What are the basic coordinates of the dispute between Heidegger and Levinas over the phenomenology of “death” and its larger ontological or ethical significance? Or, put in the “perfectionist” terms developed in Chapter 4, in what ways do Heidegger and Levinas disagree about how we human beings become genuinely or fully ourselves? Examining the convergences and divergences of Heidegger’s and Levinas’s phenomenologies of death, this chapter suggests that Heidegger and Levinas both understood themselves as struggling to articulate the requisite ethical response to the great traumas of the twentieth century. By comparing their thinking at this level, I contend, we can better understand the ways in which Levinas genuinely diverges from Heidegger even while building critically on his thinking.

The Greeks created a culture that seemed secure and well ordered, in which status, gender and identity appeared to be if not fixed, then at least clear cut. A free man knew his place and his privileges, a foreigner was aware of their disabilities, an enslaved woman had a fair idea of her lot, a worker in the mines of Laureion even more so. Yet, lived experience was precarious. The rich man could lose his fortune, the highborn girl could become shipwrecked and enslaved. These are not just the plot devices of Hellenistic novels; they are the potential experiences of men and women for whom vulnerability and impermanence were as real as wealth and good fortune. These conditions favoured expressions – stories and images in particular – that made change and anomaly part of the cultural repertoire of the Greeks. This is perhaps why the vivid, vibrant hybrids of the Greek imagination attracted so much attention from Christian writers. By imagining other ways of engaging with the world and offering alternatives to the settled convention, hybrids would always be a threat to those attempting to impose their order. Hybrids became demons to be slain.

As seemingly cognate sub-genres of history, the history of sexuality and women’s history have a complicated relationship. Both tell 1970s origins stories from global north liberation movements, despite the scholarly scrutiny of sexuality and women in earlier historical periods. Core journals and publications reveal these sub-fields’ distinctive, sometimes incommensurate development trajectories. Perhaps due to their recent advent, presentism is clear in both, with the corollary of a marked post-1800 skew of most research and publications. Women’s history tracks women, in all their subdivisions, of necessity with focus upon sexualities in many registers, while seeking address of race, indigeneity, ethnicity, and international and global foci. Alternatively, the history of sexuality prioritizes sexual minorities and erotic alterities, welcoming studies of identities, expression, and representation. Key themes are transgressive resistance against repression and heteronormativity, entailing special concentration on same-sex history. Women figure within these themes, while innovative feminists are influential historians of sexuality. Nonetheless, women’s history and feminist analysis of sexualities have no default standing for the history of sexuality. In short, intellectual, methodological, and political properties prove less reciprocal than might be presumed. These exciting areas of history should evolve, to illuminate crucial topics for both, for instance reproduction. As both pursue aims to incorporate all historical periods and regions, their interconnections may become stronger.

The Unvanquished and Go Down, Moses present a striking response to the earliest cognitive cartography of the Sartoris plantation house. While ideology continues to be preserved and replicated within the principal nodes of social space, Faulkner turns his attention in these works to the disruptive and resistant activity of a hidden interiority within these systems. He employs a variety of images to evoke this emergent interior dimension – from the creek bottom to the burial mound, to the fiery hearth, to the symbolic motif, most importantly, of a submerged woman in the depths, a motif that begins with Eunice’s suicidal act of defiance in Go Down, Moses. Around this last image, Faulkner develops the possibility of alterity, of producing an alternative hub of information flow that is capable of resisting, challenging, and even upending the top-down vertical hegemony that defines the cognitive cartographies of the plantation system. In this chapter, I trace this paradigm as an emergent Faulknerian ethics that emphasizes, above all, the possibility of spontaneous and free movement in social space as well as the paramount value of immanence and interpersonal relationships.

This chapter critically analyzes the work of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century white settler colonial writers who represented Indigenous characters and stories. It will examines how certain tropes persisted, from Rolf Boldrewood’s late romanticism to Eleanor Darks reconstructive modernism. It explores how novels by these writers manifest a contradictory set of ideas towards race and landscape, which it takes as emblematic of wider white Australian culture.

The introduction presents some general reflections on what characterises Heidegger’s fundamental ontology and what makes his thought a particularly promising point of departure for doing social ontology. I first introduce Heidegger’s holistic conceptions of Dasein and being-in-the-world by way of contrast to Cartesian atomism. I then go on to show that Heidegger conceives of intersubjectivity as a triangular relation between self, world, and other rather than a dyadic relation between two independent subjects. My claim is that Heidegger’s social ontology is found directly in his conception of the shared world and that his more well-known accounts of the Anyone and solicitude should be understood within this general framework. I also reflect on the relation between Heidegger’s social ontology and his politics and provide an outline of the book.

In this chapter, I clarify, contextualise, and reassess Heidegger’s ambiguous and polemical account of social cognition. Although commentators often take his critique of, for instance, empathy to be pretty straightforward, a closer look reveals that Heidegger makes a number of seemingly incoherent claims. To clarify this, I identify six different objections raised by Heidegger against theories of social cognition and then reassess who (among both historical and contemporary contenders) are, in fact, vulnerable to these objections. Drawing on Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, I then go on to develop a positive, Heideggerian account of social cognition. I show that Heidegger’s view has much in common with phenomenological empathy theories but that he departs from these by arguing that we must understand the other as exhibiting a practical comportment that constitutively depends on our shared environment. Finally, I consider how our understanding of our fellow Dasein differs from our understanding of nonhuman animals.

