In all of these discourses, she has sought to cultivate an awareness of how the self is situated and influenced, as well as the ways in which a self can influence others.In this volume, twelve scholars examine and display the influence of ...

"In this exciting and important work, Wyschogrod attempts to read contemporary ethical theory against the vast unwieldy tapestry that is postmodernism.... [A] provocative and timely study."—Michael Gareffa, _Theological Studies_ "A 'must' for readers interested in the borderlands between philosophy, hagiography, and ethics."—Mark I. Wallace, _Religious Studies Review_.

Edith Stein comes alive through these warm, totally attentive letters. She joins a deeply sensitive heart with her keen intelligence, revealing herself to be a wise mentor and a caring friend available to anyone who approached her. Here we learn what was truly important to her: the total well-being of those who treasured her letters enough to preserve them even while suffering the havoc of war and oppression. This volume offers the first English translation of the majority of her (...) surviving letters, with 4 photos and a fully linked index of recipients. (shrink)

This initial volume of the Collected Works of Edith Stein offers, for the first time in English, the unabridged biography of Edith Stein (Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), depicting her life as a child and young adult. Her text ends abruptly because the Nazi SS arrested, then deported, her to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942. Edith Stein is one of the most significant German women of the 20th century. At the age of twenty-five she became the (...) first assistant to Edmund Husserl, the founder of Phenomenology. She was much in demand as a writer and lecturer after her conversion from atheism to Catholicism. Later, as a Discalced Carmelite nun, she maintained her intellectual pursuits until she, like so many others, became a victim of the Nazi persecution that raged across Eastern Europe. By making this landmark work available in English, the Institute of Carmelite Studies provides an eye-witness account of persons and activities on the scene at the time when psychology and philosophy became separate disciplines. In addition to photographs and a map, this volume is enhanced with a preface, the foreword and afterword, notes, and a list of places associated with Edith Stein’s life. It is our aim that these, together with Edith Stein’s text, may help bring into relief the many background details of the rich autobiographical work she has left us. (shrink)

In queste pagine è delineata la vicenda esistenziale e intellettuale di Edith Stein. Donna straordinaria, è stata capace di racchiudere nella sua persona molte "possibili" vite. Le ha realizzate come ebrea e cattolica, fenomenologa e filosofa cristiana, docente e monaca carmelitana, agnostica e santa. Si tratta di un processo vitale dagli apparenti salti qualitativi, i quali si volgono all'ascolto di un medesimo nucleo identitario. Questa viva "formazione di sé" ha condotto Edith Stein a una "donazione di sé", culminata (...) nell'Olocausto. Il Diario di Edith si sovrappone ai pensieri di Angela Ales Bello, in veste di narratrice d'eccezione. Con la sentita partecipazione della narratrice, e insieme mantenendo il distacco critico della studiosa, viene scoperta la storia di un'anima. Le emozioni e le conquiste intellettuali trovano una sintesi grazie al peculiare approccio ai "fenomeni" che Edith Stein aveva appreso alla scuola di Edmund Husserl, di Tommaso d'Aquino e di Teresa D'Avila. Sintesi mirabile di pensatori che "si danno la mano" al di là dello spazio e del tempo--Front flap. (shrink)

Exploring the risks, ambiguities, and unstable conceptual worlds of contemporary thought, Crossover Queries brings together the wide-ranging writings, across twenty years, of one of our most important philosophers.Ranging from twentieth-century European philosophy—the thought of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Levinas, Janicaud, and others—to novels and artworks, music and dance, from traditional Jewish thought to Jain andBuddhist metaphysics, Wyschogrod’s work opens radically new vistas while remaining mindful that the philosopher stands within and is responsible to a philosophical legacy conditioned by the negative.Rather than (...) point to a Hegelian dialectic of overcoming negation or to a postmetaphysical exhaustion, Wyschogrod treats negative moments as opening novel spaces for thought. She probes both the desire for God and an ethics grounded in the interests of the other person, seeing these as moments both of crossing over and of negation. Alert to the catastrophes that have marked our times, she exposes the underlying logical structures of nihilatory forces that have been exerted to exterminate whole peoples. Analyzing the negationsof biological research and cultural images of mechanized and robotic bodies, she shows how they contest the body as lived in ordinary experience.“Crossover Queries brings together important essays on a remarkable range of topics by one of our most insightful cultural critics. Commenting on philosophical and theological issues that have shaped the recent past as well as scientific and technological questions that will preoccupy us in the near future, Wyschogrod consistently alerts us to the urgency of problems whose importance few recognize. To avoid the challenge these essays pose is to avoid responsibility for a future that appears to be increasingly fragile.”—Mark C. Taylor, Columbia University. (shrink)

What are the ethical responsibilities of the historian in an age of mass murder and hyperreality? Can one be postmodern and still write history? For whom should history be written? Edith Wyschogrod animates such questions through the passionate figure of the "heterological historian." Realizing the philosophical impossibility of ever recovering "what really happened," this historian nevertheless acknowledges a moral imperative to speak for those who have been rendered voiceless, to give countenance to those who have become faceless, and hope (...) to the desolate. Wyschogrod also weighs the impact of modern archival methods, such as photographs, film, and the Internet, which bring with them new constraints on the writing of history and which mandate a new vision of community. Drawing on the works of continental philosophers, historiographers, cognitive scientists, and filmmakers, Wyschogrod creates a powerful new framework for the understanding of history and the ethical duties of the historian. (shrink)

