Antonio Calcagno

For most philosophers, the work of Edith Stein continues to be eclipsed and relegated to obscurity. This work presents an excellent cross-section of Stein's writings and demonstrates the timeliness and relevance of her ideas for contemporary philosophical scholarship. Antonio Calcagno covers most of Edith Stein's philosophical life, from her early work with Husserl to her later encounters with medieval Christian thought, as well as a critical and analytical reading of major Steinian texts. Stein was an original thinker who challenged not only the direction in which Husserlian phenomenology was progressing but also sought to bring to philosophical light the relevance of certain key questions, including the meaning of what it is to be human, the relevance of metaphysics to science, and fundamental questions about the nature of God. Working to correct the perception that Stein is either an "unfaithful and distorting" phenomenologist or a pious Catholic mystic, Calcagno presents important work that has been neglected by both secular and religious scholars. The essays are not merely expository, but discuss the philosophical questions raised by Stein's work from a contemporary perspective, using Stein's original German texts. In its attention to the breadth and depth of Stein's philosophy from its initial development to its more mature form, The Philosophy of Edith Stein offers a new understanding of an individual who left behind an incredible philosophical and literary legacy worthy of scholarly attention. The book will be of interest not only to Stein scholars, but to feminists, phenomenologists, and Heideggerians.

Stein describes the peculiar mental life of the community as a Gemeinschaftserlebnis or lived experience of the community. Such an experience is marked by a certain form of consciousness insofar as one knows that one is dwelling with and for the other (miteinander und füreinander) at varying degrees of intensity.Furthermore, one experiences solidarity as one dwells within the experience of the other and vice versa. Two central problems arise with this phenomenologicaldescription. First, one wonders whether the doctrine of empathy itself can account for these higher social mental states without necessarily arguing for a specific form of consciousness that is particular to community. Second, the question arises as to why community is described as being accompanied by a peculiar mental state, whereas other social structures like the mass, society, and the state are not described in this way. This article has as its focus these two questions.

Burned at the stake for heresy, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was one of the Renaissance's more controversial thinkers. Current scholarship tends to read Bruno as either a Neo-Platonist who ultimately collapses reality to an overarching unity, or as an eclectic thinker whose disparate and disjointed musings are essentially incoherent. By closely and critically examining Bruno's writings this book demonstrates that Bruno was very much in the spirit of Modernity in that he tried to explain philosophically the possibility of the coexistence of unity and multiplicity (difference) through the «then-scientific» logic of the coincidence of opposites. His metaphysics, cosmology and ethical thinking are to be understood through this underlying logic of coincidence, thereby rendering Bruno neither an absolute Neo-Platonist nor unintelligible.

Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus have devoted significant consideration to the problem of time and politics, especially in their more recent works. ;For Derrida, the relationship between and time and politics is articulated in his notion of the democracy to come and the undecidability that ensues from the double bind 'folded into' the democracy to come. Sylvain Lazarus argues that in order to think the "interiority" of politics we have to abolish the category of time altogether. Finally, Badiou develops a philosophy of the event. Political events come about through decisive subjective interventions that are described as temporal. Interventions may be seen as representing a theory of subjectivating time. ;Ultimately, my thesis is this: emergent French thought on the nature of politics and time suggests that time conditions politics in such a fashion that time makes accessible the limits of political philosophy/thinking and political decision-making, both as simultaneously possible and impossible . We find ourselves in a state of political undecidability. Yet, this undecidability also brings to light an aporia as evidenced by Derrida's decisive stands on certain political issues. The aporia consists in the fact that in the midst of such undecidability we are called upon or forced to make certain decisive political interventions. Though political situations may be undecidable, we are called to respond to these situations because of their injustice, inhospitality, irresponsibility and terror and violence. Following Badiou, we should think of such decisions as timely interventions that make political events appear and thinkable. Badiou's notion of timely interventions that yield political events can be employed to complete the philosophical account of the aporia. The aporia can never be resolved. It is the philosophical account of the paradoxical situation we find ourselves in and is a philosophical account of the relation that exists between time and politics. This relation is aporetic because it paradoxically brings together two fundamentally human realities, namely, the undecidability of the world we find ourselves in but also the very human reality of decisively thinking politically and making decisive political actions. Yet, such political events are not merely extensions of subjective volition, rather they are also conditioned by a sense of the kairos or extra-subjective or pre-political sense of the "timely" occasion to act. The world may force or elicit us to act, forcing moments to their crisis---a crisis to which the Badiouan subject responds through her interventions

