Continental Philosophy and the History of Thought – serie

Hannah Arendt and the History of Thought, edited by Daniel Brennan and Marguerite La Caze, enrichens and deepens scholarship on Arendt’s relation to philosophical history and traditions. Some contributors analyze thinkers not often linked to Arendt, such as William Shakespeare, Hans Jonas, and Simone de Beauvoir. Other contributors treat themes that are pressing and crucial to understanding Arendt’s work, such as love in its many forms, ethnicity and race, disability, human rights, politics, and statelessness. The collection is anchored by chapters on Arendt’s interpretation of Kant and her relation to early German Romanticism and phenomenology, while other chapters explore new perspectives, such as Arendt and film, her philosophical connections with other women thinkers, and her influence on Eastern European thought and activism. The collection expands the frames of reference for research on Arendt—both in terms of using a broader range of texts like her Denktagebuch and in examining her ideas about judgment, feminism, and worldliness in this wider context.

Hannah Arendt and the History of Thought, edited by Daniel Brennan and Marguerite La Caze, enrichens and deepens scholarship on Arendt’s relation to philosophical history and traditions. Some contributors analyze thinkers not often linked to Arendt, such as William Shakespeare, Hans Jonas, and Simone de Beauvoir. Other contributors treat themes that are pressing and crucial to understanding Arendt’s work, such as love in its many forms, ethnicity and race, disability, human rights, politics, and statelessness. The collection is anchored by chapters on Arendt’s interpretation of Kant and her relation to early German Romanticism and phenomenology, while other chapters explore new perspectives, such as Arendt and film, her philosophical connections with other women thinkers, and her influence on Eastern European thought and activism. The collection expands the frames of reference for research on Arendt—both in terms of using a broader range of texts like her Denktagebuch and in examining her ideas about judgment, feminism, and worldliness in this wider context.

The philosophical concepts of “nature” and “world” have overlapped one another in a myriad of ways throughout the history of Western philosophy. Nevertheless, modernity has constructed a decisive philosophical dichotomy between the domain of nature and the domain of the human world as a response to the revolutions of the natural sciences in the seventeenth century. In Hegel and Heidegger on Nature and World, Raoni Padui investigates the responses to this distinction between nature and world in the works of Hegel and Heidegger. Both philosophers attempt to heal the wounds of modernity and to reconcile the human historical world to the domain of nature, and both refuse to accept the dichotomy between nature and world, seeking to offer a way in which humans can inhabit a meaningful world without being alienated from the nature that conditions it. However, the difference in their modes of reconciliation illustrates the options opened up by modern philosophy: either a Hegelian path of self-determination that traces our historical emancipation from the natural domain, or a Heideggerian rethinking of nature that seeks a renewed proximity to the domain of things.

Where most English-language works on Jankélévitch have almost exclusively centered around the topic of forgiveness, this book fills a gap by bringing to light other aspects of Jankélévitch’s oeuvre that deserve attention.Although Jankélévitch is increasingly considered an important French moral theorist, there remains relatively little English-language scholarship on his thought. Jankélévitch’s writing, especially on ethics and forgiveness, served as touchstones for works by Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, and Emmanuel Levinas, among others. Jankélévitch is known for the novelty of his style of writing and lecturing, as well as his analyses of subjects and topics that were not necessarily “in style” at the time. Having been forced into hiding during the German occupation of France because of his Jewish heritage, the Shoah and its aftermath made Jankélévitch reexamine, and largely renounce, the role of German thought and ideas in his own work, leading to an even greater separation between his own thought and the climate of philosophy in France during the 1950’s and ‘60’s. Many of the contributors to this volume were, themselves, students of Jankélévitch and, as such, can bring firsthand knowledge of Jankélévitch to bear.

