As the work of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Francois Jacob, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu demonstrates, Georges Canguilhem has exerted tremendous influence on the philosophy of science and French philosophy more generally. In Knowledge of Life, a book that spans twenty years of his essays and lectures, Canguilhem offers a series of ......
Recent neuroscience, in replacing the old model of the brain as a single centralized source of control, has emphasized "plasticity," the quality by which our brains develop and change throughout the course of our lives. Our brains exist as historical products, developing in interaction with themselves and with their surroundings. Hence there is a ......
The Animal That Therefore I Am is the long-awaited translation of the complete text of Jacques Derrida's ten-hour address to the 1997 Cerisy conference entitled "The Autobiographical Animal," the third of four such colloquia on his work. The book was assembled posthumously on the basis of two published sections, one written and recorded session, ......
In this lyrical meditation on listening, Jean-Luc Nancy examines sound in relation to the human body. How is listening different from hearing? What does listening entail? How does what is heard differ from what is seen? Can philosophy even address listening, ecouter, as opposed to entendre, which means both hearing and understanding? Unlike the ......
If anything marks the image, it is a deep ambivalence. Denounced as superficial, illusory, and groundless, images are at the same time attributed with exorbitant power and assigned a privileged relation to truth. Mistrusted by philosophy, forbidden and embraced by religions, manipulated as "spectacle" and proliferated in the media, images never ......
What does it mean to lead a moral life? In her first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice-one responsive to the need for critical autonomy and grounded in a new sense of the human subject. Butler takes as her starting point one's ability to answer the questions "What have I ......
The Cloud of Unknowing was the work of an unknown 14th-century English writer with a powerful message of God's unconditional love in the face of despair. Johnston's theological treatment of this and other works by the same writer makes a conscious comparison with Oriental ways of contemplation.
For over a thousand years, Eastern Christendom had as its center the second capital of the Roman Empire - Constantinople, the "New Rome", or Byzantium. The geographical division between the Eastern and Western Churches was only one manifestation of deeper rifts, characterized by a long history of conflicts, suspicions, and misunderstandings. ......
The Inner Eye of Love offers a contemporary theology of mysticism that locates it at the very center of authentic religious experience. It provides as well a practical guide for meditation even as it maps out the oceanic experience toward which meditation points. Johnston begins with the mystical tradition itself, its roots and origins, its ......
