First published in 1945, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s monumental _Phénoménologie de la perception _signalled the arrival of a major new philosophical and intellectual voice in post-war Europe. Breaking with the prevailing picture of existentialism and phenomenology at the time, it has become one of the landmark works of twentieth-century thought. This new translation, the first for over fifty years, makes this classic work of philosophy available to a new generation of readers. _Phenomenology of Perception _stands in the great phenomenological tradition of (...) Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s contribution is decisive, as he brings this tradition and other philosophical predecessors, particularly Descartes and Kant, to confront a neglected dimension of our experience: the lived body and the phenomenal world. Charting a bold course between the reductionism of science on the one hand and "intellectualism" on the other, Merleau-Ponty argues that we should regard the body not as a mere biological or physical unit, but as the body which structures one’s situation and experience within the world. Merleau-Ponty enriches his classic work with engaging studies of famous cases in the history of psychology and neurology as well as phenomena that continue to draw our attention, such as phantom limb syndrome, synaesthesia, and hallucination. This new translation includes many helpful features such as the reintroduction of Merleau-Ponty’s discursive Table of Contents as subtitles into the body of the text, a comprehensive Translator’s Introduction to its main themes, essential notes explaining key terms of translation, an extensive Index, and an important updating of Merleau-Ponty’s references to now available English translations. Also included is a new foreword by Taylor Carman and an introduction to Merleau-Ponty_ _by Claude Lefort. Translated by Donald A. Landes. (shrink)

Challenging and rewarding in equal measure, _Phenomenology of Perception_ is Merleau-Ponty's most famous work. Impressive in both scope and imagination, it uses the example of perception to return the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato. Drawing on case studies such as brain-damaged patients from the First World War, Merleau-Ponty brilliantly shows how the body plays a crucial role not only in perception but in speech, sexuality and our relation to others.

‘If in this book harsh words are spoken about some of the greatest among the intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not, I hope, to belittle them. It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men.’ - Karl Popper, from the Preface Written in political exile during the Second World War and first published in two volumes in 1945, Karl Popper’s _The Open (...) Society and Its Enemies _is one of the most influential books of all time. Hailed by Bertrand Russell as a ‘vigorous and profound defence of democracy’, its now legendary attack on the philosophies of Plato, Hegel and Marx exposed the dangers inherent in centrally planned political systems and through underground editions become an inspiration to lovers of freedom living under communism in Eastern Europe. Popper’s highly accessible style, his erudite and lucid explanations of the thoughts of great philosophers and the recent resurgence of totalitarian regimes around the world are just three of the reasons for the enduring popularity of _The Open Society and Its Enemies_ and why it demands to be read today and in years to come. (shrink)

Recently I was asked by a somewhat disillusioned but well informed official of one of the important Foundations how long I thought it would be before we attained Utopia. My reply was that I thought we would make substantial progress toward a better world within the next one hundred years.The reply to this, as the reader may surmise, was that my estimate was much too optimistic, the intimation being that anyone who hopes for such rapid progress in this (...) class='Hi'>world must be rather naive in practical matters. Such a judgment represents a widely prevailing view, but one which is supposed to be “realistic.” According to this view, social advancement is a slow business. It will be said that there is no evidence that we are much better off than the ancients. Rather than that we have progressed beyond antiquity, we find that we, as of old, have our evidences of social degradation and maladjustment. Crimes, wars, unemployment, divorce, racial and religious conflicts, even W. P. A. projects—all these are as old as recorded history. Man cannot hope to go far in the next one hundred years because in the last one thousand years he has not improved his lot in terms of fundamental human values. All he has done is multiply his gadgets and invent some new ones. Perhaps—my critic opined—we can make some headway in the next thousand years, but it will be a slow and painful process. (shrink)

Among all the writings of Plato the Timaeus is the most obscure to the modern reader, and has nevertheless had the greatest influence over the ancient and mediaeval world. The Critias is a fragment and it was designed to be the second part of a trilogy. Timaeus had brought down the origin of the world to the creation of man, and the dawn of history was now to succeed the philosophy of nature. It tells us about Atlantis and (...) Critias returns to this story, professing only to repeat what Solon was told by the priests. The war of which he was about to speak had occurred 9000 years ago. One of the combatants was the city of Athens, the other was the great island of Atlantis. (shrink)

