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Max Scheler, pinnacle of phenomenology
The essays in this book are representative of Max Scheler at his best. His book, Formalism in Ethics and a Non-Formal Value-Ethics (1916, is widely recognized to be the best phenomenological book on ethics, and his Nature of Sympathy (1912) is thought to be a detailed phenomenology of human relations that captures their optimistic side, leaving Sartre to capture their pessimistic side in Part Three, "Being for Others", in Sartre's book Being and Nothingness. It is going out on a limb (but it wouldn't be, if philosophers were more familiar with Scheler) to categorize him as the greatest of the phenomenologists. This was the opinion of the Germans in the 1920s and early 1930s, when phenomenologists had largely left Husserl to study with Scheler and Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) was too new to be sufficiently absorbed. I think the present selection of Scheler's essays should be read by every philosopher. ... Read more

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The dark heart of egalitarianism
In this slim but brilliant volume Max Scheler explains how the egalitarian philosophies of the modern secular age springs from the systematic resentment of those who are materially, intellectually, or even spiritually better off than oneself. Although it may pass itself off as deriving from noble humanitarian sentiment, the emotional disposition that underlies egalitarianism is the very negation of true Christian charity, which is the loving affirmation of the unique person, whatever its circumstances in life. Once you understand the irrational well springs of egalitarian thought, it is no surprise to find that the movements it has inspired down through history have typically ended up perpetrating the worst crimes against the person. All forms of totalitarianism begin with egalitarian sentiment --- and that is a fact about egalitarianism, not totalitarianism. The paradigm example is perhaps the French Revolution. After the optimism of new beginnings, the ideals of liberté and fraternité became drowned in the blood of the revolutionists' victims in their ruthless pursuit of égalité at the expense of all else. Egalitarianism has now come to be seen as a political end in itself in mainstream democratic thought, and although the desire for equality may appear never so benign, what is conceived in darkness will bring forth darkness.

Excellent response to Nietzsche's criticisms of Christianity
This monograph constitutes a response to the criticisms of Christianity outlined in Nietzsche's GENEOLOGY OF MORALS, in which Nietzsche argues that Christianity is a "slave revolt" of the weak--an attempt by the impotent to bring down the vitality of the capable nobility.Scheler's response is multi-faceted but centers on Nietzsche's failure to understand the nature of Christian love.Christianity is not a destructive enterprise trying to bring everyone down to the same low level of its impotent faithful, who must put their trust in the next world because they can get nowhere in this one.Rather, it attempts constructively to bring everyone UP to a new level of human flourishing.Christianity's preoccupation with the poor, weak, and marginalized stems from a recognition, through divine love, of the miracle of God's creation and infinite possibilities present even in them.The following quotation well represents Scheler's position (and Nietzsche's perspectival error):"Those people [modern nihilists] saw something bug-like in everything that lives, whereas [St.] Francis sees the holiness of life even in a bug." (p. 70).This monograph is certainly not the last word on Nietzsche's famous anti-Christian polemic, and it contains many avenues of argumentation that are not described here; but it is fair to say that it articulates a capable response to the core of his arguments.And like the Texas Cottonwood tree, when the core of the trunk rots, the result is obvious during the next storm. ... Read more

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Outside the Cosmos
Titled "The Human Place in the Cosmos", Max Scheler's book finds that the human place is largely outside the Cosmos. Scheler (1874 -- 1928), was a German philosopher who studied with Dilthey and Simmel.His own pupils included Edith Stein, and he deeply influenced other thinkers including Merleau-Ponty and Pope John Paul II. Scheler was deeply influenced by Edmund Husserl's phenomenology even though he became a sharp critic of Husserl. Before Scheler's death, Martin Heidegger called him the most important force in the philosophy of his day.

