The central topic of current philosophy of religion has been the meaning and the truth of the assertion that God exists. The roots of this preoccupation lie in the natural theology, and the criticism of that theology, of the eighteenth century in the West. The arguments of Hume and Kant are still the basis of contemporary discussion. While this attachment to eighteenth-century concerns may manifest a laudable sense of reverence for our ancestors, it has led the philosophy of religion into lamentable delinquencies and impoverishments.

Critics have charged that Heidegger's account of authenticity is morally nihilistic, that his fundamental ontology is either egocentric or chauvinistic; and many see Heidegger's turn to Nazism in 1933 as following logically from an indifference, and even hostility, to "otherness" in the premises of his early philosophy. In The Fragile "We": Ethical Implications of Heidegger's "Being and Time," Lawrence Vogel presents three interpretations of authentic existence--the existentialist, the historicist, and the cosmopolitan--each of which is a plausible version of the personal ideal depicted in Being and Time. He then draws parallels between these interpretations and three moments in the contemporary liberal-communitarian debate over the relationship of the "I" and the "We." His book contributes both to a diagnosis of what there is about Being and Time that invites moral nihilism and to a sense of how fundamental ontology might be recast so that "the other" is accorded an appropriate place in an account of human existence.

One of the signal features of our era is the re-emergence of the 'sacred' in all its different guises, from New Age paganism to the emerging religious sensitivity within cultural and political theory. The wager of Zizek's The Fragile Absolute - published here with a new preface by the author - is that Christianity and Marxism can fight together against the contemporary onslought of vapid spiritualism. The revolutionary core of the Christian legacy is too precious to be left to the fundamentalists.

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The Fragile Environment explores the impact of the human species on its environment.

Israel has quickly become one of the most polarizing forces in the North American Jewish community. In a world already much too divided, how can we approach the subject of Zionism without widening the rifts? This book wrestles with and attempts to frame the very fragile dialogue surrounding Zionism and Israel in the 21st century Progressive Jewish community. Written from a multiplicity of views, the collection explores the many lenses through which this varied community approaches Zionism, not only set apart by political differences but also by geographical diversity, religious divisiveness, socio-economic policies, gender issues, the use and abuse of power, and more. The Fragile Dialogue is a conversation starter, meant to provide the challenging yet vital basis for narrowing the rifts in our dialogue around Zionism today.

A mesmerizing, scientifically rich portrait of the teeming coral reefs of Rangiroa in French Polynesia and the island of Mo'orea in the South Pacific.

This book examines digital mass surveillance in authoritarian regimes, highlighting the role of security services. It argues that globalization hasn't diminished dictatorships, and urges Western countries to adopt new strategies to counter digitally-enhanced authoritarianism, which poses a growing challenge to liberal democracies.

Fragile Smile Book I

Certain philosophers of Antiquity compared the world to a large animal; but if the world were an animal, it would have a skin similar to the skin that envelops each living being and gives it unity. The world is neither an animal nor a machine but an interminable jumble whose destination is nothing other than the maelstrom in which the very idea of the world slips away. The world has no skin other than the turbulence that makes histories, customs, moments of grandeur and decadence. Because it is not a skin, this extension of space-time is much more fragile than the skins that are already always fragile, because everything here touches its extremities. The world is everything that passes between us – ourselves and everything that happens to us, everything that becomes of our contacts, our gazes, our movements; and through referrals from skin to skin, from the fleeting to the immemorial, you reach, without even knowing it, the entire actuality of the world: the act of its existence. This act is made up of works and disasters, splendours, horrors, and catastrophes. As long as it is ours, it is the act of an infinite emergence that is all the sense there is: a sense that incessantly goes from skin to skin and is itself never enveloped by anything. The texts in this volume are all oriented by the concern for what is currently happening to us – we, late humanoids – when we arrive at an extremity of our history, whether this extremity should turn out to be a stage, a rupture, or quite simply a last breath.