Why do we act as we do? Why do we assume that the way of being and behaving in our community is right, good, and common sense? Why do we fail to understand those who are, act, and feel differently? These are some of the questions that this book raises and attempts to answer. This ontology is rooted in the phenomenological tradition but with the innovation of taking the "form of life" as the central ontological unit. We are our form of life, but, as a transcendental-immanent reality, this is not directly equivalent to culture or society; it is rather the "political" realisation in the world of an image of the human being shared by a given community. This overcomes the traditional dualities of individual and society, consciousness and body, facticity and freedom, actuality and possibility. The subject is a subject because it identifies with that image, which is equivalent to the intersubjective consciousness of how one should act and be in the world. This gives rise to multiple forms of life. The latter implies a certain power to be who one wants to be. In this way, the book is an invitation to self-examination, for if our form of life is voluntary (i.e., capitalism), it shatters the illusion that one cannot live in any other way, and places us before the anguished but inevitable task of justifying its adoption or resorting to its abandonment. The book offers a dynamic analysis of human existence as the actualisation of a form of life that is, at the same time, the exercise of a certain power over those who seek to live otherwise, especially when that form is institutionalised by a government as the essence of the national or transnational community.

"What is the meaning of being?" This is the central question of Martin Heidegger's profoundly important work, in which the great philosopher seeks to explain the basic problems of existence. A central influence on later philosophy, literature, art, and criticism—as well as existentialism and much of postmodern thought—Being and Time forever changed the intellectual map of the modern world. As Richard Rorty wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "You cannot read most of the important thinkers of recent times without taking Heidegger's thought into account." This first paperback edition of John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson's definitive translation also features a new foreword by Heidegger scholar Taylor Carman.

Argues that symbolism is an important and unique element of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology.

A new, definitive translation of Heidegger's most important work.

What are the challenges that Nietzsche's philosophy poses for contemporary phenomenology? Elodie Boublil, Christine Daigle, and an international group of scholars take Nietzsche in new directions and shed light on the sources of phenomenological method in Nietzsche, echoes and influences of Nietzsche within modern phenomenology, and connections between Nietzsche, phenomenology, and ethics. Nietzsche and Phenomenology offers a historical and systematic reconsideration of the scope of Nietzsche's thought.

Explores the evolution of Heidegger’s thinking about nature and its relevance for environmental ethics. In Naturalizing Heidegger, David E. Storey proposes a new interpretation of Heidegger’s importance for environmental philosophy, finding in the development of his thought from the early 1920s to his later work in the 1940s the groundwork for a naturalistic ontology of life. Primarily drawing on Heidegger’s engagement with Nietzsche, but also on his readings of Aristotle and the biologist Jakob von Uexküll, Storey focuses on his critique of the nihilism at the heart of modernity, and his conception of the intentionality of organisms and their relation to their environments. From these ideas, a vision of nature emerges that recognizes the intrinsic value of all living things and their kinship with one another, and which anticipates later approaches in the philosophy of nature, such as Hans Jonas’s phenomenology of life and Evan Thompson’s contemporary attempt to naturalize phenomenology.

Phenomenology, together with Marxism, pragmatism, and analytic philosophy, dominated philosophy in the twentieth century—and Edmund Husserl is usually thought to have been the first to develop the concept. His views influenced a variety of important later thinkers, such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, who eventually turned phenomenology away from questions of knowledge. But here Tom Rockmore argues for a return to phenomenology’s origins in epistemology, and he does so by locating its roots in the work of Immanuel Kant. Kant and Phenomenology traces the formulation of Kant’s phenomenological approach back to the second edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In response to various criticisms of the first edition, Kant more forcefully put forth a constructivist theory of knowledge. This shift in Kant’s thinking challenged the representational approach to epistemology, and it is this turn, Rockmore contends, that makes Kant the first great phenomenologist. He then follows this phenomenological line through the work of Kant’s idealist successors, Fichte and Hegel. Steeped in the sources and literature it examines, Kant and Phenomenology persuasively reshapes our conception of both of its main subjects.

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.

Sartre explains the theory of existential psychoanalysis in this treatise on human reality.