For more information, or to purchase the volume directly from Springer, visit this page:
http://www.springer.com/philosophy/philosophical+traditions/book/978-94-007-1508-0

The Table of Contents of the volume is as follows:

Introduction, F. Halsall, J. Jansen, S. Murphy.

Part 1: Critical Communities and Aesthetic Subjects: Ethics, Politics, Action.

1. Community without Identity: Transcendental Communication in an Age of Flawed Identities, J. Williams

2. Othering, R. Bernasconi

3. Derrida’s Specters: Futurity, Finitude, Forgetting, J. Hodge

4. The Political and Ethical Significance of Waiting in Heidegger’s Philosophy of Action, F. ó Murchadha

5. The Political Horizon of Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, D. Davis

Part 2: Hermeneutics and Aesthetic Practices: Art, Ritual, Interpretation.

6. Violence and Splendor, A. Lingis

7. Refraction in Film and Philosophy: The Case of Godard, J. Mullarkey

8. Notes on Translating Hölderlin, D. Krell

9. Art & Edge, E.S. Casey

10. Merleau-Ponty on Cultural Schemas and Childhood Drawing, T. Welsh

11. Reflections on the Hermeneutics of Creative Acts, D. Burnham.

12. Hermeneutics as a Critique of Art, N. Davey

Part 3: Aesthetic Practice and Critical Community: Friendship

13. On Friendship, G. Allen

14. Kantian Friendship, G. Banham

15. Just Friends: The Ethics of (Postmodern) Relationships, H.Silverman

16. The Art of Friendship, W. Hamrick

• The Intentional Spectrum and Intersubjectivity: Phenomenology and the Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelians, by Michael D. Barber

World-renowned analytic philosophers John McDowell and Robert Brandom, dubbed “Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelians,” recently engaged in an intriguing debate about perception. In The Intentional Spectrum and Intersubjectivity Michael D. Barber is the first to bring phenomenology to bear not just on the perspectives of McDowell or Brandom alone, but on their intersection. He argues that McDowell accounts better for the intelligibility of empirical content by defending holistically functioning, reflectively distinguishable sensory and intellectual intentional structures. He reconstructs dimensions implicit in the perception debate, favoring Brandom on knowledge’s intersubjective features that converge with the ethical characteristics of intersubjectivity Emmanuel Levinas illuminates.

Phenomenology becomes the third partner in this debate between two analytic philosophers, critically mediating their discussion by unfolding the systematic interconnection among perception, intersubjectivity, metaphilosophy, and ethics.

• The Tenets of Cognitive Existentialism, by Dimitri Ginev

In The Tenets of Cognitive Existentialism, Dimitri Ginev draws on developments in hermeneutic phenomenology and other programs in hermeneutic philosophy to inform an interpretative approach to scientific practices. At stake is the question of whether it is possible to integrate forms of reflection upon the ontological difference in the cognitive structure of scientific research. A positive answer would have implied a proof that (pace Heidegger) “science is able to think.” This book is an extended version of such a proof. Against those who claim that modern science is doomed to be exclusively committed to the nexus of objectivism and instrumental rationality, the interpretative theory of scientific practices reveals science’s potentiality of hermeneutic self-reflection. Scientific research that takes into consideration the ontological difference has resources to enter into a dialogue with Nature.

Ginev offers a critique of postmodern tendencies in the philosophy of science, and sets out arguments for a feminist hermeneutics of scientific research.

• Transversal Rationality and Intercultural Texts: Essays in Phenomenology and Comparative Philosophy, by Hwa Yol Jung

Transversality is the keyword that permeates the spirit of these thirteen essays spanning almost half a century, from 1965 to 2009. The essays are exploratory and experimental in nature and are meant to be a transversal linkage between phenomenology and East Asian philosophy.

Transversality is the concept that dispels all ethnocentrisms, including Eurocentrism. In the globalizing world of multiculturalism, Eurocentric universalism falls far short of being universal but simply parochial at the expense of the non-Western world. Transversality is intercultural, interspecific, interdisciplinary, and intersensorial. Transversal Rationality and Intercultural Texts means to transform the very way of philosophizing itself by infusing or hybridizing multiple traditions in the history of the world.

Like no other scholar, Jung bridges the gap between Asian and Western cultures. By engaging Western philosophers as diverse as Bacon, Descartes, Heidegger, Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Glissant, Barthes, Fenollosa, McLuhan, and Eastern philosophers such as Wang Yang-ming, Nishida Kitaro, Nishitani Keiji, Watsuji Tetsuro, Nhat Hanh, and Suzuki Daisetz Teitaro, this book marks an unparalleled contribution to comparative philosophy and the study of philosophy itself.

Forthcoming titles in 2012 include M. C. Dillon’s The Ontology of Becoming and the Ethics of Particularity, edited by Lawrence Hass; and Dylan Trigg’s The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny.

The Edward Goodwin Ballard Book Prize in Phenomenology is sponsored by the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology with interest from a fund raised from Professor Ballard’s family, students, and friends. The prize of $1,000 is awarded annually, beginning in 1997, for the best book in phenomenology from the previous three years nominated in an area of interest to Ballard. For more information, including a list of past winners, visit the Ballard Prize Page.

The great enlargement of the idea of reason that has been achieved by phenomenological philosophy grew out of the powerful rediscovery of human life both as an original event and as a universal source of sense. In opposition to many exclusionary oppositions between human life as an irrational factum and reason as an objectifying principle antithetical to life, phenomenology succeeded in showing how the perceptual experience of a world operates as a basic condition for scientific reason as well as how the movement of human existence lies hidden even under the abstract laws of exact knowledge. The notion of a life-world still remains a fruitful instrument for the phenomenological vocation to unify reason with life, objective truth with first-person experience, and strict knowledge with ethics.

More than one hundred years after the foundation of phenomenology, and after more than four generations of phenomenological reflection on multiple dimensions of individual and social action, the basic link between human life and reason continues to occupy phenomenological thought and to challenge it to develop new approaches. But, among the fundamental aspects which today require renewed clarifications, the question concerning the place and sense of philosophy and philosophical thinking in our current culture and in our technological life-world stands out. Is the idea of philosophical rationality as a radical exercise in self-responsibility still normative and sense-giving, and must such an idea be altogether identified with the telos of reason? Which are the deepest forms for analyzing the subjective, intersubjective, and historical factors that move human life towards theoretical and practical responsibility? In the midst of the massive incidence of all sorts of technologies transforming the life-world, is it reasonable to search for a rational praxis embracing all human culture? Are there spurs for new intellectual and institutional spaces, new social and political proposals, in order to continue the philosophical vocation toward lucidity?

In the fatherland of José Ortega y Gasset, the pioneer of phenomenology in Spain and the promoter of ratiovitalism as first philosophy, the Fourth OPO Conference presents a grand opportunity for a genuine dialogue on all these issues, which are crucial for phenomenology and for philosophy and which may also be crucial for the future of human culture.

Conference website: http://huespedes.cica.es/aliens/sefe/opo/presentation.php
OPO Website: http://www.o-p-o.net/

For more information, contact Michael Barber at barbermd@slu.edu

For more information on the Ballard Prize, visit http://phenomenologycenter.org/about-carp/honors-awards/ballard/