Being In Common

Jean-Luc Nancy and the Thinking of Otherness explores Nancy's opening of otherness at the heart of existence through the transformative appropriation of Heidegger and Levinas.

In this engaging and much-needed book Jan Bransen argues that the rise of behavioural sciences has caused a sea change in the relationship between science and common sense. Drawing on fascinating examples such as language and communication, money, and folk physics, Don't be Fooled: A Philosophy of Common Sense is a brilliant and wry defence of a skill that is a vital part of being human.

Despite living in an “information age,” we are confronted by the clash of ideologies and a crisis of universal knowledge. The Church is not unaffected by the world’s weariness and similarly faces what Fr. Mauro Gagliardi describes as “the lack of truth, or perhaps better, the disinterest in it.” Today’s philosophical and doctrinal decline are the results of the loss of first principles and a relativistic view of doctrinal development. As Matthew Levering writes in the Foreword, this first-time English translation of Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s Le sens commun: La philosophie de l’être et les formules dogmatiques by the acclaimed translator Matthew Minerd “arrives at an auspicious time.” This book sees the great Dominican master address a variety of fundamental topics that we need to return to and relearn in our day: the relationship between common sense and both philosophy and faith; the proper defense for philosophical realism; the subordination and coordination of philosophical first principles; our natural capacity for knowing God’s existence; and, at length, the problem of dogmatic development. Although originally written during the Catholic Modernist crisis at the turn of the twentieth century, Thomistic Common Sense is no mere relic of past controversies. Jacques Maritain, for example, while reflecting on his formation as a Thomist, cited it as particularly influential. In our own time, this book serves as a foundational textbook of Thomistic philosophy, communicating its wisdom with clarity, power, and perennial resonance.

Language is a tool to deliver one individual's thought or idea or feeling to other individuals through certain kinds of medium, such that sound, image, gesture, touching, motion or even chemicals. In human being the speaking with tongue and mouth and written words or signs by hand are two main forms of language. However, broadly to say, languages also include ultra sonic wave transmission in dolphin, birds' singing, crickets' wings vibration, bees' flying pattern, ants' chemical markers on their trails, blind man finger-touching books, music sheets and performance with instruments - the music language, flag language, light-signal language, telegraphic code, computer language, etc. The criteria to judge the quality of human languages shall be evaluated by its speeding in speech, area-using efficacy in calligraphy, accuracy in meaning expression, easy understanding, and logic consistency, plus acoustic beauty and visual enjoyment. This is a try to develop Sapiensish as a common human language.

This book, by one of the most innovative and challenging contemporary thinkers, rethinks community and the very idea of the social. Nancy's fundamental argument is that being is always "being with," that "I" is not prior to "we," that existence is essentially co-existence.

From one of France’s leading contemporary thinkers, “an astutely reasoned philosophical text, offering a revolutionary analysis of theistic religion” (The Midwest Book Review). This book is a profound and eagerly anticipated investigation into what is left of a monotheistic religious spirit—notably, a minimalist faith that is neither confessional nor credulous. Articulating this faith as works and as an objectless hope, Nancy deconstructs Christianity in search of the historical and reflective conditions that provided its initial energy. Working through Blanchot and Nietzsche, re-reading Heidegger and Derrida, Nancy turns to the Epistle of Saint James rather than those of Saint Paul, discerning in it the primitive essence of Christianity as hope. The “religion that provided the exit from religion,” as he terms Christianity, consists in the announcement of an end. It is the announcement that counts, however, rather than any finality. In this announcement there is a proximity to others and to what was once called parousia. But parousia is no longer presence; it is no longer the return of the Messiah. Rather, it is what is near us and does not cease to open and to close, a presence deferred yet imminent. In a demystified age where we are left with a vision of a self-enclosed world—in which humans are no longer mortals facing an immortal being, but entities whose lives are accompanied by the time of their own decline—parousia stands as a question. Can we venture the risk of a decentered perspective, such that the meaning of the world can be found both inside and outside, within and without our so-immanent world?