Author: Corey McCall File Type: pdf This collection features original essays that examine Walter Benjamins and Theodor Adornos essays and correspondence on literature. Taken together, the essays present the view that these two monumental figures of 20th-century philosophy were not simply philosophers who wrote about literature, but that they developed their philosophies in and through their encounters with literature. Benjamin, Adorno, and the Experience of Literature is divided into three thematic sections. The first section contains essays that directly demonstrate the ways in which literature enriched the thinking of Benjamin and Adorno. It explores themes that are recognized to be central to their thinkingmimesis, the critique of historical progress, and the loss and recovery of experiencethrough their readings of literary authors such as Baudelaire, Beckett, and Proust. The second section continues the trajectory of the first by bringing together four essays on Benjamins and Adornos reading of Kafka, whose work helped them develop a distinctive critique of and response to capitalism. The third and final section focuses more intently on the question of what it means to gain authentically critical insight into a literary work. The essays examine Benjamins response to specific figures, including Georg Buchner, Robert Walser, and Julien Green, whose work he sees as neglected, undigested, or misunderstood. This book offers a unique examination of two pivotal 20th-century philosophers through the lens of their shared experiences with literature. It will appeal to a wide range of scholars across philosophy, literature, and German studies. **About the Author Corey McCall is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Elmira College, USA Nathan Ross is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Oklahoma City University, USA

Author: James W. Felt File Type: pdf Throughout more than forty years of distinguished teaching and scholarship, James W. Felt has been respected for the clarity and economy of his prose and for his distinctive approach to philosophy. The seventeen essays collected in Adventures in Unfashionable Philosophy reflect Felts encounters with fundamental philosophical problems in the spirit of traditional metaphysics but updated with modern concerns. Among the main themes of the volume are the enrichment of Thomistic philosophy through engagement with modern philosophers, Whitehead and Bergson, in particular considerations of metaphysical method and its effect on philosophic conclusions the development of a nuanced epistemological realism and the relation of possibility to actuality and of time to experience. Adventures in Unfashionable Philosophy does indeed lie off the beaten path. To deal straightforwardly today (as its author does) with God, the self, freedom, and the meaning of human life is not only unfashionable it is considered terminally naive. James Felt, however, is not naive. His clear, careful thought breathes new life into old problems, providing fresh insights where traditional approaches have failed. --Pete A. Y. Gunter, University of North Texas **Adventures in Unfashionable Philosophy is equivalently James Felts intellectual autobiography. In a series of essays written over a period of forty years and now republished with introductory self-critical comments, Felt records his journey from a youthful enthusiasm for the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead to his conversion to the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and, in recent years, his efforts to come up with a creative synthesis of the major insights of both Aquinas and Whitehead. One does not have to agree with all his conclusions, but everyone should admire the dispassionate way in which he analyzes and critiques both systems for their relative strengths and weaknesses. --Joseph A. Bracken, S.J., Xavier University Felt makes no concessions to the current unfashionable status of classical metaphysics. With justified confidence in the foundational importance of the discipline, and in dialog with some of its most famous practitioners, he explores and advances many of its perennial themes in essays exemplary in their clarity of reasoning and expression. --Jorge Nobo, Washburn University Adventures in Unfashionable Philosophy is a sound, insightful, mature, and philosophically rich work. One hears a distinctive voice in all of the essays of the collection, the voice of a teacher anxious to share ideas that have animated his own philosophical development. This is rare, and something to be celebrated when it is found. --Brian Martine, University of Alabama, Huntsville **

