Western Philosophy

Bernard E. Harcourt challenges us to move beyond decades of philosophical detours and to harness critical thought to the need for action. In a time of increasing awareness of economic and social inequality, Harcourt calls on us to make society more equal and just. Only critical theory can guide us toward a more self-reflexive pursuit of justice. Charting a vision for political action and social transformation, Harcourt argues that instead of posing the question, "What is to be done?" we must now turn it back onto ourselves and ask, and answer, "What more am I to do?"

Critique and Praxis advocates for a new path forward that constantly challenges each and every one of us to ask what more we can do to realize a society based on equality and justice. Joining his decades of activism, social-justice litigation, and political engagement with his years of critical theory and philosophical work, Harcourt has written a magnum opus.

From one of the major figures of twentieth-century intellectual life, an incisive critique of faith and reason in the secular age

Originally published in 1958, Critique of Religion and Philosophy is Walter Kaufmann's luminous appraisal of the orthodoxies of his day. Although he was a philosopher first and foremost, Kaufmann was not immune to the wellsprings from which religion originates, considering it to be among the most vital and radical expressions of the human intellect. In this panoramic and uniquely personal book, he tests the limits of faith and reason in our secular age. Kaufmann discusses topics ranging from positivism and existentialism to language, scripture, and Eros, and shares his views on thinkers such as Plato, Aquinas, Kant, Bultmann, Niebuhr, and Freud. Challenging, playful, and disarmingly honest, Critique of Religion and Philosophy is as bold and provocative as when it was first published.

Exploring the risks, ambiguities, and unstable conceptual worlds of contemporary thought, Crossover Queries brings together the wide-ranging writings, across twenty years, of one of our most important philosophers.

Ranging from twentieth-century European philosophy--the thought of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Levinas, Janicaud, and others--to novels and artworks, music and dance, from traditional Jewish thought to Jain and
Buddhist metaphysics, Wyschogrod's work opens radically new vistas while remaining mindful that the philosopher stands within and is responsible to a philosophical legacy conditioned by the negative.

Rather than point to a Hegelian dialectic of overcoming negation or to a postmetaphysical exhaustion, Wyschogrod treats negative moments as opening novel spaces for thought. She probes both the desire for God and an ethics grounded in the interests of the other person, seeing these as moments both of crossing over and of negation. Alert to the catastrophes that have marked our times, she exposes the underlying logical structures of nihilatory forces that have been exerted to exterminate whole peoples. Analyzing the negations
of biological research and cultural images of mechanized and robotic bodies, she shows how they contest the body as lived in ordinary experience.

"Crossover Queries brings together important essays on a remarkable range of topics by one of our most insightful cultural critics. Commenting on philosophical and theological issues that have shaped the recent past as well as scientific and technological questions that will preoccupy us in the near future, Wyschogrod consistently alerts us to the urgency of problems whose importance few recognize. To avoid the challenge these essays pose is to avoid responsibility for a future that appears to be increasingly fragile."--Mark C. Taylor, Columbia University

"It was Wittgenstein's habit to record his thoughts in sequences of more or less closely related 'remarks' which he kept in notebooks throughout his life. The editor of this collection has gone through these notebooks in order to select those 'remarks' which deal with Wittgenstein's views abou the less technical issues in his philosophy. So here we have Wittgenstein's thoughts about religion, music, architecture, the nature of philosophy, the spirit of our times, genius, being Jewish, and so on. The work is a masterpiece by a mastermind."-Leonard Linsky

At the onset of modernity in the sixteenth century, literature and history were wrenched apart. Wlad Godzich, one of the animators of the turn toward literary theory, seeks to restore historical consciousness to criticism after a period of painful depression. In this sweeping study, he considers the emergence of the modern state, the institutions and disciplines of culture and learning, as well as the history of philosophy, the history of historiography, and literary history itself. He offers a powerful account of semiotics; an important critical perspective on narratology; a profound discussion of deconstruction; and many brief, practical demonstrations of why Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger remain essential resources for contemporary critical thought.

The culture of literacy is on the wane, Godzich argues. Throughout the modern period, language has been the institution that provided the condition of possibility for all other institutions, from university to church to state. But the pervasive crisis of meaning we now experience is the result of a shift in the modes of production of knowledge. The culture of literacy has been faced with transformations it cannot accommodate, and the existing organization of knowledge has been challenged. By wedding literature to a reflective practice of history, Godzich leads us toward a critique of political reason, and a profound sense of how postmodernity can overcome by deftly sidestepping the modern. This book will bring to a wider audience the work of a writer who is recognized as one of the most commanding figures of his generation for range, learning, and capacity for innovation.

