Charles E. Scott

Studies in Continental Thought

The Time of Memory places emphasis on nonvoluntary memory and the mythology of memory in the context of questions that are prominent in contemporary thought. How do memories form experiences of origin and identity? How might we describe the functions of memory in thought or knowledge? Are there memories without images? How do past times become present? The book also addresses the force of mutation in the formation of memories as well as the roles of memories in experiences of ecstasy, sublimity, continuity, and discontinuity. The book engages Aristotle, Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, and Heidegger, as well as such mythological figures as Mnemosyne, Lethe, Dionysus, and Apollo.

In his challenging new book, Charles E. Scott examines the paradox that our ethical and political ideals may perpetuate the very evils they intend to prevent. He takes as his point of departure the question of ethics: that values and their pursuit in the West often perpetuate their own worst enemies. At issue are the dangers in the structures and movements of images, values, and ways of knowing that are most intimately a part of our lives. The ethical and political dimensions we live by are called into question by virtue of their belonging to something excessive to their own identities. When this excess is ignored, we will be inclined to eliminate or dominate those values and political structures that are significantly different from our own. In this encounter with excess, Scott engages the thought of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Levinas on questions of responsibility, transcendence, tragedy, and self-fragmentation. A way of thinking emerges that makes evident the advantages of the nonethical and the nonpolitical for ethical and political life.

"Interrogating the Tradition interprets figures in the history of Western thought from a broad, "continental" perspective. Divided into three major sections - hermeneutical thought, Heidegger and the Greeks, and the question of nature in German Idealism - the question of origins is central throughout and takes various shapes, all within the context of the history of Western philosophy. Addressed are the form inquiries take into manners by which we receive our philosophical tradition, the originary force of Plato and Aristotle in the formation of philosophical interpretations of time and human life, and inceptional concepts of nature in the nineteenth century."--BOOK JACKET.