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The 'free will' debate has been an issue of serious and significant tension in the history of ‘Western’ philosophy. For Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, debate has been rendered intractable by a fundamental misunderstanding of the terms involved. This is exacerbated, they argue, by a failure to identify and adopt an appropriate methodological approach to the problem. In this respect and for both philosophers, this error in the free will debate is symptomatic of a broader misunderstanding of philosophical enquiry as such and the method it necessitates. For Heidegger, the entire history of ‘Analytic/Western’ ontology has been fatally misconceived as a result of an effort to define the being of entities in static terms. The insistence on framing questions in respect of whether/what a being ‘is’ thus obstructs any meaningful enquiry by conceding existence at the outset of the investigation. He demands nothing less than the ‘destruction’ of that framework as a necessary step towards a radical account of freedom as a necessary feature of human experience. Sartre’s project is founded on Heidegger’s argument though he is critical of what he considers the ethical ambiguities inherent to Heidegger’s account of Dasein. Instead, Sartre pushes the premises of Heidegger’s project into a definitive claim about the nature of consciousness. Therein he argues that as the only being for whom ‘meaning’ is possible, consciousness is distanced from beings by ‘nothingness’ which ensures its ontological freedom. We propose that a thorough investigation of their projects will reveal an account of ontological freedom that does not suffer from the shortcomings of Sartrean existentialism whilst avoiding the methodological missteps of the traditional discourse. Moreover, we will suggest that overcoming Heidegger’s ambiguities can be achieved by advancing his concerns into an interrogation of the ground of Dasein and its ontological priority. Thus we can satisfy Sartre’s criticism while reinforcing the commitment to a radically different approach to philosophical enquiry. Our investigation will argue that although Sartre has misconstrued Heidegger’s work, making comprehension of his freedom all the more complicated, an argument persists which sheds new light on a seemingly stubborn philosophical problem. In so doing, a challenge will be presented to some of the fundamental premises of modern philosophical discourse, promising to reorient the approach to enquiry as such.

The Phenomenology of Pain is the first book-length investigation of its topic to appear in English. Groundbreaking, systematic, and illuminating, it opens a dialogue between phenomenology and such disciplines as cognitive science and cultural anthropology to argue that science alone cannot clarify the nature of pain experience without incorporating a phenomenological approach. Building on this premise, Saulius Geniusas develops a novel conception of pain grounded in phenomenological principles: pain is an aversive bodily feeling with a distinct experiential quality, which can only be given in original first-hand experience, either as a feeling-sensation or as an emotion. Geniusas crystallizes the fundamental methodological principles that underlie phenomenological research. On the basis of those principles, he offers a phenomenological clarification of the fundamental structures of pain experience and contests the common conflation of phenomenology with introspectionism. Geniusas analyzes numerous pain dissociation syndromes, brings into focus the de-personalizing and re-personalizing nature of chronic pain experience, and demonstrates what role somatization and psychologization play in pain experience. In the process, he advances Husserlian phenomenology in a direction that is not explicitly worked out in Husserl’s own writings.

In this work Tim Ingold offers a persuasive new approach to understanding how human beings perceive their surroundings. He argues that what we are used to calling cultural variation consists, in the first place, of variations in skill. Neither innate nor acquired, skills are grown, incorporated into the human organism through practice and training in an environment. They are thus as much biological as cultural. To account for the generation of skills we have therefore to understand the dynamics of development. And this in turn calls for an ecological approach that situates practitioners in the context of an active engagement with the constituents of their surroundings. The twenty-three essays comprising this book focus in turn on the procurement of livelihood, on what it means to ‘dwell’, and on the nature of skill, weaving together approaches from social anthropology, ecological psychology, developmental biology and phenomenology in a way that has never been attempted before. The book is set to revolutionise the way we think about what is ‘biological’ and ‘cultural’ in humans, about evolution and history, and indeed about what it means for human beings – at once organisms and persons – to inhabit an environment. The Perception of the Environment will be essential reading not only for anthropologists but also for biologists, psychologists, archaeologists, geographers and philosophers. This edition includes a new Preface by the author.

Francis Bacon introduced his contemporaries to a new way of investigating nature. He called it "natural and experimental history." Despite its rather traditional name, Bacon's natural and experimental history was a new discipline: it comprised new ideas, new practices and new models of collaborative research. This new discipline was, in many ways, a surprisingly successful project. It provided early modern naturalists with tools, methods and models for both investigating nature and writing about their subject. It also offered a set of norms and values for guiding research. And yet, this new discipline was not a science of nature -- it was more like an art. This book aims to trace the emergence, evolution and reception of Francis Bacon's art of experimental natural history.

The Crisis of the European Sciences is Husserl's last and most influential book, written in Nazi Germany where he was discriminated against as a Jew. It incisively identifies the urgent moral and existential crises of the age and defends the relevance of philosophy at a time of both scientific progress and political barbarism. It is also a response to Heidegger, offering Husserl's own approach to the problems of human finitude, history and culture. The Crisis introduces Husserl's influential notion of the 'life-world' – the pre-given, familiar environment that includes both 'nature' and 'culture' – and offers the best introduction to his phenomenology as both method and philosophy. Dermot Moran's rich and accessible introduction to the Crisis explains its intellectual and political context, its philosophical motivations and the themes that characterize it. His book will be invaluable for students and scholars of Husserl's work and of phenomenology in general.