Phenomenology Books

Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge Classics)

Merleau-Ponty

Amazon Price: $16.29 List Price: $23.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Routledge Amazon Marketplace: 52 new & used starting at $13.42

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Movements -> Existentialism
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Movements -> Phenomenology
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Routledge Murders a Great Work 1 out of 5 stars.
32 of 32 people found this review helpful.

Merleau-Ponty's work is nothing less than a classic, one of the great works of philosophy in the 20th century. It should go without saying, then, that this work should be made available in an up-to-date and scholarly translation.
Unfortunately, this is what Routledge has refused to do. Not only does this "new" edition maintain all of the known mistakes and inconsistencies of the original translation (most of which were not corrected when the translation was revised twenty years ago), but it also introduces literally dozens of type-setting errors. In addition to all of the obvious mistakes in punctuation and spelling (e.g., "intelfection" on p. xx; "in a world" instead of "in a word" on p. 129; "deralizes" for "derealizes" on p. 140; "writes" for "writers," p. 163; "Rinswanger" for "Binswanger," note 6, p. 185, and the list goes on and on), you will also encounter such lovely gems as "Bergson's inferiority" (instead of "interiority", p. 67) and "adduction" transformed into "abduction" -- when distinguishing between the two is precisely the point of Merleau-Ponty's discussion (p. 243). In short, an already flawed translation has now been bungled into a bloody mess. If you are reading this book for the first time, you would be well-advised to check the used bookstores for a copy of the earlier edition. If you are trying to use this text with students, lots of luck to you!
It is also worth mentioning that Routledge has again failed to include a translation of Merleau-Ponty's original table of contents in this edition, so that many English readers are still unaware that he provided a detailed outline of the entire text to guide the reader. A translation by Daniel Guerriere is available in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 10, no. 1 (1979) - although, of course, the page numbers no longer correspond to this "new" edition.

Editorial Review:

Impressive in both scope and imagination, it uses the example of perception to return the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato.

Phenomenology of Spirit (Galaxy Books)

G. W. F. Hegel

Amazon Price: $13.57 List Price: $19.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Oxford University Press, USA Amazon Marketplace: 75 new & used starting at $8.98

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Classics -> General AAS
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> General -> Classics
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 47 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

The Phenomenology of Modernism 2 out of 5 stars.
5 of 11 people found this review helpful.

Today, an entire market has been created for the manufacture of literature designed to make philosophy intelligible to your average moron, all in the spirit of the assumption that "anyone can do philosophy" provided of course that everything is put into fart-jokes and countless other idiotic colloquialisms. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have the genuinely incomprehensible and pretentious works which truly deserve the bashings that the simple-minded laymen of the world give to them. In many ways, these types of books are in fact more damaging than the "moron-friendly" ones, precisely because they create an image of philosophy that is nothing but empty verbosity. That is, they are parodies of genuine thinking.

Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit" can be said to be a canonical example (even perhaps the prototype) of this latter category. On the whole, this book is less of a systematic philosophical treatise (despite what Hegel claims in the preface) and more of an exercise in using literary hand-waving to mystify a naive audience into accepting a series of absurd, premeditated conclusions. This book is filled to the brim with dizzying tautologies, circular thinking, and completely arbitrary conclusions and jumps of logic. Either Hegel seems to have honestly confused the accidental (the infamous "philosophical prose") with the essential (a search for truth) and was therefore genuinely stupid/insane, or he was a very calculating and precise intellectual charlatan. While the Phenomenology itself is probably a mixture of both, the latter case seems to apply more fully to Hegel as a person.

In spite of all this, what makes this book at least worth delving into, and also what makes Hegel appear to be something slightly more than a complete fool/psychopath, is his ability to not only point out the modernist point of view, but also to exemplify it in himself.

Firstly, the very crux of his entire "dialectic," is his fundamental belief in progress. Riding the same intellectual current as Darwin and others, Hegel posits that mankind is gradually raising itself up from a "primitive" and "ignorant" state into a more "complex" and "knowledgeable" one. As such, Hegel considers his Phenomenology of Spirit to be the final stage of this "development," after which humanity will arrive at an "end of history" and live in a state of perpetual utopia. Obviously, this was quite influential to Marx's own eschatological vision, as well as people like Francis Fukuyama. What's more, this is the essence of the entire contemporary "conservative" viewpoint: one in which humanity, through centuries of "progress," has arrived at a more or less perfected state of existence.

