A Language In Which To Dwell A Dwelling From Which To Speak

The works of Heidegger are perhaps the most influential in contemporary philosophy, yet they are not only least readily understood, but even what ‘understanding’ means in this context is usually overlooked. This book addresses Heidegger’s dense prose seeking an understanding of ‘language’ which leads to a journey that allows the emergence of the terrain revealed when travelling with the philosopher. This book offers an experience of walking with Heidegger when considering ‘language’, but refuses a conceptual analysis of the text. As such, it offers a profound experience, and yet refuses to reduce Heidegger’s texts to simple formulae. The texts used include Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time, and many of his essays and lectures, as well as drawing on the writings of other thinkers.

Philosophy of Creativity is a prolegomenon in the field of philosophical studies of creativity. The book sets forth a cross and multi-cultural point of view, emphasizing points of agreement between seminal thinkers and living traditions over the whole earth. The seven chapters turn about the philosophical and spiritual notion of creativity. Creativity is presented as metaparadigm, or the philosophical way that critiques and transcends paradigms, while intrepreting them in light of this novel meta-paradigmatic perspective. This work draws important insights from major philosophical traditions in both the Orient and the Western world such as Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Pragmatism, Existentialism, Phenomenology, and Process Philosophy.

“Education is not an art of putting sight into the eye that can already see, but one of turning the eye towards the proper gaze of Being. That’s what must be managed!” Plato insists. This claim is the take-off point for Eduardo Duarte’s meditations on the metaphysics and ontology of teaching and learning. In Being and Learning he offers an account of learning as an attunement with Being’s dynamic presencing and unconcealment, which Duarte explores as the capacity to respond and attend to the matter that stands before us, or, in Arendtian terms, to love the world, and to be with others in this world. This book of ‘poetic thinking’ is a chronicle of Duarte’s ongoing exploration of the question of Being, a philosophical journey that has been guided primarily through a conversation with Heidegger, and which also includes the voices of Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, as well Lao Tzu and the Buddha, among others. In Being and Learning, Duarte undertakes a ‘phenomenology of the original’: a writing that consciously and conspicuously interrupts the discursive field of work in philosophy of education. As the late Reiner Schurmann described this method: “it recalls the ancient beginnings and it anticipates a new beginning, the possible rise of a new economy among things, words and actions.” Being and Learning is a work of parrhesia: a composition of free thought that disrupts the conventional practice of philosophy of education, and thereby open up gaps and spaces of possibility in the arrangement of words, concepts, and ideas in the field. With this work Eduardo Duarte is initiating new pathways of thinking about education.

Challenging mainstream architecture’s understandings of place, this book offers an illuminating clarification that allows the idea’s centrality, in all aspects of everyday design thinking, to be rediscovered or considered for the first time. Rigorous but not dense, practical but not trivialising, the book unfolds on three fronts. First, it clearly frames the pertinent aspects of topology—the philosophy of place—importantly differentiating two concepts that architecture regularly conflates: place and space. Second, it rejects the ubiquitous notion that architecture “makes place” and, instead, reasons that place is what makes architecture and the built environment possible; that place “calls” for and to architecture; and that architecture is thus invited to “listen” and respond. Finally, it turns to the matter of designing responses that result not just in more places of architecture (demanding little of design), nor merely in architecture with some “sense of place” (demanding little more), but, rising above those, responses that constitute an architecture of place (demanding the greatest vigilance but offering the utmost freedom). Opening up a term regarded as so common that its meaning is seldom considered, the author reveals the actual depth and richness of place, its innateness to architecture, and its essentiality to practitioners, clients, educators, and students—including those in all spatial disciplines.

Tune in to HGTV, visit your local bookstore's magazine section, or flip to the 'Homes' section of your weekend newspaper, and it becomes clear: domestic spaces play an immense role in our cultural consciousness. The Domestic Space Reader addresses our collective fascination with houses and homes by providing the first comprehensive survey of the concept across time, cultures, and disciplines. This pioneering anthology, which is ideal for students and general readers, features writing by key scholars, thinkers, and writers including Gaston Bachelard, Mary Douglas, Le Corbusier, Homi Bhabha, Henri Lefebvre, Mrs. Beeton, Ma Thanegi, Diana Fuss, Beatriz Colomina, and Edith Wharton. Among the many engaging topics explored are: the impact of domestic technologies on family life; the relationship between religion and the home; nomadic peoples and housing; domestic spaces in art and literature; and the history of the bedroom, the kitchen, and the bathroom. The Domestic Space Reader demonstrates how discussions of domestic spaces can help us better understand our inner lives and challenge our perceptions of life in particular times and places.

Few philosophers held greater fascination for Jacques Derrida than Martin Heidegger, and in this book we get an extended look at Derrida’s first real encounters with him. Delivered over nine sessions in 1964 and 1965 at the École Normale Supérieure, these lectures offer a glimpse of the young Derrida first coming to terms with the German philosopher and his magnum opus, Being and Time. They provide not only crucial insight into the gestation of some of Derrida’s primary conceptual concerns—indeed, it is here that he first uses, with some hesitation, the word “deconstruction”—but an analysis of Being and Time that is of extraordinary value to readers of Heidegger or anyone interested in modern philosophy. Derrida performs an almost surgical reading of the notoriously difficult text, marrying pedagogical clarity with patient rigor and acting as a lucid guide through the thickets of Heidegger’s prose. At this time in intellectual history, Heidegger was still somewhat unfamiliar to French readers, and Being and Time had only been partially translated into French. Here Derrida mostly uses his own translations, giving his own reading of Heidegger that directly challenges the French existential reception initiated earlier by Sartre. He focuses especially on Heidegger’s Destruktion (which Derrida would translate both into “solicitation” and “deconstruction”) of the history of ontology, and indeed of ontology as such, concentrating on passages that call for a rethinking of the place of history in the question of being, and developing a radical account of the place of metaphoricity in Heidegger’s thinking. This is a rare window onto Derrida’s formative years, and in it we can already see the philosopher we’ve come to recognize—one characterized by a bravura of exegesis and an inventiveness of thought that are particularly and singularly his.