Antonio Calcagno

_Offers a dialogue about the future of the nature of the human, technology, metaphysical foundations, globalization, and social and political oppression._ In order to create a greater dialogue between new and emerging Italian philosophy and established continental traditions of thought, Silvia Benso and Antonio Calcagno bring together the work of well-known figures in Italian philosophy such as Antonio Negri, Roberto Esposito, Remo Bodei, Gianni Vattimo, Massimo Cacciari, and Adriana Cavarero with important thinkers like Schelling, Hegel, Schmitt, Heidegger, Gadamer, Irigaray, Arendt, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, and Foucault. In _Open Borders_, Benso and Calcagno introduce to a larger English-speaking audience the thought of highly regarded late twentieth-century Italian philosophers who seek to redefine concepts such as freedom, interpretation, existence, woman, male-female relationships, realism, emotions, and aesthetics. The diverse contributors to this book often transgress and redefine the limits and insights of philosophy itself and bring to the fore a new body of thinking that offers new ways of self-understanding while deeply engaging the issues and questions of contemporary society.

Drawing on Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein, the chapter argues that a shared social world with companion animals would have to include the following elements: a shared sense of a built environment, a common language, which includes speech but also gesture and bodily expression, a shared value system, and a rich common affective life. Empathy is foundational for creating larger social worlds between humans and companion animals where particular bonds of meaning, shared space, value, and togetherness manifest themselves. The chapter makes the case for this argument first by laying out Husserl’s and Stein’s accounts of empathy, and then by using those accounts to show that the shared world of humans and companion animals is valuable and meaningful.

Responses, both critical and constructive, to changing realities in modern politics and society. In gathering these essays, Antonio Calcagno and Mark Yenson have chosen the conceptual lens of crisis and collapse, not in the spirit of lamenting or decrying the death of a once-enjoyed, but now lost, state of affairs. Rather, they seek to understand what the concepts of crisis and collapse mean, how they are deployed in various situations, and how they are used to explain shifts in politics and society. The contributing scholars featured in this volume demonstrate how two important political thinkers imagined new worlds and social orders that could arise from significant change brought on by forms of crisis and collapse. Through their work, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil offer new generative visions of what it is to be human in a time when our very understanding of humanity is changing.

If community is determined primarily in consciousness as a mental state of oneness, can community exist when there is no accompanying mental state or collective intentionality that makes us realise that we are one community? Walther would respond affirmatively, arguing that there is a deep psychological structure of habit that allows us to continue to experience ourselves as a community. The habit of community works on all levels of our person, including our bodies, psyches and spirits (Geist). It allows us to continue to be in community even though we are not always conscious of it. Husserl would describe this as part of the passive synthesis of Vergemeinschaftung. Walther’s analysis of the passive structure of habit opens up important possibilities for the inner consciousness of time. Drawing from Husserl’s and Walther’s analyses, I argue for the possibility of a communal inner time consciousness, or an inner awareness of timeconsciousness of the community, which gives rise to three constitutive moments: communal retention or communal memory, a sense of the communal present or a communal “now,” and communal protentions or anticipations. Ultimately, I will show how Walther’s treatment of habit demonstrates that time conditions the lived experience of community. One can, therefore, speak of a time of the community—its past, present and future—even though Walther herself does not explicitly develop this possibility.

This volume is a guide to the legacy of the philosophical work of Jean-Luc Marion. A leading phenomenologist and philosopher of religion, Marion’s work addresses questions on the nature and knowledge of God, love, consciousness, art, psychology, and spirituality. Here, leading Marion scholars explain the development of his key concepts, while critically mining the philosopher’s ideas for relevant implications and applications to contemporary issues in various fields of study, including philosophy, theology, art, psychology and literature. The first volume to cover Marion’s wider corpus, this book opens with an original essay by Marion himself, and goes on to present a comprehensive view of Marion’s ideas. Though largely anchored in philosophy, the essays are interdisciplinary and explore the various questions central to Marion’s work, including the visibility and invisibility of God, the constitutive force of the horizon of consciousness, the gift and givenness, eroticism and love, art and painting, psychology, literature, memory, iconography, and spirituality.

This book is dedicated to Edith Stein (1891–1942), who is known widely for her contributions to metaphysics. Though she never produced a dedicated work on questions of ethics, her corpus is replete with pertinent reflections. This book is the first major scholarly volume dedicated to exploring Stein’s ethical thought, not only for its wide-ranging content, from her earlier to later works, but also for its applications to such fields as psychology, theology, education, politics, law, and culture. Leading international scholars come together to provide a systematic account of Stein’s ethics, highlighting its relation to Stein’s highly developed and complex metaphysics. Questions about the good, evil, the rights and ethical comportment of the person, the state, and feminism are addressed. The book appeals to scholars interested in the history of philosophical and ethical thought.