Edward S. CASEY

EDWARD S. CASEY

Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Stony Brook University, was the president of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division) from 2009–10, and chairman of the Philosophy Department at Stony Brook University for a decade. He works in aesthetics, philosophy of space and time, ethics, perception, and psychoanalytic theory. He obtained his doctorate at Northwestern University in 1967 and has taught at Yale University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, The New School for Social Research, Emory University, and several other institutions. He is the author of The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History; Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World; Remembering: A Phenomenological Study; and its sequel, Imagining: A Phenomenological Study.

SPIRIT AND SOUL
Essays in Philosophical Psychology

Third, revised edition, 2024

Paperback original, 540 pages, $30
ISBN: 978-0-88214-176-3

Kindle/Apple Books, $9.99
ISBN: 978-0-88214-177-0

In a clear and vivid manner, Edward S. Casey, one of America’s finest thinkers, takes up the great themes of imagination, remembering, perceiving, and place. A brilliant and useful account of basic philosophical problems, which are also major mysteries of the soul. Casey asks, How are we to join—or to rejoin, or to see as already conjoined—spirit and soul? For Casey, spirit and soul are “held together … above all, by the images that imagining and remembering share.” First published in 1991 and expanded in 2004, this revised edition adds a comprehensive bibliography.

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For Casey, philosophy itself would not be possible without the imagination. Like emotion, imagination is “a spontaneously unifying factor in human experience, first linking body with soul … and then connecting soul with spirit.” For Casey, like for Hegel and Giegerich, this linking is not an external process that starts with two different objective entities: body and soul, “but of an indefinite plurality of modes of existing between which imagination moves in its Mercurial manner.” If, for Casey, imagination is an upward linking already in process, a binding adhesive that is active at a subtle level, it is also not the only process at work as a synthesizing force. Imagination's upward movement is matched by memory's downward movement from spirit to soul.
—STANTON MARLAN