George Pattison

A critical presentation of Lev Shestov's life and work from his formative years and early writings on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche to his European reception and interactions with French and German philosophers and writers (Husserl, Heidegger, Gilson), following his exile in 1921. The chapter provides an interpretation of his conception of temporal existence, death, faith and non-systematic philosophical reflection from the point of view of his legacy and influence on prominent postmodern writers and philosophers (such as Camus, Blanchot, Ionesco, Deleuze, and Jankelevitch).

A critical presentation of Lev Shestov's life and work from his formative years and early writings on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche to his European reception and interactions with French and German philosophers and writers (Husserl, Heidegger, Gilson), following his exile in 1921. The chapter provides an interpretation of his conception of temporal existence, death, faith and non-systematic philosophical reflection from the point of view of his legacy and influence on prominent postmodern writers and philosophers (such as Camus, Blanchot, Ionesco, Deleuze, and Jankelevitch).

A critical presentation of Lev Shestov's life and work from his formative years and early writings on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche to his European reception and interactions with French and German philosophers and writers (Husserl, Heidegger, Gilson), following his exile in 1921. The chapter provides an interpretation of his conception of temporal existence, death, faith and non-systematic philosophical reflection from the point of view of his legacy and influence on prominent postmodern writers and philosophers (such as Camus, Blanchot, Ionesco, Deleuze, and Jankelevitch).

A critical presentation of Lev Shestov's life and work from his formative years and early writings on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche to his European reception and interactions with French and German philosophers and writers (Husserl, Heidegger, Gilson), following his exile in 1921. The chapter provides an interpretation of his conception of temporal existence, death, faith and non-systematic philosophical reflection from the point of view of his legacy and influence on prominent postmodern writers and philosophers (such as Camus, Blanchot, Ionesco, Deleuze, and Jankelevitch).

A critical presentation of Lev Shestov's life and work from his formative years and early writings on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche to his European reception and interactions with French and German philosophers and writers (Husserl, Heidegger, Gilson), following his exile in 1921. The chapter provides an interpretation of his conception of temporal existence, death, faith and non-systematic philosophical reflection from the point of view of his legacy and influence on prominent postmodern writers and philosophers (such as Camus, Blanchot, Ionesco, Deleuze, and Jankelevitch).

A critical presentation of Lev Shestov's life and work from his formative years and early writings on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche to his European reception and interactions with French and German philosophers and writers (Husserl, Heidegger, Gilson), following his exile in 1921. The chapter provides an interpretation of his conception of temporal existence, death, faith and non-systematic philosophical reflection from the point of view of his legacy and influence on prominent postmodern writers and philosophers (such as Camus, Blanchot, Ionesco, Deleuze, and Jankelevitch).

Martin Heidegger is one of the most controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. His writings are notoriously difficult: they both require and reward careful reading. _The Later Heidegger_ introduces and accesses: * Heidegger's life and the background to his later works * The ideas and texts of some of his influential later works, including _The Question concerning Technology, The Origin of the Work of Art_, and _What is Called Thinking?_ * Heidegger's continuing importance to philosophy and contemporary thought.

In his intellectual autobiography Dream and Reality (Self-Knowledge in Russian), Berdyaev writes about his two interrogations by Communist authorities in the period between the Revolution and his exile in 1922, the first by the Cheka and the second by its successor organization, the GPU (eventually to evolve into the KGB). Our current information about the first is limited to Berdyaev’s own account and it is possible that no formal record was kept, for reasons I shall come to. The second is recorded in the GPU files and was published in 2005. In this article I shall consider these interrogations with regard to what they tell us about Berdyaev’s intellectual position on the eve of his expulsion from the Soviet Union and how he was perceived by the Soviet authorities. In the case of the 1922 interrogation, I shall preface my remarks with a translation of the protocol found in the GPU files. As this includes references to aspects of Soviet history that are familiar only to specialists, I shall also make some comments about these references before coming to the more interesting questions raised by the document. These include questions connected to the letters appended to the protocol of the interrogation that are of interest in their own right, not least since they indicate a connection between Berdyaev and the Dostoevsky scholar, M. M. Bakhtin.

