In Reflexivity and the Crisis of Western Reason Barry Sandywell outlined and defended a central place for reflexivity in the human sciences. In this second equally outstanding Volume of Logological Investigations, he reconstructs the origins of European reflection.

This ground breaking work explores the genealogical analysis of the discourses of reflection. Barry Sandywell traces the differences between the traditional discourses of reflection and the experiences of reflexivity in everyday, social and philosophical thought.Brilliantly organised and abounding with astonishing insights, Reflexivity and the Crisis of Western Reason offers a fundamental challenge to our normal ways of viewing social thought.

This substantial and ambitious dictionary explores the languages and cultures of visual studies. It provides the basis for understanding the foundations and motivations of current theoretical and academic discourse, as well as the different forms of visual culture that have come to organize everyday life. The book is firmly placed in the context of the 'visual turn' in contemporary thought. It has been designed as an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary introduction to the vocabularies a...

Visual culture has become one of the most dynamic fields of scholarship, a reflection of how the study of human culture increasingly requires distinctively visual ways of thinking and methods of analysis. Bringing together leading international scholars to assess all aspects of visual culture, the Handbook aims to provide a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the subject.The Handbook embraces the extraordinary range of disciplines which now engage in the st...

The Reflexive Initiative is an authoritative intervention in the practice and tradition of reflexive social theory. It demonstrates the importance of the reflexive imperative, not only in the investigation of everyday life but across a wide range of human sciences and philosophical perspectives. Forty years after the publication of On the Beginning of Social Inquiry, the chapters in this collection range from re-appraisals of earlier essays on topics such as ‘reunions’, ‘rethinkin...

This is a work of social theory and philosophy which seeks to make the constitution of social theory a ‘social’ activity. It is essentially a collaborative text, by five authors, committed to a re-awakening of some of the forgotten dimensions of social theorizing. The collaborative work was originally occasioned by an attempt to analyse the notion of social stratification and its treatment in the sociological tradition. The authors’ main concern here is with the nature of social theorizing...

Interpreting Visual Culture brings together original writings from leading experts in art history, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies. Ranging from an analysis of the role of vision in current critical discourse to discussion of specific examples taken from the visual arts, ethics and sociology, it presents the latest material on the interpretation of the visual in modern culture.Among topics covered are:* the visual rhetoric of modernity* the drawings...

In this third Volume of Logological Investigations Sandywell continues his sociological reconstruction of the origins of reflexive thought and discourse with special reference to pre-Socratic philosophy and science and their socio-political context.

Richard Rorty's collected papers, written during the 1980s and now published in two volumes, take up some of the issues which divide Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophers and contemporary French and German philosophers and offer something of a compromise - agreeing with the latter in their criticisms of traditional notions of truth and objectivity, but disagreeing with them over the political implications they draw from dropping traditional philosophical doctrines. In this volume Rorty offers ...

This volume argues that theory, far from being dead, has undergone major shifts in order to come to terms with the most urgent cultural and political questions of today. Offering an overview of theory’s new directions, this groundbreaking collection includes essays on affect, biopolitics, biophilosophy, the aesthetic, and neoliberalism, as well as examinations of established areas such as subaltern studies, the postcolonial, and ethics.Influential figures such as Agamben, Badiou, A...

Bakhtin and the Human Sciences demonstrates the abundance of ideas Bakhtin′s thought offers to the human sciences, and reconsiders him as a social thinker, not just a literary theorist. The contributors hail from many disciplines and their essays′ implications extend into other fields in the human sciences. The volume emphasizes Bakhtin′s work on dialogue, carnival, ethics and everyday life, as well as the relationship between Bakhtin′s ideas and those of other important s...

In this important new book, Diana Coole shows how existential phenomenology illuminates and enlivens our understanding of politics. Merleau-PontyOs focus on embodied experience allows us to approach political life in a manner that is both critical and engaged. With breadth of vision and penetrating insight, Coole demonstrates that political questions were always central to Merleau-PontyOs philosophical project. Her examination of his complete body of work presents us with a rigorous philos...