In this pioneering book, Robert Mugerauer seeks to make deconstruction and hermeneutics accessible to people in the environmental disciplines, including architecture, planning, urban studies, environmental studies, and cultural geography.Mugerauer demonstrates each methodology through a case study. The first study uses the traditional approach to recover the meaning of Jung's and Wittgenstein's houses by analyzing their historical, intentional contexts. The second case study utiliz...

Much recent philosophical work proposes to illuminate dilemmas of human existence with reference to the arts and culture, often to the point of submitting particular works to preconceived formulations. In this examination of three texts that respond to loss, Robert Mugerauer responds with close, detailed readings that seek to clarify the particularity of the intense force such works bring forth. Mugerauer shows how, in the face of what is irrevocably taken away as well as of what continues...

themes among the essays resurface and resonate. Though our request for essays was broad and open-ended, we found that topics such as seeing, authenticity, interpretation, wholeness, care, and dwelling ran as undercur rents throughout. Our major hope is that each essay plays a part in revealing a larger whole of meaning which says much about a more humane relation ship with places, environments and the earth as our home. Part I. Beginnings and directions At the start, we recognize the treme...

Martin Heidegger's philosophical works devoted themselves to challenging previously held ontological notions of what constitutes "being," and much of his work focused on how beings interact within particular spatial locations. Frequently, Heidegger used the motifs of homelessness and homecoming in order to express such spatial interactions, and despite early and continued recognition of the importance of homelessness and homecoming, this is the first sustained study of these motifs in his ...

Schopenhauer is the most readable of German philosophers. This book gives a succinct explanation of his metaphysical system, concentrating on the original aspects of his thought, which inspired many artists and thinkers including Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud, and Wittgenstein. Schopenhauer's central notion is that of the will - a blind, irrational force that he uses to interpret both the human mind and the whole of nature. Seeing human behaviour as that of a natural organism governed by the wi...

Theodor Adorno was no stranger to controversy. In The Jargon of Authenticity he gives full expression to his hostility to the language employed by certain existentialist thinkers such as Martin Heidegger. With his customary alertness to the uses and abuses of language, he calls into question the jargon, or 'aura', as his colleague Walter Benjamin described it, which clouded existentialists' thought. He argued that its use undermined the very message for meaning and liberation that...

WITTGENSTEINS CONCEPTION OF PHILOSOPHY was first published in 1969 by Basil Blackwell Publishers, the official publisher of Wittgensteins works. It was intended to be a clear and concise introduction to Wittgensteins whole philosophy that corrects many basic misunderstandings of Wittgenstein at the time. After all these years, many scholars still regard it as the best introduction to Wittgenstein. We are reprinting this book and making it available electronically. In addition, we are appen...

A deeply thoughtful, deeply irreverent look at the mythology of play, Gods and Games ties together Joseph Campbell's approach to myth and religion with Johan Huizinga's view of our species as Homo ludens — "Man the Game-player" — suggesting that play is a central aspect of the human spirit and human culture."A comprehensive and clear review.... loaded with quotations both pertinent and entertaining that may be eye-openers both to traditional r...

What if imagination and art are not, as many of us might think, the frosting on life, but the fountainhead of human experience? What if our logic and science derive from art forms, rather than the other way around?In this trenchant volume, Rollo May helps all of us find those creative impulses that, once liberated, offer new possibilities for achievement.A renowned therapist and inspiring guide, Dr. May draws on his experience to show how we can break out of old patterns in...

The atmosphere of silence all around provided a faithful setting for Heidegger’s philosophy. I could not help comparing it with the atmosphere I had encountered in the house of Professor Berdyaev near Paris and that of Professor Jaspers in Heidelberg. In every case, the external world faithfully reflected the world of the mind. In Berdyaev’s case it was the spirit of communion; in Jaspers’s that of spiritual engagement. But in Heidegger’s case it was the spirit of overwhelming solitude. Wi...

The last few decades have witnessed an explosion in ideas and theories on art. Art itself has never been so topical, but much recent thinking remains inaccessible and difficult to use. This book assesses the work of those thinkers (including artists) who have had a major impact on making, criticizing and interpreting art since the 1960s. With entries by leading international experts, this book presents a concise, critical appraisal of thinkers and their ideas about art and its place in the...