Beyond Philosophy

"So much of published philosophy is actually the working out of an intellectual problem, not pushing past what we know and perhaps can know. It is when we encounter not knowing that thinking happens, not to fill in the blanks of ignorance but to grapple with and learn to live in the not-knowing, the feeling, the beyonding of livingdying. Nancy Tuana and Charles Scott's alertness to plays and networks of power puts thinking beyond traditional philosophical practice in this illuminating book. —Ladelle McWhorter, author of Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America"—

"Beyond Philosophy exposes academic and traditional westernized philosophy as well as contemporary liberatory discourses in ways that disrupt and open thought beyond its current delimitations. Tuana and Scott entice us to embody inexhaustible disruptions, openings, and silences as they exquisitely and intimately remain attuned "beyond."—Alejandro A. Vallega, University of Oregon, author of Latin American Philosophy from Identity to Radical Exteriority

"Beyond Philosophy reads like a finely crafted fugue. Inventive, lyrical, passionate, and wise, this double-voiced work models an art of thinking that dissolves the borders between philosophy and the enfleshed world. Through original interpretations of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Anzaldúa as thinkers beyond reason, Tuana and Scott decisively confront the most pressing political issues of our day. At the same time, they linger over scenes of stillness that undo them: a Brueghel painting, the play of light on trees, erotic love. An utterly compelling book."—Lynne Huffer, author of Foucault's Strange Eros

"We learn in this extraordinary new work by two of America's most important and original thinkers that the beyond of philosophy is not some mystic space of silent contemplation but a series of borders between different philosophical traditions, sites of contestation and mutual enrichment between philosophy, art, and poetry, rigorous academic thinking and political activism. Whether it is engaging the works of Nietzsche, Foucault, or Anzaldúa, or confronting questions of climate change, racial oppression, sexual and species differences, or sustainable agriculture, Beyond Philosophy is the very best that philosophy has to offer us today. It is a brilliant and powerful polyphonic manifesto for what philosophy can and should be in our troubled times."—Michael Naas, DePaul University

"The authors of Beyond Philosophy, I believe, would neither affirm nor deny these more dire possibilities of beyond. And that is the great strength of their book and its major benefit, at least to me. The authors are to be congratulated and thanked. Their book deserves the widest possible readership and the deepest possible reading."—David Farrell Krell - DePaul University, Research in Phenomenology