Crises in Continental Philosophy

Edited by Arleen B. Dallery & Charles E. Scott
With P. Holley Roberts

Subjects: Phenomenology
Series: SUNY series, Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
Paperback : 9780791404201, 283 pages, October 1990
Hardcover : 9780791404195, 283 pages, October 1990

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Table of contents

Introduction

PART I. HUSSERL'S NARRATIVE OF THE CRISIS OF REASON AND THE LIFE-WORLD

1. Rudolf Bernet, Husserl's Concept of the World

2. R. Philip Buckley, A Critique of Husserl's Notion of Crisis

3. J. Claude Evans, The Myth of Absolute Consciousness

PART 2. THE POSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY AS SOCIAL CRITIQUE

4. Charles Harvey, Husserl's Complex Concept of the Self and the Possibility of Social Criticism

5. Kenneth Baynes, Crisis and Life-World in Husserl and Habermas

6. Linda Alcoff, Feminist Politics and Foucault: The Limits to a Collaboration

7. Thomas R. Thorp, Derrida and Habermas on the Subject of Political Philosophy

PART 3. SUBJECTION TO LANGUAGE, POWER, AND HISTORY

8. Michael Clifford, Dasein and the Analytic of Finitude

9. Ladelle McWhorter, Foucault's Analytics of Power

10. Jane Kelley Rodeheffer, The Call of Conscience and the Call of Language: Reflections on a Movement in Heidegger's Thinking

PART 4. RETRIEVAL OF CRISES

11. Walter A. Brogan, Heidegger and Aristotle: Dasein and the Question of Practical Life

12. Dennis J. Schmidt, Economies of Production: Heidegger and Aristotle on Physics and Techne

13. Thomas A. Davis, The Deinon of Yielding at the End of Metaphysics

14. Jane Love, Appetite and Violability: Questioning a Platonic Metaphor

PART 5. SHATTERING IDENTITIES

15. Dorothea Olkowski, Monstrous Reflection: Sade and Masoch--Rewriting the History of Reason

16. Iris Marion Young, Abjection and Oppression: Dynamics of Unconscious Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia

17. Richard P. Boothby, Lacanian Castration: Body-Image and Signification in Psychoanalysis

18. Gayle L. Ormiston, Postmodern Differends

Notes

Contributors

Description

This book punctuates the moments of crisis in continental thought from the foundational crisis of reason in Husserl's call for a rigorous science of phenomenology to the current crisis of postmodernism and its rejection of Husserl's metanarrative of history and rationality. The mediating links between these moments is the centrality of the epochal history of Being, the power of cultural and disciplinary practices, and the dispersal of meaning in the post-Husserlian and post-subjective philosophies of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and others.

Included here are the thoughts of leading scholars who critically discuss Husserl's analysis of the crisis of Western thought and the importance of the concepts of "world" in Husserl's early writings. The authors analyze the deprivileging of philosophy as social critique through the text of Husserl, Habermas, Foucault, and recent feminist theory. They examine the end of the epistemological and morally autonomous subject in continental thought. Together, these thoughts articulate multiple points or moments of crisis without cure or end.

Arleen B. Dallery is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at LaSalle University. Charles E. Scott is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. P. Holley Roberts is currently pursuing a Ph. D. in Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.