In this groundbreaking volume, Krzysztof Ziarek rethinks modern experience by bringing together philosophical critiques of modernity and avant-garde poetry. Ziarek explores, through selective readings of avant-garde poetry, the key aspects of the radical critique of experience: technology, everydayness, event, and sexual difference. To that extent, The Historicity of Experience is less a book about the avant-garde than a critique of experience through the avant-garde. Ziarek reads the avant-garde in dialogue with the work of some of the major critics of modernity (Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Jean-François Lyotard, and Luce Irigaray) to show how avant-garde experiments bear critically on the issue of modern experience and its technological organization. The four poets Ziarek considers—Gertrude Stein, Velimir Khlebnikov, Miron Biaoszewski, and Susan Howe—demonstrate the broad reach of and variety of forms taken by the avant-garde revision of experience and aesthetics. Moreover, this quartet illustrates how the main operative concepts and strategies of the avant-garde underpinned the practices of canonical writers. A profound philosophical meditation on language, modernity, and the everyday, The Historicity of Experience offers a fundamental reconceptualization of the avant-garde in relation to experience.

To be free is to escape all limitations and obstacles&—or so we think at first. But if we probe further, we discover that freedom embraces its own necessities, a set of conditions without which it could not exist. Freedom's Embrace explores these necessities of freedom. J. Melvin Woody surveys competing conceptions of freedom and traces debates about the nature and reality of freedom to confusions about knowledge, humanity, and nature that are rooted in some of the most fundamental assumptions of modern Western thought. The preemption of freedom as an exclusively human privilege with all nature relegated to mechanical necessity is a fatal error that renders both humanity and nature equally unintelligible. What distinguishes human beings from other animals is not freedom but the use of symbols, which vastly extends the range of available options and enables us to envision freedom as an ideal by which customary institutions and norms may be judged and transformed. By carefully surveying its necessary conditions and limitations, Woody reconciles the salient competing conceptions of freedom and weaves them together into a richer and broader theory that resolves old controversies and opens the way toward an ethics of freedom that can meet the challenges of relativism and nihilism that arise from recognizing the historicity and malleability of culture.

Examines theological motifs in the work of Jan Patočka, drawing out their implications for contemporary theology and philosophy of religion.

No detailed description available for "The Concept of Freedom in Anthropology".

Drawn from the author’s experience as an internationally-recognised theorist, lecturer and practitioner, this practical book elucidates the notoriously difficult and distinctly different therapeutic approach, existential therapy. Balancing theory and practice, the book provides trainees with an accessible introduction to the author’s own three phase structural model for existential therapy, one which has become widely established and used in training and practice. Substantially revised and updated throughout, Part One examines the philosophical underpinnings, essential theory and distinctive features of existential therapy while Part Two goes on to present the author′s structural model for practice. Both parts are now prefaced by useful schematic overviews which introduce the content and pinpoint key themes in each chapter, helping readers to navigate the text with ease. Practical exercises encourage further engagement with the text and the themes, issues and practices under consideration. Seen by existential therapists across the world as one of the most influential books on the topic, this new edition is an essential read for all those training, practising or interested in existential therapy.

Contemporary politics is dominated by discussions of rights and liberties as the proper subjects about which citizens should be concerned in the political sphere. In Public Space and Political Experience: An Arendtian Interpretation, David Antonini argues that Hannah Arendt conceived of politics differently and that her thought can help us retrieve a more authentic sense of politics as the site where citizens can speak and act together about matters of shared concern. Antonini shows that citizens can experience politics together if they approach it not as a realm where privately interested individuals compete for their rights or liberties but instead as a space where plural human beings come together as distinct yet equal creatures. Antonini argues that if we read Arendt as primarily concerned with political experience, we can reimagine common political concepts such as freedom, power, revolution, and civil disobedience. The book posits that politics should be considered a fundamental form of human experience, one rooted in what Arendt refers to as the existential condition of politics—human plurality. If plurality is the existential condition out of which our political life emerges, we can enliven and reimagine the possibilities that political life can provide for contemporary citizens.