Poetics Speculation And Judgment

A collection of ten previously published or delivered essays by Taminiaux (philosophy, Boston College and the Universite de Louvain). Among the topics are the attitudes of philosophers to politics and fine art, the nostalgia for Greece at the dawn of classical Germany, and the Hegelian legacy in Heidegger's overcoming of aesthetics. Paper edition (unseen), $19.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

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Examines the role that poets and the poetic word play in the formation of philosophical thinking in the modern German tradition. Several of the most celebrated philosophers in the German tradition since Kant afford to poetry an all-but-unprecedented status in Western thought. Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer argue that the scope, limits, and possibilities of philosophy are intimately intertwined with those of poetry. For them, poetic thinking itself is understood as intrinsic to the kind of thinking that defines philosophical inquiry and the philosophical life, and they developed their views through extensive and sustained considerations of specific poets, as well as specific poetic figures and images. This book offers essays by leading scholars that address each of the major figures of this tradition and the respective poets they engage, including Schiller, Archilochus, Pindar, Hölderlin, Eliot, and Celan, while also discussing the poets’ contemporary relevance to philosophy in the continental tradition. Above all, the book explores an approach to language that rethinks its role as a mere tool for communication or for the dissemination of knowledge. Here language will be understood as an essential event that opens up the world in a primordial sense whereby poetry comes to have a deeply ethical significance for human beings. In this way, the volume positions ethics at the center of continental discourse, even as it engages philosophy itself as a discourse about language attuned to the rigor of what poetry ultimately expresses. “With its impressive range of both philosophers and poets, this volume opens up new avenues of thinking at the intersections of philosophy and poetry.” — Robert D. Metcalf, cotranslator of Martin Heidegger’s Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy

Gosetti-Ferencei argues that Heidegger has overlooked central elements in Hlderlin's poetics, such as a Kantian understanding of aesthetic subjectivity and a commitment to Enlightenment ideals. These elements, she argues, resist the more politically distressing aspects of Heidegger's interpretations, including Heidegger's nationalist valorization of the German language and sense of nationhood, or Heimat.

The imagination is a decisive, if underappreciated, theme in German thought since Kant. In this rigorous historical and textual analysis, Christopher Yates challenges an oversight of traditional readings by presenting the first comparative study of F.W.J. Schelling and Martin Heidegger on this theme. By investigating the importance of the imagination in the thought of Schelling and Heidegger, Yates' study argues that Heidegger's later, more poetic, philosophy cannot be understood properly without appreciating Schelling's central importance for him. A key figure in post-Kantian German Idealism, Schelling's penetrating attention to the creative character of thought remains undervalued. Capturing the essential manner in which Heidegger's ontology and Schelling's idealism intersect, The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling likewise presents an introduction to better understanding Heidegger's later thought. It reveals how his engagement with Schelling encouraged Heidegger to recover and refine the imagination as a poetic, as opposed to reductive and dogmatic, collaborator in the life of truth. Tracing the theme of imagination in new readings of these major thinkers, Yates' study not only acknowledges Schelling's provocative place in post-Kantian German Idealism, but demonstrates as well the significance of Schelling's philosophical focus and style for Heidegger's own concentration on the creative vocation of human artistry and thought.

In Tragedies of Spirit, Theodore D. George engages Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit to explore the philosophical significance of tragedy in post-Kantian continental thought. George follows lines of inquiry originally developed by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Derrida, and takes as his point of departure the concern that Hegel's speculative philosophy forms a summit of modernity that the present historical time is called to interrogate. Yet, George argues that Hegel's larger speculative ambitions in the Phenomenology compel him to turn to the resource of tragedy in order to give voice to issues of incommensurability, discontinuity, otherness, strife, and crisis. From this standpoint, Hegel's interest in the tragic proves to be more pervasive and to run deeper than has previously been recognized. The author shows that Hegel's reliance upon the tragic not only stretches and tests assumptions of speculative philosophy, but also illuminates original insights into human finitude. While situating Hegel's approach to tragedy as part of a broader response to Kant, George also contextualizes Hegel's interest in tragedy with reference to figures in German Idealism and Romanticism, such as Schelling, Hölderlin, and Schlegel.

