A bold and wide-ranging study across centuries, examining the conflict between "conventional" and "magical" nominalism in philosophy, history, aesthetics, political theory, and photography. In this magisterial new book, intellectual historian Martin Jay traces the long-standing competition between two versions of nominalism--"conventional" and what he calls "magical." According to Jay, since at least William of Ockham, the conventional form of nominalism contributed to the disenchantment of the world by viewing general terms as nothing more than mere names we use to group particular objects together, rejecting the idea that they refer to a further, "higher" reality. Magical nominalism, instead, performs a reenchanting function by investing proper names, disruptive events, and singular objects with an auratic power of their own. Drawing in part on Jewish theology, it challenges the elevation of the constitutive subject resulting from Ockham's reliance on divine will in his critique of real universals. &nbsp; Starting with the 14th-century revolution of nominalism against Scholastic realism, Jay unpacks various "counterrevolutions" against nominalism itself, including a magical alternative to its conventional form. Focusing on fundamental debates over the relationship between language, thought, and reality, Jay illuminates connections across thinkers, disciplines, and vast realms of human experience. Ranging from theology and philosophy of history to aesthetics and political theory, this book engages with a range of artists and thinkers, including Adorno, Ankersmit, Badiou, Barthes, Bataille, Benjamin, Blumenberg, Derrida, Duchamp, Foucault, Kracauer, Kripke and Lyotard. It places photography in a suggestive new discursive context. Ultimately, Magical Nominalism offers a strikingly original way to understand humanity's intellectual path to modernity along with its vicissitudes.

Magical Nominalism: The Historical Event, Aesthetic Reenchantment, and the Photograph (The Life of Ideas)

Politics & Social Sciences

Jay, Martin

Philosophy

University of Chicago Press

Charts the flight of some of this century's most important thinkers from Nazi Germany to the United States. Jay explores the theories of The Frankfurt School -- among them, the work of Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal and Herbert Marcuse -- as well, such as George Lichtheim, Hannah Arendt, and Henry Pachter.

Permanent Exiles

History

Americas

Columbia University Press

Levinas's Ethical Politics (The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies)

Emmanuel Levinas conceives of our lives as fundamentally interpersonal and ethical, claiming that our responsibilities to one another should shape all of our actions. While many scholars believe that Levinas failed to develop a robust view of political ethics, Michael L. Morgan argues against understandings of Levinas’s thought that find him politically wanting or even antipolitical. Morgan examines Levinas’s ethical critique of the political as well as his Jewish writings―including those on Zionism and the founding of the Jewish state―which are controversial reflections of Levinas’s political expression. Unlike others who dismiss Levinas as irrelevant or anarchical, Morgan is the first to give extensive treatment to Levinas as a serious social political thinker whose ethics must be understood in terms of its political implications. Morgan reveals Levinas’s political commitments to liberalism and democracy as well as his revolutionary conception of human life as deeply interconnected on philosophical, political, and religious grounds.

Morgan, Michael L.

Indiana University Press

Martin Jay tackles a question as old as Plato and still pressing today: what is reason, and what roles does and should it have in human endeavor? Applying the tools of intellectual history, he examines the overlapping, but not fully compatible, meanings that have accrued to the term "reason" over two millennia, homing in on moments of crisis, critique, and defense of reason.After surveying Western ideas of reason from the ancient Greeks through Kant, Hegel, and Marx, Jay engages at length with the ways leading theorists of the Frankfurt School―Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno, and most extensively Habermas―sought to salvage a viable concept of reason after its apparent eclipse. They despaired, in particular, over the decay in the modern world of reason into mere instrumental rationality. When reason becomes a technical tool of calculation separated from the values and norms central to daily life, then choices become grounded not in careful thought but in emotion and will―a mode of thinking embraced by fascist movements in the twentieth century.Is there a more robust idea of reason that can be defended as at once a philosophical concept, a ground of critique, and a norm for human emancipation? Jay explores at length the ommunicative rationality advocated by Habermas and considers the range of arguments, both pro and con, that have greeted his work.

Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory (George L. Mosse Series in the History of European Culture, Sexuality, and Ideas)

Europe

University of Wisconsin Press

Martin Jay tackles a question as old as Plato and still pressing today: what is reason, and what roles does and should it have in human endeavor? Applying the tools of intellectual history, he examines the overlapping, but not fully compatible, meanings that have accrued to the term "reason" over two millennia, homing in on moments of crisis, critique, and defense of reason. After surveying Western ideas of reason from the ancient Greeks through Kant, Hegel, and Marx, Jay engages at length with the ways leading theorists of the Frankfurt School―Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno, and most extensively Habermas―sought to salvage a viable concept of reason after its apparent eclipse. They despaired, in particular, over the decay in the modern world of reason into mere instrumental rationality. When reason becomes a technical tool of calculation separated from the values and norms central to daily life, then choices become grounded not in careful thought but in emotion and will―a mode of thinking embraced by fascist movements in the twentieth century. Is there a more robust idea of reason that can be defended as at once a philosophical concept, a ground of critique, and a norm for human emancipation? Jay explores at length the ommunicative rationality advocated by Habermas and considers the range of arguments, both pro and con, that have greeted his work.

Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Franz Neumann, Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal—the impact of the Frankfurt School on the sociological, political, and cultural thought of the twentieth century has been profound. The Dialectical Imagination is a major history of this monumental cultural and intellectual enterprise during its early years in Germany and in the United States. Martin Jay has provided a substantial new preface for this edition, in which he reflects on the continuing relevance of the work of the Frankfurt School.

Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and Institute of Social Research

Little,Brown & Co

Nathanael West: The Art of His Life

FSG.

Fine cloth copy in an equally fine dw. Particularly and surprisingly well-preserved; tight, bright, clean and especially sharp-cornered. ; 261 pages; Description: xiii, 261 p. ; 22 cm. Subjects: Soviet Union --Social life and customs --1970-1991. Signed and inscribed by the author and complete with a 4-page manuscript letter by him to Professor Stade (? ) . Signed and inscribed by the author and complete with a 4-page manuscript letter by him to Professor Stade(? ) .

Winter Dreams: An American in Moscow

Houghton/Mifflin

Fin de Siècle Socialism, originally published in 1988, demonstrates the lively potential for cultural criticism in intellectual history. Martin Jay discusses such controversies as the Habermas-Gadamer debate and the deconstructionist challenge to synoptic analysis. This book should be of interest to students and teachers of modern European history, political and social theory.

Fin de Siècle Socialism and Other Essays (Routledge Revivals)

Arts & Photography

Routledge

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jay, Martin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Jay, Martin

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jay, Martin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Magical Nominalism: The Historical Event, Aesthetic Reenchantment, and the Photograph (The Life of Ideas)

Permanent Exiles

Levinas's Ethical Politics (The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies)

Levinas's Ethical Politics (The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies)

Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory (George L. Mosse Series in the History of European Culture, Sexuality, and Ideas)

Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory (George L. Mosse Series in the History of European Culture, Sexuality, and Ideas)

Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and Institute of Social Research

Nathanael West: The Art of His Life

Winter Dreams: An American in Moscow

Fin de Siècle Socialism and Other Essays (Routledge Revivals)