Jacques Lacan’s teaching lasted about three decades. Like Freud before him, Lacan was profoundly interested in the arts, particularly in painting. Lacan not only turned to specific artworks to clarify psychoanalytic concepts but also addressed theoretical aspects of painting. Like scholars from other fields, such as philosophy or cultural studies, who have turned to Lacan’s thinking throughout his career, art scholars often make use of Lacan’s teaching while analyzing various notions in art. These arguments deal mostly with Lacan’s early teaching or his seminars from the sixties. Yet, his late teaching and its relation to the visual arts remains relatively unknown, even though Lacan’s most radical views are presented for the first time during his late teaching of the seventies, and these conceptualizations carry immense value for theoretical discourse on contemporary art. Lacan’s late teaching and its relation to art fashions the cornerstone of this book, it is the wrap thread that runs through it. The other thread, the woof, which this book weaves into the psychoanalytic discourse, is of a different kind and nature: the discourse of art which analyzes specific instances of the works of art of contemporary Israeli artists: Michal Na’aman, David Ginton, Joshua Borkovsky and Shahar Yahalom.

Le 17 juin 1940, l’écrivain français Jean Guéhenno prit une double résolution après avoir entendu la déclaration radiophonique du maréchal Pétain annonçant aux Français la fin des combats et la demande d’armistice: tenir un journal, mais ne rien publier tant que durerait l’occupation allemande. Le récit de cette période trouble parut en 1947 sous le titre éloquent de Journal des années noires. Si le livre a été quelque peu oublié, la formule, par contre, est passée à la postérité. Dans l’esprit de Guéhenno, elle signifiait que ces années-là furent un tunnel, sinon un cauchemar: noires pour les victimes civiles et militaires disparues; noires pour les errements et les égarements des élites gouvernant la France; noires encore et surtout pour le déshonneur infligé à la conscience historique d’une grande nation; l’envers des Lumières, lesquelles se confondaient pour lui avec l’idée qu’il se faisait de la France.

Nietzsche is not ordinarily considered a philosopher of law, and despite the voluminous literature on almost every other aspect of his thought, little has been written about his reflections on the role of law in the social, intellectual, and personal spheres. Yet careful reading of his works reveals a significant body of critical reflection on socio-jurisprudential questions regarding the nature of law, obedience to the law, the criminal mindset, punishment, and more. The book presents for the first time, a comprehensive collection of aphorisms gathered from the entire Nietzschean corpus that explicitly or implicitly addresses the subject of law, arranged thematically, along with contextualization, annotation, and commentary. The book contains six chapters - The Self in the Presence of Law, The Criminal: A Profile, Causation, Action, Free Will, Punishment, Rights and Obligations, Religion and State. It thus provides a panoramic view of Nietzsche’s critical discourse on law and legal culture.

The World of Machiavelli explores his teaching by placing it squarely in its political and intellectual context. Based on a wide range of personal letters, diplomatic dispatches and administrative memoranda as well as on his treatises, plays and poems, it traces the development of his skills, mental habits and unique views from his youth, through his turbulent public career, to his last days. Alongside the formative historical and personal circumstances, the book explores the universal dimensions of Machiavelli’s thought, which forms an integral part of an ongoing conversation about our ability to organize our shared lives and shape our destiny. Thus, The World of Machiavelli differs from most biographies and studies of his thought: focusing on a cluster of themes that are central both in his works and in our modern public life, the book invites the readers to reflect on major issues of our time by engaging with Machiavelli.

Philo was the first Jewish philosopher who left behind one of the richest bodies of work from antiquity, yet his personality and intellectual development have remained a riddle. Maren Niehoff presents the first biography of Philo, arguing that his trip to Rome in 38 CE was a turning point in his life. He was exposed then not only to new political circumstances but also to a new cultural and philosophical environment. The Intellectual Biography traces Philo's trajectory from his early days as a Bible interpreter in the Jewish community of Alexandria to his diplomatic and intellectual activity in Rome, when he engaged Roman philosophy. Anticipating Sa'ada Gaon and Maimonides by almost a thousand years, Philo creatively presents Jewish philosophy in the context of contemporary culture and thought.

Life crises present before the person experiencing them an opportunity to embark on a philosophical journey that is not detached from everyday life. This book provides philosophical guidance which could help a person define their own basic questions, as well as support in the process of creative, autonomous, critical and authentic development of a newly generated world view. It aims to enable a person to realize ideas from the history of human thought and to make their life more meaningful.

