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Philosophers debate the death of philosophy as much as they debate the death of God. Immanuel Kant claimed responsibility for both philosophy’s beginning and end, while Martin Heidegger argued it concluded with Friedrich Nietzsche. In the twentieth century, figures as diverse as John Austin and Richard Rorty have proclaimed philosophy’s end, with some even calling for the advent of “post-philosophy.” In an effort to make sense of these conflicting positions—which often say as much about the philosopher as his subject—this book undertakes the first systematic treatment of “the end of philosophy,” while also recasting the history of Western thought itself. The book begins with post-philosophical claims such as scientism, which it reveals to be self-refuting, for they subsume philosophy into the branches of the natural sciences. Similar issues are discovered in Rorty’s skepticism and strands of continental thought. Revisiting the work of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century philosophers, when the split between analytical and continental philosophy began, the book finds that both traditions followed the same path—the road of reference—which ultimately led to self-contradiction. This phenomenon, whether valorized or condemned, has been understood as the death of philosophy. Tracing this pattern from Willard Van Orman Quine to Rorty, from Heidegger to Emmanuel Levinas and Jürgen Habermas, the book reveals the self-contradiction at the core of their claims while also carving an alternative path through self-reference.

The book Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, published in 2010, presented David Foster Wallace's challenge to Richard Taylor's argument for fatalism. In this anthology, notable philosophers engage directly with that work and assess Wallace's reply to Taylor as well as other aspects of Wallace's thought. The thinkers in this book explores Wallace's philosophical and literary work, illustrating remarkable ways in which his philosophical views influenced and were influenced by themes developed in his other writings, both fictional and nonfictional. This book unlocks key components of Wallace's work and its traces in modern literature and thought.

The question “Where do we come from?” has fascinated philosophers, scientists, and artists for generations. This book reorients the question of the matrix as a place where everything comes from (chora, womb, incubator) by recasting it in terms of acts of “matrixial/maternal hospitality” producing space and matter of and for the other. This book theorizes such hospitality with the potential to go beyond tolerance in understanding self/other relations. Building on and critically evaluating a wide range of historical and contemporary scholarship, it applies this theoretical framework to the science, technology, and art of ectogenesis (artificial womb, neonatal incubators, and other types of generation outside of the maternal body) and proves the question “Can the machine nurse?” is critical when approaching and understanding the functional capacities and failures of incubating technologies, such as artificial placenta. The book concludes with the science and art of male pregnancy, positioning the condition as a question of the hospitable man and newly defined fatherhood and its challenge to the conception of masculinity as unable to welcome the other.

This book challenges the belief, dominant in contemporary philosophy, that reason is determined solely by our discursive, linguistic abilities as communicative beings. In this view, the medium of language is not the only force of reason. Music, art, and other nonlinguistic forms of communication and understanding are also significant. Introducing an expansive theory of mind that accounts for highly sophisticated, penetrative media, the book advances a novel conception of rationality while freeing philosophy from its exclusive attachment to linguistics. The book's media of reason treats all kinds of understanding and thought, propositional and nonpropositional, as important to the processes and production of knowledge and thinking. By developing an account of rationality grounded in a new conception of media, it raises the profile of the prelinguistic and nonlinguistic dimensions of rationality and advances the Enlightenment project, buffering it against the postmodern critique that the movement fails to appreciate aesthetic experience. Guided by the work of Jürgen Habermas, Donald Davidson, and a range of media theorists, including Marshall McLuhan, the text rebuilds, if he does not remake, the relationship among various forms of media—books, movies, newspapers, the Internet, and television—while offering an original and exciting contribution to media theory.