Additionally, Hegel remarkably points out the fact that it is impossible for the modern worldview to truly criticize itself "from within." Nearly two centuries later, Ted Kaczynski had noticed the exact same thing. In this sense, Hegel can be seen as where both the "liberal" and "conservative" points of view meld into one: modernism. Hegel also explicitly states that the Protestant Reformation in effect killed the presence of the sacred and transcendent in Western civilization.

In conclusion, my recommendation to readers would be to study the Phenomenology of Spirit in a very detached way, as intellectual history only--That is, if they can cut through the jungles of verbiage and horrible writing. In terms of providing any sort of absolute truth about how reality really functions, this book is absolutely worthless. What you will find instead is a lengthy apologetic for a collectivist, secular, "feel-good" society in which God has become nothing but a dead function of the capricious mass-mind. However, in terms of providing a more or less clear window into the zeitgeist of the modern age, this book is truly like no other.

Editorial Review:

This brilliant study of the stages in the mind's necessary progress from immediate sense-consciousness to the position of a scientific philosophy includes an introductory essay and a paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of the text to help the reader understand this most difficult and most influential of Hegel's works.

Introduction to Phenomenology

Robert Sokolowski

Amazon Price: $26.99 List Price: $29.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Cambridge University Press Amazon Marketplace: 40 new & used starting at $18.95

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Historical Study -> History of Ideas
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Consciousness & Thought
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> History & Surveys

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

What is phenomenology? 5 out of 5 stars.
11 of 12 people found this review helpful.

As Cal Schrag notes in a fantastic litte essay called "The Recovery of the Phenomenological Subject": "In 1945 Maurice Merleau-Ponty began the preface to his classic work Phenomenologie de la perception, with the observation that the reader might find it odd that the question What is phenomenology? still needs to be answered one-half a century after the first writings of Edmund Husserl. The fact however remains, wrote Mereleau-Ponty, that this question still awaits an answer. Some fifty years after the publication of Merleau-Ponty's seminal work on perception we are still asking the question What is phenomenology?"

I do not hesitate (well, maybe a little) to reply that reading this excellent book by Sokolowski will certainly put the beginner on the path to answering this difficult question. Perhaps it answers best What is Husserlian phenomenology? but what better place to begin the journey than at the beginning. This is certainly not a scholarly text. You will not find footnotes at the bottom of every page. You won't even get citations to Husserl's texts. And you certainly won't find anything like a ten-page analysis of the words "phenomenon" and "logos" as encountered at the outset of Heidegger's Being and Time. But it's not supposed to be a critical scholarly text, it is just what it says: an introduction to phenomenology.

I think this text will be especially beneficial to readers who are familiar with philosophy but who stand outside the continental tradition - e.g. analytic philosophers. Also, those who already understand Husserl (or think they do) will find this book a fantastic read as well. Don't think that just because it is an introduction that it is beneath you. I think you will be suprised (and perhaps encouraged) by the ability of Sokolowski to state so clearly an answer to the question What is phenomenology?

Editorial Review:

This book presents the major philosophical doctrines of phenomenology in a clear, lively style with an abundance of examples. The book examines such phenomena as perception, pictures, imagination, memory, language, and reference, and shows how human thinking arises from experience. It also studies personal identity as established through time and discusses the nature of philosophy. In addition to providing a new interpretation of the correspondence theory of truth, the author also explains how phenomenology differs from both modern and postmodern forms of thinking.

Phenomenology of the Human Person

Robert Sokolowski

Amazon Price: $24.29 List Price: $26.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Cambridge University Press Amazon Marketplace: 22 new & used starting at $23.71

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Consciousness & Thought
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Metaphysics
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Movements -> Phenomenology

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

An Excellent Book on a Crucially Important Subject 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

In Phenomenology of the Human Person, Professor Sokolowski seeks, "philosophically, to clarify what human [beings or] persons are." It seems to me that Sokolowski (and I choose the metaphor carefully) weaves his clarification chiefly out of five major threads. They are: "human language," "the doctrine of mental representations," "speakers," "listeners," and "the human conversation," I propose to comment briefly on each of the five. I begin with the first two.