Author: Jean-Luc Nancy File Type: pdf From Platos Symposium to Hegels truth as a Bacchanalian revel, from The Bacchae of Euripedes to Nietzsche, philosophy holds a deeply ambivalent relation to the pleasures of intoxication. At the same time, from Baudelaire to Lowry, from Proust to Dostoyevsky, literature and poetry are also haunted by scenes of intoxication, as if philosophy and literature share a theme that announces and navigates their proximities and differences. For Nancy, intoxication constitutes an excess that both fascinates and questions philosophys sober ambitions for appropriate forms of philosophical behavior and conceptual lucidity. At the same time, intoxication displaces a number of established dualities--reason and passion, mind and body, rationality and desire, rigor and excess, clarity and confusion, logic and eros. Taking its point of departure from Baudelaires categorical imperative to understand modernity--be drunk always--Nancys little book is composed in fragments, quotations, drunken asides, and inebriated repetitions. His contemporary banquet addresses a range of related themes, including the role of alcohol and intoxication in rituals, myths, divine sacrifice, and religious symbolism, all those toasts to the sacred spirits involving libations and different forms of speech and enunciation--to the gods, to modernity, to the Absolute. Affecting both mind and body, Nancys subject becomes intoxicated Ego sum, ego existo ebrius--I am, I exist--drunk. From Platos Symposium to Hegels truth as a Bacchanalian revel, from The Bacchae of Euripedes to Nietzsche, philosophy holds a deeply ambivalent relation to the pleasures of intoxication. At the same time, from Baudelaire to Lowry, from Proust to Dostoyevsky, literature and poetry are also haunted by scenes of intoxication, as if philosophy and literature share a theme that announces and navigates their proximities and differences. For Nancy, intoxication constitutes an excess that both fascinates and questions philosophys sober ambitions for appropriate forms of philosophical behavior and conceptual lucidity. At the same time, intoxication displaces a number of established dualities--reason and passion, mind and body, rationality and desire, rigor and excess, clarity and confusion, logic and eros. Taking its point of departure from Baudelaires categorical imperative to understand modernity--be drunk always--Nancys little book is composed in fragments, quotations, drunken asides, and inebriated repetitions. His contemporary banquet addresses a range of related themes, including the role of alcohol and intoxication in rituals, myths, divine sacrifice, and religious symbolism, all those toasts to the sacred spirits involving libations and different forms of speech and enunciation--to the gods, to modernity, to the Absolute. Affecting both mind and body, Nancys subject becomes intoxicated Ego sum, ego existo ebrius--I am, I exist--drunk. **Review The originality of Intoxication lies in the acuity and patience (and indeed the touch of humor) with which it teases out the surprising concurrence, or interaction, of two apparently unrelated terms--that of the Absolute on the one hand, and that of ivresse or drunkenness on the other.-Richard A. Rand, University of Alabama Read Nancys wonderfully exhilarating Intoxication and youll understand why it is urgent to be, like Rimbauds boat, ivre. Make no mistake French ivresse has little to do with intoxications dull thud of medical measure. Leave intoxication for breathalyzers ivresse is pure elation, sublimated elevation, an ecstatic Bacchic frenzy soaring to poetic rapture, a rapture that, as Hegel stated, achieves the dizzy dissolution of all absolutes.--Jean-Michel Rabate, University of Pennsylvania About the Author Jean-Luc Nancy is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Universite Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. Among the most recent of his many books to be published in English are Corpus Dis-Enclosure The Deconstruction of Christianity The Truth of Democracy Adoration The Deconstruction of Christianity II Corpus II Writings on Sexuality The Pleasure in Drawing Identity Fragments, Frankness After Fukushima The Equivalence of Catastrophes and, with Frederico Ferrari, Being Nude The Skin of Images (all Fordham). Philip Armstrong is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University.

Author: Anthony Lester File Type: pdf Human rights, equality, freedom of expression, privacy, the rule of law. These five ideas are vitally important to the way of life we enjoy today. The battle to establish them in law was long and difficult as recently as 1970 two-hundred-thousand British Asians were almost stripped of their British citizenship as a result of racist legislation. From assaults on the EU Human Rights Act to the revelations about the NSA and GCHQ brought to light by Edward Snowden, our civil liberties are now under threat in ways they never have been before. Leading human rights lawyer Lord Anthony Lester provides an insider account of how political and legal reforms were achieved and demonstrates why we must act now to ensure they survive the next few decades. **Review Anthony Lester has throughout his life and often far in advance of his times been an eloquent fighter for freedom of speech, equality under the law, protection from official arbitrariness and much else besides. His views and actions as lawyer, legislator and citizen have often irked those in power but have conduced to justice, human dignity and a sense of reasonableness and decency in the world around him. In this book he combines legal and political argument with telling personal anecdote and he does so with a most engaging combination of practicality and passion. Vikram Seth, bestselling author of A Suitable Boy and *Two Lives* All the forces that, for decades, abused the human rights of the thalidomide children, are on the rise again in an ugly xenophobic populism those who have the loudest voices have the smallest vision. They must be repulsed and no better person to summon us to the ramparts than the author of this exciting book. Sir Harold Evans, editor-at-large for Thomson Reuters and former editor of *The Sunday Times* Anthony Lester is one of the worlds foremost advocates of rights. His advocacy reflects his deep understanding of the principles at stake, his formidable skills as a litigator, and his passionate commitments in dealing with such issues as equality and freedom of expression. Reading this book is like holding a conversation with him. His opinions and his arguments are bracing and incisive and the entire experience is intellectually exciting. Aryeh Neier, president emeritus of the Open Society Foundations and former executive director of both Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Association This stirring call to action confirms, yet again, Anthony Lester as Britains unique human rights visionary a legal genius of political savvy and powerful principle. Harold Hongju Koh, Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School and former Legal Adviser to the US Department of State under President Obama FIVE IDEAS TO FIGHT FOR is the powerful and provocative distillation of a lifetime of conviction and reminds us all in Lord Lesters own words that there is never a time for apathy especially now. Marian Wright Edelman, President and CEO, Childrens Defense Fund This powerful, elegant book is a distillation of decades of commitment to the advancement of human rights across the globe by one of the foremost lawyers of our time. FIVE IDEAS TO FIGHT FOR should be required reading for every lawyer and every politician. Hon. Margaret H. Marshall, former Chief Justice, Supreme Judicial Court, Massachusetts About the Author Lord Anthony Lester of Herne Hill QC is Britains most eminent human rights lawyer. In 2007, he was awarded the Judges Award for a Lifetime of Achievement in the service of human rights. He is a Liberal Democrat Peer and frequent commentator for the Guardian on legal matters. He lives in London.