What is it to see the world, other people, and imagined situations as making personal moral demands of us? What is it to experience stories as speaking to us personally and directly? Kierkegaard's Mirrors explores Kierkegaard's answers to these questions, with a new phenomenological interpretation of Kierkegaardian 'interest'.

Thanks to improved food, medicine, and living conditions, the average age of the population is increasing throughout the modern industrialized world. Yet, despite the recent upsurge of scholarly interest in the lives of older people and the blossoming of historical demography, little historical demographic attention has been paid to the lives of the elderly. A landmark volume, Aging in the Past marks the emergence of the historical demographic study of aging. Following a masterly explication of the new field by Peter Laslett, leading scholars in family history and historical demography offer new research results and fresh analyses that greatly increase our understanding of aging, historically and across cultures. Focusing primarily on post-Industrial Europe and the United States, they explore a range of issues under the broad topics of living arrangements, widowhood, and retirement and mortality. This important work provides a much-needed historical perspective on and suggests possible alternative solutions to the problems of the aged. Contributors: George Alter, Rudolf Andorka, Allen C. Goodman, Myron P. Gutmann, Michael R. Haines, E. A. Hammel, Tamara K. Hareven, Nancy Karweit, David I. Kertzer, Peter Laslett, Andrejs Plakans, Roger L. Ransom, Daniel Scott Smith, Richard Sutch, Peter Uhlenberg, Richard Wall, Charles Wetherell This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.

Building upon Husserl’s challenge to oppositions such as those between form and content and between constituting and constituted, The Concept of Passivity in Husserl’s Phenomenology construes activity and passivity not as reciprocally exclusive terms but as mutually dependent moments of acts of consciousness. The book outlines the contribution of passivity to the constitution of phenomena as diverse as temporal syntheses, perceptual associations, memory fulfillment and cross-cultural communication. The detailed study of the phenomena of affection, forgetting, habitus and translation sets out a distinction between three meanings of passivity: receptivity, sedimentation or inactuality and alienation. Husserl’s texts are interpreted as defending the idea that cultural crises are not brought to a close by replacing passivity with activity but by having more of both.