Under the guidance of phenomenological insights, this book presents the sensuous in its elemental sense. The elemental is not to be confused here with the classical notion of the atom, which is viewed as a self-contained entity into which all reality is reducible. Rather, the elemental is a living creative force that resists categorization. This force embodies the principle of openness and opening, a principle celebrated and given expression by numerous artists and other friends of the sensuous. As elemental, the sensuous irreducibly expresses itself in multiple ways. The editors of this volume avoid posting themselves between the sensuous and those to whom it presents itself. Each of the contributors here responds to the call of the elemental, and each finds his or her starting point where everyone else starts and ends. The multiple voices brought together here constitute a concert, with the elemental sensuous as the conductor. In reading this book, the reader will become more aware of himself or herself, and more aware of the world in which he or she lives.

In the West, philosophy is generally confined to the domain of the intellect, and music to the domain of the emotion. This book makes either domain the location for the other. African musical aesthetics constitutes this location, and has its home in it. Moreover, since the separation of the domain of the intellect and the domain of emotion represents a bifurcation of what it is to be a human being, and by making either domain the location of the other, what African musical aesthetics accomplishes is the affirmation of a unified sense of what it is to be a human being. Accordingly, the unity of philosophy and music give rises to a unified sense of being human. It is to such unity that African musical aesthetics takes us. For African musical aesthetics to accomplish this task, this book challenges the conventional Western understanding of philosophy—an understanding that projects Africa as devoid of philosophy. It is this projection that pervaded Africa during the colonial period, and it is the projection that is challenged in African philosophy. From an African philosophical perspective African musical aesthetics turns out to be an emancipatory process that seeks to affirm the humanity of Africans but also a process that seeks to affirm common humanity. Music is not solely a matter of audiology, what is played, or what one dances to. It has its elemental task in calling our attention to what we are as human beings. In so far as it is sensuous, it constitutes us as members of the sensible world, and links us intrinsically to all that is sensuous. It is more than humanism. Music registers us as members of nature. It is nature naturing.

Bachelard called them "the hormones of the imagination." Hegel observed that, "through the four elements we have the elevation of sensuous ideas into thought." Earth, air, fire, and water are explored as both philosophical ideas and environmental issues associated with their classical and perennial conceptions. David Macauley embarks upon a wide-ranging discussion of their initial appearance in ancient Greek thought as mythic forces or scientific principles to their recent reemergence within contemporary continental philosophy as a means for understanding landscape and language, poetry and place, the body and the body politic. In so doing, he shows the importance of elemental thinking for comprehending and responding to ecological problems. In tracing changing views of the four elements through the history of ideas, Macauley generates a new vocabulary for and a fresh vision of the environment while engaging the elemental world directly with reflections on their various manifestations.

This book explores the lived experience of being at home as well as being homeless. Being at home or not is typically a matter of being at a place or not, where such a place is carved out of space and designated as such. It is a place that is both empirical and trans-empirical. When one is at home or not at home, one typically has in mind an inhabited place. To inhabit or not to inhabit it is to find oneself in a place that has an affective presence or absence. In either case, affectivity points to a lived place where lived experience is constituted and displayed. Thus, in this context, affectivity becomes more than the subject of empirical psychology. If psychology were to have access, it would be in the context of phenomenological or existential psychology – a psychology that has its roots in the sensible world and, hence, a psychology that expresses an aesthetic dimension. Each of the contributors in this book extends an invitation to the readers to participate in constituting, extending, and sharing with others the sense of either being at home or of being homeless. This book appeals to students, researchers as well as general interest readers.

Although the seasons have been a perennial theme in literature and art, their significance for philosophy and environmental theory has remained largely unexplored. This pioneering book demonstrates the ways in which inquiry into the seasons reveals new and illuminating perspectives for philosophy, environmental thought, anthropology, cultural studies, aesthetics, poetics, and literary criticism. The Seasons opens up new avenues for research in these fields and provides a valuable resource for teachers and students of the environmental humanities. The innovative essays herein address a wide range of seasonal cultures and geographies, from the traditional Western model of the four seasons––spring, summer, fall, and winter––to the Indigenous seasons of Australia and the Arctic. Exemplifying the crucial importance of interdisciplinary research, The Seasons makes a compelling case for the relevance of the seasons to our daily lives, scientific understanding, diverse cultural practices, and politics.

The rift which has long divided the philosophical world into opposed schools-the "Continental" school owing its origins to the phenomenology of Husserl and the "analytic" school derived from Frege-is finally closing. But this closure is occurring in ways both different and in certain respects at odds with one another. On the one hand scholars are seeking to rediscover the concerns and positions common to both schools, positions from which we can continue fruitfully to address important philosophical issues. On the other hand successors to both traditions have developed criticisms of basic assumptions shared by the two schools. They have suggested that we must move not merely beyond the conflict between these two "modem" schools but beyond the kind of philosophy represented in the unity of the two schools and thereby move towards a new "postmodern" philosophical style. On the one hand, then and for example, Husserl scholarship has in recent years witnessed the development of an interpretation of Husserl which more closely aligns his phenomenology with the philosophical concerns of the "analytic" tradition. In certain respects, this should come as no surprise and is long overdue. It is true, after all, that the early Husserl occupied himself with many of the same philosophical issues as did Frege and the earliest thinkers of the analytic tradition. Examples include the concept of number, the nature of mathematical analysis, meaning and reference, truth, formalization, and the relationship between logic and mathematics.

"A genuine contribution to the literature . . . important especially to specialists in Continental philosophy but also to historians, literary theorists, and others who read recent European philosophy and who thus would want to think through the problem of the hegemony of vision."—David Hoy, University of California, Santa Cruz