Orientations Press LLC is the official publishing house of the Foundation for Philosophical Orientation. It is dedicated to publishing texts concerning the philosophy of orientation and all issues that may belong to it.
Orientations Press publishes free eBooks, which you can download from our website, as well as prints available for purchase at production costs only. The publications will comprise texts exploring the complexities of human orientation, including, but not limited to: original research and dissertations connected with the philosophy of orientation; works on philosophers related to the philosophy of orientation (e.g., Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kant, Descartes, Aristotle, etc.); translations of Werner Stegmaier’s texts; the best essays submitted to our essay prize competitions; texts regarding orientation skills and particularly successful orientations in everyday and professional life. But not only philosophical aspects of orientation are of interest, but also biological, physiological, psychological, socio-psychological, economical, political, media, cultural, artistic, and religious. If you are interested in publishing a book or an article with us, please contact reinhard.mueller@hfpo.com.
Orientations Press
Orientation is a process that you can observe when looking at yourself and others; over time, routines and structures are formed in it through which you find hold and guidance. Because the process is bound to a standpoint, it always refers to other standpoints all of which are difficult to grasp, so that you can only orient yourselves to them. This requires communication; if everyone had the same reason, there would be no need for communication. Everyday interaction and communication show that people are not equal, but different in their orientations and inferior and superior to each other in different areas of human orientation. All other philosophies presuppose the basic conditions of orientation, and we can show how they make certain orientation decisions from certain standpoints at certain times. The Courageous Beginnings in this augmented edition are intended to provide an orientation in philosophy through a clear presentation of the insights that brought philosophy closer to a philosophy of orientation. They are intended to show what justifies understanding philosophy as orientation today. With its ongoing self-criticism in its history without final solutions, which cannot exist in life, and with the respective alternatives between which decisions are made, philosophy today is well-equipped to deal with nihilism and relativism that became the nightmares of philosophers in the 20th century. Orientation is a positive concept: it makes us open to deal with the world as it is with all its temporality and complexity and without any embellishments and idealizations, and it makes us confident that people will be able to master the serious crises that lie ahead.
Orientations Press
The philosophy of the art of living asks the age-old question of orienting one’s own life: ‘How can I live well?’ An art of living is always called for when people do not know what to do and how to go on, when the ways of life are no longer self-evident, when traditions, conventions, rules, and norms lose their plausibility and individuals begin to worry about themselves. The art of living and of its philosophy has a practical aim: It is not concerned with ethical principles, but with the concrete practice of people’s everyday life, with their individual and successful lives. Friedrich Nietzsche, as he often did, pushed the problem of the art of living to the extreme, making it palpable both in its dignity and in its force. For him, the modern uncertainty of human orientation caused by nihilism pointed to art and aesthetics, which, he supposed, makes life if not justifiable, at least bearable. The arts open up a multi-perspectival seeing and hearing, they experiment with alternative forms and techniques, and create the finest sensibilities for both – Nietzsche himself, with his rich forms of philosophical writing, is an outstanding example of this.
The volume we present here, entails contributions of German-speaking scholars on Nietzsche and the ways of living he proposes, especially, but not alone in Dawn. The papers are selected from a book series on the common issue “Critical Art of Living,” edited by Günter Gödde, Jörg Zirfas, and others, and translated on behalf of the Foundation for Philosophical Orientation.
Orientations Press
Through our periodic prize competitions, we seek to philosophically confront some of the most pressing reorientations humanity faces in the 21st century. The current digital transformation increasingly affects all dimensions of our orientation, most noticeably in how we communicate, process and store information, work and move in our everyday life, but also with regard to big data, universal surveillance, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things – to just mention a few main keywords. However, it is unclear how this change currently impacts our life and what the long-term consequences will be. As such, through our prize competition, we want to make a contribution to addressing this transformation and provide some initial footholds.
On the day of our foundation’s inauguration, on October 25, 2019, we launched a philosophical prize competition concerning the question of this volume. Here we collect the six award-winning contributions:
1st prize award: “Orientation to Profiles: Identity in a Digitized World” by Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio; 2nd prize award: “Meet the Moment: An Inventory of Experience in the Digital Era and the Call for Orientation Virtues” by Samantha Sprole; 3rd prize award: “The Digital Transformation of Human Orientation: An Inquiry into the Dawn of a New Era” by Christoph Durt; special student award: split between Abigail Bergeron’s “The Question Concerning Digital Technologies” and Paul Stephan’s “How Could and Should Digitization Change Our Orientation? On the Use and Abuse of Digitization from a Utopian Perspective.” Reinhard G. Mueller introduces the conception of this FPO prize competition, Werner Stegmaier its philosophical horizon.
Orientations Press
Our publishing is inaugurated by Werner Stegmaier’s An Orientation to the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, translated from the original German by the author and Reinhard G. Mueller. The book provides a methodological Nietzsche interpretation, a well-founded overview of Nietzsche’s main philosophical distinctions, and, as a result, a new understanding of his famous concepts of the will to power, the overman, the eternal return of the same, and others. It simultaneously opens up Nietzsche’s philosophical cosmos to our current orientations. The English version adds a postscript on how to study Nietzsche today, after his posthumous notes have been edited in completely revised transcriptions revealing in which ways he actually oriented himself philosophically. From them, we may learn more not only about philosophy, but also, as Kant already taught, about philosophizing.
Click the download link under the book image to download the book for free. Or you can purchase the hardcover print here on Amazon.