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Stephen David Ross (born 1935) is an American philosopher, currently Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture and of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University. He has published over 30 books in interdisciplinary philosophy, especially on art, literature, ethics, and metaphysics, from American pragmatism through poststructuralism, from human beings to animals and things.
He was born May 4, 1935, to Allan Ross and Bessie Schlosberg. He studied mathematics at Columbia University, where he received an MA in 1957, and a PhD in philosophy in 1961. He taught philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of Colorado in Boulder before moving to Binghamton University/State University of New York in 1967. He married Marilyn Gaddis Rose in 1968.
He spent the rest of his teaching career in Binghamton, where he helped create two interdisciplinary PhD programs, one in Philosophy, Literature, and the Theory of Criticism in the Department of Comparative Literature, the second in Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture (PIC), located first in the Department of Philosophy, later becoming an independent program. He was appointed Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture and of Comparative Literature in 2006. He is currently Alfred North Whitehead Fellow in the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland. He was editor of the journal International Studies in Philosophy from 1979 to 2011.
His career has been devoted to different possibilities of expressing and living with uncertain beliefs, unsettled experiences, and inexhaustible realities. He has explored different forms of writing and varied terminologies for expressing what resists expression, based on the conviction that such a resistance requires constant vigilance and innovative writing, the constant production and transformation of forms of knowledge, especially including philosophy, whose relations to art, literature, science, and religion enrich it profoundly with novel and imaginative questions and answers.
He began in American pragmatism, reading it to question itself fundamentally and to entail the inexhaustibility of nature and reason, the mysteriousness of things. He wrote several books on ordinality and an ordinal metaphysics, influenced by his mentor, Justus Buchler. He turned then to Alfred North Whitehead and his notion of prehension or perspective. A universe of orders composed of orders composing other orders, of perspectives, is an inexhaustible universe without totality. Everything is limited, including every limit, an inexhaustible play of limit and unlimit.
In 2002 he came to believe that such a sense of inexhaustibility required a very different style of writing, more literary and oblique, and found this in post-Heideggerian writings, especially Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Deleuze and Guattari. The Ring of Representation was written in sonorous and voiced verbs—ringing, sounding—avoiding all forms of the verb "to be" so as to question the question of Being.
An ongoing theme throughout his work was that of an infinite ethics, infinite in each decision and inclusive of all things. This led him to Levinas's notions of betrayal and generosity, two notions that would deeply influence his writing. Betraying contains a double meaning, violation and revelation. He linked it with Anaximander's notion of injustice in all things, later defining it as the nonidentity of every identity with itself, a systematic and pervasive sense of how nature and reason exceed themselves, with evolution a foremost example of the first, art and literature of the second.
This was followed by seven volumes on gifts and generosity, undercutting the sense of possessing and having that color traditional views of knowledge, truth, and being. Then followed explorations of images in philosophy and art, understanding the world as images, a different way of thinking of perspectives. Images proliferate from other images, revealing and betraying them. This double movement of betraying led to books on enchantment and disenchantment, on asking and telling, to a novel, returning to an infinite and inclusive ethics through animals and other things.
These all express a sense of unceasing questioning, and questioning that questioning, that he suggests is profoundly ethical: ethical fullness.
In his recent writings he has turned to poetry.
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In philosophy, deconstruction is a loosely-defined set of approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. The concept of deconstruction was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who described it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essences which are valued above appearances.
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in a number of his texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy although he distanced himself from post-structuralism and disowned the word "postmodernity".
Emmanuel Levinas was a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry who is known for his work within Jewish philosophy, existentialism, and phenomenology, focusing on the relationship of ethics to metaphysics and ontology.
John David Caputo is an American philosopher who is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus at Syracuse University and the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Villanova University. Caputo is a major figure associated with postmodern Christianity and continental philosophy of religion, as well as the founder of the theological movement known as weak theology. Much of Caputo's work focuses on hermeneutics, phenomenology, deconstruction, and theology.