Sokolowski discusses human language in terms of names and syntax. As he writes on page 167: names "present a thing as to be thoughtfully unfolded." The thing may be either an individual (proper noun, "John Smith") or a universal (common noun, "human being"), and the unfolding takes place by way of syntax, because syntax is the means we have contrived in order to be able to "say something about something." That is, syntax is the means by which we engage in predication. The doctrine of mental representations comes in two forms. In its "innocent" form, our thinking concerns, not things in the world, but the "copies" or "ideas" of them that, supposedly, we have in our minds. In its radicalized form, which is the form Hume gives it, our thinking concerns, not "copy-ideas," but "fictional ideas" that we first construct in our imagination, and then impose on "the world" conceived as "modern science" conceives it, which is, as composed of nothing but matter or body "moving" in conformity with "natural laws." Hume's contention, then, is that, without these "fictions" (e.g., the fiction of "substantial identity"), we would literally have no "things" about which to think. Hence, Hume would have us regard ourselves as, essentially, constructors and deconstructors of fictions.

Turning now to speakers and listeners, on page 63, Sokolowski cites the psychologist Paul Bloom as arguing against a "widely held theory of how children learn names," according to which, "the child gets used to hearing a particular sound when a particular object appears, and suddenly or gradually the sound becomes the name of the object." But, "according to Bloom," as reported by Sokolowski, "[names] ... are not learned in this way; rather, the child must experience the sound as being used by someone else to name the object." Then, putting Bloom's claim in his own words, Sokolowski remarks: "The child does not just experience the word and the thing; he experiences another person using the word to signify the thing. Without this mediation of another person, sounds would not be taken as words." Picking up the thread of speakers and listeners on page169, Sokolowski observes: "One mind by itself is, effectively, no mind. One mind cannot be actualized as a mind without the stimulus of speech with others." Now, as I understand it, these sentences take what was said on page 63 about the child's acquisition of names, and generalize it to cover how we acquire a mind and learn how to think. That is, just as the child acquires a language through the mediation of others acting as speakers, so we (strange as it sounds) acquire a mind and learn how to think in the same way. That is, mind and thinking are not automatically ours; we have to acquire the one, and learn how to do the other. And the place in which we make the acquisition and do the learning is "the human conversation."

Sokolowski borrows the term "the human conversation" from the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott. Both would, I think, understand the human conversation in some such terms as these. It includes everyone who has ever thought and spoken, on any subject whatever, and who has had his or her thought and speech entered into the record, whether oral or written, where it waits for us to take it up, reflect on it, respond to it, and, by so doing, enter into the conversation ourselves. At the same time, however, Sokolowski sees the end or objective of the human conversation differently from the way Oakeshott sees it. For Oakeshott, the human conversation is an "inconsequent adventure." For Sokolowski it is, in all its departments, aimed at truth. These departments comprise the various ways in which we speak about things, e.g., morally, politically, scientifically, and philosophically. Sokolowski suggests that in each of these departments, we are motivated by a desire for truth; he calls this desire "veracity"; he defines it as "the eros involved with reason"; and, more broadly, he says of it: "[This] desire is" very deep in us, more basic than any particular desire or emotion, more elemental than any particular attempt to find things out, and more fundamental than any act of telling the truth to others. We are made human by it, and it is there in us to be developed well or badly." (p. 21).

The threads of speakers, listeners, and the human conversation converge on page 217, and their convergence results in a philosophical clarification of what human beings or persons are. Sokolowski writes: "The persons recognized as speakers and listeners may be deemed more or less successful in their speaking and listening, but they are engaged in the activity in a way that animals and plants are not ... It is philosophically notable that not all entities in the world can be taken as interlocutors. Some but not all are admissible to this status. Only those who are admissible are characterized as persons."

I end with this piece of dogmatism. Today, we are invited to think of ourselves either "scientifically" as, like everything else in "nature," the behavior of our matter (e.g., neurons); or "humansitically," as the constructors and deconstructors of fictions. Or, finally, we are invited to think of ourselves as (the term is Sokolowski's) "agents of truth." For myself, I prefer the third alternative, mainly because I do not see how I can claim that I deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, just because of what I am--if all I am is neurons or a constructor and deconstructor of fictions.

Editorial Review:

In this book, Robert Sokolowski argues that being a person means to be involved with truth. He shows that human reason is established by syntactic composition in language, pictures, and actions and that we understand things when they are presented to us through syntax. Sokolowski highlights the role of the spoken word in human reason and examines the bodily and neurological basis for human experience. Drawing on Husserl and Aristotle, as well as Aquinas and Henry James, Sokolowski here employs phenomenology in a highly original way in order to clarify what we are as human agents.

Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind

Evan Thompson

Amazon Price: $39.96 List Price: $49.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Belknap Press Amazon Marketplace: 30 new & used starting at $38.27

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Consciousness & Thought
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Movements -> Phenomenology
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> General

Editorial Review:

How is life related to the mind? The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan Thompson explores in Mind in Life.

