John Sallis

The relation between voice, song and imagination is at the heart of the work of many composers. This essay examines this relation by stipulating first that the voice is a way in which one is given an awareness of oneself. Subsequently, it is shown how this form of self-awareness reaches a higher degree through the voices resounding in music and finds its most sublime form when it is transformed into song. Therefore, the work of composers, as is illustrated in a discussion of Débussy, Mahler and Wagner, is concerned with finding one’s own style and song in a process of giving oneself over to the muses.

Nach der Phanomenologie von Einbildungskraft (2010) legt John Sallis eine Logik der Imagination vor. Sallis stellt sich in die Tradition Hegels, Husserls und Heideggers, wenn er versucht, den Anspruch der Logik uber den Bereich der Sprache zu erweitern. Wenn wir in der Einbildungskraft aber auch Widerspruche erfahren, muss eine Logik der Imagination auch diesen gerecht werden. Nicht nur die Logik des Traums, auch die Tiefe des Erinnerns und die Uneinholbarkeit unserer Geburt erfassen wir nur in den Widerspruchen der Einbildungskraft. Mit dem Entwurf einer phanomenologischen Kosmologie erweitert Sallis die Logik der Imagination bis in die Unendlichkeit des Weltalls.

_English summary:_ In this major work, John Sallis probes the very nature of imagination and reveals how its force extends into all spheres of human life. While drawing critically on the entire history of philosophy, Sallis's work takes up a vantage point determined by the contemporary deconstruction of the classical opposition between sensible and intelligible. Thus, in reinterrogating the nature of imagination, this work carries out a radical turn to the sensible and to the elemental in nature. Advancing through rigorous phenomenological and hermeneutical analyses, the author also draws on the poetic word of such figures as Shakespeare, Holderlin, and Keats; thereby he offers an original and fundamental approach to the questions of the image, of time, of self and other, and of the nature of art. Above all, imagination, now liberated from subjectivity, is shown to play a decisive role both in drawing together the moments of our experience of sensible things and in opening experience to the encompassing light, atmosphere, earth, and sky._ The English edition of this work was published by Indiana University Press. German description:_ John Sallis untersucht den Kerngedanken der Einbildungskraft und zeigt, dass deren Kraft auf alle Bereiche des menschlichen Lebens Einfluss hat. Aus dem Blickwinkel der gegenwartigen Dekonstuktion des klassischen Gegensatzes zwischen der intelligiblen und der sinnlichen Wirklichkeit setzt er sich kritisch mit der gesamten Geschichte der Philosophie auseinander. Dadurch, dass er das Wesen der Einbildungskraft hinterfragt, wendet sich seine Untersuchung dem Sinnlichen und dem Elementaren in der Natur zu. Er greift auf die Methoden der radikalisierten Phanomenologie und der Hermeneutik zuruck, um ein ganz neues Konzept der Einbildungskraft zu erarbeiten. So wird deutlich, dass die Einbildungskraft eine zentrale Rolle fur das Verstandnis des Wesens von Zeit, Eigenen und Fremden sowie der Kunst spielt. Dies wird an Werken von Shakespeare, Keats und Holderlin veranschaulicht. Der Autor zeigt, dass die Einbildungskraft, sobald sie von jeglicher Subjektivitat befreit ist, die Momente unserer Wahrnehmung sinnlicher Dinge zusammenbringt und gleichzeitig die Wahrnehmung fur Licht, Atmosphare, Erde und Himmel offnet.

_Transfigurements_ develops a framework for thinking about art through innovative readings of some of the most important philosophical writing on the subject by Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. Sallis exposes new layers in their texts and theories while also marking their limits. By doing so, his aim is to show that philosophy needs to attend to art directly. Consequently, Sallis also addresses a wide range of works of art, including paintings by Raphael, Monet, and Klee; Shakespeare’s comedies; and the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Mahler, and Tan Dun. Through these interpretations, he puts forth a compelling new elaboration of the philosophy of art.

This second edition of The Gathering of Reason expands on John Sallis's classic study of Kant's First Critique. This study examines the relation of imagination to reason and to human knowledge and action in general. Moving simultaneously at several different hermeneutical levels, Sallis carries out an interpretation of the Transcendental Dialectic of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Although, in contrast to the Analytic, the Dialectic seldom refers explicitly to imagination, Sallis shows that the concept of reason in the Dialectic requires the complicity of imagination. Sallis demonstrates that for Kant, reason alone does not suffice for bringing before our minds the metaphysical ideas of the soul, the world, and God; rather it is through the force of imagination that these ideas are brought forth and made effective. A new preface situates the book in relation to Sallis's later work, and an extensive afterword focuses on Kant and the Greeks.

This paper resumes my discussion with Charles Scott concerning the concept of nature. The discussion stems from Scott’s book The Lives of Things, and this paper is prompted by a short text (appended to this paper) in which Scott elaborates and clarifies certain significant points. The focus of the discussion is on the double sense of nature, that the word can designate, at once, both natural things in their singular happening and the eidetic double, the essence, of such things. The key issue is the way in which the second, eidetic sense folds back over the first, singular sense so as to conceal it.

