>

This volume contains the most significant pieces of unpublished writing completed by Eric Voegelin during an important time of his career. Spanning the period from the early 1960s to the late 1970s, these selections supplement the body of work Voegelin published after the appearance of the first three volumes of Order and History in 1956 and 1957. The five texts included here are "What Is History?" "Anxiety and Reason," "The Eclipse of Reality," "The Moving Soul," and "The Beginning and the Beyond." In their introduction to the volume, Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella place these writings in their proper context and discuss the ways in which they reveal clues to the evolution of Voegelin's thought. In "What Is History?" Voegelin considers the development of a transcendent structure of history while simultaneously rejecting the notion that history can have a universal meaning. "Anxiety and Reason" focuses on Voegelin's critically important theory of historiogenesis, which links events in pragmatic history with legendary and mythical events leading back to the beginning of the cosmic order. In "The Eclipse of Reality," Voegelin presents a critique of modernity by analyzing the work of Sartre, Schiller, Comte, and others. "The Moving Soul"--a "thought experiment" inspired by a remark Henry Margenau makes in The Nature of Physical Reality--attempts to reformulate the connections between physics and myth. The most important of these essays is "Me Beginning and the Beyond." Here Voegelin meditates on the universality of experience formed by the tension of existence under God. Publication of these previously unpublished writings will enable scholars to trace the genesis of many of the concerns that occupied Voegelin during a period in which the conception of his main work was undergoing frequent and perhaps fundamental changes.

Groundless Existence discusses the implicit phenomenological and existential foundations of Schmitt's political philosophy. The book's unique contribution lies in its claim that Schmitt decisively breaks with the metaphysical tradition and predicates the political on the 'groundless' categories of existence, including risk, decision, and agonism. This argument is substantiated by both tacit and explicit existentialist and phenomenological underpinnings of Schmitt's work, discussed here for the first time in book form.The book provides an insight into the implications of Schmitt's thought reconceptualized in the light of contemporary political developments. An essential text for anyone interested in the political theory of Carl Schmitt, it offers a new reading of Schmitt's work against the double background of phenomenology and existentialism.

Recent scholarship on children’s literature displays a wide variety of interests in classic and contemporary children’s books. While environmental and ecological concerns have led to an interest in ‘ecocriticism’, as yet there is little on the significance of the ecological imagination and experience to both the authors and readers – young and old – of these texts. This edited collection brings together a set of original international research-based chapters to explore the role of children’s literature in learning about environments and places, with a focus on how children’s literature may inform and enrich our imagination, experiences and responses to environmental challenges and injustice. Contributions from Australia, Canada, USA and UK explore the diverse ways in which children’s literature can provide what are arguably some of the first and possibly most formative engagements that some children might have with ‘nature’. Chapters examine classic and new storybooks, mythic tales, and image-based and/or written texts read at home, in school and in the field. Contributors focus on exploring how children’s literature mediates and informs our imagination and understandings of diverse environments and places, and how it might open our eyes and lives to other presences, understandings and priorities through stories, their telling and re-telling, and their analysis. This book was originally published as a special issue of Environmental Education Research.

This book returns to the question at the center of our existence, a question that the narcissistic culture in which we are immersed systematically tends to remove: “Why?” The underlying thesis is that the answer must not be sought in success or social recognition, but in a “fragment of truth”, hidden somewhere inside each of us, which reveals itself only if we detach ourselves from our ego and its certainties. It is not, therefore, a matter of finding yet another philosophical theory of the meaning of existence, but rather of shedding light on the conditions under which such meaning can emerge. The author shows us that the ultimate source of our existential orientation lies in the affective sphere, and that the current crisis of orientation is derived from the atrophy of the process of affective maturation on a large scale, and from a lack of knowledge and experience about which techniques are best to reactivate it. We are like glowworms that had once unlearned how to illuminate and have since begun to hover around the magic lantern of the ascetic ideal, already criticized by Nietzsche, and then around neon advertising signs. We are glowworms that have forgotten that we have within our own affective structure a precious source of orientation. The basic thesis is that this source of orientation can be reactivated through the care of desire and practices of emotional sharing.

This book traces the aesthetic of wonder from the romantic period through contemporary philosophy and literature, arguing for its relevance to ecological consciousness. Most ecocritical scholarship tends to overshadow discussions of wonder with the sublime, failing to treat these two aesthetic categories as distinct. As a result, contemporary scholarship has conflated wonder and the sublime and ultimately lost the nuances that these two concepts conjure for readers and thinkers. Economides illuminates important differences between these aesthetics, particularly their negotiation of issues relevant to gender-based and environmental politics. In turn, readers can utilize the concept of wonder as an open-ended, non-violent framework in contrast to the ethos of domination that often surrounds the sublime.

Thought necessarily reflects the times. Following the tragedy of the Holocaust, this fact became ever more clear. And it may be the reason postwar philosophical texts are so difficult to understand, since they confront incomprehensibly traumatic experiences. In this first English-language translation of any of his books, Miroslav Petříček — one of the most influential and erudite Czech philosophers, and a student of Jan Patočka — argues that to exist in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, Western philosophy has had to rewrite its tradition and its discourse, radically transforming itself. Should philosophy be capable of bearing witness to the time, Petříček contends, this metamorphosis in philosophy is necessary. Offering an original Central European perspective on postwar philosophical discourse that reflects upon the historical underpinnings of pop culture phenomena and complex philosophical schools — including Adorno, Agamben, Benjamin, Derrida, Husserl, Kracauer, and many others — Philosophy en noir is a record of this transformation