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Rating: 
Summary: Great, Non-Watered-Down Introduction To Postmodernists
Review: Crucial thinkers from the phenomenological, structuralist, psycho-analytic, hermeneutical, and post-structuralist traditions are presented here in the form of crucial, seminal, in-depth writings. Todd May's long, impressively comprehensive introductory essay is a highly illuminating starting point for engaging the various thinkers and movements featured in the text. It also stands alone well as an in-depth and very accessible overview of the history of 20th Century Continental thought for those with very little or no previous understanding of it. I cannot recommend it highly enough. In the anthologized writings themselves, Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty explain their phenomenological approaches to method, Ferdinand Saussure provides his most controversial and fascinating insights into language which Claude Levi-Strauss then applies to anthropology and which Jacques Lacan draws on as part of his taking psychoanalytic theory to new levels of philosophical complexity and interdisciplinarity. Also here is chapter 2 of "The Sex Which Is Not One," Luce Irigaray's mindblowing psychoanalytic feminsist account of female sexuality in contra-distinction to the Freudian/Lacanian one. Feminist psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva provides a very dense and richly insightful essay exploring some questions of linguistics and commenting a good deal on Husserl, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is here in an accessible yet dense introduction to his philosophical hermeneutics. And as if all this wasn't enough, we also have Martin Heidegger's difficult classic "Letter On 'Humanism,'" Jacques Derrida's justly famous, unavoidable 1968 essay, "Differance," Michel Foucault's frequently anthologized "Nietzsche, Genealogy & History" and an essay from Lyotard, the coiner of the word "postmodernism," which provides a characterization of the meanings of the words "postmodernism" and "modernism" which I would think all those who ever venture to use these terms should reckon with and be instructed by. A difficult yet extremely helpful and rewarding anthology and introduction to an amazing century in Continental philosophy.
Rating:
Summary: Great, Non-Watered-Down Introduction To Postmodernists
Review: Crucial thinkers from the phenomenological, structuralist, psycho-analytic, hermeneutical, and post-structuralist traditions are presented here in the form of crucial, seminal, in-depth writings. Todd May's long, impressively comprehensive introductory essay is a highly illuminating starting point for engaging the various thinkers and movements featured in the text. It also stands alone well as an in-depth and very accessible overview of the history of 20th Century Continental thought for those with very little or no previous understanding of it. I cannot recommend it highly enough. In the anthologized writings themselves, Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty explain their phenomenological approaches to method, Ferdinand Saussure provides his most controversial and fascinating insights into language which Claude Levi-Strauss then applies to anthropology and which Jacques Lacan draws on as part of his taking psychoanalytic theory to new levels of philosophical complexity and interdisciplinarity. Also here is chapter 2 of "The Sex Which Is Not One," Luce Irigaray's mindblowing psychoanalytic feminsist account of female sexuality in contra-distinction to the Freudian/Lacanian one. Feminist psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva provides a very dense and richly insightful essay exploring some questions of linguistics and commenting a good deal on Husserl, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is here in an accessible yet dense introduction to his philosophical hermeneutics. And as if all this wasn't enough, we also have Martin Heidegger's difficult classic "Letter On 'Humanism,'" Jacques Derrida's justly famous, unavoidable 1968 essay, "Differance," Michel Foucault's frequently anthologized "Nietzsche, Genealogy & History" and an essay from Lyotard, the coiner of the word "postmodernism," which provides a characterization of the meanings of the words "postmodernism" and "modernism" which I would think all those who ever venture to use these terms should reckon with and be instructed by. A difficult yet extremely helpful and rewarding anthology and introduction to an amazing century in Continental philosophy.
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