Amy M. Alvarez explores the cultural, spiritual, and place-based experiences of Afro-Caribbean and African American diasporic peoples in this haunting and emotionally charged collection of poems that meditates on the meaning of home and existence. Born in New York City to Jamaican and Puerto Rican parents, Alvarez draws readers into a journey of self-discovery and identity, connecting the past with the present while highlighting the complexities of navigating life as a multicultural American. The musicality of her language weaves together themes of environment, family, and migration, as well as her own ancestry as a Black Latinx woman. Makeshift Altar is an intimate collection that explores identities forged by colonialism and displacement and shaped by individual choice and collective power.

A chapbook from Pulitzer Prize winner Rae Armantrout on climate change.Notice is the product of a life-long interest in natural sciences by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Rae Armantrout. The collection draws poems from her previous books calling our attention to how language frames and shapes our relationships to climate and kin. The title is a call to take heed of the signs coming to us daily. "Notice" can be read as a noun or a verb. As a noun it might be thought of as a public warning. The author has selected poems that respond in various ways to the environmental crisis which we all see developing and about which we don't seem to be able to take appropriate action. The poem "Preparedness," for instance, hazards a wild guess about the cause of this failure to act. Some of the poems here address the problem directly. In others the focus is broader or the approach more subtle. There are even a few poems in which the author allows for something like hope.

Joshua "Josh" Gibson (1911–1947) is a baseball legend - one of the greatest power hitters in the Negro Leagues, and in all of baseball history. At the height of his career, this trailblazing athlete suffered grueling physical ailments, lost his young wife who died giving birth to their twins, and endured years of Jim Crow–era segregation and discrimination - all the while breaking records on the ball field. Dorian Hairston's debut poetry collection explores the Black American experience through the lens of Gibson's life and seventeen-year baseball career, which culminated in his posthumous election to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972. Hairston brilliantly reconstructs the personas of Gibson and others in his orbit whose encounters with white supremacy interweave with the inevitability of losing loved ones. By alternating between the perspectives of Gibson, members of his family, and contemporary Black baseball players, Hairston captures the complexity and the pain of living under the oppressive weight of grief and racial discrimination. Emotive, prescient, and absorbing, these powerful poems address social change, culture, family, race, death, and oppression—while honoring and giving voice to Gibson and a voiceless generation of African Americans.

The Safety of Small Things meditates on mortality from a revealing perspective. Images of stark examination rooms, the ravages of chemotherapy, biopsies, and gel-soaked towels entwine with remembrance to reveal grace and even beauty where they are least expected. Jane Hicks captures contemporary Appalachia in all of its complexities: the world she presents constantly demonstrates how the past and the present (and even the future) mingle unexpectedly. The poems in this powerful collection juxtapose the splendor and revelation of nature and science, the circle of life, how family and memory give honor to those we've lost, and how they can all fit together. This lyrical and contemplative yet provocative collection sings a song of lucidity, redemption, and celebration.

ANTHROPOCENE AND CRITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY. CRITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY AFTER MERLEAU-PONTY (PART II). AROUND MERLEAU-PONTY. TEXTS BYNicola Banwell, Gael Caignard, Myriam Coté, Stanislas De Courville, Gianluca De Fazio, Elena De Silvestri, Luca Fabbris, Emmanuel Falque, Giovanni Fava, Lisa Guenther, Galen A. Johnson, Rajiv Kaushik, Corinne Lajoie, Emily S. Lee, Federico Leoni, Paolo Missiroli, Cinzia Orlando, Pietro Pasquinucci, Marie-Anne Perreault, Stéphanie Perruchoud, Andrea Pitts, Joel Michael Reynolds, Camille Roelens, Tristana Martin Rubio, Davide Scarso, Alessandra Scotti, Jenny Slatman, Bryan Smyth, Ted Toadvine

The contagious joy of a party, the solemn silence in a church, the gloomy atmosphere of endless rows of identical houses in an ugly city. Through a criticism of the reification and psychologization that goes back to the very beginning of Western philosophy, Hermann Schmitz offers a fundamentally new theory of embodiment and feelings based on atmospheres, unstable but powerful phenomena that fill the “surfaceless spaces” of lived experience. This collection of essays, selected by Schmitz himself, offers a comprehensive portrait of his theory, both in its fundamental outlines and later progress.

Beyond the Bible, Beyond the West is a research in ontological hermeneutics: it is critical of “textual positivism” – which makes the univocity and clarity of a text the main goal of its task – and also of “cultural positivism” – a cultural matrix that elevates univocity and clarity as the ultimate goal of contemporary systems. This essay indirectly sketches a cultural critique and not only a theological one. Means, medium and guarantor of this ontological indelible reserve are ambivalence and paradox. We will try to follow the trace of these throughout the hermeneutic arc – and not only at its beginning.

This volume, written from a diachronic perspective, is devoted to the initatic and deeply transformative dimension of religious experience in Neoplatonic philosophy which aims at restoring the soul’s condition prior to its descent into matter. It brings together philosophers and historians of religions, specializing in the study of mithraism, theurgy, Christian mysticism and the philosophical exegesis of the Chaldean Oracles.

