Transcendence ─ On Self-Determination and Cosmopolitanism

"Mitchell Aboulafia offers a gracefully presented and intellectually satisfying conception of transcendence for an age when multiculturalism is an undeniable social fact. Aboulafia's argument crisscrosses the Atlantic to bring into play its key themes-cosmopolitanism and self determination. The result is a highly persuasive and sophisticated conception of human freedom that acknowledges social and biological forces without succumbing to the old dualism of freedom and determinism."-Cynthia Willett, Emory University

"Aboulafia has written a fascinating and important book, one that reaches across intellectual contexts and advances our insights into the social medium in which we fashion our world and ourselves. The figures that dwell in this book come from different places and, while they are not unaware of each other, their conversations are surprising. Transcendence shows us ways of thinking and creating philosophical conversations that offer new insights."-Robert Gibbs, University of Toronto

Notions of self-determination have been central to politics for almost two centuries, yet the relationship between the self-determination of individuals and peoples has not been adequately addressed. Nor have these forms of self-determination been adequately allied to cosmopolitanism. Transcendence seeks to rectify this. It offers an original theory of self and society that relates self-determination, of both individuals and peoples, to cosmopolitanism. To this end, the book highlights affinities between existentialism and pragmatism, traditions whose similarities have been insufficiently explored, and it provides comparative studies of figures central to these traditions.

The book's guiding thread is a unique model of the social development of the self that incorporates biological influences and is indebted to the pragmatist George Herbert Mead. Aboulafia draws on the work of a wide range of thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic G.W.F. Hegel, William James, John Dewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcum:, Pierre Bourdicu, Richard Rorty, Neil Gross, and Jean Baker Miller and accords supporting roles to Adam Smith, Jnrgen Habermas, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Charles Taylor, and Simone de Beauvoir. No current work combines European and American traditions of self-determination and cosmopolitanism in this manner.

Mitchell Aboulafia is Director of Interdivisional Liberal Arts and Professor of Liberal Arts and Philosophy at The Juilliard School. He is the author of The Cosmopolitan Self: George Herbert Mead and Continental Philosophy (2001); The Mediating Self: Mead, Sartre, and Self-Determination (1986); and The Self: Winding Circle: A Study of Hegels System (1982).