ASCP Members' Books 2017

Paolo Diego Bubbio, God and the Self in Hegel: Beyond Subjectivism (SUNY: 2017)

God and the Self in Hegel proposes a reconstruction of Hegel’s conception of God and analyzes the significance of this reading for Hegel’s idealistic metaphysics. Paolo Diego Bubbio argues that in Hegel’s view, subjectivism—the tenet that there is no underlying “true” reality that exists independently of the activity of the cognitive agent—can be avoided, and content can be restored to religion, only to the extent that God is understood in God’s relation to human beings, and human beings are understood in their relation to God. Focusing on traditional problems in theology and the philosophy of religion, such as the ontological argument for the existence of God, the Trinity, and the “death of God,” Bubbio shows the relevance of Hegel’s view of religion and God for his broader philosophical strategy. In this account, as a response to the fundamental Kantian challenge of how to conceive the mind-world relation without setting mind over and against the world, Hegel has found a way of overcoming subjectivism in both philosophy and religion.

http://www.sunypress.edu/p-6360-god-and-the-self-in-hegel.aspx

Laura D'Olimpio, Media and Moral Education: a philosophy of critical engagement (Routledge: 2017)

Media and Moral Education demonstrates that the study of philosophy can be used to enhance critical thinking skills, which are sorely needed in today’s technological age. It addresses the current oversight of the educational environment not keeping pace with rapid advances in technology, despite the fact that educating students to engage critically and compassionately with others via online media is of the utmost importance. 

D’Olimpio claims that philosophical thinking skills support the adoption of an attitude she calls critical perspectivism, which she applies in the book to international multimedia examples. The author also suggests that the Community of Inquiry – a pedagogy practised by advocates of Philosophy for Children – creates a space in which participants can practise being critically perspectival, and can be conducted with all age levels in a classroom or public setting, making it beneficial in shaping democratic and discerning citizens. 

https://www.routledge.com/Media-and-Moral-Education-A-Philosophy-of-Critical-Engagement/DOlimpio/p/book/9781138291423

Christian R. Gelder  &  Robert Boncardo (eds.) Mallarmé: Rancière, Milner, Badiou (Rowman and Littlefield: 2017)

From the post-War writings of Sartre and Blanchot to the post-structuralism of Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva, French philosophers have consistently debated the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, almost as a rite of passage. Alain Badiou, Jean-Claude Milner and Jacques Rancière — three of the most important philosophers alive today — are no exception, having written extensively about the poet since the 1960s and 70s up until today. This book contains a series of interviews with these three figures on Mallarmé, as well as an extended introduction that places their thought on literature into dialogue. Speaking about their personal and philosophical relationships with each other, on methods of reading, on poetry and politics, and poetry and mathematics, each philosopher reflects on their life-long engagement with Mallarmé, as well as on the different, often incommensurable, images of the poet their philosophies have generated. As Rancière, Milner and Badiou point to the past importance and future directions Mallarmé gives to thought, these interviews lend credence to Barthes’ remark that “all we can do is repeat Mallarmé – and it is good that we do so”.

https://www.amazon.com/Mallarm%C3%A9-Ranciere-Insolubilia-Contemporary-Philosophy/dp/1786603101

Alex Ling, Badiou Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts (I.B. Tauris: 2017)

He has been regarded with suspicion by some, as an anti-postmodernist who dared to write about unfashionable concepts such as truth and meaning. But in recent years, the philosopher Alain Badiou has risen in prominence, pioneering new ways to produce, conceptualise and discover art. Badiou Reframed is an original book about an original thinker which applies – for the first time – Badiou's philosophy to the visual arts. The six central concepts of this philosophy – 'being and appearing', 'event and subject' and 'truth and ethics' – are elucidated through detailed analysis of a range of visual artworks, including Marcel Duchamp's readymades, the abstract paintings of Kazimir Malevich and Mark Rothko, Banksy's contemporary street art, the sculpture of Alberto Giacometti, Stéphane Mallarmé’s visual poetry and Victor Fleming’s classic film The Wizard of Oz. In focusing on Badiou's critical relationship with the visual arts, Alex Ling reinterprets and represents not only the man, but art itself.

view book at I.B.Tauris

Catherine Mills, Biopolitics (Routledge: 2018)

The concept of biopolitics has been one of the most important and widely used in recent years in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. In Biopolitics, Mills provides a wide-ranging and insightful introduction to the field of biopolitical studies. The first part of the book provides a much-needed philosophical introduction to key theoretical approaches to the concept in contemporary usage. This includes discussions of the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Roberto Esposito, and Antonio Negri. In the second part of the book, Mills discusses various topics across the categories of politics, life and subjectivity. These include questions of sovereignty and governmentality, violence, rights, technology, reproduction, race, and sexual difference. 