Bergson is rightly considered the philosopher of duration. Has this theory, however, been sufficiently elucidated? Is there a domain, aside from life itself, to which the characteristics of duration can be meaningfully ascribed? Why, in his thesis from 1907, does Bergson write of a “real” duration? His subsequent work Duration and Simultaneity: With Reference to Einstein’s Theory (1922) is the only volume written by Bergson in the period separating Creative Evolution (1907) and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). Duration and Simultaneity represents a polemical, unique, mature and relatively neglected work, one that allows us however to respond to these questions – provided that we read it as a work of philosophy and metaphysics. This book was awarded the 2020 Polydore de Paepe Prize of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium.

Our historical period is characterized by a vision of liberal heritage and a capitalist economic path. But it is far from obvious what “liberal” really means here, and what connection it has with capitalism. The current volume thus first attempts to provide a clarification of the long-term genesis of “liberal reason” in the West, following its development in the seventeenth century down to the present day. Secondly, the text aims to identify the basic logic that feeds liberal reason, a logic that nourishes capitalist processes but goes far beyond them. This analysis provides a picture in which liberal reason no longer needs to be 'represented' because it has tacitly occupied the entire conceptual space of the political. It now plays all the parts in the political comedy, both majorities and oppositions, right and left, concealing the systematic operation of distortion that has taken place. The ramifications of liberal reason have also taken root among intellectuals and movements that consider themselves to be 'neutral', or even 'anti-capitalist'. Liberalism's occupation, as pervasive as it is unnoticed, lies at the basis of the perceived impossibility of conceiving alternatives, and therefore of the continual deadlock in which contemporary consciousness struggles.

The volume contains the proceedings of an international conference exploring the concept of 'contemporaneity' from different perspectives and in reference to different disciplinary fields (philosophy, literature and art theory). In the chronological motion of historiography, contemporaneity is conceptualised as simply being the present era, one that follows modernity. Such thinking overlooks a more complex understanding of the contemporary, which is, in its original meaning, the co-presence of different times, a disconnection of temporal continuity, a rupture in the present, which becomes a meeting point where the past and the future intersect. The contemporary is untimely and, in this sense, is just in time, as it relates to time through anachronism. It is more present than the present of actuality.

The Kyoto School was the most important philosophical current in Japan during the 20th century. In the context of a growing interest in Japanese philosophy, as well as in non-European philosophy in general, this essay represents the first attempt to set the political thought of Kiyoshi Miki (1897-1945) and Jun Tosaka (1900-1945) in dialogue with contemporary thought. Miki and Tosaka were both leftist thinkers interested in thinking through political action “from below. ” This book introduces their concepts of “basic experience” and “everydayness” through conversation with contemporary theories of speculative realism, especially that of Mark Fisher. According to Miki and Tosaka, social myths are not just fictions but political “objects” with a life of their own, capable of generating political subjects and subverting the dominant ideology.

Offering an overview of the relationship between smell and atmospheres as proposed within the humanities, this volume aims at interpreting the “olfactive” as a cross-sensorial and ecological modality of perception. It investigates osmospheres - i.e. , the olfactory irradiances which provide persons, commodities, situations and places with an aura, a vague but unique flavour—from the perspective of relational and social aesthetics. For reasons that are addressed extensively, the central case study is of food, which exemplifies the porous boundaries between subject and environment, identity and alterity, knowing and feeling. In the light of contemporary artistic and marketing practices, in which food osmospheres are staged in order to convey emotions and drive consumer behavior, this work speculates on the socio-political aesthetic implications of osmospheric foodification attempting to capture the essence of today’s urban and domestic dwelling.

This book aims to reflect on mental illness through considering the influence that criticism and German idealism exerted on directions of philosophical, scientific and psychoanalytical thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and which can still be perceived today. It aims, therefore, not only to offer today's cultural and scientific debate an analysis of otherwise undetected aspects of classical German philosophy but also to shed light on subjects and issues present within current philosophical, psychiatric and scientific investigation.

Written by four hands, the current volume moves on two planes that fruitfully intersect and sometimes conflict in their interpretations. On the one hand, Petar Bojanič proposes that gestures are not parasitic of social acts but instead constitute a supporting element. From this interpretative angle, gestures contribute to the constitution of a group or institution. On the other hand, Virgilio Cesarone first presents a phenomenology of gesture, showing that non-instrumental gestural expression, which refers to the constitution of another's body as alter ego, is truly human. Furthermore, gesture shows its essentiality precisely at the moment when it serves no purpose. He thus proposes a hermeneutics of gesture, aiming to show that gesture cannot be considered an accessory and expressive element of a thought that is inwardly closed, but part of a thought that moves with the hand itself.

The book offers a study of ancient rhetoric within a philosophical reflection that aims to reconstruct its history. Through the various definitions of rhetoric and all its practical, ethical, social and political implications, the author leads us to the rhetorical languages of today, developed within the democracies and the so-called populisms that characterize the West – or rather, what remains of it.