In 1980, Paul Zumthor published Parler du moyen age, an elegant little book on the state of the discipline and the task of the medievalist, tracing a history of medieval studies from its pre-war romanticism and positivism up to Zumthor’s own view from the horizon of the late 1970s. Through this retrospective, Zumthor in part recounts the transformation of the field by medievalists like Auerbach, Curtius, and Spitzer, but also positions himself as a kind of bridge between that generation of medievalists whose most influential works came out in the years immediately following WWII and the work of medievalists today, with the rise of post-structuralism, for instance, breaking in between. One of the central concerns of the book is precisely this movement between eras, not only between postwar medievalism and its romantic heritage, but also between the present moment of a reader and the objects of the past being read. Such concerns with interpretation across historical distance have a long and crucial history in the field of hermeneutics, which reached its peak between the 1960s and 1980s. Following Zumthor’s lead, therefore, this chapter will look backwards, performing a genealogy of philosophical and literary hermeneutics that traces Zumthor’s engagement with this tradition – particularly his engagement with Hans Robert Jauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and his friend Roland Barthes – and attends to the place of the medieval in it.

Chapter 5 shows that Kierkegaard does not reject prudence or self-interest as antieudaimonism tends to do. Instead, he develops a noneudaimonistic ethics and theology, in which morality overrides prudence in cases of conflict. Still, his concept of the highest good (eternal happiness) involves a synthesis of morality and prudence, in which happiness is conditioned by morality. Like Kant, Kierkegaard develops a noneudaimonistic “highest good” and rejects both predestination and Pelagianism, sketching an intermediary view that combines human agency with divine grace. However, he departs from Kant by combining a modern account of alterity, in which morality is essentially other-regarding, with the idea that morality is Christocentric, since it concerns imitating Christ and serving the neighbor. The result is an account of morality and happiness which is not only broadly Augustinian and Kantian but also highly modern.

A detailed phenomenological analysis of the various manifestations of corporeality can help to grasp and make sense of how the body is apprehended in different psychopathological conditions. I will argue that once distinguished the body-object (the representational, explicit and ultimately visible manifestation of one's corporeality) from the lived body (the proto-reflexive semi-experiential/semi-representational manifestation of one's corporeality), the latter should be distinguished from the living body. What I will call here the ‘living body’ is the immediately felt, pathic, purely impressive, pre-reflective, non-representational, experiential and invisible manifestation of one's corporeality. I will also propose that the living body possess two distinct profiles: self-affection or the primordial bodily chiasm enforcing one's feeling of belonging to oneself and to the world, and the sheer flesh or chaotic plurality of invisible bodily forces immediately felt without the intercession of a representation. A further manifestation of corporeality is the body-for-others; that is the experience of feeling one's corporeality when it is looked at by another person. I will match these different profiles of corporeality to specific anomalous psychopathological conditions, namely the appearance of the sheer, chaotic flesh to the borderline person's form of existence; the body as a corporealized, restricted, inhibited and rigid body to melancholia; the mechanic, robotic functioning object “out there” to schizophrenia; and finally the body apprehended through the gaze of the other to the existence of persons with eating disorders

The relations between embodiment and temporality reach from the micro-temporality of conscious experience to the enactment of human existence. First, the basic internal time consciousness is marked by the rhythmicity of vital processes (heartbeat, respiratory rhythm, daily periods, etc.). Moreover, the bodily drives, urges, and needs, which may be subsumed under the term conation, crucially determine the future-directed temporality of primary experience. On the other hand, the body forms an extract of sensorimotor and affective experience which are sedimented in implicit or body memory, thus shaping an individual's capacities and dispositions. Finally, existential temporality is essentially characterized by the vital processes of birth, growth, aging, and dying.

Body, time, and intersubjectivity are equally interconnected. First, interbodily resonance establishes the primary experience of the shared present, beginning in the child's early development. Thus, a basic contemporality emerges, which later continues in social synchronizations and temporal orders as the basis of social life. However, this temporal alignment is also subject to desynchronizations, for example, in backlogs of tasks, in guilt, remorse, or grief – situations that require processes of psychosocial resynchronization.

All these interconnections are subject to various kinds of disturbances which are also found in psychopathology and thus crucially determine the emergence and course of mental disorders.

During the second half of the twentieth century, some Latin American intellectuals put theology and philosophy at the service of explaining and solving the social and economic disparities facing the region. Paradigm results of this development were the liberation theology of Gustavo Gutiėrrez and the liberation philosophy of Enrique Dussel. Chapter 9 considers these attempts to establish the causes of oppression and become the voice of a vaguely defined group of people, the Latin American poor. Other categories of liberation theology and philosophy examined here include the center-periphery distinction and the very notion of liberation, which are adaptations of categories from dependency theory and Marxism respectively. The chapter argues that neither liberation theology nor liberation philosophy can accommodate strong intuitions about justice. They also rely on discredited assumptions from dependency theory. In addition, liberation philosophy faces some problems of its own, since it makes misleading and often false claims about events and rival philosophical theories. To illustrate these problems, the chapter looks closely at Dussel’s claim that all Western philosophy suffers from ideological contamination.

This chapter focuses on Joseph Addison and Richard Steele as primary proponents of Enlightened culture in late Stuart England. Often seen now as ineffectual witnesses to the human costs of expanding commerce and imperialism, Addison and Steele were important as advocates of religious toleration, universal education, cultural relativism and hostility to extractive colonialism. Drawing a parallel between their modelling of empathetic persuasion in their periodical papers with Steele’s practice as a sentimental dramatist, I show how his playwriting sought to create national sympathy across sectarian, ethnic and ideological boundaries in order to create empathy for outsiders. This was a particularly urgent issue for Steele, who suffered all his career because he was Anglo-Irish.