We investigate the effect on the complexity of adding the universal modality and the reflexive transitive closure modality to modal logics. From the examples in the literature, one might conjecture that adding the reflexive transitive closure modality is at least as hard as adding the universal modality, and that adding either of these modalities to a multi-modal logic where the modalities do not interact can only increase the complexity to EXPTIME-complete. We show that the first conjecture holds under reasonable assumptions (...) and that, except for a number of special cases which we fully characterize, the hardness part of the second conjecture is true. However, the upper bound part of the second conjecture fails miserably: we show that there exists a uni-modal, decidable, finitely axiomatizable, and canonical logic for which adding the universal modality causes undecidability and for which adding the reflexive transitive closure modality causes high undecidability. (shrink)

Edith Russell had already written the lives of Carey Thomas and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt when she married Bertrand Russell in 1952. She preserved his files as no one before had, and took a great interest in his earlier years as she did in his current campaigns and family. When Clark’s Life appeared in 1975, she reacted strongly to it. She wrote three drafts of her comments, each draft more extensive, and including information only she would have, such as Russell’s (...) views on personal matters, even his habits of dress. This unabridged excerpt goes to the end of Chapter 7 (about 1912). (shrink)

Weaving the Threads of Life: The Khita Gyn‐Eco‐Logical Healing Cult among the Yaka. René Devisch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. 344 pp. $53.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Traditional methods of teaching professional nursing ethics in the classroom have translated into limited success in clinical practice. Students don’t perceive an integration of ethics education in practical clinical settings, while educators grapple with a lack of perceived ‘excellence of moral character’ in their students when they are taught intellectual virtues and theoretical wisdom in the classroom that they do not see demonstrated in the clinical setting. Also traditionally, emphasis in ethics teaching has tended to focus on the nurse-patient relationship, (...) while less attention has been paid to nursing in a more inter/intra professional or global context. The purpose of using constructivist theory and concept-based learning strategies to teach junior level nursing students ethics was to present implications for nurse educators that will help them foster/improve their student’s critical thinking, and increase their mastery and global integration of the complex abstract concepts associated with professional nursing ethics. (shrink)

No other thinker so engaged the Russian cultural imagination of the early twentieth century as did Friedrich Nietzche. The Revolution of Moral Consciousness shows how Nietzschean thought influenced the brilliant resurgence of literary life that started in the 1890s and continued for four decades. Through an analysis of the Russian encounter with Nietzsche, Edith Clowes defines the shift in ethical and aesthetic vision that motivated Russia's unprecedented artistic renascence and at the same time led its followers to the brink (...) of cultural despair. Clowes shows how in the last years of the nineteenth century a diverse array of writers and critics discovered Nietzsche's thought, embracing or repudiating it with equal vigor. The literary storm brewing around Nietzsche and the concurrent relaxation of censorship combined to attract a public eager to follow the new intellectual fashion. Young writers, such as Andreev and Kuprin, welcomed the idea of the "superman" as a promising path to personal fulfillment. The tragic fates of their protagonists and the alluring gospel of the vulgar Zarathustra-like characters of such bestselling authors as Boborykin, Artsybashev, and Verbitskaia found enthusiastic, if indiscriminating, audiences ready to be "taught" how to "find themselves." By considering this Nietzschean cult, Clowes draws fresh insight into the nature of the budding popular-culture industry in Russia and the fast-growing reading public. From this ferment emerged the greatest Russian literary voices of the early twentieth century. The revolutionary romantics, Gorky and Lunacharsky, sought in Nietzsche's writing a new vision of total social and cultural change. Merezhkovsky led a generation of mystic symbolists in the search for a literary myth of resurrection. Ivanov, Blok, and Belyi appropriated the image of the "crucified Dionysus" as the central symbol of spiritual transfiguration. Their encounters with Nietzschean thought disclose an even more profound creative struggle with their own cultural past and its established formulations of nation and individual, culture and history. Clowes uses the term future anxiety to speak of a creative mentality that strove to assert itself by diminishing the impact of powerful literary precursors, such as Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Solovyov, and opening to the imagination the vision of a future full of vast creative possibility. (shrink)

"I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely ...

To avoid the difficulties that follow from essentialism in ethics, a new account of generality is required. The first half of this paper develops such an account by considering the work of Levinas and of Merleau-Ponty who turn to the incarnate subject as expressing a mode of generality of which universals and essences are derivative types. I call this kind of generality “carnal generality” and the context-specific complexes that exhibit it “carnal generals.” In the second part I turn to paradigmatic (...) lives both within and outside of religious tradition to show how such lives function as carnal generals. I examine some competing claims, Nelson Goodman’s account of samples and Alasdair MacIntyre’s view of the virtues as they bear on resolving ethical disputes, and suggest reasons for preferring a phenomenological view of paradigmatic lives. (shrink)