Charles E. Scott – författare

Questions of whether anything exceeds reasonable sense and meaning have persisted throughout the history of philosophy. These questions have even continued in postmodern thought as well as in liberatory philosophies in which many kinds of events and lineages are experienced and seen as beyond philosophy. In this cowritten text, distinguished philosophers Nancy Tuana and Charles Scott pay particular attention to lineages and their dynamism as they develop the idea of things beyond philosophy, beyond norms. This is not a history of philosophy or a critical study of a particular philosopher but a way to engage experience around dimensions of events that are beyond measuring, counting, meaning, and value. These attunements, they assert, are vitally important for the ways people orient themselves in the world and comport themselves in it. Tuana and Scott build on the alternatives to normative ethics that they find in the work of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Anzaldúa. They urge attunement to the world as a way to speak about what is impossible to give voice to, to live in the spaces between speech and the unspeakable, and to conceptualize and articulate the boundaries of rational sensibility.

Questions of whether anything exceeds reasonable sense and meaning have persisted throughout the history of philosophy. These questions have even continued in postmodern thought as well as in liberatory philosophies in which many kinds of events and lineages are experienced and seen as beyond philosophy. In this cowritten text, distinguished philosophers Nancy Tuana and Charles Scott pay particular attention to lineages and their dynamism as they develop the idea of things beyond philosophy, beyond norms. This is not a history of philosophy or a critical study of a particular philosopher but a way to engage experience around dimensions of events that are beyond measuring, counting, meaning, and value. These attunements, they assert, are vitally important for the ways people orient themselves in the world and comport themselves in it. Tuana and Scott build on the alternatives to normative ethics that they find in the work of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Anzaldúa. They urge attunement to the world as a way to speak about what is impossible to give voice to, to live in the spaces between speech and the unspeakable, and to conceptualize and articulate the boundaries of rational sensibility.

" . . . stimulating and insightful . . . a thoroughly researched and timely contribution to the secondary literature of ethics . . . " —Library Journal"His important new work establishes Scott . . . as one of the foremost interpreters of the Continental philosophical tradition of the US. . . . Necessary for anyone working in ethics or the Continental tradition." —Choice" . . . a provocative discourse on the consequences of the ethical in the thought of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Heidegger." —The Journal of ReligionCharles E. Scott's challenging book advances the broad claim that ethics as a way of judging and thinking has come into question as philosophers have confronted suffering and conflicts that arise from our traditional systems of value.

". . . remarkable account of the impact of postmodern philosophy on the question of ethics and politics . . . commendable also for its balanced view of Heidegger's relationship to politics and ethics. . . . an excellent account of Heidegger's philosophical understanding of technology . . ." —ChoiceThis book takes as its point of departure the question of ethics: that values and their pursuit in the West often perpetuate their own worst enemies. At issue are the dangers in the structures and movements of images, values, and ways of knowing that are most intimately a part of our lives.

Companion to Heidegger's Contributions to PhilosophyEdited by Charles E. Scott, Susan Schoenbohm, Daniela Vallega-Neu, and Alejandro VallegaA key to unlocking one of Heidegger's most difficult and important works.The publication of the first English translation of Martin Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) marked a significant event for Heidegger studies. Considered by scholars to be his most important work after Being and Time, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) elaborates what Heidegger calls "being-historical-thinking," a project in which he undertakes to reshape what it means both to think and to be. Contributions is an indispensable book for scholars and students of Heidegger, but it is also one of his most difficult because of its aphoristic style and unusual language. In this Companion 14 eminent Heidegger scholars share strategies for reading and understanding this challenging work. Overall approaches for becoming familiar with Heidegger's unique language and thinking are included, along with detailed readings of key sections of the work. Experienced readers and those coming to the text for the first time will find the Companion an invaluable guide to this pivotal text in Heidegger's philosophical corpus.Contributors include Walter A. Brogan, David Crownfield, Parvis Emad, Günter Figal, Kenneth Maly, William McNeill, Richard Polt, John Sallis, Susan Schoenbohm, Charles E. Scott, Dennis J. Schmidt, Alejandro Vallega, Daniela Vallega-Neu, and Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann.Charles E. Scott is Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He is author of The Question of Ethics, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Ethics and Politics (both Indiana University Press), and The Time of Memory.Susan Schoenbohm has taught philosophy at Vanderbilt University, The University of the South, and Pennsylvania State University. She has published several articles on Heidegger, contemporary Continental thought, ancient Greek thought, and ancient Asian thought.Daniela Vallega-Neu teaches philosophy at California State University, Stanislaus. She is author of Die Notwendigkeit der Grundung in Zeitalter der Deconstruction.Alejandro Vallega teaches philosophy at California State University, Stanislaus.Studies in Continental Thought—John Sallis, general editorJuly 2001288 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4cloth0-253-33946-4$44.95 L / £34.00paper0-253-21465-3$22.95 s / £17.50

"Like Foucault and Levinas before him, though in very different ways, Scott makes an oblique incision into phenomenology . . . [it is] the kind of book to which people dazed by the specters of nihilism will be referred by those in the know." —David Wood". . . refreshing and original." —Edward S. CaseyIn The Lives of Things, Charles E. Scott reconsiders our relationships with ordinary, everyday things and our capacity to engage them in their particularity. He takes up the Greek notion of phusis, or physicality, as a way to point out limitations in refined and commonplace views of nature and the body as well as a device to highlight the often overlooked lives of things that people encounter. Scott explores questions of unity, purpose, coherence, universality, and experiences of wonder and astonishment in connection with scientific fact and knowledge. He develops these themes with lightness and wit, ultimately articulating a new interpretation of the appearances of things that are beyond the reach of language and thought.

