Two essential works by Heidegger on the nature of identity 

Information and Mind explores questions of consciousness that Fred Dretske addressed in his philosophical career. Ranging from one of the earliest problems Dretske analyzed—the nature of seeing an object—to epistemological issues that he began working on mid-career, to matters he focused on in later years, including information, mental representation, and conscious experience, this volume investigates and engages with a spectrum of his prolific works. These papers, written by former colleagues and students from the University of Wisconsin and Stanford University, were inspired by talks given at the Center for the Explanation of Consciousness at Stanford in 2015 to celebrate Dretske’s life and work. In addition to scholarly essays, the authors also recount stories of personal interactions with Dretske that transformed their views or changed their professional trajectory. A bibliography of Dretske’s publications rounds out the volume. This generous volume includes contributions by Fred Adams, John A. Barker, John Perry, Paul Skokowski, and Dennis Stampe.
 

A closely annotated translation of Merleau-Ponty’s lecture notes on literary language

Investigations into the Literary Use of Language presents an annotated translation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s lecture notes from one of the two courses that he gave during his inaugural year teaching at the Collège de France. In his notes from the concurrent course, The Sensible World and the World of Expression, Merleau-Ponty contends that our embodied perceptual engagement with the sensible world already involves the same spontaneity that underlies cultural expression. Approaching it from the other side, he revisits here the analysis of language that he had undertaken in the unfinished manuscript The Prose of the World.

Focusing on the work of Paul Valéry (1871–1945) and Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle, 1783–1842), Merleau-Ponty explores how the spontaneity of literary language sheds light on the relation between lived experience and language more broadly, and how cultural expression remains grounded in embodied perceptual experience in a way that is homologous yet irreducible to it. Specifically, Merleau-Ponty shows how Stendhal had already overcome Valéry’s skepticism concerning literary sincerity by effectively incorporating what the latter called the linguistic “implex”—in effect, language as institution—and thus achieving a “total style” of improvisational spontaneity in which the “conquering function” characteristic of the literary use of language gives shape to an immanent model of political engagement.