics, to issues of environmental philosophy and our contemporary environmental crisis. David Utsler argues that, although Ricoeur himself was not an environmental philosopher, his work provides frameworks to reconsider our way of being-in-the-world as it pertains to our relationship with the environment. The unprecendented environmental crisis can be thought of as the result of interpretations—bad ones—and the crisis we now face requires the task of new and creative interpretation. This book discusses the ways in which Ricoeur's hermeneutics has the potential to restructure the discourse and dialogue surrounding environmental issues, and to creatively mediate the many conflicting interpretations that call for resolution. Utsler does not claim this text to be a comprehensive application of Ricoeur's work to environmental philosophy, as he believes there is still a great deal more of Ricoeur's philosophy from which to draw to enrich the growing field of environmental hermeneutics.




Anacarnation and Returning to the Lived Body with Richard Kearney


Book Description

This edited collection responds to Richard Kearney’s recent work on touch, excarnation, and embodiment, as well as his broader work in carnal hermeneutics, which sets the stage for his return to and retrieval of the senses of the lived body. Here, fourteen scholars engage the breadth and depth of Kearney’s work to illuminate our experience of the body. The chapters collected within take up a wide variety of subjects, from nature and non-human animals to our experience of the sacred and the demonic, and from art’s account of touching to the political implications of various types of embodiment. Featuring also an inspired new reflection from Kearney himself, in which he lays out his vision for “anacarnation,” this volume is an important statement about the centrality of touch and embodiment in our experience, and a reminder that, despite the excarnating tendencies of contemporary life, the lived body remains a touchstone for wisdom in our increasingly complicated and fragile world. Written for scholars and students interested in touch, embodiment, phenomenology, and hermeneutics, this diverse and challenging collection contributes to a growing field of scholarship that recognizes and attempts to correct the excarnating trends in philosophy and in culture at large.




Touch


Book Description

Our existence is increasingly lived at a distance. As we move from flesh to image, we are in danger of losing touch with each other and ourselves. How can we combine the physical with the virtual, our embodied experience with our global connectivity? How can we come back to our senses? Richard Kearney offers a timely call for the cultivation of the basic human need to touch and be touched. He argues that touch is our most primordial sense, foundational to our individual and common selves. Kearney explores the role of touch, from ancient wisdom traditions to modern therapies. He demonstrates that a fundamental aspect of touch is interdependence, its inherently reciprocal nature, which offers a crucial corrective to our fixation with control. Making the case for the complementarity of touch and technology, this book is a passionate plea to recover a tangible sense of community and the joys of life with others.




Signs of Change


Book Description

This is a collection of essays focusing on conventions of change in the arts, philosophy, and literature.




The Logic of the Living Present


Book Description

Some might ask "Why Locke's theory of knowledge now?" Though appreciated for his social philosophy, Locke has been criticized for his work in the field of epistemology ever since the publication of the Essay. It is even as if Locke serves only as an example of how not to think. When people criticize Locke, they usually cite the hostile commen taries of Berkeley, Kant, Husserl, or Sellars. But, one might ask, are they not all so eager to show the excellence of their own epistemo logical views that they distort and underestimate Locke's thought? Russell aptly noted in his History of Western Philosophy that: No one has yet succeeded in inventing a philosophy at once credible and self-consis tent. Locke aimed at credibility, and achieved it at the expense of consistency. Most of the great philosophers have done the opposite. A philosophy which is not self-consis tent cannot be wholly true, but a philosophy which is self-consistent can very well be wholly false. The most fruitful philosophies have contained glaring inconsistencies, but for that very reason have been partially true. There is no reason to suppose that a self consistent system contains more truth than one which, like Locke's, is obviously more or less wrong. (B. Russell, A History of Western Philosophy [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945], p. 613. ) Here Russell is uncommonly charitable with Locke.