Thompson draws upon sources as diverse as molecular biology, evolutionary theory, artificial life, complex systems theory, neuroscience, psychology, Continental Phenomenology, and analytic philosophy to argue that mind and life are more continuous than has previously been accepted, and that current explanations do not adequately address the myriad facets of the biology and phenomenology of mind. Where there is life, Thompson argues, there is mind: life and mind share common principles of self-organization, and the self-organizing features of mind are an enriched version of the self-organizing features of life. Rather than trying to close the explanatory gap, Thompson marshals philosophical and scientific analyses to bring unprecedented insight to the nature of life and consciousness. This synthesis of phenomenology and biology helps make Mind in Life a vital and long-awaited addition to his landmark volume The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (coauthored with Eleanor Rosch and Francisco Varela).

Endlessly interesting and accessible, Mind in Life is a groundbreaking addition to the fields of the theory of the mind, life science, and phenomenology.

Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

Bernard Stiegler

Amazon Price: $25.15 List Price: $27.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Stanford University Press Amazon Marketplace: 9 new & used starting at $25.12

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Movements -> Existentialism
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Movements -> Phenomenology
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> General

Editorial Review:

Disorientation is the first publication in English of the second volume of Technics and Time, in which French philosopher Bernard Stiegler engages in a close dialogue with Husserl, Derrida, and other philosophers who have devoted their energies to technics, such as Heidegger and Simondon.The author's broad intent is to respond to Western philosophy's historical exclusion of technics and techniques from its metaphysical questionings, and in so doing to rescue critical and philosophical thinking. For many years, Stiegler has explored the origins and philosophical, ethical, and political stakes of a global process he calls "the industrial temporalization of consciousness." Here, demonstrating that technology—including alphabetical writing—is memory, he argues that through new technologies of retention and inscription we have come to live in a world where time devours space, a disoriented world in which we have lost our bearings. Immersed in the multimedia of an over-connected world, with time and space as we know them abolished, we no longer find "cardinal points" to guide us and may even be led where we do not wish to go. We must therefore prepare to confront new spheres of ideological control and discover new possibilities in the digital environment.

The Visible and the Invisible (SPEP)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Amazon Price: $24.30 List Price: $27.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Northwestern University Press Amazon Marketplace: 27 new & used starting at $17.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Metaphysics
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Modern
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Movements -> Existentialism

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Merleau-Ponty's Last Work 5 out of 5 stars.
31 of 41 people found this review helpful.

The Visible and the Invisible is the last work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, left unfinished by his untimely death. (Does anyone really have a timely death?)

In this volume from Northwestern University Press, the unfinished text is appended by the working notes for the volume in an excellent translation by Alphonso Lingis with deft editing and a sterling introduction by Claude Lefort.

Merleau-Ponty, arguably the greatest philosopher of the Twentieth Century (he does not carry the baggage Heidegger does), was moving in this volume to a new determination of the relationship between phenomenology and ontology. Reading the volume and the working notes leads the reader to wonder how successful it would have been had Merleau-Ponty lived to publish it. As it is, it adds up to another of the intangibles taht make Western intellectual history such an enticing puzzle. Recommended for anyone interested in Twentieth Century philosophy.

Flesh Ontology 5 out of 5 stars.
14 of 21 people found this review helpful.

The working notes of this book are utterly staggering in their implication to ontology. What is being? Merleau answers in the manner of Lao-Tse, and alludes to something like a divine-feminine at the heart of wild perception. It was said by Sartre in his autobiography "Situations" that after Merleau's mother died who was like a "goddess" to him Merleau returned began the project anew. What is intimated in the working notes is invaluable to the true student of philosophy and life. And in the end, Merleau returns to the very object of his study. You can really feel this descent at the book nears its end. It is, however, an ascent of the entirety of the history of philosophy to a new level of comprehension. That I assure you.

Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (October Books)

Slavoj Žižek

Amazon Price: $21.55 List Price: $23.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: The MIT Press Amazon Marketplace: 35 new & used starting at $15.57

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Entertainment -> Movies -> History & Criticism
Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Psychology & Counseling -> Psychoanalysis
Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Psychology & Counseling -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

This book is great; those below who don't like it are clowns 5 out of 5 stars.
27 of 30 people found this review helpful.

