Ontology Books - Page 12

Of God Who Comes to Mind (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

Emmanuel Levinas

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The thirteen essays collected in this volume investigate the possibility that the word “God” can be understood now, at the end of the twentieth century, in a meaningful way. Nine of the essays appear in English translation for the first time.

Among Levinas’s writings, this volume distinguishes itself, both for students of his thought and for a wider audience, by the range of issues it addresses. Levinas not only rehearses the ethical themes that have led him to be regarded as one of the most original thinkers working out of the phenomenological tradition, but he also takes up philosophical questions concerning politics, language, and religion. The volume situates his thought in a broader intellectual context than have his previous works. In these essays, alongside the detailed investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, Rosenzweig, and Buber that characterize all his writings, Levinas also addresses the thought of Kierkegaard, Marx, Bloch, and Derrida.

Some essays provide lucid expositions not available elsewhere to key areas of Levinas’s thought. “God and Philosophy” is perhaps the single most important text for understanding Levinas and is in many respects the best introduction to his works. “From Consciousness to Wakefulness” illuminates Levinas’s relation to Husserl and thus to phenomenology, which is always his starting point, even if he never abides by the limits it imposes. In “The Thinking of Being and the Question of the Other,” Levinas not only addresses Derrida’s Speech and Phenomenon but also develops an answer to the later Heidegger’s account of the history of Being by suggesting another way of reading that history.

Among the other topics examined in the essays are the Marxist concept of ideology, death, hermeneutics, the concept of evil, the philosophy of dialogue, the relation of language to the Other, and the acts of communication and mutual understanding.

On Presence: Variations and Reflections

Ralph Harper

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Editorial Review:

The Reverend Ralph Harper, a philosopher and theologian, has been credited with introducing existentialism to North America in 1948 with his work Existentialism: A Theory of Man. Forty years later, Harper delved deeper into the interior life of the human imagination in On Presence: Variations and Reflections. Winner of the 1992 Grawemeyer Award in Religion, On Presence is an insightful articulation of mankind's experience of presence. Drawing from philosophers like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Marcel, theologians like Augustine, Aquinas, and Tillich, mystics like Meister Eckhart and John of the Cross, and novelists like Dostoevsky and Proust, this compelling work considers the transcendent and religious dimensions of the ordinary mysteries in everyday life.

Heidegger's Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse and Authenticity in Being and Time (Modern European Philosophy)

Taylor Carman

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A good study 3 out of 5 stars.
17 of 21 people found this review helpful.

This book is a fine piece of scholarship, and it certainly stands out amongst other commentaries on Heidegger's thought, most of which are plagued by ideological tendentiousness and unclarity. Carman's book avoids both of these failings, and for that reason alone is well worth a read.

The guiding thesis of the book is that Heidegger's "analytic" in "Being and Time" should be understood as the provision of "hermeneutic conditions," i.e. the conditions under which human beings are able to interpretively make sense of the world. Focusing particularly on Heidegger's views on language and intentionality, Carman makes a fairly good case for this reading.

The main problem that I found in this book is that, by tying Heidegger's researches with contemporary Anglo-American thought so closely, Carman winds up distorting the real originality of Heidegger's thought. Heidegger's thought is so deeply unlike virtually everything else that has come along in the last 200 years that it is a mistake to assimilate his work to that of other philosophers. Commentators and readers alike need to keep Heidegger's own admonitions about his work in mind while reading him; this is a man, after all, once told his students that it was his "personal conviction" that his "hermeneutics" is not philosophy at all (Summer 1923), and who later said that "It is my belief that it is all over for philosophy" (Winter 1923-1924).

That said, Carman's work is an eminently readable, well-argued study that ought to be a paradigm for other scholars. While I have my doubts about attempts to make Heidegger into an analytic philosopher, I can only praise Carman's effort at making Heidegger speak to a contemporary audience about issues of universal philosophical concern.

Editorial Review:

Unlike those who view Heidegger as an idealist, Taylor Carman asserts that Heidegger is best understood as a realist and offers a new interpretation of his major work, Being and Time. Among the book's distinctive features are an interpretation explicitly oriented within a Kantian framework (often taken for granted in readings of Heidegger) and an analysis of Dasein in relation to recent theories of intentionality; notably those of Dennett and Searle.

Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste

Clement Greenberg

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Thanks to his unsurpassed eye and his fearless willingness to take a stand, Clement Greenberg (1909 1994) became one of the giants of 20th century art criticism a writer who set the terms of critical discourse from the moment he burst onto the scene with his seminal essays Avant Garde and Kitsch (1939) and Towards a Newer Laocoon (1940). In this work, which gathers previously uncollected essays and a series of seminars delivered at Bennington in 1971, Greenberg provides his most expansive statement of his views on taste and quality in art, arguing for an esthetic that flies in the face of current art world fashions. Greenberg insists despite the attempts from Marcel Duchamp onwards to escape the jurisdiction of taste by producing an art so disjunctive that it cannot be judged that taste is inexorable.
He argues that standards of quality in art, the artist's responsibility to seek out the hardest demands of a medium, and the critic's responsibility to discriminate, are essential conditions for great art. The obsession with innovation the epidemic of newness leads, in Greenbergs view, to the boringness of so much avant garde art. He discusses the interplay of expectation and surprise in aesthetic experience, and the exalted consciousness produced by great art. Homemade Esthetics allows us particularly in the transcribed seminar sessions, never before published to watch the critics mind at work, defending (and at times reconsidering) his theories. His views, often controversial, are the record of a lifetime of looking at and thinking about art as intensely as anyone ever has.

Holy Tradition of Working: Passages from the Writings of Eric Gill

Eric Gill

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On Being and What There Is: Classical Vaisesika and the History of Indian Ontology

Wilhelm Halbfass

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An Excellent Exploration of Classical Indian Realism 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

This book is a gem. Not only is the author, Wilhelm Halbfass, a profound scholar of both Western and Indian philosophy, he possess an acute philolosophical mind himself. The book begins with a fascinating exploration of the history of Western Metaphysics, and culminates with the recent controversy over the very meaningfulness of the question of being. While noting that many analytic philosophers think that the classical Western tradition of metaphysics extending back to Plato and Aristotle is based on linguistic confusions, Halbfass makes clear that not all analytic philosophers feel this way, and seems to think that Heidegger's repeated assertion that the moderns neglect Being for the sake of beings, has a point. The introductory chapter concludes by insisting that Western Philosophy has not, by any means, come to a conclusion about the nature, or even the possibility, of Metaphysics, and, therefore, that it would be unseemly for Western Philosophers to approach the Indian Philosophical Tradition from as stance of certainty or superiority.
The next chapter introduces the question of being in Indian Philosophy by tracing the origins of the Indian thought to certain questions and speculations raised in the Vedas. Halbfass makes a strong case for the thesis that the Vedas, in general, raise the question of being with respect to the origina of the universe. Though Halbfass does detect in certain of the early Vedic speculations the roots of the classical Advaitin monistic position, he insists, based on impressive textual evidence, that the Vedic Indians were not so much interested in the original, uniform, state of the world, as in the space the Gods opened up in that state, a space which allows for the existence of contingent beings.

Halbfass next goes on to argue that that the earliest Indian Schools of Philosophy can be distinguished by whether or not they are primarily concerned with origins, and with the evolution of the world of experience from an original and unmanifest nature, or are primarily concerned with "what there is", with the classification of all beings and all possible beings. It is this question of "what there is" which dominated the labors of the earliest Indian Realism, the Vaisesika School. Halbfass devotes several chapters to the explication of the subtle and ingenious categorial scheme of the Vaisesika. In the course of his discussion he makes the intellectual penetration and sophistication of the great Vaisesika and Nyaya philosophers crystal clear to the attentive reader. But he also forcefully states the objections of the anti-realistic Buddhists and Advaitins to the realism of the Vaisesika (noting, along the way, how the Jains tried to mediate between extreme realism and anti-realism), and in concluding the book he notes that the Advaita Vedanta of Sankara posits an ultimate One that is not unlike that which is spoken of in the Vedas as the origin or source of all things. The question of "What There is" thus gets covered over at the end of the dialectic, and there is a return to the question of being.
What I really appreciate about this book, aside from its stylistic clarity and the staggering scholarship it evinces, is the fairness with which Halbfass states the arguments of both the realists and the idealists. It is clear that he himself is torn with respect to which side has won this debate. Persons who like polemics, and want an author to come down on one side or the other of a philosophical argument, will find this book frustrating. But all those who know how difficult it is to find the right answers to the most profound questions, will leave this book enormously stimulated, and will have renewed awe and respect for the philosophical prowess of the ancient Indian masters. I cannot recomment this book highly enough to anyone interested in Indian philosophy or the philosophical debate which has raged, in both the east and the west, between the realists and the idealists.

