Spirits Hovering Over the Ashes


Book Description

This book explores the consequences of postmodern theory and answers the question, "What did postmodern theory begin?"




Spirits Hovering Over the Ashes


Book Description

This book explores the consequences of postmodern theory and answers the question, "What did postmodern theory begin?"




Spirit in Ashes


Book Description

Contemporary phenomena of mass death--such as Hiroshima and Auschwitz--have brought with them the threat of annihilation of human life. In this provocative and disturbing book, Edith Wyschogrod shows that the various manifestations of man-made mass death form a single structure, a "death-event," which radically alters our understanding of language, time, and self. She contends that the death event has its own logic and driving force that she traces to pre-Socratic philosophy and to certain mythological motifs that recur in Western thought. "Spirit in Ashes is one book in contemporary philosophy that should be read aloud and taken to heart by any professional or intellectual who purports to have a conscience."--Carl Rasche, Journal of the American Academy of Religion "A masterful blend of scholarship, originality, and serious passion."--Robert C. Neville, Commonweal "An original, insightful, and challenging work."--Robert Burch, Canadian Philosophical Reviews




Adventures in the Spirit


Book Description

In Adventures in the Spirit, respected and influential theologian Philip Clayton argues that two major intellectual movements of our day-panentheism and emergence-are converging and that together they offer exciting new vistas for theological reflection. On the one hand, over the last decades many theologians have been re-conceiving the God-world relation panentheistically, affirming a radical indwelling of God within the world and the world within God. On the other hand, scientists have begun to abandon the reductionist ideology that characterized much of the modern period, with a new emphasis on emergence. Their study of how new, novel structures and entities arise throughout the evolutionary process yields a much more open-ended, holistic vision of reality, Clayton argues.




In the Beginning was the Spirit


Book Description

This title provides an astonishing synthesis of humankind's understanding of the Great Spirit that energizes and runs through all creation.




Interactive Wittgenstein


Book Description

The philosophical thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein continues to have a profound influence that transcends barriers between philosophical disciplines and reaches beyond philosophy itself. Less than one hundred years after their publication, his early masterpiece 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' and the posthumously published 'Philosophical Investigations' have emerged as two classic philosophical texts, each of which has elicited widely divergent readings and spawned contesting schools of interpretation. This collection of original essays by leading experts offers deep insights into the forces that shaped and influenced Wittgenstein's thought on a broad variety of topics. It also contains the text - in both the original German and an English translation by Juliet Floyd and Burton Dreben - of letters and cards sent to Wittgenstein by the philosopher and logician Gottlob Frege, which shed light on their interaction during the crucial period when Wittgenstein completed work on the 'Tractatus'. This important record of a philosophical friendship is complemented by a scholarly apparatus and an introduction. Other essays featured in this volume document and discuss Wittgenstein's thinking on music and religion as well as issues that take center stage in the 'Investigations' such as Wittgenstein's account of rule-following. The volume provides an invaluable research tool not only for students of the history of philosophy and for scholars of both Wittgenstein and Frege but also for anyone interested in the intellectual history of the first half of the twentieth century.




Wittgenstein on the Human Spirit


Book Description

Provides a new understanding of Wittgenstein's discourse as an edifyng philosophy of culture, pursued through self-reflection. Investigates the conceptual underpinnings of culture, revealing them as shared expressive spiritual forms of life.




Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity


Book Description

In Ethics–Politics–Subjectivity, Simon Critchley takes up three questions at the centre of contemporary theoretical debate: What is ethical experience? What can be said of the subject who has this experience? What, if any, is the relation of ethical experience to politics? These questions are approached by way of a critical confrontation with a number of major thinkers, including Lacan, Genet, Blanchot, Nancy, Rorty and, in particular, Levinas and Derrida. Critchley offers a critical reconstruction of Levinas's notion of ethical experience and, questioning the religious pietism and political conservatism of the dominant interpretation of Levinas's work, develops an ethics of finitude which, far from being tragic, opens on to an experience of humour and the comic. Using this reading of Levinas as a way of unlocking the rich ethical potential of Derrida's work, Critchley outlines and defends the political possibilities of deconstruction. On the basis of Derrida's recent work, Critchley attempts to rethink notions of friendship, democracy, economics and technology.




Architectural Reflections


Book Description

Louise Erdrich is one of the most critically and commercially successful Native American writers. This book is the first fully comprehensive treatment of Erdrich's writing, analysing the textual complexities and diverse contexts of her work to date. Drawing on the critical archive relating to Erdrich's work and Native American literature, Stirrup explores the full depth and range of her authorship. Breaking Erdrich's oeuvre into several groupings - poetry, early and late fiction, memoir and children's writing - Stirrup develops individual readings of both the critical arguments and the texts themselves. He argues that Erdrich's work has developed an increasing political acuity to the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in Native American literatures. Erdrich's insistence on being read as an American writer is shown to be in constant and mutually-inflecting dialogue with her Ojibwe heritage.This sophisticated analysis is of use to students and readers at all levels of engagement with Erdrich's writing.




The Marrano Way


Book Description

The Marrano phenomenon is a still unexplored element of Western culture: the presence of the borderline Jewish identity which avoids clear-cut cultural and religious attribution and – precisely as such – prefigures the advent of the typically modern "free-oscillating" subjectivity. Yet, the aim of the book is not a historical study of the Marranos (or conversos), who were forced to convert to Christianity, but were suspected of retaining their Judaism "undercover." The book rather applies the "Marrano metaphor" to explore the fruitful area of mixture and cross-over which allowed modern thinkers, writers and artists of the Jewish origin to enter the realm of universal communication – without, at the same time, making them relinquish their Jewishness which they subsequently developed as a "hidden tradition." The book poses and then attempts to prove the "Marrano hypothesis," according to which modern subjectivity derives, to paraphrase Cohen, "out of the sources of the hidden Judaism": modernity begins not with the Cartesian abstract ego, but with the rich self-reflexive self of Michel de Montaigne who wrestled with his own marranismo in a manner that soon became paradigmatic to other Jewish thinkers entering the scene of Western modernity, from Spinoza to Derrida. The essays in the volume offer thus a new view of a "Marrano modernity," which aims to radically transform our approach to the genesis of the modern subject and shed a new light on its secret religious life as surviving the process of secularization, although merely in the form of secret traces.