This book will be an indispensable guide for those wishing to gain an understanding of the central theories and issues in biopolitical studies. For those already working with the concept of biopolitics, it provides challenging and provocative insights and argues for a groundbreaking reorientation of the field. 

https://www.routledge.com/Biopolitics/Mills/p/book/9781844656059

Helen Ngo, The Habits of Racism A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment (Lexington Books: 2017)

The Habits of Racism examines some of the complex questions raised by the phenomenon and experience of racism. Helen Ngo first draws on the resources of Merleau-Ponty to argue that the conceptual reworking of habit as bodily orientation helps to identify the more subtle but fundamental workings of racism; to catch its insidious, gestural expressions, as well as its habitual modes of racialized perception. Racism, on this account, is equally expressed through bodily habits, and this in turn raises important ethical questions regarding the responsibility for one's racist habits. 

Ngo considers what the lived experience of racism and racialization teaches about the nature of the embodied and socially-situated being, arguing that racialized embodiment problematizes and extends existing accounts of general embodied experience, which calls into question dominant paradigms of the “self” in philosophy, as coherent, fluid, and synchronous. Drawing on thinkers such as Fanon, she argues that the racialized body is “in front of itself” and “uncanny” (in the Heideggerian senses of “strange” and “not-at-home”), while exploring the phenomenological and existential implications of this disorientation and displacement.

Finally, she returns to the visual register to take up the question of “objectification” in racism and racialization. While she critically examines the subject-object ontology presupposed by Sartre's account of “the gaze” (le regard), recalling that all embodied being is always already relational and co-constituting, drawing on Merleau-Ponty's concept of the intertwining, she argues that racialized embodiment reveals to us the ontological violence of racism—not a merely violation of one's subjectivity as commonly claimed, but also a violation of one's intersubjectivity.

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498534642/The-Habits-of-Racism-A-Phenomenology-of-Racism-and-Racialized-Embodiment

Steven G. Ogden, The Church, Authority, and Foucault: Imagining the Church as an Open Space of Freedom (Routledge: 2017)

The Church, Authority, and Foucault addresses the problem of the Church's enmeshment with sovereign power, which can lead to marginalization. Breaking new ground, Ogden uses Foucault’s approach to power and knowledge to interpret the church leader's significance as the guardian of knowledge. This can become privileged knowledge, under the spell of sovereign power, and with the complicity of clergy and laity in search of sovereigns. Inevitably, such a culture leads to a sense of entitlement for leaders and conformity for followers. All in the name of obedience.

The Church needs to change in order to fulfil its vocation. Instead of a monarchy, what about Church as an open space of freedom? This book, then, is a theological enterprise which cultivates practices of freedom for the sake of the other. This involves thinking differently by exploring catalysts for change, which include critique, space, imagination, and wisdom. In the process, Ogden uses a range of sources, analysing discourse, gossip, ritual, territory, masculinity, and pastoral power. In all, the work of Michel Foucault sets the tone for a fresh ecclesiological critique that will appeal to theologians and clergy alike.

Jack Reynolds, Phenomenology, Naturalism and Science: A Hybrid and Heretical Proposal (Routledge: 2017)

Arguing for the compatibility of phenomenology and naturalism, this book also refashions each. The opening chapters begin with a methodological focus, which seeks to curb the "over-bidding" characteristic of both traditional transcendental phenomenology and scientific naturalism. Having thus opened up the possibility that the twain might meet, it is in the detailed chapters on matters where scientific and phenomenological work overlap and sometimes conflict – on time, body, and others – that the book contests some of the standard ways of understanding the relationship between phenomenological philosophy and empirical science, and between phenomenology and naturalism.

https://www.amazon.com/Phenomenology-Naturalism-Empirical-Science-Heretical/dp/1138924385

Matthew Sharpe, Rory Jeffs, & Jack Reynolds (eds.) 100 years of European Philosophy Since the Great War (Springer: 2017)

