These essays reveal Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)-known in the West largely through his studies of Rabelais and Dostoevsky-as a philosopher of language, a cultural historian, and a major theoretician of the novel. The Dialogic Imagination presents, in superb English translation, four selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Problems of ......
Threshold Phenomena reexamines Jacques Derrida's thinking of hospitality, from his well-known writings of the 1990s to his recently-published seminars on the same topic. The book follows Derrida's rereading of several central figures and texts on hospitality (Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, Kant's Perpetual Peace, Levinas's Totality and Infinity) ......
An important milestone of 20th Century philosophy was the rise of personalism. After the crimes and atrocities against millions of human beings in two World Wars, especially the Second, some philosophers and other thinkers began to seek arguments showing the value of each human being, to expose and denounce the folly of political structures that ......
In this wide-ranging and probing book Erin Manning extends her previous inquiries into the politics of movement to the concept of the minor gesture. The minor gesture, although it may pass almost unperceived, transforms the field of relations. More than a chance variation, less than a volition, it requires rethinking common assumptions about human ......
A guide for souls seeking clarity in complex times. This book includes essays that focus on restoring ourselves to our full birthright as beings "made in God's image and explore themes such as genius, intelligence, character, and prayer.
No figure among the western Marxist theoreticians has loomed larger in the postwar period than Louis Althusser. A rebel against the Catholic tradition in which he was raised, Althusser studied philosophy and later joined both the faculty of the Ecole normal superieure and the French Communist Party in 1948. Viewed as a "structuralist Marxist," ......
In this volume Christopher Dawson outlines his main thesis for the history of culture, which was his life's work. Anthropology, sociology, philosophy, religion and history form the backdrop for the key idea of his thought - namely, that religion is the soul of a culture and that a society or culture which has lost its spiritual roots is a dying ......
The lectures that were the basis for Man and the State were delivered at the University of Chicago at a time when Maritain was still in the first enthusiasm of his participation in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He devotes particular attention to the concept of rights, since, historically, rights theories were fashioned to ......
Simone Weil, the French philosopher, political activist, and religious mystic, was little known when she died young in 1943. Four years later the philosopher-farmer Gustave Thibon compiled La pesanteur et la grace from the notebooks she left in his keeping. In 1952 this English translation accelerated the fame and influence of Simone Weil. The ......