Noting the difficulties involved in unqualifiedly identifying Kierkegaard as a philosopher, the paper presents him as a writer, an approach that enables us to take the whole Kierkegaard into view. Such an approach is in keeping with his own comments about his work and is seen to resonate with new understandings of being a writer that emerge in Europe in his time. This new writerly identity typically involves the promotion of a particular world-view with a significant moral element that addresses the perceived situation of the writer’s world. In this regard the writer also assumes the role of pedagogue, a role that brings him or her into a relation to philosophy. In the case of Kierkegaard it is shown that particular writing effects serve to subvert readers’ experience of time and, by inviting them to ‚weigh over‘ (Dan. overveie) the issues addressed in the text serves as a pedagogy of freedom. Time-experience and freedom are, however, issues of central concern to philosophy of religion so that ‚Kierkegaard the writer‘ also contributes in his way to the development of philosophy, especially when this is understood as involving a way of life.

A Philosophy of Prayer explores prayer within the perspective of post-Kantian philosophy. Against a background of traditional sources, including Augustine, The Cloud of Unknowing, and the seventeenth century French School of spirituality, the book uses Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Berdyaev, Tillich, Marcel, Simone Weil, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Louis Chrétien to provide an interpretation of what is meant by the passivity and self-annihilation of the praying self, suggesting an 'apophatics of the personality'. Pattison pays particular attention to the question of language and the implications of the role given to silence in traditional texts, arguing that language remains a defining element of the human God-relationship and that silence is not to be construed as the negation of language but as the revelation of the depth of language itself. The basic structure of prayer is shown to be implicitly eschatological, oriented towards a coming Kingdom of justice and peace while, at the same time, expressing a deep desire for ontological homecoming, a tension manifest in, respectively, Levinas and Heidegger. On Pattison's reading, Prayer calls for and develops a particular orientation of the self towards existence, corresponding to the virtue of humility, long understood as the basic Christian virtue. This is shown to be in tension with modernity's commitment to strong versions of autonomy. However, the choice of humility is not presented as the reinstatement of religious heteronomy but as a free choice of the praying self.

Deconstructive Subjectivities Edited by Simon Critchley and Peter Dews SUNY Press, 1996. Pp. 257. ISBN 0–7914–2724–2. £17.25. Modern Movements in European Philosophy, 2nd edn Manchester University Press, 1994. Pp. 367. ISBN 0–7190–434–0 (hbk), 0–7190–428–9 (pbk). £12.99 (pbk) States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers on the European Mind Manchester University Press, 1995. Pp. 311. ISBN 0–7190–4705–6 (hbk), 0–7190–4262–3 (pbk). £14.99 (pbk) Poetics of Modernity: Toward a Hermeneutic Imagination Humanities Press, 1995. Pp. 251. ISBN 0–391–03798–6 (hbk). £35.00 (pbk) By Richard Kearney Selves in Discord and Resolve. Kierkegaard's Moral‐Religious Psychology from Either/or to Sickness unto Death By Edward F. Mooney Routledge. Pp. xvi + 140. ISBN 0–415–91370–5 £12.00 (pbk). Ethics, Killing and War By Richard Norman Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. x + 256. ISBN 0–521–45553–7. $49.95 (Aus.). The Philosophy of Science Edited by David Papineau Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. vi + 339. ISBN 0–19–875164–8 (hbk), 0–19–875165–6 (pbk). £9.99 (pbk). Foucault and the Political By Jon Simons Routledge 1995. Pp. viii +152. ISBN 0–415–10065–8 (hbk), 0–415–10066–6 (pbk). £40.00 (hbk) £12.99 (pbk) Lectures de l'ontologie fondamentale. Essais sur Heidegger, 2nd edn (Collection Krisis) By Jacques Taminiaux Jérôme Millon, 1995. Pp. 299. ISBN 2–905614–24–2. 150 FF.