This book is a collection of specifically commissioned articles on the key continental European philosophical movements since 1914. It shows how each of these bodies of thought has been shaped by their responses to the horrors set in train by World War I, and considers whether we are yet ‘post-post-war’. The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 set in chain a series of crises and re-configurations which have continued to shape the world for a century: industrialized slaughter, the end of colonialism and European empires, the rise of the USA, economic crises, fascism, Soviet Marxism, the gulags and the Shoah. Nearly all of the major movements in European thinking (phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Hegelianism, Marxism, political theology, critical theory and neoliberalism) were forged in, or shaped by, attempts to come to terms with the global trauma of the World Wars. This is the first book to describe the development of these movements after World War I, and as such promises to be of interest to philosophers and historians of philosophy around the world.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-50361-5

Jason Tuckwell, Creation and the Function of Art: Techné, Poiesis and the Problem of Aesthetics (Bloomsbury: 2017)

Returning to the Greek understanding of art to rethink its capacities, Creation and the Function of Art focuses on the relationship between techné and phusis (nature). Moving away from the theoretical Platonism which dominates contemporary understandings of art, this book instead reinvigorates Aristotelian causation.

Beginning with the Greek topos and turning to insights from philosophy, pure mathematics, psychoanalysis and biology, Jason Tuckwell re-problematises techné in functional terms. This book examines the deviations at play within logical forms, the subject, and upon phusis to better situate the role of the function in poiesis (art). In so doing, Tuckwell argues that art concerns a genuinely creative labour that cannot be resolved via an ontological or epistemological problem, but which instead constitutes an encounter with the problematic. As such, techné is shown to be a property of the living, of intelligence coupled to action, that not only enacts poiesis or art, but indicates a broader role for creative deviation in nature.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/creation-and-the-function-of-art-9781350010765

Paul Tyson, De-fragmenting Modernity; re-integrating knowledge with wisdom, belief with truth, and reality with being (Cascade Books: 2017)

We live in a strangely fragmented lifeworld. On the one hand, abstract constructions of our own imagination - such as money, "mere" facts, and mathematical models - are treated by us as important objective truths. On the other hand, our understanding of the concrete realities of meaning and value in which our lives are actually embedded - love, significance, purpose, wonder - are treated as arbitrary and optional subjective beliefs. This is because, to us, only quantitative and instrumentally useful things are considered to be accessible to the domain of knowledge. Our lifeworld is designed to dis-integrate knowledge from belief, facts from meanings, immanence from transcendence, quality from quantity, and "mere" reality from the mystery of being. This book explores two questions: why should we, and how can we, reintegrate being, knowing and believing?

https://www.bookdepository.com/de-Fragmenting-Modernity-Paul-Tyson/9781532614644

Michelle Boulous Walker, Slow Philosophy: Reading against the Institution (Bloomsbury: 2017)

In an age of internet scrolling and skimming, where concentration and attention are fast becoming endangered skills, it is timely to think about the act of reading and the many forms that it can take. Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution makes the case for thinking about reading in philosophical terms. Boulous Walker argues that philosophy involves the patient work of thought; in this it resembles the work of art, which invites and implores us to take our time and to engage with the world. At its best, philosophy teaches us to read slowly; in fact, philosophy is the art of reading slowly – and this inevitably clashes with many of our current institutional practices and demands.

Slow reading shares something in common with contemporary social movements, such as that devoted to slow food; it offers us ways to engage the complexity of the world. With the help of writers as diverse as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Woolf, Adorno, Levinas, Critchley, Beauvoir, Le Dœuff, Irigaray, Cixous, Weil, and others, Boulous Walker offers a foundational text in the emerging field of slow philosophy, one that explores the importance of unhurried time in establishing our institutional encounters with complex and demanding works.

http://www.bloomsbury.com/au/slow-philosophy-9781474279918/

Anita Williams, Psychology and Formalisation: Phenomenology, Ethnomethodology and Statistics (Peter Lang: 2017)

This book revisits psychology’s appropriation of natural scientific methods. The author argues that, in order to overcome ongoing methodological debates in psychology, it is necessary to confront the problem of formalisation contained in the appropriation of methods of natural science. By doing so, the subject matter of psychology – the human being – and questions about the meaning of human existence can be brought to the centre of the discipline. Drawing on Garfinkel, Sacks, Edwards and Potter, the author sees ethnomethodologically informed qualitative methods, which stem from phenomenology, as a possible alternative to statistical methods, but ultimately finds these methods to be just another method of formalisation. She returns to Husserlian phenomenology as a way to critique the centrality of method in psychology and shows that the adoption of natural scientific methods in psychology is part of the larger push to formalise and objectify all aspects of human existence.

https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Formalisation-Phenomenology-Ethnomethodology-Statistics/dp/3631726112