Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision [Paperback]

This collection of original essays by preeminent interpreters of continental philosophy explores the question of whether Western thought and culture have been dominated by a vision-centered paradigm of knowledge, ethics, and power. It focuses on the character of vision in modern philosophy and on arguments for and against the view that contemporary life and thought are distinctively ocularcentric. The authors examine these ideas in the context of the history of philosophy and consider the character of visual discourse in the writings of Plato, Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Benjamin, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and Habermas. With essays on television, the visual arts, and feminism, the book will interest readers in cultural studies, gender studies, and art history as well as philosophers.

David Michael Levinis Senior Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. His most recent book isThe Listening Self(1989).

CONTRIBUTORS:
Hans Blumenberg, Susan Buck-Morss, Paul Davies, Thomas Flynn, Stephen Houlgate, Martin Jay, Dalia Judovitz, David Michael Levin, John McCumber, Andrea Nye, Herman Rapaport, Robert Romanyshyn, Gary Shapiro, Georgia Warnke

A genuine contribution to the literature . . . important especially to specialists in Continental philosophy but also to historians, literary theorists, and others who read recent European philosophy and who thus would want to think through the problem of the hegemony of vision. David Hoy, University of California, Santa Cruz