Jacques Lacan's theories are completely, utterly undecipherable. The only way to begin to understand the fundamentals of psychoanalytic theory is to read somebody else writing on Lacan. And thank God Zizek does that for us. To understand Lacan, I've always had to turn to film theory critism--Laura Mulvey--but none of that ever goes beyond theories of the gaze, neglecting to dispell the mystery around some of the most basic concepts of Lacan. Zizek rolls through these various terms and ideas, always providing an exemplification of the idea in popular culture, usually in Hitchcock or within Sci-Fi genres, and then a clear-to-understand definition. So if you're confused as to what desire, drive, lack, objet a, other, Other, the Real, or the Thing are in terms of Lacanian jargon, this might be your book.

Editorial Review:

Slavoj Zizek, a leading intellectual in the new social movements in Eastern Europe, provides a virtuoso reading of the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan through the works of contemporary popular culture, from horror fiction and detective thrillers to popular romances and Hitchcock films.

Slavoj Zizek is a Researcher in the Institute of Sociology at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He ran as a proreform candidate for the presidency of the republic of Slovenia, then part of Yugoslavia, in 1990.

Pragmatism (The Works of William James)

William James

Amazon Price: $119.50 List Price: $119.50 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Harvard University Press Amazon Marketplace: 16 new & used starting at $7.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Movements -> Humanism
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Movements -> Phenomenology
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Movements -> Pragmatism

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Essential to Understanding Contemporary Philosophies 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 11 people found this review helpful.

I rate this work 5 stars because of its immense influence on today's common ways of thinking and its importance in understanding the rise of science and capitalism in America.

James challenges philosophers of all ilks to give us a net value to their systems; that is, how do they affect human life or make the world we know better or worse for us? James insists that no philosophy finally matters unless it impacts life in concrete terms. To lock down his philosophy he fashions a new model of truth, stating that whatever is beneficial is true.

There are huge problems here, e.g., the rise of the subjective. James doesn't specify to whom truth should be beneficial (humanity in general? Subjective selves?), so his theory leads to strange quandaries. It would be "true" for a sound-minded criminal on trial to plead insanity, and it would also be "true" for the prosecutor to charge guilt and sanity. Obviously, confusing "useful" and "true" is a category obfuscation. As well, morality would suffer on this view. If lying is useful then regarding lies as truths is fully permissible by James's line of thought.

Nevertheless, the book is important to read because so much of today's world is run in terms of the useful rather than the ideal or intrinsically good. That is why art is marginalized, morality compromised, and capital generating systems glorified. We need James's Pragmatism to understand ourselves today.

Editorial Review:

"It is absolutely the only philosophy with no humbug in it," an exhilarated William James wrote to a friend early in 1907. And later that year, after finishing the proofs of his "little book," he wrote to his brother Henry: "I shouldn't be surprised if ten years hence it should be rated as 'epoch-making,' for of the definitive triumph of that general way of thinking I can entertain no doubt whatever--I believe it to be something quite like the protestant reformation." Both the acclaim and outcry that greeted Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking helped to affirm James's conviction. For it was in Pragmatism that he confronted older philosophic methods with the "pragmatic" method, demanding that ideas be tested by their relation to life and their effects in experience. James's reasoning and conclusions in Pragmatism have exerted a profound influence on philosophy in this century, and the book remains a landmark.

Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Texts)

E. Levinas

Amazon Price: $94.40 List Price: $139.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Springer Amazon Marketplace: 29 new & used starting at $94.40

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Foreign Language Nonfiction -> French
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Metaphysics
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Movements -> Existentialism

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

One of the Great Books 5 out of 5 stars.
17 of 21 people found this review helpful.

To previous reviewers:

~ Levinas is trying to uncover the source of the idea of infinity ~

No, infinity by definition is boundless and cannot be encompassed or reduced. Levinas is not asking the Cartesian question nor concerned with securing the `existence' of the external world. The concept of infinity is unique in that its content always exceeds or overflows its concept. Ethical relation operates in just this manner: the relation to the other is not negative (ala Idealism) but rather a relation to an excess. This excess is no Hinterwelt, but rather goodness.

~ Then he proceeds to "show" that the face to face relation with the Other is the source for our capacity to have theoretical and practical knowledge. ~

Indeed. Though the term `source' is very problematic. Levinas shows theoretical and practical `knowledge' - science and law/politics - are fundamentally social. In this way, the ethical relation opens and conditions this `knowledge,' while always exceeding it. What if science claimed to discover that women were `inferior' to men? We would no doubt question the `truth' of this discovery. Why? Because such a claim seems to exceed the bounds of what scientific activity can produce. This example shows how ethics exceeds theoretical knowledge. The same goes for the `practical.' Why do we think that segregation is wrong or unjust? Why is excluding the `other' from basic political participation, and the responsibility and rights it entails, a problem? Political theory and practice, which in its way is a kind of `scientific ethics,' can also lead to problematic situations. How are we able to judge or discern or resist claims that seek to justify unethical attitudes and practices? The face-to-face is Levinas's attempt to grapple with this perennial problem.

