Introduction: Three Types of Experience Chapter One: Have We Forgotten Experience? 1.1 In Praise of the A Posteriori 1.2 Substance 1.3 New Totalitarianisms and Technological Phenomenology: The Chapters Chapter Two: Experience in Antiquity: Aristotle's A Posteriori Technics 2.1 Technics and Praxis: Aristotle 2.2 Against Theoretical Reason: Praxis, Technics, Contingency 2.3 Form and Substance: Ancients, Christians and Moderns Chapter Three: Subjective Experience: William James's Radical Empiricism 3.1 James's Radical Empiricism 3.1.1 James and Hume: Radical Empiricism and Classical Empiricism 3.1.2 Experience and its Functions 3.2 Pragmatism: Activities 3.3 Dewey or Formal Pragmatics 3.4 Some Conclusions Chapter Four: Objective Experience: Methodenstreit and Homo Economicus 4.1 Methodenstreit: Formalists and Substantivists 4.1.1 Historical School: Subjective Experience and Institutions 4.1.2 Max Weber: Subjective Experience as Method, Objective Experience as Outcome 4.2 Classicals and Neoclassicals 4.2.1 Physics and Economics: From Conservation of Substance to Field of Utilities 4.2.2 Scottish Enlightenment 4.3 Conclusions: The Economic and the Political Chapter Five: Hannah Arendt's A Posteriori Politics: Free Will, Judgment, and Constitutional Fragility 5.1 Ancients and Moderns 5.2 Pax Romana 5.3 After the Polis: Augustine and Free Will 5.4 Politics as Aesthetic Judgment 5.5 Conclusions: From Politics to the Technological System Chapter Six: Forms of Life: Technological Phenomenology 6.1 Forms of Life: Transformations of Performative Language 6.1.1 Forms of Life and Exclusion: Homo sacer's experience 6.1.2 Language and Forms of life 6.2 Technological Forms of Life 6.2.1 Communicational Forms of Life 6.2.2 Entropy against Negentropy 6.2.3 Incompleteness: From Predications (Science) to Algorithms (Engineering) 6.2.4 System Encounter: War Games or Sex Games? 6.3 Conclusions Chapter Seven: Aesthetic Multiplicity: The View and the Ten Thousand Things 7.1 Fuzzy Singularities 7.1.1 Views 7.1.2 Art and Singularities 7.2 The Gaze as Multiplicity 7.2.1 Beauty: China against Metaphysics 7.2.2 Mountains that Breathe (and Perceive) Chapter Eight: Conclusions 8.1 Technology 8.2 Institutions 8.3 Metaphysics or Empirical Multiplicity

"This is a book of amazing scholarly scope. It stands out as an extremely serious study that does not pander to fads and fashions nor seek approval from readers. Here is a major statement that will surprise many who think they are familiar with Lash's thought."—Philip Smith, Yale University "In this book, Scott Lash analyses the diverse meanings of a concept key to the social sciences and provides a hermeneutic lens through which the languages of sociology, anthropology, technology and art illuminate one another. A broadening of perspective, engaging with Chinese cosmology at the end of the book, distinguishes Experience as a truly global account of our age."—Roberto Esposito, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa "In his remarkable book, Scott Lash weaves his way through eras and cultures to construct a possible theory - transcultural and transhistorical - of what most defies theory. The 'empirical' option he gradually develops can indeed, after James and Arendt, erect experience as philosophy's decisive issue."—François Jullien, Fondation maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris