Author: Knox Peden File Type: epub Spinoza Contra Phenomenology fundamentally recasts the history of postwar French thought, typically presumed to have been driven by a critique of reason indebted to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Although the reception of phenomenology gave rise to many innovative developments in French philosophy, from existentialism to deconstruction, not everyone in France was pleased with this German import. This book recounts how a series of French philosophers used Spinoza to erect a bulwark against the nominally irrationalist tendencies of phenomenology. From its beginnings in the interwar years, this rationalism would prove foundational for Althussers rethinking of Marxism and Deleuzes ambitious metaphysics. There has been a renewed enthusiasm for Spinozism of late by those who see his work as a kind of neo-vitalism or philosophy of life and affect. Peden counters this trend by tracking a decisive and neglected aspect of Spinozas philosophyhis rationalismin a body of thought too often presumed to have rejected reason. In the process, he demonstrates that the virtues of Spinozas rationalism have yet to be exhausted.**

Author: Signe Rousseau File Type: epub There have been famous chefs for centuries. But it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that the modern celebrity chef business really began to flourish, thanks largely to advances in media such as television which allowed ever-greater numbers of people to tune in. Food Media charts the growth of this enormous entertainment industry, and also how, under the threat of the obesity epidemic, some of its stars have taken on new authority as social activists, while others continue to provide delicious distractions from a world of potentially unsafe food. The narrative that joins these chapters moves from private to public consumption, and from celebrating food fantasies to fueling anxieties about food realities, with the questionable role of interference in peoples everyday food choices gaining ground along the way.Covering celebrity chefs such as Jamie Oliver and Rachael Ray, and popular trends like foodies, food porn and fetishism, Food Media describes how the intersections between celebrity culture and food media have come to influence how many people think about feeding themselves and their families - and how often that task is complicated when it need not be.

Author: Jeffrey L. High File Type: pdf In an authorial class with dramatists and authors of literary prose such as Goethe, Schiller, Thomas Mann, Brecht, and Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) remains prominent in international evaluations of artistic genius when measured by enduring popular and artistic reception legal, philosophical, and scientific criticism and resonance of political rage. Scholars have long been fascinated by Kleists biography and works, in no small part due to his influence on authors, philosophers, political thinkers, and filmmakers, who regard Kleist as among the most accessible of classic artists - one whose relevance requires neither theoretical introduction nor literary-historical justification. The present volume addresses two centuries of engagement with Kleist and his works from an angle that has proven most important to their popular canonical status - his artistic and political legacies. What mattered to Kleist has mattered to centuries of readers, and thus all the more to artists and thinkers with similarly urgent messages to convey. **

Author: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka File Type: pdf There is no greater gift to man than to understand nothing of his fate, declares poet-philosopher Paul Valery. And yet the searching human being seeks ceaselessly to disentangle the networks of experiences, desires, inward promptings, personal ambitions, and elevated strivings which directed hisher life-course within changing circumstances in order to discover his sense of life. Literature seeks in numerous channels of insight the dominant threads of the sense of life, the inward quest, the frames of experience in reaching the inward sources of what we call destiny inspired by experience and temporality which carry it on. This unusual collection reveals the deeper generative elements which form sense of life stretching between destiny and doom. They escape attention in their metamorphic transformations of the inexorable, irreversibility of time which undergoes different interpretations in the phases examining our life. Our key to life has to be ever discovered anew. There is no greater gift to man than to understand nothing of his fate, declares poet-philosopher Paul Valery. And yet the searching human being seeks ceaselessly to disentangle the networks of experiences, desires, inward promptings, personal ambitions, and elevated strivings which directed hisher life-course within changing circumstances in order to discover his sense of life. Literature seeks in numerous channels of insight the dominant threads of the sense of life, the inward quest, the frames of experience in reaching the inward sources of what we call destiny inspired by experience and temporality which carry it on. This unusual collection reveals the deeper generative elements which form sense of life stretching between destiny and doom. They escape attention in their metamorphic transformations of the inexorable, irreversibility of time which undergoes different interpretations in the phases examining our life. Our key to life has to be ever discovered anew.**