"The Human Place in the Cosmos" was Scheler's final work and appeared just before his death in 1928.It is short, difficult, and dense -- more of a essay than a fully developed book. This edition was publishedin 2009 in the "Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy" series of Northwestern University.The translation is by the late Manfred Frings (1925 -- 2008), the editor of Scheler's collected works, with an introduction, notes, and glossary of Scheler's philosophical terminology by Professor Eugene Kelly, who has written extensively about Scheler. Kelly aptly describes Scheler's text as "an adventure in high philosophy".

This is a book for readers who think that philosophy is important in discussing the large questions of life. It is also a book which will appeal to readers with a modernist, post-religious outlook.In other words, Scheler seeks to find meaning and spirituality in life but not within traditional theism or religion. Some of the thinkers that receive attention in this book are the Buddha, Spinoza, and William James. A good background in thinking about philosophical questions and a willingness to study a text closely are helpful in approaching this book.

Scheler describes his book as a "philosophical anthropology" and says its aim is to address two questions: "what is the human being and what is his place in being?" Scheler finds three broad answers to the questions, each of which includes insights but are individually unsatisfactory: 1. The Jewish-Christian view of creationism; 2. the Greek view of reason and participation in logos; 3. the view of the natural sciences, evolutionary biology, and genetics.Scheler's develops his own answers to these questions which begin with inorganic matter and work up through plants and animals to determine what human beings share with other forms of things and how they differ.He then approaches his questions from the other direction, so to speak, to try to understand the role of human beings in what he terms the cosmos.

The crux of the book is in the development of what Scheler calls spirit. Spirit is what makes people human and which separates them from other living things. The development of spirit is what human beings ultimately share with the cosmos and with large reality. Scheler's understanding of "spirit" is difficult and should not be confused with "soul" or with "mind" in idealism or Cartesian dualism. For Scheler, spirit is not a thing or a substance. Animals show a greater or lesser degree of instinctual, associative or possibly reasoning ability to protect themeselves and to find food and sex.Human beings show a much greater problem-solving ability. But only humans have an ability to step outside their surroundings, objectify them, and ask themselves what they mean. This ability to step back and reflect, Scheler calls Spirit, and it is a process and an ongoing subject rather than a thing. For all his criticism, this strikes me as a Husserelian approach.

Scheler develops a Spinozistic answer to the relationship between physical process and mental processes, finding that both are two sides of the same thing unified together by spirit.Spirit stands aside from pragmatic issues and searches for meaning through art, law, literature, music, philosophy. It enables people to say "no" to their impulses, upon occasion, in a way animals cannot do. Scheler's understanding of spirit differs from that of traditional religions and earlier philosophies. Most importantly, Scheler's spirit is a weak, difficult reed.It has now power of its own, unlike, say, a transcendental God, and only fully comes through rarely, at the upper reaches of human effort. "Short and rare is what is beautiful in its tenderness and vulnerability", Scheler writes (p.47).While animals are enclosed in their lives and in the environment, human beings live outside of it, in rare moments, through spirit, reflectiveness, and the objectification of their environment.Hence the human place "in the cosmos" is "outside the cosmos."

With its existence "outside the cosmos" spirit tries to find meaning in God or other forms of transcendence.But it is not to be found there for Scheler, but rather from within. Meaning and transcendence are developing concepts that come from below, rather than from above. Thus it is the role of human beings through the generations to develop their varying understandings of spirit.At the conclusion of the book, Scheler writes:

"One might tell me at this point, and, indeed, I was once told, that it is impossible to bear the idea of an unfinished and God-in-becoming.My answer is that metaphysics is not an insurance company for weak people in need of protection.Metaphysics requires and presupposes human beings with strong and courageous minds." (p. 66)

Readers with a strong interest in philosophical and religious questions will benefit from studying Scheler's book.

Robin Friedman

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Using posthumous manuscripts, the author shows that Scheler conceived the origin of time in the self-activating center of individual and universal life as threefold ‘absolute’ time of a four-dimensional expanse. This serves as a basis for establishing the phenomenon of objective time in multiple steps of constitutionality, including the physical field theory and theory of relativity.

