Forms of Life and Subjectivity: Rethinking Sartre’s Philosophy explores the fundamental question of why we act as we do. Informed by an ontological and phenomenological approach, and building mainly, but not exclusively, on the thought of Sartre, Daniel Rueda Garrido considers the concept of a "form of life” as a term that bridges the gap between subjective identity and communities. This first systematic ontology of "forms of life” seeks to understand why we act in certain ways, and why we cling to certain identities, such as nationalisms, social movements, cultural minorities, racism, or religion. The answer, as Rueda Garrido argues, depends on an understanding of ourselves as "forms of life” that remains sensitive to the relationship between ontology and power, between what we want to be and what we ought to be. Structured in seven chapters, Rueda Garrido’s investigation yields illuminating and timely discussions of conversion, the constitution of subjectivity as an intersubjective self, the distinction between imitation and reproduction, the relationship between freedom and facticity, and the dialectical process by which two particular ways of being and acting enter into a situation of assimilation-resistance, as exemplified by capitalist and artistic forms of life. This ambitious and original work will be of great interest to scholars and students of philosophy, social sciences, cultural studies, psychology and anthropology. Its wide-ranging reflection on the human being and society will also appeal to the general reader of philosophy.

This work examines the varieties of reductionism that affect philosophical writing about human origins and identity. Gillett goes on to discuss the effects of neurological interventions, such as psychosurgery, on the image of the human.

In each of the films discussed in this study - 'Le Mepris', 'All About My Mother', 'The Thin Red Line' - something extraordinary is proposed. Or if not proposed, then shown, visually, by stranger and more powerful means than narrative or argument.

The purpose of the text is threefold: 1] to contribute to the renaissance of Husserl interpretation around a) the continuing publication of Husserl's manuscripts and b) his unpublished manuscripts; 2] to account for the historical origins and influence of the phenomenological project by articulating Husserl's relationship to authors before and after him; 3] to argue for the viability of the phenomenological project as conceived by Husserl in his later years. In regard to the last purpose, Luft's main argument shows that Husserlian phenomenology is not exhausted in the Cartesian (early) perspective, which is indeed its weakest and most vulnerable perspective. Husserlian phenomenology is a robust and philosophically necessary perspective when taken from its hermeneutic (late) perspective. And the ultimate point Luft makes in the text is that Husserl's hermeneutic phenomenology is distinct from other hermeneutic philosophers, namely, Cassirer, Heidegger and Gadamer. Unlike them, Husserl's focus centers on the work the subject must do in order to uncover the prejudices that guide his/her unreflective relationship to the world. In making his argument, Luft also demonstrates that there is a deep consistency within Husserl's own writings-from early to late-around the guiding themes of: 1] the natural attitude; 2] the need and function of the epoché; and 3] the split between egos, where the transcendental self (distinct from the natural self) is seen as the fundamental ability we all have to inquire into the genesis of our tradition-laden attitudes toward the world.

Forms of Life and Subjectivity: Rethinking Sartre's Philosophy explores the fundamental question of why we act as we do. Informed by an ontological and phenomenological approach, and building mainly, but not exclusively, on the thought of Sartre, Daniel Rueda Garrido considers the concept of a ""form of life"" as a term that bridges the gap between subjective identity and communities.

Can you be a self on your own or only together with others? Is selfhood a built-in feature of experience or rather socially constructed? How do we at all come to understand others? Does empathy amount to and allow for a distinct experiential acquaintance with others, and if so, what does that tell us about the nature of selfhood and social cognition? Does a strong emphasis on the first-personal character of consciousness prohibit a satisfactory account of intersubjectivity or is the former rather a necessary requirement for the latter? Engaging with debates and findings in classical phenomenology, in philosophy of mind and in various empirical disciplines, Dan Zahavi's new book Self and Other offers answers to these questions. Discussing such diverse topics as self-consciousness, phenomenal externalism, mindless coping, mirror self-recognition, autism, theory of mind, embodied simulation, joint attention, shame, time-consciousness, embodiment, narrativity, self-disorders, expressivity and Buddhist no-self accounts, Zahavi argues that any theory of consciousness that wishes to take the subjective dimension of our experiential life serious must endorse a minimalist notion of self. At the same time, however, he also contends that an adequate account of the self has to recognize its multifaceted character, and that various complementary accounts must be integrated, if we are to do justice to its complexity. Thus, while arguing that the most fundamental level of selfhood is not socially constructed and not constitutively dependent upon others, Zahavi also acknowledges that there are dimensions of the self and types of self-experience that are other-mediated. The final part of the book exemplifies this claim through a close analysis of shame.