In philosophy, the terms obscurantism and obscurationism identify and describe the anti-intellectual practices of deliberately presenting information in an abstruse and imprecise manner that limits further inquiry and understanding of a subject. The two historical and intellectual denotations of obscurantism are: (1) the deliberate restriction of knowledge — opposition to the dissemination of knowledge; and (2) deliberate obscurity — a recondite style of writing characterized by deliberate vagueness.
Other is a term used to define another person or people as separate from oneself. In phenomenology, the terms the Other and the Constitutive Other distinguish other people from the Self, as a cumulative, constituting factor in the self-image of a person; as acknowledgement of being real; hence, the Other is dissimilar to and the opposite of the Self, of Us, and of the Same. The Constitutive Other is the relation between the personality and the person (body) of a human being; the relation of essential and superficial characteristics of personal identity that corresponds to the relationship between opposite, but correlative, characteristics of the Self, because the difference is inner-difference, within the Self.
Simon Critchley is an English philosopher and the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, USA.
"Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" was a lecture presented at Johns Hopkins University on 21 October 1966 by philosopher Jacques Derrida. The lecture was then published in 1967 as chapter ten of Writing and Difference.
"The Origin of the Work of Art" is an essay by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger drafted the text between 1935 and 1937, reworking it for publication in 1950 and again in 1960. Heidegger based his essay on a series of lectures he had previously delivered in Zurich and Frankfurt during the 1930s, first on the essence of the work of art and then on the question of the meaning of a "thing", marking the philosopher's first lectures on the notion of art.
David Wood was Centennial Professor of Philosophy, and Joe B. Wyatt Distinguished University Professor, at Vanderbilt University.
Robert L. Bernasconi is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He is known as a reader of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas, and for his work on the concept of race. He has also written on the history of philosophy.
Speculative realism is a movement in contemporary Continental-inspired philosophy that defines itself loosely in its stance of metaphysical realism against its interpretation of the dominant forms of post-Kantian philosophy.
Trace is one of the most important concepts in Derridian deconstruction. In the 1960s, Jacques Derrida used this concept in two of his early books, namely Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology.
Ethan Kleinberg works on the acrobatics of modern thought. He is Class of 1958 Distinguished Professor of History and Letters at Wesleyan University, Editor-in-Chief of History and Theory and was Director of Wesleyan University's Center for the Humanities. Kleinberg's research interests include European intellectual history with special interest in France and Germany, critical theory, educational structures, and the philosophy of history. Together with Joan Wallach Scott and Gary Wilder he is a member of the Wild On Collective who co-authored the "Theses on Theory and History" and started the #TheoryRevolt movement. He is the author of Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought (SUP); Haunting History: for a deconstructive approach to the past (SUP); Generation Existential: Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927-61 (CUP) which was awarded the 2006 Morris D. Forkosch prize for the best book in intellectual history by the Journal of the History of Ideas and co-editor of the volume Presence: Philosophy, History, and Cultural Theory for the Twenty-First Century (CUP). He is completing a book length project titled The Surge: a new compass of history for the end-time of truth.
Writing and Difference is a book by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. The work, which collects some of the early lectures and essays that established his fame, was published in 1967 alongside Of Grammatology and Speech and Phenomena.
Jean-Michel Emmanuel Salanskis is a French philosopher and mathematician, professor of science and philosophy at the University of Paris X Nanterre.
The following is a bibliography of John D. Caputo's works. Caputo is an American philosopher closely associated with postmodern Christianity.
John Llewelyn was a Welsh-born British philosopher whose extensive body of work, published over a period of more than forty years, spans the divide between Analytical and Continental schools of contemporary thought. He has conjoined the rigorous approach to matters of meaning and logic typical of the former and the depth and range of reference typical of the latter in a constructive and critical engagement with the work of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas.
Edward S. Casey is an American philosopher and university professor. He has published several volumes on phenomenology, philosophical psychology, and the philosophy of space and place. His work is widely cited in contemporary continental philosophy. He is currently distinguished professor emeritus of philosophy at Stony Brook University in New York and distinguished visiting faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute.