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LifeTime
Max Scheler was one of the most creative philosophers of the 20th Century.Usingthe phenomenological approach he explored many areas of experience, and is probably best known for his development of a new ethical personalism. As the editor of the Collected Works of Scheler, Manfred Frings has a unique grasp of the total corpus of Scheler's work. Drawing upon his knowledge of Scheler, Frings explores Scheler's insights into one of the most familiar yet mysterious of phenomena, namely time. As the title suggests, we live time, and the time we live is not just clock-time. Indeed, Frings traces our experience of time to a lived time that is at the core of our being. Using effective descriptions of lived experience, he follows Scheler's "grand attempt to trace time in its micro-and macrocosmic constitution, in which humanity, as a process of temporalization itself, lives its existence" (p. xvi).Along the way, Fringsintroduces the reader to many of Scheler's other insights as well, and applies Scheler's insights into the nature of time to a variety of significant problems ranging from capitalism to population.This study is both profound and illuminating.I recommend it to you in the highest. ... Read more

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One of the pioneers of modern sociology, Max Scheler (1874- 1928) ranks with Max Weber, Edmund Husserl, and Ernst Troeltsch as being among the most brilliant minds of his generation.Yet Scheler is now known chiefly for his philosophy of religion, despite his groundbreaking work in the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of emotions, and phenomenological sociology.This volume comprises some of Scheler's most interesting work--including an analysis of the role of sentiments in social interaction, a sociology of knowledge rooted in global social and cultural comparisons, and a cross-cultural theory of values--and identifies some of his important contributions to the discussion of issues at the forefront of the social sciences today.Editor Harold J. Bershady provides a richly detailed biographical portrait of Scheler, as well as an incisive analysis of how his work extends and integrates problems of theory and method addressed by Durkheim, Weber, and Parsons, among others.Harold J. Bershady, professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Ideology and Social Knowledge and the editor of Social Class and Democratic Leadership.Heritage of Sociology series ... Read more

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The Nature of Sympathy explores, at different levels, the social emotionsof fellow-feeling, the sense of identity, love and hatred, and traces theirrelationship to one another and to the values with which they are associated.Scheler criticizes other writers, from Adam Smith to Freud, who have arguedthat the sympathetic emotions derive from self-interested feelings or instincts.He reviews the evaluations of love and sympathy current in different historicalperiods and in different social and religious environments, and concludes byoutlining a theory of fellow-feeling as the primary source of our knowledge ofone another.A prolific writer and a stimulating thinker, Max Scheler ranks second onlyto Husserl as a leading member of the German phenomenological school.Scheler's work lies mostly in the fields of ethics, politics, sociology, and religion.He looked to the emotions, believing them capable, in their own quality, ofrevealing the nature of the objects, and more especially the values, to whichthey are in principle directed."Scheler's book is in many ways important and great. The questions raised andthe method followed are important: modern British thought with its crude useand abuse of the "emotive theory" could do well with a systematic study of theemotions which might show them up as complex intentional structures, andwhich might rely as much on the phenomenological insights of a Scheler, ason the behaviouristic flair of Gilbert Ryle."-J.N. Findlay, Mind ... Read more

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The best study of sympathy
Max Scheler is a now almost forgotten early phenomenologist. He made very objective studies of values, sympathy, sociology of knowledge and sociology of culture. This is one of his masterpieces in which he tries to phenomenological differentiate and explain the meaning of 'sympathy'.

The book differentiates the concept of sympathy from related concepts like fellow-feeling, commiserisation etc. He argues how sympathy is not the same as these concepts and why sympathy is not a form of enlightened self-interest either.

