The contribution of this book to the field of reconciliation is both theoretical and practical, recognizing that good theory guides effective practice and practice is the ground for compelling theory. Using a Girardian hermeneutic as a starting point, a new conceptual Gestalt emerges in these essays, one not fully integrated in a formal way but showing a clear understanding of some of the challenges and possibilities for dealing with the deep divisions, enmity, hatred, and other effects of...

In The Plays of Samuel Beckett Eugene Webb first summarizes the western philosophical tradition which has culminated in the void--the centuries of attempts to impose form and meaning on existence, the failure of which has left experience in fragments and man a stranger in an unintelligible universe. Succeeding chapters take up the plays work by work, interpreting each individually and tracing recurrent motifs, themes, and images to show the continuity in the underlying tendencies ...

Philosophers of Consciousness is both an expository study of the thought of the six figures it focuses on and an original exploration of the themes they address. In addition, as Eugene Webb states, "it does not hesitate to probe the more problematic areas of the thought of each thinker and to suggest what to some of their advocates will probably seem rather bold and controversial interpreations of their ideas."The book reveals some deep differences that set the six off aga...

Collectively the works of Samuel Beckett, winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature, reveal a remarkable continuity of theme. Together his writings present a particular view of life and each novel constitutes part of a larger whole.

Under the broad umbrella of the Christian religion, there exists a great divide between two fundamentally different ways of thinking about key aspects of the Christian faith. Eugene Webb explores the sources of that divide, looking at how the Eastern and Western Christian worlds drifted apart due both to the different ways they interpreted their symbols and to the different roles political power played in their histories. Previous studies have focused on historical events or on the history...

After the disappointing events of the 1960s, including the loss of Algeria, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the American war in the former French colony of Indo-China, people in France began to look seriously to Freudianism in the transformed version of Jacques Lacan, for a new way of understanding human relations and the relations between human beings and society. The movement in France is not specifically psychoanalytic but developed against such a background. Psychoanalytic t...

In a subtle exposition of the tension between sacred and secular themes in twentieth-century literature, Eugene Webb analyzes works by Yeats, Mann, Rilke, Stevens, Beckett, Joyce, Nietzsche, Eliot, Auden, and Ibsen. He demonstrates the connection between modern literature and religious tradition, and shows how conceptions of the sacred and its relation to the secular have been transformed in modern literary imagery.Webb considers the writers he discusses to be the true explorers of...

"The order of history emerges from the history of order" is the sentence that opens Eric Voegelin's multivolume work, Order and History. A search for an understanding of the order that can be found in history, and within the human being who is the subject of history, has resulted in a large and complicated body of work by this contemporary philosopher. Eugene Webb offers a full illumination and assessment of that work.

The essays that Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo collect in this volume locate multiple affinities between the philosophies of Nietzsche and Levinas. Both philosophers question the nature of subjectivity and the meaning of responsibility after the "death of God." While Nietzsche poses the dilemmas of a self without a ground and of ethics at a time of cultural upheaval and demystification, Levinas wrestles with subjectivity and the sheer possibility of ethics after the Shoah. Both argue that...

Art and Answerability contains three of Mikhail Bakhtin's early essays from the years following the Russian Revolution, when Bakhtin and other intellectuals eagerly participated in the debates, lectures, demonstrations, and manifesto writing of the period. Because they predate works that have already been translated, these essays—"Art and Answerability," "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity," and "The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art"—are essential to a compr...

This volume brings together for the first time some of the most helpful and insightful essays on the four most influential and discussed philosophers in the history of existentialism: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. The contributors write on such topics as Kierkegaard's knight of faith and his diagnosis of the 'present age;' Nietzsche's view of morality and self-creation; Heidegger's accounts of worldhood and authenticity; and Sartre's ontology, ethics, and conception of the...

Strange Wonder confronts Western philosophy's ambivalent relationship to the Platonic "wonder" that reveals the strangeness of the everyday. On the one hand, this wonder is said to be the origin of all philosophy. On the other hand, it is associated with a kind of ignorance that ought to be extinguished as swiftly as possible. By endeavoring to resolve wonder's indeterminacy into certainty and calculability, philosophy paradoxically secures itself at the expense of its own conditi...