According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a "transparent self-model." In Being No One, Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is. Building a bridge between the humanities and the empirical sciences of the mind, he develops new conceptual toolkits and metaphors; uses case studies of unusual states of mind such as agnosia, neglect, blindsight, and hallucinations; and offers new sets of multilevel constraints for the concept of consciousness. Metzinger's central question is: How exactly does strong, consciously experienced subjectivity emerge out of objective events in the natural world? His epistemic goal is to determine whether conscious experience, in particular the experience of being someone that results from the emergence of a phenomenal self, can be analyzed on subpersonal levels of description. He also asks if and how our Cartesian intuitions that subjective experiences as such can never be reductively explained are themselves ultimately rooted in the deeper representational structure of our conscious minds.

Karen Ng sheds new light on Hegel's famously impenetrable philosophy. She does so by offering a new interpretation of Hegel's idealism and by foregrounding Hegel's Science of Logic, revealing that Hegel's theory of reason revolves around the concept of organic life. Beginning with the influence of Kant's Critique of Judgment on Hegel, Ng argues that Hegel's key philosophical contributions concerning self-consciousness, freedom, and logic all develop around the idea of internal purposiveness, which appealed to Hegel deeply. She charts the development of the purposiveness theme in Kant's third Critique, and argues that the most important innovation from that text is the claim that the purposiveness of nature opens up and enables the operation of the power of judgment. This innovation is essential for understanding Hegel's philosophical method in the Differenzschrift (1801) and Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), where Hegel, developing lines of thought from Fichte and Schelling, argues against Kant that internal purposiveness constitutes cognition's activity, shaping its essential relation to both self and world. From there, Ng defends a new and detailed interpretation of Hegel's Science of Logic, arguing that Hegel's Subjective Logic can be understood as Hegel's version of a critique of judgment, in which life comes to be understood as opening up the possibility of intelligibility. She makes the case that Hegel's theory of judgment is modelled on reflective and teleological judgments, in which something's species or kind provides the objective context for predication. The Subjective Logic culminates in the argument that life is a primitive or original activity of judgment, one that is the necessary presupposition for the actualization of self-conscious cognition. Through bold and ambitious new arguments, Ng demonstrates the ongoing dialectic between life and self-conscious cognition, providing ground-breaking ways of understanding Hegel's philosophical system.

Jean-Paul Sartre, at the height of his powers, debates with Italy’s leading intellectuals In 1961, the prolific French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre was invited to give a talk at the Gramsci Institute in Rome. In attendance were some of Italy’s leading Marxist thinkers, such as Enzo Paci, Cesare Luporini, and Galvano Della Volpe, whose contributions to the long and remarkable discussion that followed are collected in this volume, along with the lecture itself. Sartre posed the question “What is subjectivity?”—a question of renewed importance today to contemporary debates concerning “the subject” in critical theory. This work includes a preface by Michel Kail and Raoul Kirchmayr and an afterword by Fredric Jameson, who makes a rousing case for the continued importance of Sartre’s philosophy.

"In Practice, Power, and Forms of Life, philosopher Terry Pinkard interprets Sartre's late work as a fundamental reworking of his earlier work, especially in terms of his understanding of the possibility of communal action as genuinely free, which the French philosopher had previously argued was impossible. Pinkard shows how Sartre figured in contemporary debates about the use of the first-person and how this informed his theory of action. Pinkard reveals how Sartre was led back to Hegel, which itself was spurred on by his newfound interest in Marxism in the 1950s. Pinkard also argues that Sartre took up Heidegger's critique of existentialism, developing a new post-Marxist theory of the way actors exhibit the class relations of their form of life in their actions, and showing how genuine freedom is present only in certain types of "we" relationships. Pinkard argues that Sartre constructed a novel position on freedom that has yet to be adequately taken up and thought through in philosophy and political theory. Through Sartre, Pinkard advances an argument that contributes to the history of philosophy as well as contemporary and future debates on action and freedom"--