The Logos of the Sensible World

The Logos of the Sensible World
Author: John Sallis
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2019-03-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0253040485

This volume of the collected writings of John Sallis presents a two-semester lecture course on Maurice Merleau-Ponty given at Duquesne University from 1970 to 1971. Devoted primarily to a close reading of the French philosopher's magnum opus, Phenomenology of Perception, the course begins with a detailed analysis of The Structure of Behavior. The central topics considered in the lectures include the functions of the phenomenological body; beyond realism and idealism; the structures of the lived world; spatiality, temporality, language, sexuality; and perception and knowledge. Sallis illuminates Merleau-Ponty's first two works and offers a thread to follow through developments in his later essays. Merleau-Ponty's notion of the primacy of perception and his claim that "the end of a philosophy is the account of its beginning" are woven throughout the lectures. For Sallis's part, these lectures are foundational for his extended engagement with Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible, which was published in Sallis's Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings.

The Logos of the Living World

The Logos of the Living World
Author: Louise Westling
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2013-10-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0823255670

Today we urgently need to reevaluate the human place in the world in relation to other animals. This book puts Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy into dialogue with literature, evolutionary biology, and animal studies. In a radical departure from most critical animal studies, it argues for evolutionary continuity between human cultural and linguistic behaviors and the semiotic activities of other animals. In his late work, Derrida complained of philosophers who denied that animals possessed such faculties, but he never investigated the wealth of scientific studies of actual animal behavior. Most animal studies theorists still fail to do this. Yet more than fifty years ago, Merleau-Ponty carefully examined the philosophical consequences of scientific animal studies, with profound implications for human language and culture. For him, “animality is the logos of the sensible world: an incorporated meaning.” Human being is inseparable from animality. This book differs from other studies of Merleau-Ponty by emphasizing his lifelong attention to science. It shows how his attention to evolutionary biology and ethology anticipated recent studies of animal cognition, culture, and communication.

The Sensible World and the World of Expression

The Sensible World and the World of Expression
Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2020-02-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0810141426

The Sensible World and the World of Expression presents the lecture notes for a course taught by Maurice Marleau-Ponty, a central figure of phenomenological philosophy, at a key point in his career.

The Creation of Man

The Creation of Man
Author: Thomas H. Tobin SJ
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2023-12-07
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1666786225

This monograph, a revised form of a 1980 Harvard dissertation, is a study of Philo's interpretation of the creation of man in Genesis 1-3, and specifically in 1:27 and 2:7. Tobin approaches this study with two particular questions: (1) what were the exegetical traditions available to Philo and what were Philo's own developments and contributions?; and (2) what was the philosophical milieu of the period in Alexandria and how did this influence both the traditions and their use by Philo? Very early in the book Tobin establishes the two basic criteria which he will use in determining which interpretations are Philo's own and which are those of his predecessors. Pre-Philonic interpretations are (1) those which Philo tells us directly are not his own; and (2) those which clash with a position which spans the entire Philonic corpus and thus can be identified as Philo's own.

John and Philosophy

John and Philosophy
Author: Troels Engberg-Pedersen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2017-02-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0192511041

John and Philosophy: A New Reading of the Fourth Gospel offers a Stoic reading of the Fourth Gospel, especially its cosmology, epistemology, and ethics. It works through the gospel in narrative sequence providing a 'philosophical narrative reading'. In each section of the gospel Troels Engberg-Pedersen raises discusses philosophical questions. He compares John with Paul (in philosophy) and Mark (in narrative) to offer a new reading of the transmitted text of the Fourth Gospel. Of these two profiles, the narrative one is strongly influenced by the literary critical paradigm. Moreover, by attending carefully to a number of narratological features, one may come to see that the transmitted text in fact hangs together much more coherently than scholarship has been willing to see. The other profile is specifically philosophical. Scholarship has been well aware that the Fourth Gospel has what one might call a philosophical dimension. Engberg-Pedersen shows that throughout the Gospel contemporary Stoicism, works better to illuminate the text. This pertains to the basic cosmology (and cosmogony) that is reflected in the text, to the epistemology that underlies a central theme in it regarding different types of belief in Jesus, to the ethics that is introduced fairly late in the text when Jesus describes how the disciples should live once he has himself gone away from them, and more.

The Moral Psychology of Clement of Alexandria

The Moral Psychology of Clement of Alexandria
Author: Kathleen Gibbons
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2016-10-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1315511487

In The Moral Psychology of Clement of Alexandria, Kathleen Gibbons proposes a new approach to Clement’s moral philosophy and explores how his construction of Christianity’s relationship with Jewishness informed, and was informed by, his philosophical project. As one of the earliest Christian philosophers, Clement’s work has alternatively been treated as important for understanding the history of relations between Christianity and Judaism and between Christianity and pagan philosophy. This study argues that an adequate examination of his significance for the one requires an adequate examination of his significance for the other. While the ancient claim that the writings of Moses were read by the philosophical schools was found in Jewish, Christian, and pagan authors, Gibbons demonstrates that Clement’s use of this claim shapes not only his justification of his authorial project, but also his philosophical argumentation. In explaining what he took to be the cosmological, metaphysical, and ethical implications of the doctrine that the supreme God is a lawgiver, Clement provided the theoretical justifications for his views on a range of issues that included martyrdom, sexual asceticism, the status of the law of Moses, and the relationship between divine providence and human autonomy. By contextualizing Clement’s discussions of volition against wider Greco-Roman debates about self-determination, it becomes possible to reinterpret the invocation of “free will” in early Christian heresiological discourse as part of a larger dispute about what human autonomy requires.

The Enneads of Plotinus, Volume 1

The Enneads of Plotinus, Volume 1
Author: Paul Kalligas
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 729
Release: 2014-10-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 140085251X

The first volume in a landmark commentary on an important and influential work of ancient philosophy This is the first volume of a groundbreaking commentary on one of the most important works of ancient philosophy, the Enneads of Plotinus—a text that formed the basis of Neoplatonism and had a deep influence on early Christian thought and medieval and Renaissance philosophy. This volume covers the first three of the six Enneads, as well as Porphyry's Life of Plotinus, a document in which Plotinus’s student—the collector and arranger of the Enneads—introduces the philosopher and his work. A landmark contribution to modern Plotinus scholarship, Paul Kalligas’s commentary is the most detailed and extensive ever written for the whole of the Enneads. For each of the treatises in the first three Enneads, Kalligas provides a brief introduction that presents the philosophical background against which Plotinus’s contribution can be assessed; a synopsis giving the main lines and the articulation of the argument; and a running commentary placing Plotinus’s thought in its intellectual context and making evident the systematic association of its various parts with each other.