This volume of essays on the philosopher John Sallis assesses his wide ranging and genuinely original contribution to philosophy. Along with the response to the essays by Sallis, these essays indicate directions for the future of philosophy.

This is the first anthology of commentary on Sallis that shows what is genuinely unique in his thought: the transformative relation of reason and imagination in thinking "after Heidegger."

Beginning with the assertion that earth is the elemental place that grants an abode to humans and to other living things, in Senses of Landscape the philosopher John Sallis turns to landscapes, and in particular to their representation in painting, to present a powerful synthetic work. Senses of Landscape proffers three kinds of analyses, which, though distinct, continually intersect in the course of the book. The first consists of extended analyses of distinctive landscapes from four exemplary painters, Paul Cezanne, Caspar David Friedrich, Paul Klee, and Guo Xi. Sallis then turns to these artists’ own writings—treatises, essays, and letters—about art in general and landscape painting in particular, and he sets them into a philosophical context. The third kind of analysis draws both on Sallis’s theoretical writings and on the canonical texts in the philosophy of art (Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and Heidegger). These analyses present for a wide audience a profound sense of landscape and of the earthly abode of the human.

A collection of philosophical essays on place and nature, featuring beautiful paintings and drawings. What is the effect of light as it measures the seasons? How does light leave different traces on the terrain—on a Pacific Island, in the Aegean Sea, high in the Alps, or in the forest? John Sallis considers the expansiveness of nature and the range of human vision in essays about the effect of light and luminosity on place. Sallis writes movingly of nature and the elements, employing an enormous range of philosophical, geographical, and historical knowledge. Paintings and drawings by Alejandro A. Vallega illuminate the text, accentuating the interaction between light and environment. “A profound and exceptionally nuanced piece of writing that brings philosophy and art into close proximity. Decades of Sallis’s remarkable philosophical thinking are at work and play.” —Jason M. Wirth, Seattle University “Beautifully conceived and written. Sallis engages the elemental interplay of earth and sky, translucence and obscurity, airiness and density, height and depth, wet and dry, gods and mortals, storms and clouds, rivers and fog, plains and mountains–nature in its expansive, indefinable materiality and ephemeral intangibility.” —Charles E. Scott, Vanderbilt University

Aesthetic sensibility rests on perceptual experience and characterizes not only our experience of the arts but our experience of the world. Sensibility and Sense offers a philosophically comprehensive account of humans' social and cultural embeddedness encountered, recognized, and fulfilled as an aesthetic mode of experience. Extending the range of aesthetic experience from the stone of the earth's surface to the celestial sphere, the book focuses on the aesthetic as a dimension of social experience. The guiding idea of pervasive interconnectedness, both social and environmental, leads to an aesthetic critique of the urban environment, the environment of daily life, and of terrorism, and has profound implications for grounding social and political values. The aesthetic emerges as a powerful critical tool for appraising urban culture and political practice.

Improvisation is usually either lionized as an ecstatic experience of being in the moment or disparaged as the thoughtless recycling of clichés. Eschewing both of these orthodoxies, The Philosophy of Improvisation ranges across the arts—from music to theater, dance to comedy—and considers the improvised dimension of philosophy itself in order to elaborate an innovative concept of improvisation. Gary Peters turns to many of the major thinkers within continental philosophy—including Heidegger, Nietzsche, Adorno, Kant, Benjamin, and Deleuze—offering readings of their reflections on improvisation and exploring improvisational elements within their thinking. Peters’s wry, humorous style offers an antidote to the frequently overheated celebration of freedom and community that characterizes most writing on the subject. Expanding the field of what counts as improvisation, The Philosophy of Improvisation will be welcomed by anyone striving to comprehend the creative process.

Kant and the Feeling of Life positions Kant's concept of life as a guiding thread for understanding not only Kant's approach to aesthetics and teleology but the underlying unity of the Critique of Judgment itself. The "feeling of life," which Kant describes as affecting us in various ways—as animating, enlivening, and quickening the mind—lies at the heart of Kant's philosophical project, but it has remained understudied for a theme of such centrality. This volume brings together, for the first time, essays focused on the topic of life in Kant's work, providing a wealth of perspectives and analyses ranging from the Critique of Judgment to Kant's early aesthetics, his social and political philosophy, his work connected to the body and health, and his moral theory.

The essays collected in this volume take a new look at the role of language in the thought of Martin Heidegger to reassess its significance for contemporary philosophy. They consider such topics as Heidegger's engagement with the Greeks, expression in language, poetry, the language of art and politics, and the question of truth. Heidegger left his unique stamp on language, giving it its own force and shape, especially with reference to concepts such as Dasein, understanding, and attunement, which have a distinctive place in his philosophy.

Force of Imagination The Sense of the Elemental John Sallis A bold and original investigation into how imagination shapes thought and feeling. "This is a bold new direction for the author, one that he takes in an arresting and convincing manner.... a powerful, original approach to what others call 'ecology' but what Sallis shows to be a question of the status of the earth in philosophical thinking at this historical moment." --Edward S. Casey In this major original work, John Sallis probes the very nature of imagination and reveals how the force of imagination extends into all spheres of human life. While drawing critically on the entire history of philosophy, Sallis's work takes up a vantage point determined by the contemporary deconstruction of the classical opposition between sensible and intelligible. Thus, in reinterrogating the nature of imagination, Force of Imagination carries out a radical turn to the sensible and to the elemental in nature. Liberated from subjectivity, imagination is shown to play a decisive role both in drawing together the moments of our experience of sensible things and in opening experience to the encompassing light, atmosphere, earth, and sky. Set within this elemental expanse, the human sense of time, of self, and of the other proves to be inextricably linked to imagination and to nature. By showing how imagination is formative for the very opening upon things and elements, this work points to the revealing power of poetic imagination and casts a new light on the nature of art. John Sallis is Liberal Arts Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. His previous books include Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogues; Shades--Of Painting at the Limit; Stone; Chorology: On Beginning in Plato's Timaeus (all published by Indiana University Press), Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy and Double Truth. Studies in Continental Thought--John Sallis, editor Contents Prolusions On (Not Simply) Beginning Remembrance Duplicity of the Image Spacing the Image Tractive Imagination The Elemental Temporalities Proprieties Poetic Imagination

Informed by Gloria Anzaldúa's and José Carlos Mariátegui's work, as well as by Andean cosmology, Omar Rivera turns to Inka stonework and architecture as an example of a “Cosmological Aesthetics.” He articulates ways of sensing, feeling and remembering that are attuned to an aesthetic of water, earth and light. On this basis, Rivera brings forth a corporeal orientation that can be inhabited by the oppressed, one that withdraws from predominant modern/Western conceptions of the human. By providing an aesthetic analysis of cosmological sensing, Rivera sets the stage for exploring physical dimensions of anti-colonial resistance, and furthers the Latinx and Latin American tradition of anti-colonial and liberatory philosophy. Seeing aesthetic involvements with the cosmos as a source for embodied modes of resistance, Rivera turns to the work of María Lugones and Enrique Dussel in order to make explicit the aesthetic dimensions of their work. Andean Aesthetics and Anticolonial Resistance creates a new dialogue between art historians, artists, and philosophers working on Latin American thought, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. It weaves together a Latin American philosophy that connects pre-Columbian cosmologies with contemporary thinkers. Rivera's original approach introduces us to the living, evolving and aesthetic alternatives to coloniality of power and of knowledge, overhauling current understandings of decolonial theory and opening the tradition in transformative ways.