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Gregory Fried offers in this book a careful investigation of Martin Heidegger’s understanding of politics. Disturbing issues surround Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism, his disdain for liberal democracy, and his rejection of the Enlightenment. Fried confronts these issues, focusing not on the historical debate over Heidegger’s personal involvement with Nazism, but on whether and how the formulation of Heidegger’s ontology relates to his political thinking as expressed in his philosophical works. The inquiry begins with Heidegger’s interpretation of Heraclitus, particularly the term polemos (“war,” or, in Heidegger’s usage, “confrontation”). Fried contends that Heidegger invests polemos with broad ontological significance and that his appropriation of the word provides important insights into major strands of his thinking—his conception of the human being, understanding of truth, and interpretation of history—as well as the meaning of the so-called turn in his thought. Although Fried finds that Heidegger’s politics are continuous with his thought, he also argues that Heidegger’s work raises important questions about contemporary identity politics. Fried also shows that many postmodernists, despite attempts to distance themselves from Heidegger, fail to avoid some of the same political pitfalls his thinking entailed.
What is paganism? What does it mean to be a pagan in today's world? What do the Gods, the Sacred and Myths of pagan traditions tell us about what has transpired over past millennia, and how do the developments of recent centuries affect our understanding of them? Polemos: The Dawn of Pagan Traditionalism takes up these and other penetrating questions in a conceptual tour de force, exploring a worldview long thought lost under the weight of monotheistic conversions, the science and technology of Western Modernity, and the deconstructions and simulacra of Postmodernism. In this wide-ranging study and compelling manifesto, Askr Svarte illustrates how, far from a fragmentary relic of the past, paganism is very much alive and wields a critical analysis of the past, present, and future with the potential to return to the forefront of consciousness. Polemos: The Dawn of Pagan Traditionalism, the first book of the two-volume work published in Russian in 2016, sets out not only to rediscover and redefine the pagan legacy, but to orient paganism's understanding of the paradigms which have confronted it. Titled after the ancient Greeks' divine representation of war, which the philosopher Heraclitus deemed "the father and king of all", Polemos maps paganism's positions on the battlefield of ideas between paradigms, polemics, and trends. From ancient rites and myths to contemporary technologies and socio-cultural dynamics, few stones are left unturned in this extensive articulation of the pagan worldview in the twenty-first century.
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century. His work has profoundly influenced philosophers including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, Hubert Dreyfus, Stanley Cavell, Emmanuel Levinas, Alain Badiou, and Gilles Deleuze. His accounts of human existence and being and his critique of technology have inspired theorists in fields as diverse as theology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, and the humanities. This Lexicon provides a comprehensive and accessible guide to Heidegger's notoriously obscure vocabulary. Each entry clearly and concisely defines a key term and explores in depth the meaning of each concept, explaining how it fits into Heidegger's broader philosophical project. With over 220 entries written by the world's leading Heidegger experts, this landmark volume will be indispensable for any student or scholar of Heidegger's work.
Martin Heidegger held Plato responsible for inaugurating the slow slide of the West into nihilism and the apocalyptic crisis of modernity. In this book, Gregory Fried defends Plato against Heidegger’s critiques. While taking seriously Heidegger’s analysis of human finitude and historicity, Fried argues that Heidegger neglects the transcending ideals that necessarily guide human life as situated in time and place. That neglect results in Heidegger’s disastrous politics, unhinged from a practical reason grounded in the philosophical search from a truth that transcends historical contingency. Thinking both with and against Heidegger, Fried shows how Plato’s skeptical idealism provides an ethics that captures both the situatedness of finite human existence and the need for transcendent ideals. The result is a novel way of understanding politics and ethical life that Fried calls a polemical ethics, which mediates between finitude and transcendence by engaging in constructive confrontation with both traditions and other persons. The contradiction between the founding ideals of the United States and its actual history of racism and slavery provides an occasion to discuss polemical ethics in practice.
Exploiting the abundant primary sources available, this book examines the diverse ways in which war shaped the Hellenistic world. An overview of war and society in the Hellenistic world. Highlights the interdependence of warfare and social phenomena. Covers a wide range of topics, including social conditions as causes of war, the role of professional warriors, the discourse of war in Hellenistic cities, the budget of war, the collective memory of war, and the aesthetics of war. Draws on the abundance of primary sources available.
Critically evaluating and synthesizing all the previous research on the phenomenology of Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, the book brings a new voice into contemporary philosophical discussions. It elucidates the development of Patočka’s phenomenology and offers a critical appropriation of his work by connecting it with non-phenomenological approaches. The first half of the book offers a succinct, and systematizing, overview of Patočka’s phenomenology throughout its development to help readers appreciate the motives behind and grounds for its transformations. The second half systematically explicates, critically examines and creatively develops Patočka’s concept of the movement of existence as the most promising part of his asubjective phenomenology. The book appeals to new readers of Patočka as well as his scholars, and to students and researchers of contemporary philosophy concerned with topics such as embodiment, personal identity, intersubjectivity, sociality, or historicity. By re-assessing Patočka’s philosophy of history and his civilizational analysis, it also helps to better articulate the question of the place of Europe in the post-European world.
The question of the relation of Martin Heidegger’s thought to politics has been a subject of controversy since the 1930s, when he became an advocate of the National Socialist regime in Germany. This volume addresses this question in a unique format, as a dialogue among leading Heidegger scholars. That dialogue begins with an exchange between Gregory Fried and Emmanuel Faye about Faye’s contention that Heidegger’s work represents nothing short of “the introduction of Nazism into philosophy.” At stake are issues such as what Heidegger himself understood Nazism to be, whether a thinker’s life and actions define the meaning of his work, the enduring threat of fascism, and the nature of rationality and philosophy itself. Richard Polt, Matthew Sharpe, Dieter Thomä, William Altman, and Sidonie Kellerer join the conversation, with responses from Fried and Faye.
The Other Border Wars: Conflict and Stasis in Latin American Culture questions bordering as an organizing principle of culture, conflict, and politics. Shannon Dowd argues that Central and South American border conflicts such as the Chaco War, between Bolivia and Paraguay (1932–1935); the Soccer War, between El Salvador and Honduras (1969); and the Falklands/Malvinas War, between Argentina and the United Kingdom (1982); can be considered as stasis, meaning civil strife, rather than polemos, meaning international war. Through analyses of literature, film, and theater, Dowd shows that border conflict is entwined with domestic strife, reinforced by stagnant geographical lines, and magnified under globalization. Deploying a capacious theory of stasis to question modern sovereignty and bordering, Dowd examines border zones from the outbreak of hostilities to the present, highlighting the lasting legacies of enclosure and violence. The Other Border Wars asks readers to consider how cultural expression challenges the purported fixity of Latin American borders, and even the very idea of bordering.
This book interrogates the philosophical backdrop of Clausewitzian notions of war, and asks whether modern, network-centric militaries can still be said to serve the 'political'. In light of the emerging theories and doctrines of Network-Centric War (NCW), this book traces the philosophical backdrop against which the more common theorizations of war and its conduct take place. Tracing the historical and philosophical roots of modern war from the 17th Century through to the present day, this book reveals that far from paralyzing the project of re-problematisating war, the emergence of NCW affords us an opportunity to rethink war in new and philosophically challenging ways. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, social theory, war studies and political theory/IR. Manabrata Guha is Assistant Professor (ISSSP) at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India.