Extensions

Essays on Interpretation, Rationality, and the Closure of Modernism

By Stephen H. Watson

Series: SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy
Paperback : 9780791411926, 347 pages, August 1992
Hardcover : 9780791411919, 347 pages, September 1992

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Time, Narrative, and the Dialectics of the Phantasm

 

1. Prologue: On the Crisis of Theory
2. On the Narrative of Dasein
3. Circulos in Demonstrando
4. Discipline and Interpretation
5. Against Demarcation
6. Dialectic and the Canonizations of Excess
7. The Phantasm and the Ruins of Being
8. On the Critical Tribunal
9. The Genre(s) of Theory

 

I. Abysses

II. Aesthetics and the Foundations of Interpretation

III. Hermeneutics and the Retrieval of the Sacred

IV. On the Agon of the Phenomenological

V. The Dispersion of Dasein

VI. Between Truth and Methos
Supplement: Quarreling Between the Ancients and the Moderns

VII. On the De-Lineation of the Visible

VIII. On the Right to Interpret: Beyond the Copernican Turn

IX. The Philosopher's Text

X. On the Rationality of the Fragment

Notes

Index of Proper Names

Stephen Watson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.

Reviews

"It is a very stimulating and provocative text. Extensions is a book that needs to be read!" — Gayle L. Ormiston, Kent State University

"The author addresses the central issue of the structure and limits of rationality. He does so on the basis of a comprehensive reading of a wide variety of voices ranging from high modernity to what we now call 'postmodernity. ' The author is a wide and intelligent reader of Kant and the German Idealists (including Fichte and Schelling), nineteenth century hermeneutics, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, contemporary French 'postmodernism;' he is also familiar with the analytic tradition, which is very rare for someone with these interests. This unusual range is a very attractive feature of a book whose display of scholarship is truly impressive. The position the author defends is sensible and astute: he seeks out a conception of rationality which moves between the extremes of historicism and eternal truth, timeless theory and literary imagination. " — John D. Caputo, Villanova University