Jason Wirth

This is an essay on place in light of the ecological crisis as an exercise in what Pierre Charbonnier has recently called ecological reason, that is, “the environmental reflexivity of our species.” How do the roots of our prevailing political and economic relationships to the many lands that sustain us appear retroactively from the perspective of ecological reason? In a kind of tragic reversal, the mad rush to global prosperity and political dignity now appears as the emerging catastrophe of our failure to heed the terrestrial affordances that sustain us. I explicate this problem and root about for responses to it by lacing together the recent work of Charbonnier as well as John Sallis, Bruno Latour, and Brian Burkhart in a single weave of place-specific thinking. How can we begin to rethink place from the ground up?

As a sign that interest in Schelling is growing beyond its initial reception within more continentally inflected studies, Lara Osteric has collected eleven generally impressive essays that are organized around the chronological development of Schelling’s thinking, and that reassess his place in the history of philosophy.Eric Watkins enters the debate around the decisive influences on Schelling’s early thinking. Conceding the well-known influences of Hölderlin, Fichte, Jacobi, and the Pantheismusstreit, his reactionary Tübingen teachers, and Reinhold’s attempt to provide a firm foundation for Kantian critical philosophy, Watkins argues for...

As is well known, the renowned Hegel scholar, Franz Rosenzweig, had a dramatic break with Hegel in particular and German Idealism more broadly, as strikingly evidenced in his magnum opus, The Star of Redemption. In the third or 1815 draft of Die Weltalter, Schelling writes that while “all thinking must begin the dialectic, it cannot end in the dialectic.” Schelling continued his turn toward what he called “positive philosophy,” which emerges “toto caelo” differently than from the “universality” and “indeterminacy” of negative thought. What is this new mode of thought, born—both for Schelling and for his unexpected admirer Rosenzweig—from the limitations of negative thought? How does one characterize this rupture within Idealism itself?

Repositions Bachelard as a critical and integral part of contemporary continental philosophy. Like Schelling before him and Deleuze and Guattari after him, Gaston Bachelard made major philosophical contributions to the advancement of science and the arts. In addition to being a mathematician and epistemologist whose influential work in the philosophy of science is still being absorbed, Bachelard was also one of the most innovative thinkers on poetic creativity and its ethical implications. His approaches to literature and the arts by way of elemental reverie awakened long-buried modes of thinking that have inspired literary critics, depth psychologists, poets, and artists alike. Bachelard’s extraordinary body of work, unduly neglected by the English-language reception of continental philosophy in recent decades, exhibits a capacity to speak to the full complexity and wider reaches of human thinking. The essays in this volume analyze Bachelard as a phenomenological thinker and situate his thought within the Western tradition. Considering his work alongside that of Schelling, Husserl, Bergson, Buber, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Deleuze, and Nancy, this collection highlights some of Bachelard’s most provocative proposals on questions of ontology, hermeneutics, ethics, environmental politics, spirituality, and the possibilities they offer for productive transformations of self and world.

"Blessed are they who are empty, for in them life finds no restrictions, no barriers."I begin by expressing my heartfelt gratitude to my three astute readers, all of whose own work I admire and esteem. They already inhabit the philosophical universe to which my book aspires, and I am moved that they recognize this. Writing, to borrow Paul Celan's famous simile, often seems like a message in a bottle, tossed out to sea. How rare and wonderful that it washes ashore, and rarer still when received in a heartland!These insightful comments, provocative embellishments and commentaries, and well-posed questions are, to my thinking, the highest honor that a reader can grant a text. I learned much from them. As Maurice...