Walter A. "Mac" Davis (born November 9, 1942) is an American philosopher, critic, and playwright. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio State University and the author of eight books. Davis has also taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His theoretical work engages critically with psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism, Hegelian dialectics and postmodernism. For a more general audience, he has written plays and two volumes of essays in cultural criticism.
Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Davis earned a B.A. from Marquette University in 1964, an M.A. from the same institution in 1966, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1969. [1] He taught in the English departments at the University of California at Santa Barbara from 1969 to 1977 and at Ohio State University from 1977 to 2002, when he retired to focus on writing. [2]
As a theorist and critic of literature, Davis has been associated with the 'Chicago School' of R. S. Crane and Wayne C. Booth, [3] but Davis's work shows him to be an engaged critic of these critics. [4] His first book, The Act of Interpretation: A Critique of Literary Reason, published by The University of Chicago Press in 1978, stages a series of interpretations of William Faulkner's The Bear as a simultaneous demonstration and critique of critical pluralism. In his later book, Get The Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama, and the Audience, Davis takes a more psychoanalytic approach, analyzing in depth five American plays-- The Iceman Cometh , A Streetcar Named Desire , Death of a Salesman , Long Day's Journey into Night , and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? —in terms of their psychological impact upon the audience. Critic Frank Lentricchia called Davis's Get The Guests "unparalleled" and wrote of the author, "Davis is a man of the theatre, he reads plays as theatrical events, and he can get at plays in ways that most people of the theatre cannot because he is a superb theorist and scholar as well." [5]
Davis's most wide-ranging philosophical work is Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud. In this book, Davis adumbrates a theory of the human subject (less technically, "the self") that dialectically integrates four theories of subjectivity usually considered incompatible: G. W. F. Hegel's self-consciousness, Martin Heidegger's existentialism, Karl Marx's dialectical materialism and related Marxist theories of ideology, and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. In his consideration of Hegel, Davis argues that the Structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, et al. represent prematurely arrested moments in a dialectical movement issuing in Hegelian "unhappy consciousness." At other points in the text Davis writes at length upon such topics as sexuality, love, neurosis, psychosis, death, capitalism, freedom and authenticity, seeking always to challenge the consensus of intellectual and/or popular discourse on these topics. In the section on existentialism, for example, Davis attempts to revitalize this philosophy by taking it beyond pop-Sartrean notions of freedom. He emphasizes the extent to which human freedom is not a given but merely a possibility. The struggle to achieve freedom and authenticity proceeds through the hard intellectual work that Davis calls "anti-bildung", the rooting out of all the ideological obfuscations that have been implanted in us by our families and cultures. Inwardness and Existence has influenced the writings of scholars as diverse as leading Anglican theologian Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, [6] and film theorist Todd McGowan, who has said of it, "No one who reads [Inwardness and Existence] will ever think about existence itself in the same way again. Davis’s landmark work will profoundly transform anyone who reads it." [7]
Building on the idea of anti-bildung, Davis's 2001 book Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative takes the historical trauma of the first atomic bombing as the basis for a radically interdisciplinary investigation of trauma generally and of historical discourse in particular, culminating in a chapter that combines psychoanalysis, history and aesthetics to argue for "artistic cognition as a distinct and primary way of knowing." [8] The "deracination" of the title refers to the necessity of "deracinating," or "rooting out," the ideological "guarantees" that structure our responses to events both personal and political.
Davis has written two volumes of essays in cultural criticism. Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche Since 9-11 (2006) contains Davis's clearest and most direct statement of his concept of "deracinating" the "guaranteees" [9] as well as essays on the Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, Christian fundamentalism, capitalism, ethics and evil. The essay "A Postmodernist Response to 9-11: Slavoj Zizek, or the Jouissance of an Abstract Hegelian" contains Davis's critique of critical theorist Slavoj Zizek and an extended critical discussion of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Davis's 2007 book Art and Politics: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, Theatre takes the controversy surrounding the play My Name is Rachel Corrie as a jumping-off point for a discussion of the role of the arts (specifically the theatre) in post 9-11 America. The book includes Davis's "Manifesto for a Progressive Theatre" and an argument for monologue as the form that can best accomplish the necessary task of dramatically examining what Davis calls "the tragic structure of experience.". [10]
Davis is both a playwright and an actor in regional theatre. His plays include: The Holocaust Memorial: A Play About Hiroshima; An Evening with JonBenet Ramsey, an exploration of the effects of childhood trauma; Between Two Deaths: Life on the Row, a monologue spoken by a murderer on death row; and Trim: The Tyger Woods Story, a satire of celebrity, media and race in America. As an actor his roles have ranged from Oscar Madison in Neil Simon's The Odd Couple to the title role in King Lear. [2]
Davis is currently[ when? ] at work on an epic-length novel, a vast bildungsroman titled The Last Catholic.
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Existentialism is a form of philosophical inquiry that explores the issue of human existence. Existentialist philosophers explore questions related to the meaning, purpose, and value of human existence. Common concepts in existentialist thought include existential crisis, dread, and anxiety in the face of an absurd world, as well as authenticity, courage, and virtue.
A subject is a being who has a unique consciousness and/or unique personal experiences, or an entity that has a relationship with another entity that exists outside itself.
