| The Voice of Misery: A Continental Philosophy of Testimony Contributor(s): Van Der Heiden, Gert-Jan (Author) |
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ISBN: 1438477600 ISBN-13: 9781438477602 Publisher: State University of New York Press OUR PRICE: $35.10 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: January 2021 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Philosophy | Epistemology - Philosophy | Movements - Phenomenology |
| Dewey: 121.3 |
| LCCN: 2019011267 |
| Physical Information: 0.78" H x 6" W x 9" (1.13 lbs) 350 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: From analytic epistemology to gender theory, testimony is a major topic in philosophy today. Yet, one distinctive approach to testimony has not been fully appreciated: the recent history of contemporary continental philosophy offers a rich source for another approach to testimony. In this book, Gert-Jan van der Heiden argues that a continental philosophy of testimony can be developed that is guided by those forms of bearing witness that attest to limit experiences of human existence, in which the human is rendered mute, speechless, or robbed of a common understanding. In the first part, Van der Heiden explores this sense of testimony in a reading of several literary texts, ranging from Plato's literary inventions to those of Kierkegaard, Melville, Soucy, and Mortier. In the second part, based on the orientation offered by the literary experiments, Van der Heiden offers a more systematic account of testimony in which he distinguishes and analyzes four basic elements of testimony. In the third part, he shows what this analysis implies for the question of the truth and the truthfulness of testimony. In his discussion with philosophers such as Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, Agamben, Foucault, Ricoeur, and Badiou, Van der Heiden also provides an overview of how the problem of testimony emerges in a number of thinkers pivotal to twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought. |