Although the ideas of Soren Kierkegaard played a pivotal role in the shaping of mainstream German philosophy and the history of French existentialism, the question of how philosophers should read Kierkegaard is a difficult one to settle. His intransigent religiosity has led some philosophers to view him as essentially a religious thinker of a singularly anti-philosophical attitude who should be left to the theologians. In this major new survey of Kierkegaard's thought, George Pattison addresses this question head on and shows that although it would be difficult to claim a "philosophy of Kierkegaard" as one could a philosophy of Kant, or of Hegel, there are nevertheless significant points of common interest between Kierkegaard's central thinking and the questions that concern philosophers today. The challenge of self-knowledge in an age of moral and intellectual uncertainty that lies at the heart of Kierkegaard's writings remains as important today as it did in the culture of post-Enlightenment modernity.

Martin Heidegger is one of the most controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. His writings are notoriously difficult: they both require and reward careful reading. _The Later Heidegger_ introduces and accesses: * Heidegger's life and the background to his later works * The ideas and texts of some of his influential later works, including _The Question concerning Technology, The Origin of the Work of Art_, and _What is Called Thinking?_ * Heidegger's continuing importance to philosophy and contemporary thought.

The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard brings together some of the most distinguished contemporary contributors to Kierkegaard research together with some of the more gifted younger commentators on Kierkegaard's work. There is significant input from scholars based in Copenhagen's Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, as well as from philosophers and theologians from Britain, Germany, and the United States. Part 1 presents some of the philological, historical, and contextual work that has been produced in recent years, establishing a firm basis for the more interpretative essays found in following parts. This includes looking at the history of his published and unpublished works, his cultural and social context, and his relation to Romanticism, German Idealism, the Church, the Bible, and theological traditions. Part 2 moves from context and background to the exposition of some of the key ideas and issues in Kierkegaard's writings. Attention is paid to his style, his treatment of ethics, culture, society, the self, time, theology, love, irony, and death. Part 3 looks at the impact of Kierkegaard's thought and at how it continues to influence philosophy, theology, and literature. After an examination of issues around translating Kierkegaard, this section includes comparisons with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, as well as examining his role in modern theology, moral theology, phenomenology, postmodernism, and literature.

In the first part of Either/Or, Kierkegaard presents a collection of papers composed by an unidentified person (A) that sets out the elements of an aesthetic view of life. This is often seen in terms of a general lack of self-commitment and the pursuit of more or less sophisticated forms of pleasure. This paper argues that, in reality, A’s papers present the existential outworking of a consistent metaphysical nihilism. Amongst the features of a life lived in full consciousness of the ultimate meaninglessness of the world adduced by A are: (1) distraction, restlessness and a penchant for ‘the interesting’; (2) the absence of any basis for mutual respect in relations between persons; (3) an underlying orientation towards violence in human relationships; and (4) the role of art as the maximum form in which life can be justified. This paper concludes by indicating how the analysis of the aesthetic in Either/Or I might be seen to anticipate Kierkegaard’s later view of the essentially violent and persecutory nature of society.

Taking its cue from Vladimir Putin’s use of Dostoevsky to support his critical view of Western culture, the article challenges the view that Dostoevsky can be straightforwardly corralled into the Russian President’s nationalistic and imperialistic agenda. Instead, it follows the approach taken by George Lukacs in response to National Socialism’s self-representation as the authentic inheritor of the German cultural tradition, namely, to show that any great cultural work is going to be resistant to the kind of one-dimensional interpretations typical of authoritarian regimes. Particularly, the article focusses on much-debated passages of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (aka Demons) to show that the writer has a more nuanced view and that his work contains resources to resist today’s ultra-nationalism.