The Idea of Beginning in Jules Lequier's Philosophy analyzes the work of an author mostly unknown in Anglophone countries, but who greatly influenced the trajectory of French philosophy over the last two centuries. Jules Lequier, in The Search for a First Truth, argues that beginning such a search is the goal towards which philosophy must tend. To achieve this, Lequier established a postulate, that of freedom against necessity, and set out a program as an inaugural gesture: “TO MAKE, not to become, but to make, and, in making, TO MAKE ONESELF.” By the fertility of possible beginnings, the making in Lequier is always first and radical. As Ghislain Deslandes reveals in this exploration of Lequier’s work, that something new is possible in philosophy after all, and that it should even be possible to invent it in other fields, applying the principle that "everything is to be relearned, and started again, but in another truth." Deslandes explores parallels between the “classical” antiphilosophers Pascal and Kierkegaard and Lequier, whose importance to French philosophy is today better documented and more widely recognized.

In Badiou, Infinity, and Subjectivity: Reading Hegel and Lacan after Badiou, Mohammad Reza Naderi elaborates on the trajectory of Alain Badiou’s philosophy by following a leading thread: the dominance of axiomatic thought and the category of mathematical infinity. According to this primary proposition, axiomatic thought is the only form of thinking adequate to the infinity of being. Using both primary and secondary literature, the author demonstrates two other major propositions: 1) The coherence of Badiou’s intellectual development from the early interventions to the publication of Being and Event, and 2) The formation of a theory Naderi calls “discipline.” By working through three dimensions of disciplinary thinking—interiority, novelty, and beginning—Naderi provides a new framework for understanding the inner structure of what Badiou calls “procedures of truths” and develops a new interpretation that ultimately reveals the inner logic of Badiou’s method.

This book frames the mission of the Continental Philosophy and History of Thought series at Lexington Books. International leading scholars contribute essays that explore and redefine the relationship between received arguments in contemporary Continental philosophy and various influential figures and arguments in the history of thought. By bringing Continental philosophy and the histories of thought into dialogue, editors Christian Lotz and Antonio Calcagno broaden the standard canon of what is considered Continental philosophy by including important yet understudied figures and arguments in the tradition; the chapters also deepen and contextualize significant movements and debate in the field by showing their rich historical underpinnings, thereby establishing new viewpoints in specific constituent subfields of philosophy. Reading Continental Philosophy and the History of Thought shows the growing richness of Continental philosophy via unexplored rethinking of the history of thought. The contributors expand Continental philosophy with and through the recovery of important historical developments, figures, and lines of thought.

A timely new interpretation of Nietzsche’s politics which reconciles the apparent contradictions in Nietzsche’s texts by defining his politics as “ethical libertarianism.”Nietzsche’s politics has been the subject of much debate, with the existing scholarship largely divided between aristocratic and anti-democratic readings on the one hand, and democratic readings on the other. This book takes its place in the emerging trend of trying to find a “third way” by arguing that Nietzsche's philosophy implies a form of libertarianism. This interpretation emphasizes individual self-transformation and the need to organize society in a way which best facilitates this for its members. While libertarianism is closest to Nietzsche’s requirements, it needs to be reformulated to be made fully consistent with his philosophy. This requires a rejection of any grounding of the natural rights of the individual, presumed to be equal for all, in a metaphysical conception of the self. A Nietzschean “ethical libertarianism” would be based on protecting equal access of individuals to conditions which promote self-cultivation. It is thus democratic, but also meritocratic, as rights will be seen to accrue on the basis of individual development.

A timely new interpretation of Nietzsche’s politics which reconciles the apparent contradictions in Nietzsche’s texts by defining his politics as “ethical libertarianism.”Nietzsche’s politics has been the subject of much debate, with the existing scholarship largely divided between aristocratic and anti-democratic readings on the one hand, and democratic readings on the other. This book takes its place in the emerging trend of trying to find a “third way” by arguing that Nietzsche's philosophy implies a form of libertarianism. This interpretation emphasizes individual self-transformation and the need to organize society in a way which best facilitates this for its members. While libertarianism is closest to Nietzsche’s requirements, it needs to be reformulated to be made fully consistent with his philosophy. This requires a rejection of any grounding of the natural rights of the individual, presumed to be equal for all, in a metaphysical conception of the self. A Nietzschean “ethical libertarianism” would be based on protecting equal access of individuals to conditions which promote self-cultivation. It is thus democratic, but also meritocratic, as rights will be seen to accrue on the basis of individual development.

