James R. Mensch's Books

Ethics and Selfhood

Alterity and the Phenomenology of Obligation

By: James R. Mensch

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Ethics and Selfhood

Alterity and the Phenomenology of Obligation

By: James R. Mensch

According to James R. Mensch, a minimal requirement for ethics is that of guarding against genocide. In deciding which races are to live and which to die, genocide takes up a standpoint outside of humanity. To guard against this, Mensch argues that we must attain the critical distance required for ethical judgment without assuming a superhuman position. His description of how to attain this distance constitutes a genuinely new reading of the possibility of a phenomenological ethics, one that involves reassessing what it means to be a self. Selfhood, according to Mensch, involves both embodiment and the self-separation brought about by our encounter with others—the very others who provide us with the experiential context needed for moral judgment. Buttressing his position with documented accounts of those who hid Jews during the Holocaust, Mensch shows how the self-separation that occurs in empathy opens the space within which moral judgment can occur and obligation can find its expression. He includes a reading of the major moral philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Arendt, Levinas—even as he develops a phenomenological account of the necessity of reading literature to understand the full extent of ethical responsibility. Mensch's work offers an original and provocative approach to a topic of fundamental importance.

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226

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State University of New York Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0791486699

ISBN 13

9780791486696

Intersubjectivity and Transcendental Idealism

By: James R. Mensch

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Intersubjectivity and Transcendental Idealism

By: James R. Mensch

The threat of solipcism nagged Husserl. The question of the status of others occupied him during the last years of his life and remained a question that seemed to challenge the foundation of his life's work. This book offers new answers to this persistent philosophical question by defining the question in specifically Husserlian terms and by means of a careful examination of Husserl's later texts, including the unpublished Nachlass.

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444

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SUNY Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0887067514

ISBN 13

9780887067518

Knowing and Being

A Postmodern Reversal

By: James R. Mensch

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Knowing and Being

A Postmodern Reversal

By: James R. Mensch

Everyone knows that &"postmodernism&" implies pluralism, anti-foundationalism, and, generally,a postnormative view of the self and reality. While many embrace it, few bother to tell us what is wrong with modernity. What are the problems that brought about its crisis and ultimate demise as a philosophical and cultural movement? What are the lessons for the postmodern movement that can he drawn from them? James Mensch here explains why modernism failed as a viable philosophical enterprise and how postmodernism must be understood if it is to serve as a defensible intellectual project in its stead. The heart of Mensch's argument is a reversal of the modernist view of the unitary subject as a ground of epistemological and ethical normativity. He substitutes for modernism a view, beholden to Aristotle but adapted to for our present age, that sees subjectivity as temporality in a world where subject and object are interactive. The result is a pluralism of forms of subjectivity corresponding to the different modes of temporality brought about by the world. In a series of analyses on the nature knowing, Mensch shows how we can embrace both the perspectivism of postmodernism while avoiding the skepticism and relativism that have constantly threatened to undermine its insights.

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245

Publisher

Penn State Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0271041927

ISBN 13

9780271041926

After Modernity

Husserlian Reflections on a Philosophical Tradition

By: James R. Mensch

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After Modernity

Husserlian Reflections on a Philosophical Tradition

By: James R. Mensch

This book provides an important new answer to the much-discussed question of the nature and possibility of philosophy following the collapse of the modern foundationalist paradigm. Mensch offers an alternative based in phenomenology. Using Husserl's analysis of temporality to reinvigorate Aristotle's account of time, he shows how the passing of modernity is actually an opening for doing metaphysics in a new nonfoundationalist manner. Positioning Husserl within a wider context, Mensch views him both as a culmination of the modern foundationalist paradigm and as providing a way to overcome it through his descriptive analyses.

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324

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SUNY Press

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ISBN 10

0791429865

ISBN 13

9780791429860

Levinas's Existential Analytic

A Commentary on Totality and Infinity

By: James R. Mensch

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Levinas's Existential Analytic

A Commentary on Totality and Infinity

By: James R. Mensch

By virtue of the originality and depth of its thought, Emmanuel Levinas’s masterpiece, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, is destined to endure as one of the great works of philosophy. It is an essential text for understanding Levinas’s discussion of “the Other,” yet it is known as a “difficult” book. Modeled after Norman Kemp Smith’s commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Levinas’s Existential Analytic guides both new and experienced readers through Levinas’s text. James R. Mensch explicates Levinas’s arguments and shows their historical referents, particularly with regard to Heidegger, Husserl, and Derrida. Students using this book alongside Totality and Infinity will be able to follow its arguments and grasp the subtle phenomenological analyses that fill it.