According to Brian Orend’s binary political model, minimally just states possess a robust set of moral rights, while other states essentially exist in a moral vacuum in which they possess no moral rights. I argue that a more plausible comparative model would allow for a state to acquire (or lose) discrete moral rights as it improves (or damages) its moral record. This would generate a more accurate portrayal of both domestic policy within states and military conflict between states; including, in (...) particular, the role of the Allied forces during World War Two. (shrink)

Combining history and biography with astute philosophical analysis, Nicolas de Warren explores and reinterprets the intellectual trajectories of ten German philosophers as they reacted to and experienced the First World War. His book will enhance our understanding of the intimate and invariably complicated relationship between philosophy and war.

Evidence found in The New York Times from 1939 to 1945 and corroborating sources are used to demonstrate the impact of the Second World War on the progressive educational movement. We posit that December 7, 1941 initiated the waning of the progressive education movement in the secondary social studies curriculum. Progressive education emphasized a child-centered, experiential curriculum, an issues-centered approach to learning, and a critical analysis of society. Our findings indicate that the educational climate during the Second (...) World War initiated a shift from questioning American institutions to celebrating them. Education became more centralized and many educational organizations were mobilized to support the war effort. Specifically, the secondary social studies curriculum became one of several propaganda vehicles in support of the war. In addition, colleges and universities became training grounds for teachers, defense workers, and soldiers. A war on the home front ensued. The progressive secondary social studies curriculum itself was viewed as placing the nation at risk. While other factors such as the Back-to-Basics movement and the Cold War contributed to the waning of the secondary progressive educational movement, World War Two (WWII) set the decline in motion. (shrink)

European civilization largely lost its sense of direction after World War One when its humanist consensus, that promoted human betterment, collapsed into a fruitless political opposition between left and right wing extremism. This collapse is here exemplified by the breakdown in relationship between left winger Bertrand Russell and right winger D.H. Lawrence during WW1. However, the real causes of the loss of the humanist consensus are more deep-rooted, as that consensus has its roots in the Renaissance andn Enlightenment movements (...) when the influence of humanist views was at its height. By the late 19th century imperialism and militarism threatened the consensus, and the senseless slaughter of WW1 brought it to an end. The humanist consensus re-emerged post-WW2, largely through American influence, but it has declined since. To restore the consensus, it is argued here that humanism can be strengthened by dualist theory and by a process of contextualization that brings humanity to the fore. By using ‘connecting contexts’ we can open our minds to larger perspectives. In that way, we are collectively more inclined to be optimistic about our prospects. The future of humanity seems to depend on such developments in our critical thinking about ourselves. (shrink)

World War I was an epochal event that permanently redefined international politics. Yet, there is no consensus about what kind of international system it erected. This article argues that since 191...

The article reviews the concepts of the multi-author book Society. National Strategy. War: Political and Strategic Lessons of the First World War. This collective research is notable for rich original scientific apparatus and methodological proficiency. Thus, the analysis of participating countries is conducted according to a single template, which includes: the state of pre-war society in all participating countries ; goals of engaging in war and expectations of the powerful and financial elites for the war ; assessment of how (...) did different strata of society find the war; the evolution of the morale of the people during the war; problems that arose during the war ; the evolution of women’s position in society during the war, the development of a broad segment of women-workers, the extension of emancipation as one of the positive results of the war; the outcome of the war for the country. Special attention is drawn to the pacifist nature of the ideology of the reviewed research, demonstration of deprivation and suffering of people in all countries. The book’s authors identify the main causes of the First World War: ambitions and inefficiency of the world’s elites, the lack of a coherent strategy. As the result, the USA, thanks to their strategy, received the maximum dividends with minimal participation. At the same time, it is noted that the context of research on the nature of war should be expanded to take into account the general competition of countries and civilizations. The authors comprehensively analyze the informational and propaganda activities of the participating countries and conclude that England’s activities in this field were the most effective. Based on the methodology of this collective research, the nature of a future world war, its potential participants and their goals can be considered. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyze two methods of reading archives: ‘against the grain’ and ‘along the grain’. First one focuses mainly on revealing what is marginalized and omitted in archive’s dominant narration. The other carefully studies the logic of an archive itself. As such, reading against the grain allows to reveal victims’ forgotten stories, while reading along the grain helps to understand perpetrators’ perspective that may further lead to better recognition of the mechanisms of organized violence. I apply both approaches (...) to the album War against War (1924) by Ernst Friedrich, which contains archival photographs from World War I. Keywords: War against War; World War I; archival photographs; reading against the grain; reading along the grain. (shrink)

The article presents some additional biographical online sources to Ludwig Wittgenstein in the years 1913-1918.