~ Oh yeah, the Other is a man, because the feminine other is not Other enough for Levinas, and romantic love is bad. ~

The problem of the feminine in Levinas is a real issue. Yet only a reductive and amateurish reading would pose the problem in these blunt terms. "The Other is man" and not women, is false according to any close reading of Levinas's texts. It is true that Levinas implicitly treats gender with a patriarchal slant, yet it is also true that he complicates and problematizes the way gendered is valued. There is a running debate on this within feminist camps. The more thoughtful and rigorous feminists realize the complexity and nuanced structural problems within Levinas's thinking of the feminine. Even if we admit that there is an undeniable patriarchal aspect in Levinas's work, we must also admit that he subverts that same patriarchy from within his own work. Here we may possibly oppose Levinas to Levinas. (Check out Tine Chanter's essay in `Addressing Levinas'). Oh ya, `romantic love is bad'?? Go read `Phenomenology of Eros' more carefully.

~Essentially, what he does is fuse Husserl and Heidegger's theories, to an extent, and replaces the transcendental ego of Husserl with the face to face relation with the Other.~

This sounds like a bad regurgitation of certain of Levinas's critics. The more precise way to put it is this: Levinas plays Heidegger's anti-scientism against Husserl, and Husserl's anti-historicism and relativism against Heidegger. There is a certain sense where the other displaces Husserl's T-Ego, in terms of its structural function. Yet Levinas is not after absolute knowledge, and `replacing' the ego with alterity precisely disturbs and relativizes - in fact renders impossible - constitution.

~ Levinas is just intentionally writing obscurely, perhaps because he realizes how silly his whole enterprise is and how much modernism is contained within it (still trying to find the condition for experience itself, did someone say German Idealism?).~

This comment shows the extent of our reviewer's ignorance. 1st: Levinas's entire project is one the most rigorous and non-reductive challenges to the Idealist tradition from Fichte to Husserl. Levinas's project is precisely a critique of the modernist project to secure absolute foundations. He ever retained an allergy to G-Idealism and saw within its totalizing logic the seeds of Auschwitz. 2nd: The claim that Levinas intentionally wrote obscurely betrays intellectual laziness and a certain chauvinism. A simple survey of Levinas's contemporaries, French philosophy of the mid-20th century, shows that Levinas is writing within a specific intellectual culture and style. Continental philosophy in general tends to be more difficult for us Anglophones in that we are socialized into an instrumental and minimalist stylistic culture. One need only read Hegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, or Derrida to the see the extent in which Levinas is operating within a certain tradition and style of philosophy.

Finally, the following suggestion by the above reviewer can help us understand Levinas's basic point:

~ you would be better served by spending 3 hours contemplating and reasoning to your own working definition of the following words: --- "totality" --- "infinity" --- "other"
Then spend 3 hours contemplating and reasoning to your own understanding of how the three are interrelated.~

As you sit `contemplating' your definitions, imagine you are right on the cusp of a new idea that will refute Levinas and bring you philosophic immortality. All of a sudden, a frantic bang on your door jars you. You open the door and there stands your neighbor with blood running down his face. He explains that while he was sitting watching water flow over rocks (while contemplating Aristotle); a tree branch fell on his head. You immediately begin to help your neighbor: bandages, ice, call the ambulance, and so forth. By the time the ordeal is over, you have forgotten the specifics of you idea and must start all over.

The supplicating demand of the other interrupts all self activity, rendering our clarity and certainty and sedentary contemplation secondary and relative. No matter how grand and all encompassing our ideas become, there always remains an exterior: an other who bangs on the door needing help; whom we feel obliged to help even if the don't agree with our ideas, even if they are stupid, confused, and so forth. This knock on the door is not another `meaning,' idea, world, or theory, not another term to be defined or explained. The knock on the door is the face of the other that needs and demands whether or not our theory or definition justifies it.

Totality and Infinity is, no doubt, one of the Great Books.

Editorial Review:

First published in English by Duquesne in 1969, this has become one of the classics of modern philosophy.