The Phenomenology Of Love And Reading

The current revival of interest in ethics in literary criticism coincides fortuitously with a revival of interest in love in philosophy. The literary return to ethics also coincides with a spate of neuroscientific discoveries about cognition and emotion. But without a philosophical grounding this new work cannot speak convincingly about literature's relationship to our ethical lives. Jean-Luc Marion's articulation of a phenomenology of love provides this philosophical grounding. The Phenomenology of Love and Reading accepts Jean-Luc Marion's argument that love matters for who we are more than anything-more than cognition and more than being itself. Cassandra Falke shows how reading can strengthen our capacity to love by giving us practice in love ́s habits-attention, empathy, and a willingness to be overwhelmed. Confounding our expectations, literature equips us for the confounding events of love, which, Falke suggests, are not rare and fleeting, but rather constitute the most meaningful and durable part of our everyday life.

The current revival of interest in ethics in literary criticism coincides fortuitously with a revival of interest in love in philosophy. The literary return to ethics also coincides with a spate of neuroscientific discoveries about cognition and emotion. But without a philosophical grounding this new work cannot speak convincingly about literature's relationship to our ethical lives. Jean-Luc Marion's articulation of a phenomenology of love provides this philosophical grounding. The Phenomenology of Love and Reading accepts Jean-Luc Marion's argument that love matters for who we are more than anything-more than cognition and more than being itself. Cassandra Falke shows how reading can strengthen our capacity to love by giving us practice in love ́s habits-attention, empathy, and a willingness to be overwhelmed. Confounding our expectations, literature equips us for the confounding events of love, which, Falke suggests, are not rare and fleeting, but rather constitute the most meaningful and durable part of our everyday life.

Dante and the Other brings together noted and emerging Dante scholars with theologians, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists, bridging the Florentine's premodern world to today's postmodern context. Exploring how alterity has become a potent symbol in religion, philosophy, politics, and culture, this book will be of interest to many related fields. The book offers a thorough foundation in approaching Dante as proto-phenomenologist. It includes an informative review of literature, historical insight into Dante's poetics-toward-ineffability as alternative to modern scientism, a foray into science fiction, existential elaborations, phenomenological analyses of Inferno's Canto I, and applications to psychotherapy and qualitative research. It also contains a poem from an imagined Virgil retiring in Limbo, and a meditation on Dante's complicated relationship to homosexuality. Dante and the Other presents the mystical passion of apophatic spirituality, the millennia-spanning Augustinianism of radical orthodoxy, Levinas, Heidegger, and many others--all driven by Dante's Labors of Love. It is essential reading for Dante scholars, as well as readers interested in his works.

Ironically, the philosophy of love has long been neglected by philosophers, so-called “lovers of wisdom,” who would seemingly need to understand how one best becomes a lover. In Kierkegaard and the Philosophy of Love, Michael Strawser shows that the philosophy of love lies at the heart of Kierkegaard’s writings, as he argues that the central issue of Kierkegaard’s authorship can and should be understood more broadly as the task of becoming a lover. Strawser starts by identifying the questions (How should I love the other? Is self-love possible? How can I love God?) and themes (love’s immediacy, intentionality, unity, and eternity) that are central to the philosophy of love, and he develops a rich context that includes analyses of the conceptions of love found in Plato, Spinoza, and Hegel, as well as prominent contemporary thinkers. Strawser provides an original and wide-ranging analysis of Kierkegaard’s writings—from the early The Concept of Irony and Edifying Discourses to the late The Moment, while maintaining the prominence of Works of Love— to demonstrate how Kierkegaard’s writings on love are relevant to the emerging study of the philosophy of love today. The most unique perspective of this work, however, is Strawser’s argument that Kierkegaard’s writings on love are most fruitfully understood within the context of a phenomenology of love. In interpreting Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist of love, Strawser claims that it is not Husserl and Heidegger that we should look to for a connection in the first instance, but rather Max Scheler, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Emmanuel Levinas, and most importantly, Jean-Luc Marion, who for the most part center their thinking on the phenomenological nature of love. Based on an analysis of the works of these thinkers together with Kierkegaard’s writings, Strawser argues that Kierkegaard presents readers with a first phenomenology of love, a point of view that serves as a unifying perspective throughout this work while also pointing to areas for future scholarship. Overall, this work brings seemingly divergent perspectives into a unity brought about through a focus on love—which is, after all, a unifying force.

This is a new translation, with running commentary, of what is perhaps the most important short piece of Hegel's writing. The Preface to Hegel's first major work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, lays the groundwork for all his other writing by explaining what is most innovative about Hegel's philosophy. This new translation combines readability with maximum precision, breaking Hegel's long sentences and simplifying their often complex structure. At the same time, it is more faithful to the original than any previous translation. The heart of the book is the detailed commentary, supported by an introductory essay. Together they offer a lucid and elegant explanation of the text and elucidate difficult issues in Hegel, making his claims and intentions intelligible to the beginner while offering interesting and original insights to the scholar and advanced student. The commentary often goes beyond the particular phrase in the text to provide systematic context and explain related topics in Hegel and his predecessors (including Kant, Spinoza, and Aristotle, as well as Fichte, Schelling, Hölderlin, and others). The commentator refrains from playing down (as many interpreters do today) those aspects of Hegel's thought that are less acceptable in our time, and abstains from mixing his own philosophical preferences with his reading of Hegel's text. His approach is faithful to the historical Hegel while reconstructing Hegel's ideas within their own context.

In a new retelling of the romantic rationalist adventure of ideas that is Hegel's classic The Phenomenology of Spirit, Robert Brandom argues that when our self-conscious recognitive attitudes take Hegel's radical form of magnanimity and trust, we can overcome a troubled modernity and enter a new age of spirit.

Drawing on and developing the phenomenological work of figures such as Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler, Knowing by Heart: Loving as Participation and Critique provides an account of the various feelings and feeling‐states that pertain to matters of the heart. Anthony J. Steinbock’s work investigates the special kind of knowing that is revealed most profoundly through love. Knowing by Heart describes the movement of loving as a participation that bears on all beings. Eschewing the dichotomy of rationalism and sensibility that has dominated discussions of love and emotion, Steinbock understands the heart as a vast schema ranging from the deepest loving to affects and felt conditions. The book brings into focus the importance of a full‐bodied relational account of a normative critique based in emotion. From a phenomenological description of diverse feelings to the normativity of loving as the discernment of the heart, this work evaluates hating’s relation to loving. At the basis of all this is a phenomenological and philosophical anthropology in response to the basic question: In reality, who and what are we?