By revealing the philosophical richness of French spiritualism, this book bridges a gap in the understanding of late modern philosophy and, more specifically, within philosophical history of the Continental tradition The contributors to this volume argue that French spiritualism—within the Continental tradition of philosophy and in tension with some of its most recognized voices—is deeply in favour of metaphysics. Against all abstract metaphysics of the concept, French spiritualism expresses a positive sensibility that insists upon a metaphysical experience of being in the original unity of thought and being. Thus, on the historical front, this book argues for the resourcing of late modern and contemporary philosophy by bringing to visibility a forgotten tradition that opens fresh speculative possibilities of renewal within philosophy. On the speculative front, it demonstrates the specific doctrines and philosophical method of French spiritualism in the renewal of the question of being beyond the alternatives of an ontotheology, abstract idealisms, mere empirical positivism, and a mathematical ontology. In this project of a new quest of being, the very meaning of the task of philosophy is itself transformed.The featured essays discuss defining figures of French spiritualism to highlight the historical importance and philosophical richness of their thought within the continuity of various trajectories within Continental philosophy (Biran, Cousin, Ravaisson, Lachelier, and Bergson). Other essays examine various philosophical themes of French Spiritualism in dialogue with currents within Continental and contemporary philosophy (spiritualism and phenomenology, spiritualism and psychoanalysis, spiritualism and existentialism, spiritualism and mysticism).

The foundation of this book is the work of Jean-Luc Marion, who writes at length about the problems of vanity and nihilism and offers an answer in love, specifically Christian love. A complication that arises, however, is that Marion argues that love is absent in the respective responses to nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger—two figures who play a key role in the development of his thought, and who also have their own notions of love. In Marion, Love, and Nihilism, Matthew C. Kruger explores this series of questions by providing first an overview of the responses to nihilism found in these figures, then a close reading of Marion’s thoughts on the matter before moving to accounts of the concept of love in Nietzsche and Heidegger. The book then finishes with a further critique of Marion’s work, relying on the thought of Nishitani Keiji. Kruger argues that, while Marion correctly identifies an answer in love (as did Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Nishitani, in their own ways), Marion’s thought ends in world-denial and thus fails find a complete answer to nihilism.

Responses, both critical and constructive, to changing realities in modern politics and society.In gathering these essays, Antonio Calcagno and Mark Yenson have chosen the conceptual lens of crisis and collapse, not in the spirit of lamenting or decrying the death of a once-enjoyed, but now lost, state of affairs. Rather, they seek to understand what the concepts of crisis and collapse mean, how they are deployed in various situations, and how they are used to explain shifts in politics and society. The contributing scholars featured in this volume demonstrate how two important political thinkers imagined new worlds and social orders that could arise from significant change brought on by forms of crisis and collapse. Through their work, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil offer new generative visions of what it is to be human in a time when our very understanding of humanity is changing.

Marxism and Phenomenology: The Dialectical Horizons of Critique, edited by Bryan Smyth and Richard Westerman, offers new perspectives on the possibility of a philosophical outlook that combines Marxism and phenomenology in the critique of capitalism. Although Marxism’s focus on impersonal social structures and phenomenology’s concern with lived experience can make these traditions appear conceptually incompatible, the potential critical force of a theoretical reconciliation inspired several attempts in the twentieth century to articulate a phenomenological Marxism. Updating and extending this approach, the contributors to this volume identify and develop new and previously overlooked connections between the traditions, offering new perspectives on Marx, Husserl, and Heidegger; exploring themes such as alienation, reification, and ecology; and examining the intersection of Marxism and phenomenology in figures such as Michel Henry, Walter Benjamin, and Frantz Fanon. These glimpses of a productive reconciliation of the respective strengths of phenomenology and Marxism offer promising possibilities for illuminating and resolving the increasingly intense social crises of capitalism in the twenty-first century.

