Discourse on Thinking questions that must occur to us the moment we manage to see a familiar situation in unfamiliar light.

The philosopher’s meditations on nature, technology, and evil, written in the final years of WWII, presented in “clear and highly readable translation” (Philosophy in Review). First published in German in 1995, volume 77 of Heidegger’s Complete Works consists of three imaginary conversations written as World War II was coming to an end. Composed at a crucial moment in history and in Heidegger’s own thinking, these conversations present meditations on science and technology; the devastation of nature, World War II, and the nature of evil. Heidegger also delves into the possibility of release from representational thinking into a more authentic relation with being and the world. The first conversation involves a scientist, a scholar, and a guide walking together on a country path; the second takes place between a teacher and a tower-warden, and the third features a younger man and an older man in a prisoner-of-war camp in Russia, where Heidegger’s two sons were missing in action. Unique because of their conversational style, this lucid and precise translation of these texts offers insight into the issues that engaged Heidegger’s wartime and postwar thinking.

This book reexamines the historical thinking of Liang Qichao (1873-1929), one of the few modern Chinese thinkers and cultural critics whose appreciation of the question of modernity was based on first-hand experience of the world space in which China had to function as a nation-state. It seeks to demonstrate that Liang was not only a profoundly paradigmatic modern Chinese intellectual but also an imaginative thinker of worldwide significance. By tracing the changes in Liang's conception of history, the author shows that global space inspired both Liang's longing for modernity and his critical reconceptualization of modern history. Spatiality, or the mode of determining spatial organization and relationships, offers a new interpretive category for understanding the stages in Liang's historical thinking. Liang's historical thinking culminated in a global imaginary of difference, which became most evident in the shift from his earlier proposal for a uniform national history to one that mapped "cultural history." His reaffirmation of spatiality, a critical concept overshadowed by the modernist obsession with time and history, made it both necessary and possible for him to redesign the project of modernity. Finally, the author suggests that the reconciliation of anthropological space with historical time that Liang achieved makes him abundantly contemporary with our own time, both inextricably modern and postmodern.

By systematically uncovering and comprehensively examining the epistemological implications of Heidegger's history of being and Foucault's archaeology of discursive formations, Towards an Epistemology of Ruptures shows how Heidegger and Foucault significantly expand the notions of knowledge and thought. This is done by tracing their path-breaking responses to the question: What is the object of thought? The book shows how for both thinkers thought is not just the act by which the object is represented in an idea, and knowledge not just a state of the mind of the individual subject corresponding to the object. Each thinker, in his own way, argues that thought is a productive event in which the subject and the object gain their respective identity and knowledge is the opening up of a space in which the subject and object can encounter each other and in which true and false statements about an object become possible. They thereby lay the ground for a new conceptual framework for rethinking the very relationship between knowledge and its object.

It is considerably easier to say that modern philosophy began with Descartes than it is to define the modernity and philosophy to which Descartes gave rise. In Lines of Thought, Claudia Brodsky Lacour describes the double origin of modern philosophy in Descartes's Discours de la méthode and Géométrie, works whose interrelation, she argues, reveals the specific nature of the modern in his thought. Her study examines the roles of discourse and writing in Cartesian method and intuition, and the significance of graphic architectonic form in the genealogy of modern philosophy. While Cartesianism has long served as a synonym for rationalism, the contents of Descartes's method and cogito have remained infamously resistant to rational analysis. Similarly, although modern phenomenological analyses descend from Descartes's notion of intuition, the "things" Cartesian intuitions represent bear no resemblance to phenomena. By returning to what Descartes calls the construction of his "foundation" in the Discours, Brodsky Lacour identifies the conceptual problems at the root of Descartes's literary and aesthetic theory as well as epistemology. If, for Descartes, linear extension and "I" are the only "things" we can know exist, the Cartesian subject of thought, she shows, derives first from the intersection of discourse and drawing, representation and matter. The crux of that intersection, Brodsky Lacour concludes, is and must be the cogito, Descartes's theoretical extension of thinking into material being. Describable in accordance with the Géométrie as a freely constructed line of thought, the cogito, she argues, extends historically to link philosophy with theories of discursive representation and graphic delineation after Descartes. In conclusion, Brodsky Lacour analyzes such a link in the writings of Claude Perrault, the architectural theorist whose reflections on beauty helped shape the seventeenth-century dispute between "the ancients and the moderns." Part of a growing body of literary and interdisciplinary considerations of philosophical texts, Lines of Thought will appeal to theorists and historians of literature, architecture, art, and philosophy, and those concerned with the origin and identity of the modern.