Overview

In The Lives of Things, Charles E. Scott reconsiders our relationships with ordinary, everyday things and our capacity to engage them in their particularity. Scott takes up the Greek notion of phusis, or physicality, as a way to point out limitations in refined and commonplace views of nature and the body as well as a device to highlight the often overlooked lives of things that people encounter. Scott explores questions of unity, purpose, coherence, universality, and experiences of wonder and astonishment in connection with scientific fact and knowledge. He develops these themes in a voice that presents them with lightness and wit, ultimately articulating a new interpretation of the appearances of things that are beyond the reach of language and thought. The Lives of Things explores our physical kinship with other lives and suggests options for connecting with things that might turn us toward the vitality and unexpected possibilities of singular physical events.

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9780253340689

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Reviews

This is a unique contribution that blazes a new path in post-phenomenological inquiry. The attention to things is unprecedented in recent philosophical literature and Scott's approach is refreshing and original. Edward S. Casey Like Foucault and Levinas before him, though in very different ways, Scott makes an oblique incision into phenomenology... [it is] the kind of book to which people dazed by the specters of nihilism will be referred by those in the know. David Wood

Author Information

Charles E. Scott is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University. He is author of The Question of Ethics, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Ethics in Politics (both published by Indiana University Press), and The Time of Memory.

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