Max Stirner on the Path of Doubt examines Stirner's incisive criticism of his contemporaries during the period from the death of Hegel, in 1831, to the 1848 German Revolution. Stirner's work, mainly the Ego and His Own, considered each of the major figures within that German school known as “The Young Hegelians.” Lawrence S. Stepelevich argues that for Stirner, they were but “pious atheists,” and their common revolutionary ideology concealed an ancient religious ground – which Stirner set about to reveal. The central doctrine of this school, that Mankind was its own Savior, was initiated in 1835 by the theologian, David F. Strauss's in his Life of Jesus , and it progressed with August von Cieszkowski's mystical recasting of history, followed by Bruno Bauer's absolute atheism and Ludwig Feuerbach's statement that “Man is God.” This soon found reflection in the “Sacred History of Mankind” declared by Moses Hess. Within a decade, the result was the secular reformulation of this theological ideology into the “Scientific Socialism” of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Although linked to it, Max Stirner was the most relentless and feared critic of this school. His work, never out of print, but largely ignored by academics, has inspired countless “individualists” set upon rejecting any form of religious or political “causes,” and finding Stirner's assertion that he had “set his cause upon nothing” took this as their own cause.

Max Stirner on the Path of Doubt examines Stirner's incisive criticism of his contemporaries during the period from the death of Hegel, in 1831, to the 1848 German Revolution. Stirner's work, mainly the Ego and His Own, considered each of the major figures within that German school known as “The Young Hegelians.” Lawrence S. Stepelevich argues that for Stirner, they were but “pious atheists,” and their common revolutionary ideology concealed an ancient religious ground – which Stirner set about to reveal. The central doctrine of this school, that Mankind was its own Savior, was initiated in 1835 by the theologian, David F. Strauss's in his Life of Jesus , and it progressed with August von Cieszkowski's mystical recasting of history, followed by Bruno Bauer's absolute atheism and Ludwig Feuerbach's statement that “Man is God.” This soon found reflection in the “Sacred History of Mankind” declared by Moses Hess. Within a decade, the result was the secular reformulation of this theological ideology into the “Scientific Socialism” of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Although linked to it, Max Stirner was the most relentless and feared critic of this school. His work, never out of print, but largely ignored by academics, has inspired countless “individualists” set upon rejecting any form of religious or political “causes,” and finding Stirner's assertion that he had “set his cause upon nothing” took this as their own cause.

History is replete with false and unfulfilled promises, as well as singular acts of courage, resilience, and ingenuity. These episodes have led to significant changes in the way people think and act in the world or have set the stage for such transformations in the form of rational expectations in theory and the hopeful anticipations of dialectical imagination. Negative Dialectics and Event: Nonidentity, Culture, and the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness revisits some of Theodor W. Adorno’s most influential writings and theoretical interventions to argue not only that his philosophy is uniquely suited to bring such events into sharp relief and reflect on their entailments but also that an effective historical consciousness today would be a consciousness awake to the events that interpellate and shape it into existence. More broadly, Vangelis Giannakakis presents a compelling argument in support of the view that the critical theory developed by the first generation of the Frankfurt School still has much to offer in terms of both cultivating insights into contemporary human experience and building resistance against states of affairs that impede human flourishing and happiness.

In Rethinking Philosophy with Borges, Zambrano, Paz, and Plato, Hugo Moreno argues that in Ficciones, Claros del bosque, and El mono gramático, Jorge Luis Borges, María Zambrano, and Octavio Paz practice a literary way of philosophizing—a way of seeking and communicating knowledge of reality that takes up analogical procedures. They deploy analogy as an indispensable and irreplaceable heuristic tool and literary device to convey their insight and perplexities on the nature of existence. Borges’ ironic approach involves reading and writing philosophy as fiction. Zambrano’s poetic reason is a mode of writing and thinking based on an imaginative sort of recollection that is ultimately a visionary’s poetizing technique. Paz’s poetic thinking relies on analogy to correlate and harmonize an array of worldviews, ideas, and discourses.In the appendix, Moreno shows that Plato's Republic is a forerunner of this way of philosophizing in literature. Moreno suggests that in the Republic, Plato reconciles philosophy and poetry and creates a rational prose poetry that fuses argumentation and narration, dialectical and analogical reasoning, and abstract concepts and poetic images.