Everyone's a cynic, yet few will admit it. Today's cynics excuse themselves half-heartedly--"I hate to be a cynic, but...--before making their pronouncements. Narrowly opportunistic, always on the take, contemporary cynicism has nothing positive to contribute. The Cynicism of the ancient Greeks, however, was very different. This Cynicism was a marginal philosophy practiced by a small band of eccentrics. Bold and shameless, it was committed to transforming the values on which civilization depends. In this volume of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Ansgar Allen charts the long history of cynicism, from the "fearless speech" of Greek Cynics in the fourth century BCE to the contemporary cynic's lack of social and political convictions.

Allen describes ancient Cynicism as an improvised philosophy and a way of life disposed to scandalize contemporaries, subjecting their cultural commitments to derision. He chronicles the subsequent "purification" of Cynicism by the Stoics; Renaissance and Enlightenment appropriations of Cynicism, drawing on the writings of Shakespeare, Rabelais, Rousseau, de Sade, and others; and the transition from Cynicism (the philosophy) to cynicism (the modern attitude), exploring contemporary cynicism from the perspectives of its leftist, liberal, and conservative critics. Finally, he considers the possibility of a radical cynicism that admits and affirms the danger it poses to contemporary society.

In The Death Algorithm and Other Digital Dilemmas, Roberto Simanowski wonders if we are on the brink of a society that views social, political, and ethical challenges as technological problems that can be fixed with the right algorithm, the best data, or the fastest computer. For example, the "death algorithm " is programmed into a driverless car to decide, in an emergency, whether to plow into a group of pedestrians, a mother and child, or a brick wall. Can such life-and-death decisions no longer be left to the individual human?

In these incisive essays, Simanowski asks us to consider what it means to be living in a time when the president of the United States declares the mainstream media to be an enemy of the people--while Facebook transforms the people into the enemy of mainstream media. Simanowski describes smartphone zombies (or "smombies") who remove themselves from the physical world to the parallel universe of social media networks; calls on Adorno to help parse Trump's tweeting; considers transmedia cannibalism, as written text is transformed into a postliterate object; compares the economic and social effects of the sharing economy to a sixteen-wheeler running over a plastic bottle on the road; and explains why philosophy mat become the most important element in the automotive and technology industries.

Of central importance in this second volume is Kant's explicit justification of the death penalty in the Metaphysics of Morals. Thoroughly deconstructing Kant's position--which holds the death penalty as exemplary of the eye-for-an-eye Talionic law--Derrida exposes numerous damning contradictions and exceptions. Keeping the current death penalty in the United States in view, he further explores the "anesthesial logic" he analyzed in volume one, addressing the themes of cruelty and pain through texts by Robespierre and Freud, reading Heidegger, and--in a fascinating, improvised final session--the nineteenth-century Spanish Catholic thinker Donoso Cortés. Ultimately, Derrida shows that the rationality of the death penalty as represented by Kant involves an imposition of knowledge and calculability on a fundamental condition of non-knowledge--that we don't otherwise know what or when our deaths will be. In this way, the death penalty acts out a phantasm of mastery over one's own death.

Derrida's thoughts arrive at a particular moment in history: when the death penalty in the United States is the closest it has ever been to abolition, and yet when the arguments on all sides are as confused as ever. His powerful analysis will prove to be a paramount contribution to this debate as well as a lasting entry in his celebrated oeuvre.

A renowned political philosopher updates his classic book on the American political tradition to address the perils democracy confronts today.

The 1990s were a heady time. The Cold War had ended, and America's version of liberal capitalism seemed triumphant. And yet, amid the peace and prosperity, anxieties about the project of self-government could be glimpsed beneath the surface.

So argued Michael Sandel, in his influential and widely debated book Democracy's Discontent, published in 1996. The market faith was eroding the common life. A rising sense of disempowerment was likely to provoke backlash, he wrote, from those who would "shore up borders, harden the distinction between insiders and outsiders, and promise a politics to 'take back our culture and take back our country, ' to 'restore our sovereignty' with a vengeance."

Now, a quarter century later, Sandel updates his classic work for an age when democracy's discontent has hardened into a country divided against itself. In this new edition, he extends his account of America's civic struggles from the 1990s to the present. He shows how Democrats and Republicans alike embraced a version of finance-driven globalization that created a society of winners and losers and fueled the toxic politics of our time.

In a work celebrated when first published as "a remarkable fusion of philosophical and historical scholarship" (Alan Brinkley), Sandel recalls moments in the American past when the country found ways to hold economic power to democratic account. To reinvigorate democracy, Sandel argues in a stirring new epilogue, we need to reconfigure the economy and empower citizens as participants in a shared public life.

In this classic work, best-selling author Harry Frankfurt provides a compelling analysis of the question that not only lies at the heart of Descartes's Meditations, but also constitutes the central preoccupation of modern philosophy: on what basis can reason claim to provide any justification for the truth of our beliefs? Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen provides an ingenious account of Descartes's defense of reason against his own famously skeptical doubts that he might be a madman, dreaming, or, worse yet, deceived by an evil demon into believing falsely.

Frankfurt's masterful and imaginative reading of Descartes's seminal work not only stands the test of time; one imagines Descartes himself nodding in agreement.