Reason, Crisis, and Europe Conceptual and Historical Perspectives

List of Contributors
Acknowledgments

Introduction
Marco Piasentier and Panu-Matti Pöykkö

Part One–Rethinking the Limits of Reason
1. Exceptional Reason: Kant, Husserl, and Derrida
    Tuija Pulkkinen
2. Joseph de Maistre on the Dangers of Applying Reason and Theory to Politics
    Marianne Sandelin
3. Logic and the Crisis of Reason
    Mirja Hartimo
4. Europe and the Dispute about Reason
    Jean-Michel Salanskis
5. “A Crisis Such as The Earth has Never Seen:” Reading Nietzsche is Our Crisis and Our Destiny
    Lee Braver

Part Two–Conceptual Geographies and Logics of Exclusion
6. The Afterlives of Europe Nevermore
    Nicolas de Warren
7. Ex meridie lux: The Geophilosophy of Europe’s Crisis and the Retrieval of a Mediterranean Political Space
    Antonio Cimino
8. Rereading Anticolonial Imaginaries: Resisting Epistemic Assimilation in the Twentieth Century and Their Echoes in the        Present
    Kolar Aparna

Part Three–Historical Regimes of Normativity
9. The Images of Law and Society After the End of Law: Two Cases of Re-legitimizing Legality
    Ville Erkkilä
10. European Memory in Crisis: Tracing the origins of Europe’s official memory regime
    Karolina Stenlund
11. Ordoliberalism and the Crisis of Reason: Scientific Neutrality, Normative Commitment, and the Paradox of Method
    Timo Miettinen
12. The “Survival of the Successful:” Neoliberalism as a Remedy to Civilizational Collapse
    Marco Piasentier

Part Four–Futures of Europe
13. “Africa is a geopolitical priority for the European Union:” The EU’s Geopolitical Turn and Colonial History
    Peo Hansen
14. The Crisis of Pacifism and Nuclear Deterrence
    Sami Pihlström
15. Emmanuel Levinas on Europe as Space of Peace
    Panu-Matti Pöykkö
16. The Missing People: On the Co-originality Thesis and the Future of Democracy
    Davide Tarizzo

Index

Biography

Marco Piasentier is an assistant professor in political philosophy at the University of Salerno and a research affiliate at the Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and European Narratives, University of Helsinki.

Panu‑Matti Pöykkö is a grant‑funded researcher focusing on the philosophy of religion and contemporary European and American philosophy at the Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki, and a visiting scholar at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris.

Today, Europe finds itself under strong external pressure and traversed by painful internal divisions, the former of course stirring the latter. The contemporary crises are so unreasonable that what seems to be in crisis is literally reason. But although present-day political crises strike us as unexpected, fundamentally the crisis of reason is nothing new in Europe, on the contrary, in many ways, it is the very definition of Europe. Since the beginning, Europe is also a philosophical idea, moreover, a very particular idea, in that Europe has at the same time identified itself with an ideal of reason, and thought itself in terms of the crisis and failure of this ideal. This timely book explores Europe as a philosophical question, with which both reason and its crisis are not only at stake, but at test. Its chapters draw a rich and stimulating map of different aspects of the crisis of reason tested against historical reality. It is recommended reading for anyone desiring to  traverse our time by means of thinking.
Susanna Lindberg, Professor of Continental Philosophy, Leiden University

In this collection, the editors take seriously the current crises of European modernity and of its normative categories of reason and progress as culminated in the many tragic events of the past century. With a rich multidisciplinary approach, the contributions to the volume question the very idea that the European project could even be seen as coherent and unitary attempt, and demonstrates how its genesis and trajectories of development have always been more contested, liminal, and uncertain. The book unveils alternative voices and concepts though which hegemonic rationalities can be problematised, and takes this plurality as the starting point for imaginatively think new paths of thinking for the future.
Sara Raimondi, Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations, Northeastern London

The contributions in this volume add up to a renewed vision of Europe in the world. If you care about the project of modernity then this is a must read text.
Dr. Iain MacKenzie, Centre for Critical Thought, University of Kent