Dennis J. Schmidt – författare

Engagement with the image has played a decisive role in the formulation of the very idea of philosophy since Plato. Identifying pivotal moments in the history of philosophy, Dennis J. Schmidt develops the question of philosophy's regard of the image in thinking by considering painting—where the image most clearly calls attention to itself as an image. Focusing on Heidegger and the work of Paul Klee, Schmidt pursues larger issues in the relationship between word, image, and truth. As he investigates alternative ways of thinking about truth through word and image, Schmidt shows how the form of art can indeed possess the capacity to change its viewers.

On Germans and Other GreeksTragedy and Ethical LifeDennis J. SchmidtWhat Greek tragedy and German philosophy reveal about the meaning of art for ethical life."Schmidt's investigation of tragedy is a highly significant, powerful work, one with far-reaching consequences. It bears on our understanding of the role of the arts and of philosophical thinking in our culture." —Rodolphe GaschéIn this illuminating work, Dennis J. Schmidt examines tragedy as one of the highest forms of human expression for both the ancients and the moderns. While uncovering the specifically Greek nature of tragedy as an exploration of how to live an ethical life, Schmidt's elegant and penetrating readings of Greek texts show that it was the beauty of Greek tragic art that led Kant and other German thinkers to appreciate the relationship between tragedy and ethics. The Germans, however, gave this relationship a distinctly German interpretation. Through the Greeks, the Germans reflected on the enigmas of ethical life and asked innovative questions about how to live an ethical life outside of the typical assumptions and restrictions of traditional Western metaphysics. Schmidt's engagements with Schelling, Hegel, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger show how German philosophical appropriations of Greek tragedy conceived of ethics as moving beyond the struggle between good and evil toward the discovery of community truths. Enlisting a wide range of literary and philosophical texts, some translated into English for the first time, Schmidt reveals that contemporary notions of tragedy, art, ethics, and truth are intimately linked to the Greeks.Dennis J. Schmidt is Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. He is author of The Ubiquity of the Finite and translator of Ernst Bloch's Natural Law and Human Dignity.Studies in Continental Thought—John Sallis, general editorMay 2001432 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, bibl., indexcloth0-253-33868-9$49.95 L / £38.00paper0-253-21443-2$24.95 s / £18.95

A wide-ranging attempt to develop a theory of ethical life from a hermeneutic understanding of language.Dennis J. Schmidt develops a hermeneutic theory of language that forms the starting point for thinking through the concerns of ethical life. Working from texts by Homer, Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer, this volume explores some of the ways in which we experience the fringes of language, and highlights the relation of both freedom and history to such experience. The book is also guided by the conviction that such reflections upon the limits of language can open up something decisive for the effort to address the enigmas and challenges of judgment in the realm of ethical life.Taking seriously Kant's claim in the Third Critique that aesthetic experience opens up a basis for judging that is other than that found in the language of the concept, Schmidt pursues this claim by addressing the relation of language to poetry, to music, to silence, to script, to sign language, and to painting-those experiences of language which set themselves apart from the concept. Out of the treatment of these experiences of language at its limits, the author argues that we find an opening upon the realm of ethical life that is truly beyond the calculus of good and evil. What results is an experience of radical freedom, an experience that precedes anything like a notion of freedom finding its explanation in the agency of a subject. It is here that we find the contours of what Heidegger once described as "original ethics," and experience something of the sources of ethical life.

A wide-ranging attempt to develop a theory of ethical life from a hermeneutic understanding of language.Dennis J. Schmidt develops a hermeneutic theory of language that forms the starting point for thinking through the concerns of ethical life. Working from texts by Homer, Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer, this volume explores some of the ways in which we experience the fringes of language, and highlights the relation of both freedom and history to such experience. The book is also guided by the conviction that such reflections upon the limits of language can open up something decisive for the effort to address the enigmas and challenges of judgment in the realm of ethical life.Taking seriously Kant's claim in the Third Critique that aesthetic experience opens up a basis for judging that is other than that found in the language of the concept, Schmidt pursues this claim by addressing the relation of language to poetry, to music, to silence, to script, to sign language, and to painting-those experiences of language which set themselves apart from the concept. Out of the treatment of these experiences of language at its limits, the author argues that we find an opening upon the realm of ethical life that is truly beyond the calculus of good and evil. What results is an experience of radical freedom, an experience that precedes anything like a notion of freedom finding its explanation in the agency of a subject. It is here that we find the contours of what Heidegger once described as "original ethics," and experience something of the sources of ethical life.

This book brings the powerful insights of Continental philosophy to bear on some of the most challenging difficulties of ethical life. Currently philosophy is being radically transformed by questions of how to live well. What does such a way of life mean? How are we to understand the meaning of ethicality? What are the obstacles to ethical living? And should we assume that an ethical life is a "better" life? The movement of history and the developments of culture and knowledge seem to have outstripped the capacity of traditional forms of reflection upon ethical life to understand how we might answer these questions. Ranging from existentialism to deconstruction, phenomenology to psychoanalytic theory, and hermeneutics to post-structuralism, the twelve essays in this volume take up a wide but clearly connected set of issues relevant to living ethically: race, responsibility, religion, terror, torture, technology, deception, and even the very possibility of an ethical life. Some of the questions addressed are specific to our times; others are ancient questions but with quite contemporary twists. In each case, they concern the philosophical significance of ongoing historical, cultural, and political transformations for ethical living and thinking.

A revised translation of Heidegger's most important work.The publication in 1927 of Martin Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time, signaled an intellectual event of the first order and had an impact in fields far beyond that of philosophy proper. Being and Time has long been recognized as a landmark work of the twentieth century for its original analyses of the character of philosophic inquiry and the relation of the possibility of such inquiry to the human situation. Still provocative and much disputed, Heidegger's text has been taken as the inspiration for a variety of innovative movements in fields ranging from psychoanalysis, literary theory, existentialism, ethics, hermeneutics, and theology. A work that disturbs the traditions of philosophizing that it inherits, Being and Time raises questions about the end of philosophy and the possibilities for thinking liberated from the presumptions of metaphysics.The Stambaugh translation captures the vitality of the language and thinking animating Heidegger's original text. It is also the most comprehensive edition insofar as it includes the marginal notes made by Heidegger in his own copy of Being and Time, and takes account of the many changes that he made in the final German edition of 1976. The revisions to the original translation correct some ambiguities and problems that have become apparent since the translation appeared fifteen years ago. Bracketed German words have also been liberally inserted both to clarify and highlight words and connections that are difficult to translate, and to link this translation more closely to the German text.