Books by John Sallis

This volume makes Kant accessible to students, while the most advanced scholars will profit from it.

Presents an enigmatic discourse in the history of philosophy. Plato's discourse on the chora forms the pivotal moment in the Timaeus. This book undertakes a reinterpretation of the entire dialogue oriented to the chorology. It unsettles the traditional reading of the famous passage on time as the moving image of eternity.

Offers a philosophical reflection on the nature and process of translation. This title shows that translating is much more than a matter of transposing one language into another. It approaches translation from four directions and shows how the classical concept of translation has undergone mutation and deconstruction.

This latest philosophical text by John Sallis is inspired by the work of contemporary Chinese painter Cao Jun. It carries out a series of philosophical reflections on nature, art, and music by taking up Cao Jun's art and thought, with a focus on questions of the elemental.

With ecumenicity of inspiration, methodological rigor, originality, and philosophical profundity, this title provides the philosopher, philosophical interpretations that he may want to re-read along with the dialogues themselves.

Issued in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name held at the McMullen Museum of Art, February 5-June 3, 2018.

John Sallis dismantles the traditional conception of nature in this book of imagination and the cosmos. In the thought of Emerson, Hegel, and Schelling, Sallis discerns the seeds of an understanding of nature that goes against the modern technological assault on natural things and opens a space for a revitalized approach to the world. He identifies two fundamental reorientations that philosophical thought is called on to address today: the turn to the elemental in nature and the turn from nature to the cosmos at large. He traces the elusive course of the imagination, as if coming from nowhere, and describes the way in which it bears on the relation of humans to nature. Sallis's account demonstrates that a renewal of our understanding of nature is one of the prime imperatives we demand from philosophy today.

Broaching an understanding of nature in Platonic thought, John Sallis goes beyond modern conceptions and provides a strategy to have recourse to the profound sense of nature operative in ancient Greek philosophy. In a rigorous and textually based account, Sallis traces the complex development of the Greek concept of nature. Beginning with the mythical vision embodied in the figure of the goddess Artemis, he reanimates the sense of nature that informs the fragmentary discourses of Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles and shows how Plato takes up pre-Socratic conceptions critically while also being transformed. Through Sallis's close reading of the Theaetetus and the Phaedo, he recovers the profound and comprehensive concept of nature in Plato's thought.

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.

Includes contributions by scholars working in the phenomenological tradition, together with English translations of texts and documents whose phenomenological relevance transcends their considerable historical significance.

Presents an examination of three sites in Derrida's thought: his interpretation of Heidegger regarding the privileging of the question; his account of the Platonic figure of the good; and his interpretation of Plato's discourse on the crucial notion of the chora, the originating space of the universe.

Develops a framework for thinking about art through innovative readings of some of the most important philosophical writing on the subject by Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. This title exposes fresh layers in their texts and theories while also marking their limits.

How does it feel to get caught in a violent storm in the high Alps? What does a visitor think while ascending the sacred way in Delphi? How does a rock garden in Kyoto challenge one's sense of self? This book invites readers to open their imaginations to the power of evocative places.

Force of ImaginationThe Sense of the ElementalJohn SallisA 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."e; -Edward S. CaseyIn 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, editorContentsProl

The Shakespearean image of a tempest and its aftermath forms the beginning as well as a major guiding thread of Logic of Imagination. Moving beyond the horizons of his earlier work, Force of Imagination, John Sallis sets out to unsettle the traditional conception of logic, to mark its limits, and, beyond these limits, to launch another, exorbitant logic-a logic of imagination. Drawing on a vast range of sources, including Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, as well as developments in modern logic and modern mathematics, Sallis shows how a logic of imagination can disclose the most elemental dimensions of nature and of human existence and how, through dialogue with contemporary astrophysics, it can reopen the project of a philosophical cosmology.