Dialectic, also known as the dialectical method, is a discourse between two or more people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to establish the truth through reasoned argumentation. Dialectic resembles debate, but the concept excludes subjective elements such as emotional appeal and rhetoric. Dialectic may thus be contrasted with both the eristic, which refers to argument that aims to successfully dispute another's argument, and the didactic method, wherein one side of the conversation teaches the other. Dialectic is alternatively known as minor logic, as opposed to major logic or critique.
German philosophy, meaning philosophy in the German language or philosophy by German people, in its diversity, is fundamental for both the analytic and continental traditions. It covers figures such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and the Frankfurt School, who now count among the most famous and studied philosophers of all time. They are central to major philosophical movements such as rationalism, German idealism, Romanticism, dialectical materialism, existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, logical positivism, and critical theory. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is often also included in surveys of German philosophy due to his extensive engagement with German thinkers.
The Frankfurt School is a school of social theory and critical philosophy associated with the Institute for Social Research, at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1929. Founded in the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), during the European interwar period (1918–1939), the Frankfurt School initially comprised intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents dissatisfied with the contemporary socio-economic systems of the 1930s. The Frankfurt theorists proposed that social theory was inadequate for explaining the turbulent political factionalism and reactionary politics occurring in 20th century liberal capitalist societies. Critical of both capitalism and of Marxism–Leninism as philosophically inflexible systems of social organization, the School's critical theory research indicated alternative paths to realizing the social development of a society and a nation.
The Phenomenology of Spirit is the most widely-discussed philosophical work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; its German title can be translated as either The Phenomenology of Spirit or The Phenomenology of Mind. Hegel described the work, published in 1807, as an "exposition of the coming to be of knowledge". This is explicated through a necessary self-origination and dissolution of "the various shapes of spirit as stations on the way through which spirit becomes pure knowledge".
Raya Dunayevskaya, later Rae Spiegel, also known by the pseudonym Freddie Forest, was the American founder of the philosophy of Marxist humanism in the United States. At one time Leon Trotsky's secretary, she later split with him and ultimately founded the organization News and Letters Committees and was its leader until her death.
Absolute idealism is an ontologically monistic philosophy chiefly associated with G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Schelling, both of whom were German idealist philosophers in the 19th century. The label has also been attached to others such as Josiah Royce, an American philosopher who was greatly influenced by Hegel's work, and the British idealists.
Freudo-Marxism is a loose designation for philosophical perspectives informed by both the Marxist philosophy of Karl Marx and the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud. It has a rich history within continental philosophy, beginning in the 1920s and 1930s and running since through critical theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and post-structuralism.
Miguel Ángel Virasoro (1900–1966) was an Argentine philosopher.
20th-century French philosophy is a strand of contemporary philosophy generally associated with post-World War II French thinkers, although it is directly influenced by previous philosophical movements.
Catherine Malabou is a French philosopher. She is a Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University, at the European Graduate School, and in the department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, a position formerly held by Jacques Derrida.
Search for a Method or The Problem of Method is a 1957 essay by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, in which the author attempts to reconcile Marxism with existentialism. The first version of the essay was published in the Polish journal Twórczość; an adapted version appeared later that year in Les Temps modernes, and later served as an introduction for Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason. Sartre argues that existentialism and Marxism are compatible, even complementary, even though Marxism's materialism and determinism might seem to contradict the abstraction and radical freedom of existentialism.
The following is a list of the major events in the history of German idealism, along with related historical events.
Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are works in philosophy that are strongly influenced by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory, or works written by Marxists. Marxist philosophy may be broadly divided into Western Marxism, which drew from various sources, and the official philosophy in the Soviet Union, which enforced a rigid reading of Marx called dialectical materialism, in particular during the 1930s. Marxist philosophy is not a strictly defined sub-field of philosophy, because the diverse influence of Marxist theory has extended into fields as varied as aesthetics, ethics, ontology, epistemology, social philosophy, political philosophy, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of history. The key characteristics of Marxism in philosophy are its materialism and its commitment to political practice as the end goal of all thought. The theory is also about the struggles of the proletariat and their reprimand of the bourgeoisie.
The Parallax View (2006) is a book by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Like many of Žižek's books, it covers a wide range of topics, including philosophy, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, politics, literature, and film. Some of the authors discussed in detail include Jacques Lacan, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Alain Badiou, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Daniel Dennett, Antonio Damasio, Franz Kafka, and Henry James.
Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit is a 1947 book about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel by the philosopher Alexandre Kojève, in which the author combines the labor philosophy of Karl Marx with the Being-Toward-Death of Martin Heidegger. Kojève develops many themes that would be fundamental to existentialism and French theory such as the end of history and the Master-Slave Dialectic.
Dialectical materialism is a materialist theory based upon the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that has found widespread applications in a variety of philosophical disciplines ranging from philosophy of history to philosophy of science. As a materialist philosophy, Marxist dialectics emphasizes the importance of real-world conditions and the presence of functional contradictions within and among social relations, which derive from, but are not limited to the contradictions that occur in social class, labour economics, and socioeconomic interactions.
Western Marxism is a current of Marxist theory that arose from Western and Central Europe in the aftermath of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the ascent of Leninism. The term denotes a loose collection of theorists who advanced an interpretation of Marxism distinct from both classical and Orthodox Marxism and the Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union.
History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics is a 1923 book by the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács, in which the author re-emphasizes the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's influence on the philosopher Karl Marx, analyzes the concept of "class consciousness," and attempts a philosophical justification of Bolshevism.