The Second World War was a watershed in history in many ways. I focus on the World War II discontinuity as it relates to the intersection of scientific and military enterprise. I am interested in how we should conceptualize that intersection and in offering a preliminary tracing of the “World War II regime” that has grown out of it—a regime that includes new forms of scientific and military practice but that has invaded and transformed many other cultural (...) spaces, including—my primary example here—the industrial workplace. I exploit the figure of the cyborg to thematize the social, material, and conceptual heterogeneity of the developments at issue; specify a distinct range of cyborg objects and sciences that emerged from the World War II matrix; and exemplify a historiographical approach that escapes the traditional master-narrative structures of science studies. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the intellectual output of the internees held captive as ‘enemy aliens’ on the Isle of Man during the Second World War. Looking at their interactions with local and national knowledge communities, including some Methodist priests who were responsible for introducing the internees to British political culture, it analyses how the social environment of internment created common intellectual experiences, which in turn led members of this involuntary community of displaced German-speaking scholars to form particular conceptions (...) of Englishness in the postwar era. This case study is placed in the context of wider debates about periodisation, the relationship between land-based, oceanic and other site-specific perspectives on the British Isles, as well as the entanglements between liberty and encampment in European and global contexts. (shrink)

Like in all industrial societies, in the United States economic planning was a prominent political-economic ideal in the wake of World War II. Paying attention to the postwar decades, this article focuses on how and why private American industrial corporations appropriated the practice and rhetoric of planning, in the context of the outbreak of the Cold War. This corporate appropriation displaced debates about planning into a social and cultural register in the United States. Paradoxically, the outward-looking U.S. state accepted (...) robust state planning regimes abroad even as the Cold War hampered the legitimacy of state-centered economic planning at home. The paradox helped set the stage for the global crisis of industrial societies after 1968 that brought the postwar era to a close and would ultimately undermine economic planning everywhere. (shrink)

It is widely believed that John Maynard Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace to protest the reparations imposed on Germany after the First World War. The central thesis of this paper is that Britain’s war debt problem, not German reparations, led Keynes to write The Economic Consequences of the Peace. His main goal at the Paris Peace Conference was to restore Britain’s economic hegemony by solving the war debt problem he helped to create. We show that Keynes (...) was responsible for many of the most notorious aspects of the reparations section of the Treaty, and he crafted his proposals in light of mercantilist theories designed to keep Germany relatively poor after the war. His desperate desire to solve Britain’s war debt problem, mixed with his mercantilist ideas, inspired him to write The Economic Consequences of the Peace. (shrink)

This article explores the potent force of material objects in testimional culture by enacting an encounter with the ‘debris’ of a World War Two internment camp for Japanese Canadians. Pushing beyond the limits of the repetition of linear history, the article moves instead towards a phenomenological analysis of how yielding to remains of the past might allow us to reconnect with the destroyed worlds from which they were removed. Using Michel Taussig's notion of mimesis and Peggy Phelan's work on (...) mimicry, alongside Merleau‐Ponty's work on the habit‐body, this article brings into relief the neglected place of material objects collected by archives and brought to memorials in testimonial culture. (shrink)