This volume in the Collected Writings of John Sallis presents his lecture course on German Idealism, tracing its development from the reception of Kant through the works of Fichte and Schelling. With insightful interpretations of key texts, John Sallis demonstrates the enduring power of post-Kantian thought -- especially with respect to freedom, the relation of subject to object, and the role of the imagination. He shows that what underlies the development of German Idealism is a concern with the question of system and the nature of philosophy itself. The book begins with a treatment of Kant's philosophy and its new beginning. It then discusses the initial reception of Kant's philosophy, showing how criticisms of Kant set the stage for the subsequent development of German Idealism. The central chapters focus on Fichte, first introducing his central philosophical project (the Wissenschaftslehre) and then carefully analyzing its implementation in the 1794 Grundlage. The final chapters treat Schelling's early and middle philosophy, including the 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism and his famous 1809 treatise on freedom.

The essay begins by recalling the words of Homer that to live is to behold the light of the sun. For it is the ‘elementals’ of sky, sun, and light that give all things to mortal beings, including time itself, beginning with the daily alternation between day and night. But contemporary commercial and scientific projects threaten to change all this. Whether it be through the launching of tens of thousands of communication satellites to fill the night sky or the creation of a sulfuric blanket in the atmosphere to block the sun’s rays to combat global warming, what is threatened is our very relationship to the sun and to light. The essay thus argues that what is today needed is a new ‘politics of light’, one that would guard the clarity of the sky. Needed as well is a philosophy that attends to things beyond the human life-world, to the elementals of sun, sky, and light, but also to the invisibility at the heart of light itself. Appealing to some of the most recent scientific discoveries regarding the hyper-giganticness of the cosmos, the essay concludes that philosophy must attend to ‘phenomena’ whose nature is precisely to remain concealed, phenomena such as black holes, dark matter, and dark energy that are today thought to comprise an astonishing 95% of the matter and energy of the universe. Turned in this direction, the essay concludes, philosophy can perhaps reawaken the wonder that is at its very origin.

"Being and Logos" is... a philosophical adventure of rare inspiration.... Its power to illuminate the text..., its ecumenicity of inspiration, its methodological rigor, its originality, and its philosophical profundity--all together make it one of the few philosophical interpretations that the philosopher will want to re-read along with the dialogues themselves. A superadded gift is the author's prose, which is a model of lucidity and grace." --International Philosophical Quarterly "Being and Logos is highly recommended for those who wish to learn how a thoughtful scholar approaches Platonic dialogues as well as for those who wish to consider a serious discussion of some basic themes in the dialogues." --The Academic Reviewer.

This excellent work... deserves the serious consideration of all who are interested in contemporary philosophy as well as those who concern themselves with ancient philosophy, especially Plato." —Review of Metaphysics In Chorology, John Sallis takes up one of the most enigmatic discourses in the history of philosophy. Plato's discourse on the chora—the chorology—forms the pivotal moment in the Timaeus. The implications of the chorology are momentous and communicate with many of the most decisive issues in contemporary philosophical discussions.

This long awaited volume of The Collected Writings of John Sallis presents his lectures on Martin Heidegger's monumental Being and Time. The lectures were presented during the 1985-86 academic year at Loyola University of Chicago and during the fall semester of 1999 at Pennsylvania State University. The fourteen years separating the beginning of the two courses is significant in that many of the Gesamtausgabe volumes appeared in that interval, as well as a second translation of Being and Time. While the additional Gesamtausgabe volumes make no appearance in the Sallis lectures, there is certainly an awareness of them. This book is a synthesis of the manuscripts of the two separate lecture-courses. This volume makes Being and Time accessible to students, while the most advanced scholars will also profit from it.

Originally published in 1973, this work continues to be a classic in the field of French phenomenology, focusing on tis most seminal represenataive, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. By tracing how Merleau-Ponty accounts for the beginning of philosophical thought in the dual sense of understanding its origin and showing how that origin permits philosophy (and all thought) to achieve truth, Sallis demonstrates that this process is never fully completed. With a signifigant revival of interest in French phenomenology in recent years, this paperback edition -- with a new preface by Sallis -- provides an enduring and important voice to the dialogue.

A letter from Martin Heidegger.--On the way to being; reflecting on conversations with Martin Heidegger, by Z. Adamczewski.--Heidegger's view and evaluation of nature and natural science, by E. G. Ballard.--Truth as art: an interpretation of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (sec. 44) and Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, by C. D. Keyes.--The language of the event: the event of language, by T. Kisiel.--Heidegger: the problem of the thing, by T. Langan.--The late Heidegger's omission of the ontic-ontological structure of Dasein, by R. Powell.--Towards the movement of reversal: science, technology, and the language of homecoming, by J. Sallis.--Prolegomena to "Time and being": truth and time, by A. Schuwer.--Cosmos, nature, and man and the foundations of psychiatry, by A.-T. Tymieniecka.--Heidegger and the existential a priori, by J. Wild.

Mimesis is configured in many ways. Its manifold senses require the doubling of sense, such that it designates both what is commonly displayed to the senses and what intrinsically cannot be so displayed. As Gadamer insists in his criticism of Hegel, the work of art is no mere bearer of meaning that can subsist apart from it and that could be transferred to some other vehicle. This is, then, the first of the four moments that constitute Gadamer's deconstruction of mimesis. Mimesis is transformation. This redetermination constitutes the second moment in the Gadamerian deconstruction of mimesis. The third deconstructive moment involves reconstruing the duality of mimesis, displacing the image/original relation that was definitive for traditional concepts of mimesis. The fourth claims that in the artwork, there is not only a manifestation but also a sheltering of sense, which stabilizes and secures the sense that mimesis has also set free.