Particularly interesting are his arguments against Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments in which fear motivates sypathy and Freud's concept of guilt as source of such feelings. He also shows how Buddha's concept of universal misery blocks compassion by accepting misery matter-of-factly and expecting everyone to accept and live their misery. The book concludes that sympathy is made possible by empathy but is an irreducible feeling. ... Read more

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Max Scheler (1874-1928) decisively influenced German philosophy in the period after the First World War, a time of upheaval and new beginnings. Without him, the problems of German philosophy today, and its attempts to solve them would be quite inconceivable. What was new in his philosophy was that he used phenomenology to investigate spiritual realities.

The subject of On the Eternal in Man is the divine and its reality, the originality and non-derivation of religious experience. Scheler shows the characteristic quality of that which is religious. It is a particular essence that cannot be reduced to anything else. It is a sphere that belongs essentially to humankind; without it we would not be human. If genuine fulfillment is denied it, substitutes come into being. This religious sphere is the most essential, decisive one. It determines man's basic attitude towards reality and in a sense the color, extent and position of all the other human domains in life. It forms the basis for various views about life and thought.

Scheler was emphatically an intuitive philosopher. In Scheler's work the break between being as the almighty but blind rage and value as the knowing but powerless spirit-has become complete, and makes of each human a split being. Personal experiences may be reflected here. The development of Scheler's work as a whole was highly dependent on his personal experiences. It is this that gives Scheler's work its liveliness and its validity.

Max Scheler (1874-1928) was a professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Cologne and was best known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology.

Graham McAleer is professor of philosophy and co-chair of the Catholic Social Thought Committee at Loyola College in Maryland. He is also the author of the new introduction of Transaction’s other Max Scheler book, The Nature of Sympathy.

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Perfect Condition, excellent service
No complaints.This was a good deal, reasonable speed of service, and perfect condition book. ... Read more

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A Phenomenological Event
Dr Philip Blosser of Lenoir-Rhyne College has truly arranged a definitive study of Max Scheler's critique of Kantian ethics. Not only does this book elucidate Kantian formalism and Schelerian axiology, it also provides a necessary historical context for the Kantian legacy and Scheler's assessment of Kant's formalism. Moreover, Blosser's expertise in phenomenological thought and value theory shines through in this distinctive and peerless work. I have read the book twice and still often consult it in my studies when trying to comprehend Kantian ethics. Pick up this monograph and add it to your library. It is a phenomenological event!

This philosophical masterpiece has changed my life forever!
The pure and awe-inspiring brilliance of Dr. Philip Blosser bursts forth from these pages like academic napalm.This book is a true gem penned in excellence by one of the greatest minds to ever grace the realm of philosophy.It should be thankfully discovered by one and all. ... Read more

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Peter Spader has written a magisterial study on Max Scheler, one of phenomenology's earliest and greatest figures, whose theory of ethical personalism has become a major voice in the formulation of phenomenological ethics today. Spader follows Scheler's use of the classic phenomenological approach, by means of which he presented a fresh view of values, feelings, and the person, and thereby staked out a new approach in ethics. Spader recreates the logic of Scheler's quest, revealing the basis of his thought and the reasons for his dramatic changes of direction. This remarkable study provides a framework that allows us to understand Scheler's insights in the context of their dynamic evolution of his thought. It corrects imbalances in the presentation of his ideas and defends Scheler against key misunderstandings and criticisms. In short, Spader's work continues the process of developing Scheler's pioneering theory of ethical personalism. ... Read more