Netley Hospital played a crucial role in caring for the wounded during the nineteenth century and twentieth century, becoming one of the busiest military hospitals of the time. Simultaneously, Florence Nightingale delved into the concept of health and developed the theoretical basis of nursing. This research aims to describe the experiences related to nursing and patient care described in The Netley British Red Cross Magazine during the First World War. The analysis displays different nurses' roles and the influence of (...) environmental factors in the delivery of the soldiers' care. There are indications that Nightingale's ideas would have infiltrated the nursing practices and other aspects of the soldiers' recovery at Netley. The history of the Netley Red Cross Hospital shows the theoretical and practical advancement of nursing care towards a holistic approach. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century, scientific innovations permanently changed international warfare. As chemicals traveled out of laboratories into factories and military locations, war became waged at home as well as overseas. Large numbers of women were employed in munitions factories during the First World War, but their public memories have been overshadowed by men who died on battlefields abroad; they have also been ignored in traditional histories of chemistry that focus on laboratory-based research. Mostly young and poorly educated, but (...) crucial for Britain’s military success, these female workers were subjected to procedures of social regulation and consigned to carrying out dangerous chemical procedures causing chronic illness or death; in particular, when TNT died their skin yellow, they were colloquially known as 'canaries.'. (shrink)

The rich body of understudied imagery constituting the culture of satire in pre-World War I Paris represents the work of scores of contributing artists, ranging from mockery of manners to biting critique of government policy. While František Kupka is recognized as a major Parisian contributor to the development of modernism and abstraction, his career as a satirist has been sidelined. In 1900, Kupka wrote to his friend the Czech poet Josef S. Machar that he would devote himself in future (...) mainly to lithography and graphics as these media are more "democratic". Kupka published scores of cartoons in France in the prewar period and was recognized at the time as a leading satirist. Here I explore his work... (shrink)

This article investigates whether the doctrine of social Darwinism had any bearing on the Labour Party’s decision to support Britain’s participation in the First World War. Many socialist intellect...

For nearly a century, the French have entertained an unshakable conviction that their ability to recognize themselves-to know and transmit the essence of Frenchness-depended on the teaching of the history of France. In effect, history was a discourse on France, and the teaching of history-"la pédagogie centrale du citoyen"-the means by which children were constituted as heirs and carriers of a common collective memory that made them not only citizens, but family. In this essay, I examine the rhetorical and conceptual (...) effects on history writing that emerge out of this preoccupation with the elaboration of a continuous, coherent national identity. Focusing on schoolbooks, I begin by looking at the dominant, nearly hegemonic model of French history created by Ernest Lavisse in the 1890s-a model informed by the dream of a unified, unitary French nation, embodied in and articulated through the history of France-and at the disruption of this paradigm in the aftermath of the Great War. I then consider a text written in the 1990s specifically to repudiate the kind of nationalist narratives that prevailed for most of this century-a new supranational history of Europe. I argue that, in their different experiments with fixing history, both Lavisse and the contemporary textbook authors did not so much repair a deficient history as produce a historical fixation, creating mythicized histories that are complete, closed, predictable, and at bottom ahistorical. Finally, I turn to a recent World War I novel, A Very Long Engagement by Sébastien Japrisot, in order to suggest ways in which the narrative strategies of a fiction writer may be useful to historians in thinking about a different kind of historical project. (shrink)

As one of the few philosophers to subject civilisation and barbarism to close analysis, Collingwood was acutely aware of the interrelationship between philosophy and history. This book combines historical, biographical and philosophical discussion in order to illuminate Collingwood's thinking and create the first in-depth analysis of Collingwood's responses to the Second World War.

Vedanta is the philosophy of the Vedas, those Indian scriptures which are the most ancient religious writings now known to the world. ...

An exceptional collection of letters, postcards, original writings, and photographs The First World War witnessed an unprecedented mobilization of philosophers and their families: as soldiers at the front; as public figures on the home front; as nurses in field hospitals; as mothers and wives; as sons and fathers. In Germany, the war irrupted in the midst of the rapid growth of Edmund Husserl's phenomenological movement – widely considered one of the most significant philosophical movements in twentieth century thought. Philosophers (...) at the Frontoffers a documentary history of phenomenology in the First World War. Through an exceptional collection of primary source materials (letters, postcards, original writings, photographs) from the Husserl Archives in Leuven, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, and the Archives of the University of Göttingen, the complex narratives of how the war affected the lives and thought of central figures in the phenomenological movement are charted. Key figures such as Edmund Husserl, his sons Wolfgang and Gerhart, Max Scheler, Edith Stein, Adolf Reinach, Martin Heidegger, and others are included in this collection of materials. The volume includes reproductions of original material, as well as German transcription of all texts and their English translation. (shrink)