Continental Philosophy

The Birth of Sense
Generative Passivity in Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy
By Don Beith

Don Beith proposes a new concept of “generative passivity,” the idea that our organic, psychological, and social activities take time to develop into sense. Drawing on empirical studies and phenomenological reflections, he argues that in nature, novel meaning emerges prior to any type of constituting activity or deterministic plan.

Thinking between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty
By Judith Wambacq

Questioning the dominant view that Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty have little of substance in common, Judith Wambacq draws on unpublished primary sources and current scholarship in English and French to bring them into a compelling dialogue to reveal a shared concern with the transcendental conditions of thought.

Athens and Jerusalem
By Lev Shestov
· Edited by Ramona Fotiade
· Translation by Bernard Martin
· Introduction by Ramona Fotiade

For more than two thousand years, philosophers and theologians have wrestled with the irreconcilable opposition between Greek rationality (Athens) and biblical revelation (Jerusalem).

The Crisis of Meaning and the Life-World
Husserl, Heidegger, Arendt, Patočka
By Ľubica Učník

Učník examines the existential conflict that formed the focus of Edmund Husserl’s final work: how to reconcile scientific rationality with the meaning of human existence. To investigate this conundrum, she places Husserl in dialogue with three of his most important successors: Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Jan Patočka.

Topologies of the Flesh
A Multidimensional Exploration of the Lifeworld
By Steven M. Rosen

The concept of “flesh” in philosophical terms derives from the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This was the word he used to name the concrete realm of sentient bodies and life processes that has been eclipsed by the abstractions of science, technology, and modern culture. Topology, to conventional understanding, is the branch of mathematics that concerns itself with the properties of geometric figures that stay the same when the figures are stretched or deformed.Topologies

Between You and I
Dialogical Phenomenology
By Beata Stawarska

Classical phenomenology has suffered from an individualist bias and a neglect of the communicative structure of experience, especially the phenomenological importance of the addressee, the inseparability of I and You, and the nature of the alternation between them.

The Madness of Vision
On Baroque Aesthetics
By Christine Buci-Glucksmann
· Translation by Dorothy Z. Baker

In The Madness of Vision, Buci-Glucksmann asserts the important of embodied vision in nine studies of paintings, sculptures, and images. She integrates the work of Merleau-Ponty with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Renaissance studies in optics, and twentieth-century mathematics to make the case for the pervasive influence of the baroque.

From Mastery to Mystery
A Phenomenological Foundation for an Environmental Ethic
By Bryan E. Bannon

From Mastery to Mystery is an original and provocative contribution to the burgeoningfield of ecophenomenology. Informed by current debates in environmental philosophy, Bannon critiques the conception of nature as u200a“substance” that he finds tacitly assumed by the major environmental theorists.

Nature’s Suit
Husserl’s Phenomenological Philosophy of the Physical Sciences
By Lee Hardy

Edmund Husserl, founder of the phenomenological movement, is usually read as an idealist in his metaphysics and an instrumentalist in his philosophy of science. In Nature’s Suit, Lee Hardy argues that both views represent a serious misreading of Husserl’s texts.Drawing

The Memory of Place
A Phenomenology of the Uncanny
By Dylan Trigg

From the frozen landscapes of the Antarctic to the haunted houses of childhood, the memory of places we experience is fundamental to a sense of self. Drawing on influences as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and J. G. Ballard, The Memory of Place charts the memorial landscape that is written into the body and its experience of the world.

The Madness of Vision
On Baroque Aesthetics
By Christine Buci-Glucksmann
· Translation by Dorothy Z. Baker

In The Madness of Vision, Buci-Glucksmann asserts the important of embodied vision in nine studies of paintings, sculptures, and images. She integrates the work of Merleau-Ponty with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Renaissance studies in optics, and twentieth-century mathematics to make the case for the pervasive influence of the baroque.

The Ontology of Becoming and the Ethics of Particularity
By M. C. Dillon
· Edited by Lawrence Hass

M. C. Dillon (1938–2005) was widely regarded as a world-leading Merleau-Ponty scholar. His book Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (1988) is recognized as a classic text that revolutionized the philosophical conversation about the great French phenomenologist. Dillon followed that book with two others: Semiological Reductionism, a critique of early-1990s linguistic reductionism, and Beyond Romance, a richly developed theory of love.

The Memory of Place
A Phenomenology of the Uncanny
By Dylan Trigg

From the frozen landscapes of the Antarctic to the haunted houses of childhood, the memory of places we experience is fundamental to a sense of self. Drawing on influences as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and J. G. Ballard, The Memory of Place charts the memorial landscape that is written into the body and its experience of the world.

The Tenets of Cognitive Existentialism
By Dimitri Ginev

In The Tenets of Cognitive Existentialism, Dimitri Ginev draws on developments in hermeneutic phenomenology and other programs in hermeneutic philosophy to inform an interpretative approach to scientific practices. At stake is the question of whether it is possible to integrate forms of reflection upon the ontological difference in the cognitive structure of scientific research. A positive answer would have implied a proof that (pace Heidegger) “science is able to think.”

The Intentional Spectrum and Intersubjectivity
Phenomenology and the Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelians
By Michael D. Barber

World-renowned analytic philosophers John McDowell and Robert Brandom, dubbed “Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelians,” recently engaged in an intriguing debate about perception. In The Intentional Spectrum and Intersubjectivity Michael D. Barber is the first to bring phenomenology to bear not just on the perspectives of McDowell or Brandom alone, but on their intersection.