Living with Indifference is about the dimension of life that is utterly neutral, without care, feeling, or personality. In this provocative work that is anything but indifferent, Charles E. Scott explores the ways people have spoken and thought about indifference. Exploring topics such as time, chance, beauty, imagination, violence, and virtue, Scott shows how affirming indifference can be beneficial, and how destructive consequences can occur when we deny it. Scott's preoccupation with indifference issues a demand for focused attention in connection with personal values, ethics, and beliefs. This elegantly argued book speaks to the positive value of diversity and a world that is open to human passion.

Aims to let silence disclose itself by cultivating attunements with silences' happening.In Telling Silence, Charles E. Scott speaks of silence, often indirectly, in such ways as to create occasions in which people might become more aware of silence in their experiences of themselves and the world around them. The core question of the book is: how can people be aware of silence without turning it into a thing and losing it? Lack of awareness of silence is lack of awareness of a major dimension of lives, both human and nonhuman. Attunements with silence enable attunements with being alive in the fragility that invests even the strengths of living beings. Telling Silence performs this attunement in descriptive accounts and instances of non-reflective awareness, awareness that does not deliberate or ponder. In twenty-three "fragments," poems, stories, and ways of thinking and speaking are brought together to intensify intimations of silence telling of itself.

Aims to let silence disclose itself by cultivating attunements with silences' happening.In Telling Silence, Charles E. Scott speaks of silence, often indirectly, in such ways as to create occasions in which people might become more aware of silence in their experiences of themselves and the world around them. The core question of the book is: how can people be aware of silence without turning it into a thing and losing it? Lack of awareness of silence is lack of awareness of a major dimension of lives, both human and nonhuman. Attunements with silence enable attunements with being alive in the fragility that invests even the strengths of living beings. Telling Silence performs this attunement in descriptive accounts and instances of non-reflective awareness, awareness that does not deliberate or ponder. In twenty-three "fragments," poems, stories, and ways of thinking and speaking are brought together to intensify intimations of silence telling of itself.

When Heidegger's influence was at its zenith in Germany from the early fifties to the early sixties, most serious students of philosophy in that country were deeply steeped in his thought. His students or students of his students filled many if not most of the major chairs in philosophy. A cloud of reputedly Black Forest mysticism veiled the perspective of many of his critics and admirers at home and abroad. Droves of people flocked to hear lectures by him that most could not understand, even on careful reading, much less on one hearing. He loomed so large that Being and Time frequently could not be seen as a highly imaginative, initial approach to a strictly limited set of questions, but was viewed either as an all-embracing first order catastrophy incorporating at once the most feared consequences of Boehme, Kierkegaard, Rilke, and Nietzsche, or as THE ANSWER. But most of that has past. Heidegger's dominance of German philosophy has ceased. One can now brush aside the larger-than-life images of Heidegger, the fears that his language was creating a cult phenomenon, the convictions that only those can understand him who give their lives to his thought. His language is at times unusually difficult, at times simple and beautiful. Some of his insights are obscure and not helpful, others are exciting and clarifying. One no longer expects Heidegger to interpret literature like a literary critic or an academic philologist.

The core source of this book is the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Beginning with a chapter on speaking and the other, three lead chapters focus on Levinas' account of the face of the other. These chapters are followed by explorations of the ethics of dissemination in Derrida, the freedom of the other in Sartre, the cultural other in Husserlian phenomenology, the other as sexual difference in Irigaray and Nietzsche, the sublime in aesthetics, and the deconstruction of the primacy of the ego in Foucault and Lacan.This book is especially relevant to feminist theory. It shows that postmodern, continental philosophy does indeed have ethical implications. The question of the other or the presence of the other undercuts the foundationalist starting points of ethical theory and epistemology.The Question of the Other presents fresh and original interpretations of Husserl, Nietzsche, Derrida, Levinas, Irigaray, Foucault, Lacan, Heidegger, and Sartre.

This book punctuates the moments of crisis in continental thought from the foundational crisis of reason in Husserl's call for a rigorous science of phenomenology to the current crisis of postmodernism and its rejection of Husserl's metanarrative of history and rationality. The mediating links between these moments is the centrality of the epochal history of Being, the power of cultural and disciplinary practices, and the dispersal of meaning in the post-Husserlian and post-subjective philosophies of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and others.Included here are the thoughts of leading scholars who critically discuss Husserl's analysis of the crisis of Western thought and the importance of the concepts of "world" in Husserl's early writings. The authors analyze the deprivileging of philosophy as social critique through the text of Husserl, Habermas, Foucault, and recent feminist theory. They examine the end of the epistemological and morally autonomous subject in continental thought. Together, these thoughts articulate multiple points or moments of crisis without cure or end.

Ethics and Danger examines Heidegger's association with German National Socialism and attempts to understand both the question of politics in Heidegger's thought and the thought that gives rise to that question. It explores the contribution of Heidegger's work to issues of ethics, technology, and social theory, as well as his relationship to other thinkers such as Parmenides, Aristotle, Hegel, Husserl, Benjamin, Levinas, Rorty, Foucault, and Derrida. Finally, it addresses the more general question of the future of ethical thought within continental philosophy.In order to engage the ethical issues surrounding Heidegger's life and thought, the authors speak of dangers such as facism and the facile, self-congratulatory moral stance that Heidegger exemplifies. The question of how to speak in the wake of Heidegger's thought takes many forms, and the answers represent a diversity of viewpoints from both American and continental thinkers.