Experience (eBook)

Scott Lash is Professor and Research Director at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Introduction: Three Types of Experience

Chapter One: Have We Forgotten Experience?

1.1 In Praise of the A Posteriori

1.2 Substance

1.3 New Totalitarianisms and Technological Phenomenology: The Chapters

Chapter Two: Experience in Antiquity: Aristotle's A Posteriori Technics

2.1 Technics and Praxis: Aristotle

2.2 Against Theoretical Reason: Praxis, Technics, Contingency

2.3 Form and Substance: Ancients, Christians and Moderns

Chapter Three: Subjective Experience: William James's Radical Empiricism

3.1 James's Radical Empiricism

3.1.1 James and Hume: Radical Empiricism and Classical Empiricism

3.1.2 Experience and its Functions

3.2 Pragmatism: Activities

3.3 Dewey or Formal Pragmatics

3.4 Some Conclusions

Chapter Four: Objective Experience: Methodenstreit and Homo Economicus

4.1 Methodenstreit: Formalists and Substantivists

4.1.1 Historical School: Subjective Experience and Institutions

4.1.2 Max Weber: Subjective Experience as Method, Objective Experience as Outcome

4.2 Classicals and Neoclassicals

4.2.1 Physics and Economics: From Conservation of Substance to Field of Utilities

4.2.2 Scottish Enlightenment

4.3 Conclusions: The Economic and the Political

Chapter Five: Hannah Arendt's A Posteriori Politics: Free Will, Judgment, and Constitutional Fragility

5.1 Ancients and Moderns

5.2 Pax Romana

5.3 After the Polis: Augustine and Free Will

5.4 Politics as Aesthetic Judgment

5.5 Conclusions: From Politics to the Technological System

Chapter Six: Forms of Life: Technological Phenomenology

6.1 Forms of Life: Transformations of Performative Language

6.1.1 Forms of Life and Exclusion: Homo sacer's experience

6.1.2 Language and Forms of life

6.2 Technological Forms of Life

6.2.1 Communicational Forms of Life

6.2.2 Entropy against Negentropy

6.2.3 Incompleteness: From Predications (Science) to Algorithms (Engineering)

6.2.4 System Encounter: War Games or Sex Games?

6.3 Conclusions

Chapter Seven: Aesthetic Multiplicity: The View and the Ten Thousand Things

7.1 Fuzzy Singularities

7.1.1 Views

7.1.2 Art and Singularities

7.2 The Gaze as Multiplicity

7.2.1 Beauty: China against Metaphysics

7.2.2 Mountains that Breathe (and Perceive)

Chapter Eight: Conclusions

8.1 Technology

8.2 Institutions

8.3 Metaphysics or Empirical Multiplicity

"This is a book of amazing scholarly scope. It stands out as an extremely serious study that does not pander to fads and fashions nor seek approval from readers. Here is a major statement that will surprise many who think they are familiar with Lash's thought."
--Philip Smith, Yale University

"In this book, Scott Lash analyses the diverse meanings of a concept key to the social sciences and provides a hermeneutic lens through which the languages of sociology, anthropology, technology and art illuminate one another. A broadening of perspective, engaging with Chinese cosmology at the end of the book, distinguishes Experience as a truly global account of our age."
--Roberto Esposito, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa

"In his remarkable book, Scott Lash weaves his way through eras and cultures to construct a possible theory - transcultural and transhistorical - of what most defies theory. The 'empirical' option he gradually develops can indeed, after James and Arendt, erect experience as philosophy's decisive issue."
--François Jullien, Fondation maison des sciences de l'homme, Paris