• Share this:

New in Asian Studies:

Our series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture provides a broad consideration of Chinese philosophy and culture, encompassing both historical sinological research and more purely philosophical work. It covers material from early China to the modern period, and includes philosophy, religion, literature, the arts, and culture generally. 

Freedom's Frailty: Self-Realization in the Neo-Daoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang's Zhuangzi, by Christine Abigail L. Tan, draws on Guo Xiang's commentary on the Zhuangzi to construct an account of freedom that is both metaphysical and political.

"The greatest strength of this book is that it tries to bridge the divide between Eastern and Western philosophy by engaging the thought of an understudied early medieval thinker, Guo Xiang, in response to a philosophical problem being discussed in the modern Anglophone world—namely, the question of freedom. The author argues that Guo's conceptions can help to formulate a definition of freedom that goes beyond the binary of 'freedom from'/ 'freedom to,' which is the core of relevant discussions in the Anglophone world, by proposing a 'freedom in,' or what the author calls 'dependence-based autonomy.'" — Friederike Assandri, University of Leipzig

Narrative Devices in the Shiji: Retelling the Past, by Lei Yang, provides a new model for reading the Shiji and other early Chinese historical texts.

"This book is a must-read for both students of early Chinese empires and Chinese literature. In addition to revising the common understanding of early Chinese historiography, it significantly contributes to the history of books in the Chinese context. The author brilliantly shows how Sima Qian's work revolutionized the transmission of historical knowledge, employing various rhetorical and structural devices to transform the laundry list of historical facts in annals into a coherent narrative. As the book powerfully demonstrates, Sima Qian's work imposed a new structure on raw materials, which indicates that authorship emerged and a closed text appeared for the first time in Chinese history." — Liang Cai, author of Witchcraft and the Rise of the First Confucian Empire

New in Paper in Asian Studies:

The Ethnography of Tantra: Textures and Contexts of Living Tantric Traditions, edited by Carola E. Lorea & Rohit Singh, presents Tantra from an ethnographic vantage point, through a series of case studies grounded in diverse settings across contemporary Asia.

"This is a superb and truly refreshing contribution to the study of Tantra and religion more broadly. As the volume makes clear, Tantric studies have tended to focus on texts, history, and esoteric practices without contextualizing these in everyday life. By focusing on ethnography, this volume is an excellent intervention to those more abstract, textual, historical, idealized, exotified, and often problematic depictions of Tantra." — Lisa I. Knight, author of Contradictory Lives: Baul Women in India and Bangladesh

New in Religion:

A History of Mysticism, by Richard H. Jones, is a history of the world’s mystical traditions.

"This is a very useful, comprehensive, introductory study of mystical experience across the world. Jones has covered all the major mystical traditions in a style that is clear and readable for undergraduates and other beginning students of this subject." — Steven T. Katz, Boston University

New in Philosophy:

Nietzsche and Politicized Identities, edited by Rebecca Bamford & Allison Merrick, explores to what extent Nietzsche's thought can aid us in understanding politicized identities.

"By bringing together thinkers interested in feminism, Black studies, (dis)ability studies, decolonial philosophy, and those writing about identity more broadly in Nietzsche, Nietzsche and Politicized Identities provides an important and timely resource for scholars and students." — Willow Verkerk, author of Nietzsche and Friendship

New in Paper in Philosophy and Literature:

One of the Press’s premier series, Contemporary Continental Philosophy, contains an extensive collection of works in continental philosophy and features monographs from top scholars such as David Farrell Krell, John Sallis, Charles E. Scott, Calvin Schrag, Jacques Taminiaux, and Joan Stambaugh, as well as rising stars in the field.

The Politics of Orientation: Deleuze Meets Luhmann, by Hannah Richter, interlinks Gilles Deleuze's critical philosophy with Niklas Luhmann's systems theory to unpack contemporary democratic politics as a contest for complexity-reducing orientation in sense.