Reframing Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: The Roots of Desire, edited by Elodie Boublil, investigates the works of French philosophers who have been relegated to the margins of the canon, even if their teachings and writings have been recognized as highly influential. The contributions gather around the concept of “desire” to make sense of the French philosophical debate throughout the twentieth century. The first part of the volume investigates the concept of desire by questioning the role of reflexivity in embodiment and self-constitution. It examines specifically the works of three authors—Maine de Biran, Jean Nabert, and Jean-Louis Chrétien—to highlight their specific contribution to twentieth-century French philosophy. The second part of the volume explores desire's pre-reflective and affective dynamics that resist objectification and reflexivity by analyzing the contributions of lesser-known thinkers such as Simone Weil, Sarah Kofman, and Henri Maldiney. The last part of the volume focuses on three philosophical endeavors that aim to positively rethink the foundations of phenomenology and French philosophy: Jacques Garelli, Marc Richir, and Mikel Dufrenne.

In Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism: Crisis, Body, World, Ian H. Angus investigates the crisis of reason in a contemporary context. Beginning with Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Angus connects the phenomenology of human motility to Marx’s ontology of labor in Capital and shows its basis in natural fecundity (excess). He argues that the formalization of reason creates an inability to foster differentiated community as expected by both Husserl and Marx and that the formalization of human motility by the regime of value reveals the ontological productivity of natural fecundity, showing that ecology is the contemporary exemplary science. Addressing the crisis requires a philosophy of technology (especially digital technology) and a dialogue between cultural-civilizational lifeworlds, which surpasses Husserl’s assumption that Europe is the home of reason. Angus’s overall conception of phenomenology is Socratic in that it is concerned with the presuppositions and applications of knowledge-forms in their lifeworld grounding. He further shows that the contemporary event is the epochal confrontation between planetary technology and place-based Indigeneity. This book lays out the fundamental concepts of a systematic phenomenological Marxian philosophy.

In Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism: Crisis, Body, World, Ian H. Angus investigates the crisis of reason in a contemporary context. Beginning with Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Angus connects the phenomenology of human motility to Marx’s ontology of labor in Capital and shows its basis in natural fecundity (excess). He argues that the formalization of reason creates an inability to foster differentiated community as expected by both Husserl and Marx and that the formalization of human motility by the regime of value reveals the ontological productivity of natural fecundity, showing that ecology is the contemporary exemplary science. Addressing the crisis requires a philosophy of technology (especially digital technology) and a dialogue between cultural-civilizational lifeworlds, which surpasses Husserl’s assumption that Europe is the home of reason. Angus’s overall conception of phenomenology is Socratic in that it is concerned with the presuppositions and applications of knowledge-forms in their lifeworld grounding. He further shows that the contemporary event is the epochal confrontation between planetary technology and place-based Indigeneity. This book lays out the fundamental concepts of a systematic phenomenological Marxian philosophy.

In The Ontological Roots of Phenomenology: Rethinking the History of Phenomenology and Its Religious Turn, Anna Jani examines the common methodological background of phenomenology. Through attention to the phenomenon of being, the existential experience of religiosity can be phenomenologically described by the ontological difference between being and beings. Jani demonstrates that the methodological inquiries connect closely with the ontological source of phenomenology. First, she elaborates on the contributions of Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Roman Ingarden, and Edith Stein from the point of view of Heidegger’s influence on the early phenomenologists from Husserl’s students. Second, she analyzes Heidegger’s reinterpretation of his own earlier thinking after the “turn,” which is formulated in the idea of the “new beginning of philosophical thinking” in the Contributions to Philosophy. In the context of clarifying the difference between being and beings, her third hypothesis about Ricœur’s critique of Heidegger reveals an ethical level. The primordiality of the ethical dimension of the action reveals the ontological foundation of the hermeneutical-phenomenological situation.