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A highly informative account
Spader has devoted an entire career and countless philosophical articles to analyzing and explicating the philosophy of Max Scheler, one of phenomenology's seminal figures and a major voice in the development of a phenomenological theory of ethics. This book is Spader's culminating masterpiece, his magnum opus, on the subject of a lifetime of research. Like all of Spader's work, it is clearly written, and represents a badly-needed addition to the growing English-language scholarship on Max Scheler.
Spader traces the classic phenomenological approach by which Scheler developed his theory of values and staked out his new personalist approach to ethics, and then offers a compelling reconstruction of the underlying 'logic' of Scheler's philosophical development. He reveals and examines the reasons for the dramatic shifts in direction throughout Scheler's career, which have usually been treated as all-but incomprehensible in the extant Scheler literature. Spader clearly indicates why Scheler, in his early period, neglected to fill out the phenomenological evidence he had promised to provide for his non-formal alternative to Kant's ethics; and, again, why he then, in his second phase, shifted to religious and metaphysical considerations without completing his ethics; and why, yet again in his third period, he embraced a 'pantheistic' view, as a result of an impasse in his thinking concerning the problem of theodicy. The personalism underlying Scheler's ethics naturally drove him towards theological considerations of how an infinite "person of persons" (that is, God), might be related to questions of a moral bearing. Thus Scheler was driven to undertake a religious and metaphysical investigation of the concept of God as a means of clearing a way for the completion of his ethics.
Spader corrects distortions and imbalances in existing studies of Scheler and defends him against key criticisms levelled by scholars such as Stephen Strasser, Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), Dietrich von Hildebrand, Eugene Kelly, Philip Blosser, and Parvis Emad. Spader's treatment is not only a major contribution to Scheler scholarship in the English language; it is a contribution that allows those interested in Scheler to grasp the 'logic' of his total work in such a way that they can themselves carry out and 'complete' what he left unfinished, incorporating his insights into their continuation of his work. Spader's work is of inestimable value for students of Scheler's thought, providing insights nowhere else available in English. Highly recommended. ... Read more

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Herbert List, who died in 1975, was one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century. Early in his career he photographed primarily in Italy and Greece, attracted like many previous travelers to the countries' beauty. List came of age in Germany during the development of the "new objectivity"; his photographs, surreal in aesthetic, in certain ways parallel de Chirico's paintings. After World War II he photographed the ruins of Munich, portraying the consequences of destruction by means of a classical visual form. List was the youngest of a famous group of photographers -- Hoyningen-Huene, Cecil Beaton, and Horst P. Horst -- and his photographic oeuvre is perhaps the freshest and most artistic of these distinguished individuals.

This large volume assembles 250 of Herbert List's most famous images in the first comprehensive compilation of his work. The photographs are organized according to five themes: Metaphysical Photography, Ruins and Fragments, Eros and Photography, Portraits, and Moments. Accompanying the images are essays written by five important historians of photography and art. ... Read more

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Description
With more than three hundred photographs, Herbert List: The Monograph documents for the first time all phases of List's creativity: the Fotografia Metafisica (as List's early work, with its affinity with the work of de Chirico and Magritte, has come to be known); his photographs of Classical Greek ruins and postwar Munich; his sensitive homoerotic photographs; the artist portraits spanning the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s; and his subtle and touching human-interest photo-essays. Authoritative texts by noted critics and scholars provide historical contexts and influences and detail the development of List's oeuvre. A selection of List's own writings, a comprehensive chronology, a bibliography, and records of exhibitions, collections, and published photographs and essays complete the book. The photographs and essays collected in this volume comprise the definitive presentation of this modern master.

Classic without classicism
Herbert List is one of the most impressive photographers of the 20th century. This book is a masterpiece and offers a wonderful overview of List's work. It gives the opportunity to discover a classical andrefreshing approach of the world-which escapes however from classicism.

Classical without classicism
Herbert List belongs to the most impressive photographers of the 20th century, showing a simple but wonderful vision of the world while escaping from classicism... A wonderful publication for "amateurs" and amasterpiece in arts book! ... Read more

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German-born photographer, art collector and aesthete Herbert List had a special affinity throughout his life with Italy. A man whose artistic approach had been shaped by the European avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, he found motifs in Italy that appealed to his senses and to his strong approach to form, and between the 1930s and 1970s he was drawn to the country again and again. This book presents the photographic impressions of Italy that List recorded, a mixture of people, places, art, life, past and present. Street scenes from 1930s Rome appear next to pictures of the catacombs at Palermo, and portraits of List's artist friends, among them de Chirico, Morandi and Marini, stand alongside glimpses of everyday life in Naples. ... Read more