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Levels of Organic Life and the Human
The groundbreaking classic of twentieth-century German philosophy now available in English—with an introduction by J.M. Bernstein. Helmuth Plessner’s Levels of Organic Life and the Human, draws on phenomenological, biological, and social scientific sources to offer a systematic account of nature, life, and human existence. The book considers non-living nature, plants, non-human animals, and human beings a sequence of increasingly complex modes of boundary dynamics—simply put, interactions between a thing’s insides and the surrounding world. Living things are classed and analyzed by their “positionality,” or orientation to and within an environment. According to Plessner’s radic...
Plessner's Philosophical Anthropology
The first substantial English-language introduction to Plessner's philosophical anthropology.
Levels of Organic Life and the Human
A modern classic, this powerful and sophisticated account of embodiment was first published in German in 1928 and now appears in English for the first time. With reference simultaneously to science, social theory, and philosophy, Plessner shows how life can be seen on its own terms to establish its own boundaries. Plessner's account of how the human establishes itself in relation to the nonhuman will invigorate a range of current conversations around the animal, posthumanism, the material turn, and the biology and sociology of cognition.
The Human Image in Helmuth Plessner, Pierre Bourdieu, and Psychocentric Culture
In The Human Image in Helmuth Plessner, Pierre Bourdieu, and Psychocentric Culture, Isaac E. Catt offers a unique criticism of naturalistic reductions of humans to animals, to neuro substrates and to DNA. Catt explores a new interpretation of Plessner and Bourdieu, revealing the combinatory logic of semiotic phenomenology in both and their common problematic of communication. Through an emergent synthesis of philosophical anthropology and communicology, this book provides a basis for criticism of the failed mechanistic medical model in psychiatry, a fresh argument for reconceptualizing psychiatry as a human science, and for construction of a new ecological image of communicative being. Throughout the book, alternative attempts to transcend dualisms such as cybernetics, anti-anthropocentrism, and biosemiotics are revealed to risk reification of the very objects of their analysis. Scholars of communication, semiotics, philosophy, psychiatry, cultural studies, mental distress, and psychology will find this book of particular interest.
The Limits of Community
Plessner (1892-1985), a onetime student of Husserl and contemporary of Heidegger, achieved recognition as a German social philosopher who helped establish philosophical anthropology as a discipline in the post-World War II decades. Anticipating the rise of German fascism in The Limits of Community (1924), he presents the appeal and dangers of rejecting modern society for the sake of a political ideal-based community. Translator Wallace (philosophy, Sonoma State U., California) provides a balanced introduction to Plessner's Max Weber-influenced ideas. The volume lacks an index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Political Anthropology
In Political Anthropology (originally published in 1931 as Macht und menschliche Natur), Helmuth Plessner considers whether politics--conceived as the struggle for power between groups, nations, and states--belongs to the essence of the human. Building on and complementing ideas from his Levels of the Organic and the Human (1928), Plessner proposes a genealogy of political life and outlines an anthropological foundation of the political. In critical dialogue with thinkers such as Carl Schmitt, Eric Voegelin, and Martin Heidegger, Plessner argues that the political relationships cultures entertain with one other, their struggle for acknowledgement and assertion, are expressions of certain possibilities of the openness and unfathomability of the human. Translated into English for the first time, and accompanied by an introduction and an epilogue that situate Plessner's thinking both within the context of Weimar-era German political and social thought and within current debates, this succinct book should be of great interest to philosophers, political theorists, and sociologists interested in questions of power and the foundations of the political.
Laughing and Crying
In this classic of philosophical anthropology, Helmuth Plessner investigates the significance of laughing and crying, both in themselves and in relation to human nature.
Confronting Mass Democracy and Industrial Technology
With a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary approach to German political and social theory, Confronting Mass Democracy and Industrial Technology provides fresh insight into the thought of many of the most influential intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Its essays detail the manner in which a wide range of German intellectuals grappled with the ramifications and implications of democracy, technology, knowledge, and control from the late Kaisserreich to the Weimar Republic, from the Third Reich and the Federal Republic through recently unified Germany. Scholars representing the fields of political science, philosophy, history, law, literature, and cultural studies devote essays to the ...
The Play of the Self
"The book covers extraordinary ground in literature, the arts, philosophy, and even the social sciences. The concern about the issue of self and the representations of self brings far-reaching ideas together in the most surprising and mutually illuminating ways. Poststructuralist and postmodernist critiques of self-identity have made the topic controversial and broadly relevant to all the fields represented. Extreme statements abound on both sides of the argument, and this book succeeds in marshaling subtle and nuanced thought on the topic. Each essay is neatly self-contained, remarkably relevant to other essays in the collection, and a model of illuminating argument, careful scholarship, and attractive writing." -- Book cover.
Cool Conduct
Cool Conduct is an elegant interpretation of attitudes and mentalities that informed the Weimar Republic by a scholar well known for his profound knowledge of this period. Helmut Lethen writes of "cool conduct" as a cultivated antidote to the heated atmosphere of post-World War I Germany, as a way of burying shame and animosity that might otherwise make social contact impossible.