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244

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Northwestern University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0810130548

ISBN 13

9780810130548

After Modernity

Husserlian Reflections on a Philosophical Tradition

By: James R. Mensch

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After Modernity

Husserlian Reflections on a Philosophical Tradition

By: James R. Mensch

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324

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SUNY Press

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ISBN 10

0791429865

ISBN 13

9780791429860

Selfhood and Appearing

The Intertwining

By: James Mensch

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Selfhood and Appearing

The Intertwining

By: James Mensch

What is the relation between our selfhood and appearing? Our embodiment positions us in the world, situating us as an object among its visible objects. Yet, by opening and shutting our eyes, we can make the visible world appear and disappear—a fact that convinces us that the world is in us. Thus, we have to assert with Merleau-Ponty that we are in the world that is in us: the two are intertwined. Author James Mensch employs the insights of Jan Patočka’s asubjective phenomenology to understand this double relationship of being-in. In this volume, he shows how this relation constitutes the reality of our selfhood, shaping our social and political interactions as well as the violence that constantly threatens to undermine them.

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Page Count

352

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

9004375848

ISBN 13

9789004375840

Ethics and Selfhood

Alterity and the Phenomenology of Obligation

By: James R. Mensch

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Ethics and Selfhood

Alterity and the Phenomenology of Obligation

By: James R. Mensch

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226

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State University of New York Press

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ISBN 10

0791486699

ISBN 13

9780791486696

Embodiments

From the Body to the Body Politic

By: James R. Mensch

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Embodiments

From the Body to the Body Politic

By: James R. Mensch

How does the body politic reflect the nature of human embodiment? To pursue this question in a new and productive way, James Mensch employs a methodology consistent with the fact of our embodiment; he uses Merleau-Ponty’s concept of "intertwining"—the presence of one’s self in the world and of the world in one’s self—to understand the ideas that define political life. Mensch begins his inquiry by developing a philosophical anthropology based on this concept. He then applies the results of his investigation to the relations of power, authority, freedom, and sovereignty in public life. This involves confronting a line of interpretation, stretching from Hobbes to Agamben, which sees violence as both initiating and preserving the social contract. To contest this interpretation, Mensch argues against its presupposition, which is to equate freedom with sovereignty over others. He does so by understanding political freedom in terms of embodiment—in particular, in terms of the finitude and interdependence that our embodiment entails. Freedom, conceived in these terms, is understood as the gift of others. As a function of our dependence on others, it cannot exist apart from them. To show how public space and civil society presuppose this interdependence is the singular accomplishment of Embodiments. It accomplishes a phenomenological grounding for a new type of political philosophy.

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Page Count

203

Publisher

Northwestern University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0810125617

ISBN 13

9780810125612

Intersubjectivity and Transcendental Idealism

By: James R. Mensch

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Intersubjectivity and Transcendental Idealism

By: James R. Mensch

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444

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SUNY Press

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ISBN 10

0887067514

ISBN 13

9780887067518

Levinas's Existential Analytic

A Commentary on Totality and Infinity

By: James R. Mensch

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Levinas's Existential Analytic

A Commentary on Totality and Infinity

By: James R. Mensch

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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244

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Northwestern University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0810130548

ISBN 13

9780810130548

Book's by James R. Mensch

Ethics and Selfhood

Ethics and Selfhood

Intersubjectivity and Transcendental Idealism

Intersubjectivity and Transcendental Idealism

Knowing and Being

Knowing and Being

After Modernity

After Modernity

Levinas's Existential Analytic

Levinas's Existential Analytic

After Modernity

After Modernity

Selfhood and Appearing

Selfhood and Appearing

Ethics and Selfhood

Ethics and Selfhood

Embodiments

Embodiments

Intersubjectivity and Transcendental Idealism

Intersubjectivity and Transcendental Idealism

Levinas's Existential Analytic

Levinas's Existential Analytic

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