Experience

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

• Introduction: Three Types of ExperienceChapter One: Have We Forgotten Experience?1.1 In Praise of the A Posteriori1.2 Substance1.3 New Totalitarianisms and Technological Phenomenology: The ChaptersChapter Two: Experience in Antiquity: Aristotle's A Posteriori Technics2.1 Technics and Praxis: Aristotle2.2 Against Theoretical Reason: Praxis, Technics, Contingency2.3 Form and Substance: Ancients, Christians and ModernsChapter Three: Subjective Experience: William James's Radical Empiricism3.1 James's Radical Empiricism3.1.1 James and Hume: Radical Empiricism and Classical Empiricism3.1.2 Experience and its Functions3.2 Pragmatism: Activities3.3 Dewey or Formal Pragmatics3.4 Some ConclusionsChapter Four: Objective Experience: Methodenstreit and Homo Economicus4.1 Methodenstreit: Formalists and Substantivists4.1.1 Historical School: Subjective Experience and Institutions4.1.2 Max Weber: Subjective Experience as Method, Objective Experience as Outcome4.2 Classicals and Neoclassicals4.2.1 Physics and Economics: From Conservation of Substance to Field of Utilities4.2.2 Scottish Enlightenment4.3 Conclusions: The Economic and the PoliticalChapter Five: Hannah Arendt's A Posteriori Politics: Free Will, Judgment, and Constitutional Fragility5.1 Ancients and Moderns5.2 Pax Romana5.3 After the Polis: Augustine and Free Will5.4 Politics as Aesthetic Judgment5.5 Conclusions: From Politics to the Technological SystemChapter Six: Forms of Life: Technological Phenomenology6.1 Forms of Life: Transformations of Performative Language6.1.1 Forms of Life and Exclusion: Homo sacer's experience6.1.2 Language and Forms of life6.2 Technological Forms of Life6.2.1 Communicational Forms of Life6.2.2 Entropy against Negentropy6.2.3 Incompleteness: From Predications (Science) to Algorithms (Engineering)6.2.4 System Encounter: War Games or Sex Games?6.3 ConclusionsChapter Seven: Aesthetic Multiplicity: The View and the Ten Thousand Things7.1 Fuzzy Singularities7.1.1 Views7.1.2 Art and Singularities7.2 The Gaze as Multiplicity7.2.1 Beauty: China against Metaphysics7.2.2 Mountains that Breathe (and Perceive)Chapter Eight: Conclusions8.1 Technology8.2 Institutions8.3 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