In drawing upon the work of Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and aligning it with a new trend in interdisciplinary phenomenology, Ian Andrews provides a unique look at the role of chance in art and its philosophical implications. His account of how the composer John Cage and other avant-garde creatives such as Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Sol LeWitt and Ed Ruscha used chance in their work to question the structures of experience and prompt a new engagement with these phenomena makes a truly important contribution to Continental philosophy. Chance, Phenomenology and Aesthetics will appeal to scholars and advanced students in the disciplines of phenomenology, deconstruction and hermeneutics, as well as being compelling reading for anyone interested in pursuing sound studies, art theory and art history through an interdisciplinary post-phenomenological lens.

One of the first book-length studies to examine Gadamer's relation to Heidegger in depth, this important work looks at the ways in which Gadamer positively appropriates central elements of Heidegger's work as well as the way he extends Heidegger's critique of Western metaphysics, avoiding and tacitly challenging some of the most problematical aspects of Heidegger's work. By examining two of the central concepts in Gadamer's work, tradition and language, and by analyzing Gadamer's relation to his mentor, Martin Heidegger, Sheibler successfully shows that far from being the conservative both modernist and post-modernist critics have accused him of being, Gadamer anticipates a number of concerns central to post-modern or post-structuralist thought.

The relevance of painting has been questioned many times over the last century, by the arrival of photography, installation art and digital technologies. But rather than accept the death of painting, Mark Titmarsh traces a paradoxical interface between this art form and its opposing forces to define a new practice known as 'expanded painting' giving the term historical context, theoretical structure and an important place in contemporary practice. As the formal boundaries tumble, the being of painting expands to become a kind of total art incorporating all other media including sculpture, video and performance. Painting is considered from three different perspectives: ethnology, art theory and ontology. From an ethnological point of view, painting is one of any number of activities that takes place within a culture. In art theory terms, painting is understood to produce objects of interest for humanities disciplines. Yet painting as a medium often challenges both its object and image status, 'expanding' and creating hybrid works between painting, objects, screen media and text. Ontologically, painting is understood as an object of aesthetic discourse that in turn reflects historical states of being. Thus, Expanded Painting delivers a new kind of saying, a post-aesthetic discourse that is attuned to an uncanny tension between the presence and absence of painting.

The philosophical significance of place—in Heidegger's work and as the focus of a distinctive mode of philosophical thinking. The idea of place—topos—runs through Martin Heidegger's thinking almost from the very start. It can be seen not only in his attachment to the famous hut in Todtnauberg but in his constant deployment of topological terms and images and in the situated, “placed” character of his thought and of its major themes and motifs. Heidegger's work, argues Jeff Malpas, exemplifies the practice of “philosophical topology.” In Heidegger and the Thinking of Place, Malpas examines the topological aspects of Heidegger's thought and offers a broader elaboration of the philosophical significance of place. Doing so, he provides a distinct and productive approach to Heidegger as well as a new reading of other key figures—notably Kant, Aristotle, Gadamer, and Davidson, but also Benjamin, Arendt, and Camus. Malpas, expanding arguments he made in his earlier book Heidegger's Topology (MIT Press, 2007), discusses such topics as the role of place in philosophical thinking, the topological character of the transcendental, the convergence of Heideggerian topology with Davidsonian triangulation, the necessity of mortality in the possibility of human life, the role of materiality in the working of art, the significance of nostalgia, and the nature of philosophy as beginning in wonder. Philosophy, Malpas argues, begins in wonder and begins in place and the experience of place. The place of wonder, of philosophy, of questioning, he writes, is the very topos of thinking.