Primary Ousia: An Essay on Aristotle's Metaphysics Z and H

Michael J. Loux

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Writing the Image: An Adventure with Art and Theory

Yve Lomax

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Editorial Review:

Brought together for the first time, these writings by visual artist and writer Yve Lomax are united by a common thread: they place writing itself--the written image--into the repertoire of visual art. The book both proposes and demonstrates this development. It also has a twofold purpose and function: it can be read and enjoyed as performance, often resembling poetry, thick with ideas, images and metaphors. It is also an original contribution to theoretical writing on the visual, particularly relating to the image and difference, celebrating and referring to the work of Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray and others in pursuit of its own strategy of introducing the written image into the theoretical text.

Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism

Monroe C. Beardsley

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Theories of aesthetics- scholarship on the understanding and appreciation of art 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I know the first edition of this book. In that edition Beardsley maintains he wanted to show the independent value of the aesthetic realm and therefore worked in that direction. In the present revised edition he also tries to bring essays which connects artistic work with other realms of human activity.
Anyone who has interest in the Theory of Art should have this volume in their library. And this because it does give a good sampling of the best scholarship on the subject.
Beardsley in the new preface to the work talks about a problem he more or less skimmed over in the first edition, ' defining art' . He cites one essay that of M. Weitz who uses Wittgenstein's family resemblance concept to say that it is mistaken to define Art as one set of concepts only when there are ' overlapping concepts' between different realms.
But of course making a definition of Art is only one problem of Aesthetics. ( Some by the way might answer in the famous Louie Armstrong style when asked to give a definition of 'jazz' Satchmo said ' If you got to ask, you don't know what it is' . This reminds me in a way of certain definitions of literature such as Kafka's an' axe to break up the frozen- sea within' .
But of course the question of intuitive and instinctive reaction as opposed to more reflective response is one of the questions considered in this very rich and valuable volume.

Seven Theories of Human Nature

Leslie Stevenson

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With over a quarter of a million copies sold, Seven Theories of Human Nature has established itself as the classic introduction to Western intellectual theory. Ranging from Plato's Republic to Edward O. Wilson's On Human Nature, and drawing on philosophy, psychology, sociology, politics, biology, and theology, this admirably lucid volume compresses into a small space the essence of such thinkers as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, B.F. Skinner, and Konrad Lorenz.
Stevenson juxtaposes the ideas of these and other thinkers in a way that helps us to understand how humanity has struggled to comprehend its nature. We see how Freud's theory of subconscious motivation is directly attacked by Sartre's claim that there are no subconscious acts at all. And how Skinner's theories, which assert the primacy of learned behavior, are undercut by Lorenz's studies of animals, which suggest that complex behavior can occur prior to learning. To bring these comparisons into sharper relief, Stevenson examines each theorist on four points--his speculation on the nature of the universe, his assessment of the nature of man, how he views the ills of the world, and what he would do to change it. This structure enables Stevenson to compare Plato's theory of the philosopher-king with Skinner's idea of utopia in Walden Two and pose the same questions to both: Who decides what is best for everyone else? And how can the misuse of power be prevented? Along the way, we are treated to fascinating analyses of some of the most pivotal and controversial books ever written, including Marx's Das Capital, Sartre's Being and Nothingness, Plato's Republic, and Konrad Lorenz's On Agression.
The revised edition of Seven Theories of Human Nature is more relevant than ever. For the new volume, Stevenson has added an extended discussion of sociobiology, and cites recent books for further reading on such topics as Creationism, nuclear holocaust, and feminism. Brought completely up to date, this classic introduction will fascinate anyone curious about who we are, what motivates us, and how we can understand and improve the world.