Lexington Books
Pages: 212
Trim: 6½ x 9½
978-0-7391-1118-5 • Hardback • September 2007 • $102.00 • (£78.00)
Kenneth Liberman is professor in the department of sociology, University of Oregon.
Part 1 Foreword by George Psathas
Chapter 2 Preface
Part 3 Part One - Phenomenological Investigations
Chapter 4 Chapter 1. Husserl's "Criticism of Reason"
Chapter 5 Chapter 2. Thinking with Categorical Forms
Chapter 6 Chapter 3. Levinas's Critique of Apophantic Reason
Chapter 7 Chapter 4. Heidegger's Respecification of Thinking
Chapter 8 Chapter 5. Garfinkel's Uncompromising Intellectual Rigor
Part 9 Part Two - Ethnomethodological Specifications
Chapter 10 Chapter 6. Brief Introduction to the Tibetan's Criticism of Reason
Chapter 11 Chapter 7. Recognizing the Limits of Apophansis
Chapter 12 Chapter 8. Philosophy as Its Lived Work
Chapter 13 Conclusion: Philosophers' Work
Liberman provides many detailed examples....[He]keeps his promise of showing how thinking reason lives with, and actively uses, sophistry and formal tools of reasoning....Liberman's well-planned foray into the borderlands between phenomenology and ethnomethodology may have re-awakened a slumbering giant....Bringing together two methodologically different disciplines is itself an impressive achievement....Liberman succeeds in attaining his stated goal....He displays the fluidity of thinking reason, and, even more important, shows that it must remain dynamic instead of getting trapped in its own logical aporias and contradictions....Liberman has created an exciting fusion that has the potential to reinvigorate thinking reason.
— Husserl Studies, July 2008
'To reason,' Ken Liberman proposes at the start of this book, 'is to work with other humans in applying some discipline to our thinking.' He goes on to show us, with great patience, persistence, and insight (and by using Garfinkel's ethnomethodology) just how 'people achieve sense in their mundane lives,' as exhibited in 'occasions where thinking reason' is at work in re-connecting our logic with our lifeworld experience–whether those occasions are enacted by Tibetan Buddhist monks or Australian Aboriginal people.
— Lenore Langsdorf, Professor Emerita, Southern Illinois University Carbondale