Thinking through French Philosophy has two objectives. First, it seeks to demonstrate that the thought of Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze draw inspiration from the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. Lawlor shows that Merleau-Ponty, residing somewhere between structuralism and poststructuralism, managed to articulate key ideas that helped Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze make the necessary breakthroughs that now come to mark their respective philosophies. Such ideas include Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh as developed in The Visible and the Invisible, the chiasm, and expression as a sense-giving event. The second objective of the book is to read the “great French philosophies of the Sixties” as a philosophy of “interrogation.” Lawlor argues that Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze offer us a “point of diffraction” through which we can further elaborate our thinking on various aporias opened up by these thinkers.

This article focuses on Michel Foucault’s concepts of authorship and power. Jacques Derrida has often been accused of being more of a literary author than a philosopher or political theorist. Richard Rorty complains that Derrida’s views on politics are not pragmatic enough; he sees Derrida’s later work, including his political work, more as a “private self-fashioning” than concrete political thinking aimed at devising short-term solutions to problems here and now. Employing Foucault’s work around authorship and the origins of power, I show that Derrida is indeed fashioning himself. This self-fashioning is not merely private or fanciful. Rather, I argue that Derrida can be read as employing what Foucault would call “technologies of the self” to not only show the play of possibility and impossibility at work in all politics and thought, but also to use his savoir to create two important and potentially constructive power structures. First, there is the power of deconstruction itself as a “militant critique” that calls for a forceful and irreducible justice. Second, there is the power of Derrida himself, understood as leaving behind a legacy of himself as the “originator” of deconstruction and as a public intellectual.

Engaging contemporary notions of metaphor and drawing on his past work on the subject, Josef Stern presents a theory of metaphor which is based both on context and semantics. Over the past two decades philosophers of language, linguists, and cognitive scientists have generally believed that metaphor is external to the general conceptions of semantics and grammar. Moreover, metaphor is understood in its pragmatic sense, that is, as having its nature defined by its employment and various uses in language as opposed to the content and character present in the meaning of metaphor. Stern sets as his goal a challenge of such readings of metaphor. Dialoguing with and challenging eminent thinkers on the subject of metaphor, including Donald Davidson and David Kaplan, Stern competently sketches his vision of metaphorical meaning which underlies a speaker-hearer’s capacity to interpret a metaphor by “drawing on a deep analogy between demonstratives, indexicals and metaphors.” His engaging views raise interesting questions and give much food for thought. Issues addressed include: the literal paraphrasability of metaphors vis-à-vis cognition, the roles of exemplification and similarity in metaphorical interpretation, dead metaphors, the pictorial character of metaphors, and the relation between metaphors and the literal.

Carrying out the implications and exploring the underpinnings of themes examined in Tradition and Authenticity, Thomas Langan’s latest work, Being and Truth, attempts to explain the foundational framework in which the central question of philosophy must ground itself. Langan seeks to describe the condition for the possibility of a genuinely unified discourse which concomitantly allows for the plethora of differences incarnate in people, institutions, and traditions to be considered duly and to presence themselves fully. Langan identifies as the central and perennial question of philosophy: “How can we entice ourselves to widen our horizons to take into account the experiences of others, which challenge the fragile ideological structures of explanation we have built to cope with the world?”.