Labyrinths of Exemplarity presents the first comprehensive, in-depth study of the problem of exemplarity--or how we move between the general and the particular in order to try to understand our world. The author's focus ranges from the most basic and fundamental issues of what examples are and where they come from to the complex key issues of how examples function in the discourses they inhabit and what this functioning tells us about the nature of examples or exemplarity itself. The problem is treated especially in connection to Rousseau and Aristotle, with reference to deconstruction...

Addressing central questions in the debate about Foucault's usefulness for politics, including his rejection of universal norms, his conception of power and power-knowledge, his seemingly contradictory position on subjectivity and his resistance to using identity as a political category, McLaren argues that Foucault employs a conception of embodied subjectivity that is well-suited for feminism. She applies Foucault's notion of practices of the self to contemporary feminist practices, such as consciousness-raising and autobiography, and concludes that the connection between self-transformation...

Although philosophy today has abandoned its former fascination with transcendent invisibles, it has left largely unexamined historical articulations of the divide between 'the visible' and 'the invisible.' Vision's Invisibles argues that such a self-examination is necessary for the sensitization of philosophical sight, as well as for engagements with visuality in other domains. To this end, it investigates a range of challenging understandings of visuality in its relation to invisibles, as articulated in the texts of key historical thinkers--Heraclitus, Plato, and Descartes--and of...

In Platonic Legacies John Sallis addresses certain archaic or exorbitant moments in Platonism. His concern is to expose such moments as those expressed in the Platonic phrase "beyond being" and in the enigmatic word chora. Thus he ventures to renew chorology and to bring it to bear, most directly, on Platonic political discourse and Plotinian hyperontology. More broadly, he shows what profound significance these most archaic moments of Platonism, which remained largely unheeded in the history of philosophy, have for contemporary discussions of spacings, of utopian politics, of the nature of...

Considered by some to be his most important text, this series of lectures given by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) at his home in Berlin in 1804 is widely regarded as the most perspicuous presentation of his fundamental philosophy. Now available in English, this translation provides in striking and original language Fichte's exploration of the transcendental foundations of experience and knowing in ways that go beyond Kant and Reinhold and charts a promising, novel pathway for German Idealism. Through a close examination of this work one can see that Fichte's thought is much more than a...

This original contribution to the ethical and political significance of philosophy addresses a number of major themes--identity, violence, the erotic, freedom, responsibility, religious belief, globalization--and critically engages with the work of Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, and Levinas. It promotes a unique blend of deconstructive critique and a certain English skepticism, leading to the affirmation of a negative capability--a patience and vigilance in the face of both human folly and philosophy's own homegrown pathologies. The author argues for the extension of our sense...

Rereading Marx through Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, The Promise of Memory attempts to establish a philosophy of liberation. Matthias Fritsch explores how memories of injustice relate to the promises of justice that democratic societies have inherited from the Enlightenment. Focusing on the Marxist promise for a classless society, since it contains a political promise whose institutionalization led to totalitarian outcomes, Fritsch argues that both memories and promises, if taken by themselves, are one-sided and potentially justify violence if they do not reflect on the implicit...

Daniela Vallega-Neu questions the ontological meaning of body and thinking by carefully taking into account how we come to experience thought bodily. She engages six prominent figures of the Western philosophical tradition--Plato, Nietzsche, Scheler, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Foucault--and considers how they understand thinking to occur in relation to the body as well as how their thinking is itself bodily. Through a deconstructive and performative reading, she explores how their thinking reveals a bodily dimension that is prior to what classical metaphysics comes to conceive as mind-body...

In Adorno, Roger Foster argues that there is a coherent critical project at the core of Adorno's philosophy of language and epistemology, the key to which is the recovery of a broader understanding of experience. Foster claims, in Adorno's writings, it is the concept of spiritual experience that denotes this richer vision of experience and signifies an awareness of the experiential conditions of concepts. By elucidating Adorno's view of philosophy as a critical practice that discloses the suffering of the world, Foster shows that Adorno's philosophy does not end up in a form of resignation or...

Maimonides on Judaism and the Jewish People explores Maimonides' philosophical psychology, his ethics, his views on prophecy, providence, and immortality, his understanding of the place of gentiles in the Messianic area, his attitude toward proselytes, his answer to the question, "Who is a Jew?," his conception of the nature of Torah, and his arguments concerning the nature of the Chosen People. With respect to each of these issues, Kellner shows that Maimonides adopted positions that reflected his emphasis on nurture over nature and his insistence that it is intellectual perfection and not...