Question of Place: Architecture between the Poetic and the Ethical calls for a re-understanding of the foundations of the architectural act while exposing it to phenomenological thought. Through a return to the first - and failed - encounter in the late 1970s, between phenomenology depicting phenomena in the light of human experience and architectural discourse, Edna Langenthal offers a new reading of discourse, embracing the thought of philosopher Martin Heidegger and discussing the influence of the architectural theoretician Christian Norberg-Schulz, who in her opinion missed Heidegger's contribution to her understanding. To emphasize the potential inherent in Heidegger's thought in understanding the question of place and the possibilities of dwelling in it, the author discusses the meaning of the poetic as a constitutive axis in understanding key concepts in contemporary architectural discourse. But the poetic dimension, for her, cannot exist without the ethical dimension. Through a study of the thought of Heidegger's student and critic, the philosopher Emanuel Levinas, the structure that connects an affinity between the ethical and the home and the possibilities of settling in it.

Therapeutics and Salvation: Freud and Schelling on Freedom proposes a new conceptual perspective on the history of the philosophy of freedom. The book focuses on Sigmund Freud’s theory of freedom, and its fundamental, yet uncharted, connection with the groundbreaking philosophy of the unconscious of F.W.J Schelling. The analysis radically challenges conventional liberal and rationalistic conceptions of freedom in psychoanalysis. The main argument of the book is that Freud formulated his theory of human nature with Schelling’s basic philosophical architecture, in particular Schelling’s concept of freedom, but, at the same time, subverted Schelling’s search for a new theology at the end of the latter's philosophical career. The detailed comparison of Freud’s work with the philosophy of Schelling backtracks a momentous shift from Schelling’s late theo-philosophy, at the endpoint of German Idealism, to the secular system of Freud, in which human reality ousted godly revelation and therapeutics replaced divine salvation. By delineating the move from Schelling’s God-subject relations to Freud’s human-subject relations, the book offers a new perspective on the historical evolution of German Idealism into modern secular thought.

The Western musical tradition has produced not only music, but also countless writings about music that remain in continuous—and enormously influential—dialogue with their subject. With sweeping scope and philosophical depth, A Language of Its Own traces the past millennium of this ongoing exchange. Ruth Katz argues that the indispensable relationship between intellectual production and musical creation gave rise to the Western conception of music. This evolving and sometimes conflicted process, in turn, shaped the art form itself. As ideas entered music from the contexts in which it existed, its internal language developed in tandem with shifts in intellectual and social history. Katz explores how this infrastructure allowed music to explain itself from within, creating a self-referential and rational foundation that has begun to erode in recent years. A magisterial exploration of a frequently overlooked intersection of Western art and philosophy, A Language of Its Own restores music to its rightful place in the history of ideas.

Man and Nature , the most notable work by A. D. Gordon (1860-1922) was written mostly during the second decade of the twentieth century. It is an original philosophical work, which revolves around the ethics, aesthetics and philosophy of religion. In addition to presenting a comprehensive philosophical theory in Hebrew, Gordon discusses issues which became more and more central in the generations that followed him – like ecology, gender and the rejuvenation of Judaism. By returning to nature Gordon advocates a full life of creation. This new edition contains sections from the Dgania Alef archives, which were omitted from previous editions. In the introduction, the editors describe how the text deviates from the time and place in which it was written, explaining the recent wave of renewed interest in Gordon’s writings.

In the few years after his retirement from public life and before he was sentenced to suicide, the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote the majority of his texts, which included over one hundred letters of wisdom ( espistulae morales) sent to his friend Lucilius. These letters are considered the first appearance of literary letters in Roman prose. The letters are philosophical essays written by a very wise and witty old man concluding his life, an autobiography of our spiritual world. The issues that interested Seneca are eternally relevant.

The question of theodicy has preoccupied philosophers and theologians throughout generations. Roughly: If God is moral, how can there be evil in the world? Or: Is the existence of evil not evidence against the existence of a righteous God? This question became the greatest philosophical challenge for the believer, and the main device in the hands of atheists. The question of theodicy also raises a second-order discussion, about the nature of the challenge: Is there a logical contradiction between a moral God and the existence of evil? If not, what sort of tension is this? Can the attributes of God be thought of in a coherent manner? Does the very existence of evil give rise to the challenge, or only the existence of unnecessary evil? The present research addresses Kant’s take on theodicy. It focuses mainly on two Kantian assertions that seem to disaccord with Kant’s theory of freedom: 1. That evil is entrenched in mankind, and 2. That if all-inclusive moral-order is impossible, the moral-law is erroneous. The conclusion, based on close examination of Kant’s argumentation, is that Kant did not exclude theodicy from rational discourse, but rather redefined the challenge enclosed in the question of theodicy.