Adventures in Phenomenology

Repositions Bachelard as a critical and integral part of contemporary continental philosophy.
Like Schelling before him and Deleuze and Guattari after him, Gaston Bachelard made major philosophical contributions to the advancement of science and the arts. In addition to being a mathematician and epistemologist whose influential work in the philosophy of science is still being absorbed, Bachelard was also one of the most innovative thinkers on poetic creativity and its ethical implications. His approaches to literature and the arts by way of elemental reverie awakened long-buried modes of thinking that have inspired literary critics, depth psychologists, poets, and artists alike. Bachelard’s extraordinary body of work, unduly neglected by the English-language reception of continental philosophy in recent decades, exhibits a capacity to speak to the full complexity and wider reaches of human thinking. The essays in this volume analyze Bachelard as a phenomenological thinker and situate his thought within the Western tradition. Considering his work alongside that of Schelling, Husserl, Bergson, Buber, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Deleuze, and Nancy, this collection highlights some of Bachelard’s most provocative proposals on questions of ontology, hermeneutics, ethics, environmental politics, spirituality, and the possibilities they offer for productive transformations of self and world.
Eileen Rizo-Patron is Research Associate at the Center for Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture at Binghamton University, State University of New York. She is the coeditor (with Richard Kearney) of Traversing the Heart: Journeys of the Inter-religious Imagination and the translator of Bachelard’s Intuition of the Instant. Edward S. Casey is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University, State University of New York. He is the author of many books, including The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Jason M. Wirth is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. His books include Schelling’s Practice of the Wild: Time, Art, Imagination, also published by SUNY Press.