"This is an exciting contribution to the literature that does the hard job of both rethinking Deleuze's and Luhmann's oeuvres and bringing them into conversation with one another constructively on a surprising number of topics. The use of this constellation to develop a politics of orientation ensures that the text goes beyond a comparative analysis to offer an original contribution to political theory." — Gavin Rae, author of Post-Structural Agency: The Subject in Twentieth-Century Theory

The series in American Philosophy and Cultural Thought is a home for exegetical and exploratory philosophical work on traditions, movements, and thinkers that have enlivened intellectual life and culture in North America, regardless of origin, from pre-colonial to contemporary times.

Action, Embodied Mind, and Life World: Focusing at the Existential Level, by Ralph D. Ellis, combines phenomenology with the "enactivist" approach to consciousness theory and recent emotion research to explore the way self-motivated action plans shape selective attention, exploration, and ultimately the mind's interpretation of reality - in philosophy, psychology, cultural awareness, and our personal lives.

"This is a further step in the development of a new understanding of meaning, not derived from language and concepts, but from the actual process of living. This is of more than academic interest: it is at the root of many of today's most pressing problems. The discussions of the authoritarian personality, enactivism, and denials of intrinsic meaning are particularly interesting." — Rob Parker, the International Focusing Institute

The Philosophy and Race series tackles abstract questions like the concept of race and epistemological foundations of racism, concrete investigations of subjects ranging from the incarceration of political activists of color to race and nationality in the post-9/11 United States, and studies of how philosophers such as Nietzsche and Sartre can be read within a framework of race.

Phenomenology in an African Context: Contributions and Challenges, edited by Abraham Olivier, M. John Lamola, and Justin Sands, is the first edited collection to offer a systematic introduction to African phenomenology.

"In Africa, as in other formerly colonized areas of the world, the field of indigenous philosophy has been obscured by an imperial relation with Western philosophy. Subfields such as ontology, metaphysics, and epistemology have been eclipsed by political and socioeconomic philosophy. Among the major strengths of this book is the effective way in which it brings African phenomenology out from under this double cloud of invisibility." — Paget Henry, author of Shouldering Antigua and Barbuda: The Life of V. C. Bird

"This volume usefully sees phenomenology not just as a foreign philosophical method but also as a way of understanding that African philosophy has been engaging in and which it has something to contribute to." — Bruce B. Janz, author of African Philosophy and Enactivist Cognition: The Space of Thought

Our series Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature focuses on the overlap between contemporary continental philosophy and the adjacent fields of rhetoric, literary theory, and psychoanalysis, with an emphasis on how these intersections contribute to cultural theory.

Struck by Apollo: Hölderlin's Journeys to Bordeaux and Back and Beyond, by David Farrell Krell, retraces Hölderlin's journeys to Bordeaux and back in 1801–02, explaining why they are turning points in the great poet's life.

"Traveling with a German neighbor affectionally called 'Joe,' Krell reconstructs and repeats Hölderlin's legendary trip from Nürtingen to Bordeaux and back again. Struck by Apollo is what I would call a philosophical picaresque—a journey that prompts biographical, philosophical, and literary musings, as well as educated speculations and profound reflections. For lovers of Hölderlin, it is a sheer delight." — Jason M. Wirth, author of Schelling's Practice of the Wild: Time, Art, Imagination

One of the most exciting trends in scholarship on the nineteenth century is the tendency to redraw the boundaries of its chronological, national, and disciplinary limits. The series Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century publishes books that are open to such boundary transgressions, including not only comparative studies between the United States and Europe, but also books that extend the “Long Nineteenth Century” back in time to the mid–seventeen hundreds and forward through the fin de siècle and its connections to twentieth-century modernism.

Romantic Immanence: Interventions in Alterity, 1780–1840, by Elizabeth A. Fay, offers a new, Spinozist framework for understanding encounters with otherness in Romantic literature as experiences of immanence.

"Fay brings together two much discussed topics—alterity and immanence—to reveal new ways of thinking about both. Especially welcome is the book's interest in turning away from alterity as necessarily bound with violence and abnegation. Romantic Immanence turns instead toward alterity as a joyful revelation the Romantics used to support major reconsiderations of ethics and ethical action." — Jonathan Crimmins, author of The Romantic Historicism to Come

Happy reading and come back to see what's new next month!