Books in the Cultural Memory in the Present series

Unconventionally fusing the the history of faith and reason in Islam, this book traces the Qur'an-inspired intellectual revolution that took off in the Islamic world of the seventh century, revealing its highlights and following it through to its sixteenth-century demise.

A fictionalized hybrid of personal memoir, case studies, dream sequences, and theoretical reflection, this book on madness, trauma and psychiatry uses a fictional form to engage with psychotic experience and to make the case for a less mechanized, more humane treatment of "fools and madmen."

This book traces the history of phenomenological ethics and social thought in Central Europe from its founders Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl through its reception in East Central Europe by dissident thinkers such as Jan Patocka, Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), and Vaclav Havel.

Seven eminent authors, all known for their work in deconstruction, address the millennial issue of our futures, promises, prophecies, projects, and possibilities including the possibility that there may be no future at all.

This book argues against the widely celebrated utopia of "transparency" by showing, across a panorama of postwar French thought, how attempts to show the perils of transparency in politics, ethics, and knowledge led to major conceptual inventions, many of which we now take for granted.

Peeren's book is a cultural analysis that brings the literary and social theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to bear on artifacts and events from contemporary popular culture in order to theorize gender, sexual, and racial identities as fundamentally intersubjective.

Addressed not only to specialists in German studies but also to readers interested in modern poetry, philosophy, and aesthetics, this volume is wide in scope but succinct in nature, aiming to assert the relevance of the work of Friedrich Hoelderlin (1770-1843) for thinking about history, culture, and language today.

Through the emblematic work of acclaimed French novelist Gustave Flaubert, this book contributes to the controversial discussion of modernity's relationship to religion.

B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of India's constitution, and M.K. Gandhi, the Indian nationalist, two figures whose thought and legacies have most strongly shaped the contours of Indian democracy, are typically considered antagonists who held irreconcilable views on empire, politics, and society. As such, they are rarely studied together. This book reassesses their complex relationship, focusing on their shared commitment to equality and justice, which for them was inseparable from anticolonial struggles for sovereignty.Both men inherited the concept of equality from Western humanism, but their ideas mark a radical turn in humanist conceptions of politics. This study recovers the philosophical foundations of their thought in Indian and Western traditions, religious and secular alike. Attending to moments of difficulty in their conceptions of justice and their languages of nonviolence, it probes the nature of risk that radical democracy's desire for inclusion opens within modern political thought. In excavating Ambedkar and Gandhi's intellectual kinship, Radical Equality allows them to shed light on each other, even as it places them within a global constellation of moral and political visions. The story of their struggle against inequality, violence, and empire thus transcends national boundaries and unfolds within a universal history of citizenship and dissent.

Covering the period of the Frankfurt School's exile in the United States, this book examines how the critique of racism, authoritarianism, and hard-right agitation impacted the American and German individual's self-conception (identity), while examining how a new form of politics, based on defining an Other, has shaped our everyday language, institutions, and social world.

Revisiting the history of Western religious thought and the role of nature and creation therein, this book paves the way for a new natural theology by bringing medieval theologian John the Scot Eriugena into conversation with American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.

This book revisits and revises some of the most basic concepts of time in the Judeo-Christian tradition, drawing on St. Paul's writings to rethink a new kind of radical faith in truth as an event, as the advent of the incalculable, a modality that remakes the pairing religious/secular.