Post-Cartesian Meditations: An Essay in Dialectical Phenomenology

Published by Fordham University Press 1988

Post-Cartesian Meditations

An Essay in Dialectical Phenomenology

Edited by: James L. Marsh

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823296408

Overview
Contents

About this book

Although this book derives its inspiration and model from Descartes' Meditations and Husserl's Cartesian Meditations, it attempts to overcome Cartesianism conceived as individualistic, reflective, apodictic, presuppositionless self-recovery. Instead, contends Professor Marsh, the isolated, individualistic, brougeois ego gives way to the social, communal, post-bourgeois self: wordly, linguistic, historical, practical, and critical.

The book attempts to overcome Cartesianism both in content and in form. In content, Marsh argues, the social self replaces the isolated ego; this he attempts to establish through a series of chapters progressively expanding their scope and social context. Beginning with an emphasis on individual perception, thought, and freedom, and moving through reflections on knowledge of the other, practical engagments with the other, and hermeneutics, he concludes with critiques of the psychological and social unconscious. The result is not a rejection of individual perception, reflection, and freedom, but their sublation within community, tradition, and history. For Marsh the authentic individual is the social individual, the individual-in-community.

This book not only inscribes a progressively expanding circle, but also moves in a circle. It begins with a reflection on the contemporary experience of alientation and history of philosophy, ascends in the next several chapters to considering the perceptual, cognitive, free, social self, and then descends in the last chapter to further discussion of this historical starting points in this practical and philosophical aspects. Dialectical phenomenology as method bends back on itself to reflect in a manner both critical and redemptive on its own starting point and genesis.

Post-Cartesian Meditations obviously situates itself withing the modernism/post-modernism debate being carried on by Ricoeur and Derrida, Habermas and Foucault, Searle and Rorty, Bernstein and Caputo. Like post-modernism, the book is critical of naive Cartesian presence, the excesses of technological rationality, the pathology of modernity, the irrationality of bourgeois society. Unlike post-modernism, however, the book argues for a socially mediated self, the legitimacy of technology in contrast to technocracy, the critical redemption of modernity, a dialectical rather than a rejectionistic overcoming of capitalism.

Rich in insight, suggestion, and argumentation, this book has much to offer students and instructors of philosophy generally, but will be particularly useful to those interested in phenomenological developments, or a Marxist critique of capitalism as a way of life influencing modern philosophical thought.

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Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
PREFACE Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
1 The Historical Reduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2 Perception, Expression, and Reflection Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	45
3 Objectivity, Alienation, and Reflection Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	75
4 The Free Self Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	92
5 Knowing the Other and Being with the Other Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	125
6 The Hermeneutical Turn: From Retrieval to Suspicion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	160
7 Hermeneutics of Suspicion 1: The Personal Unconscious Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	183
8 Hermeneutics of Suspicion II: Dialectical Phenomenology as Social Theory Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	200
9 The Emergence of Dialectical Phenomenology Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	239
BIBLIOGRAPHY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	263
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	273

Language: English
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 279

eBook

Published: December 6, 2021
ISBN: 9780823296408